Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  But there’s no question about the tragedy in Lincoln’s immediate family. Only one of his four children, all sons, lived to become an adult; that was Robert Todd Lincoln, who died at the age of eighty-three in 1926, Lincoln’s second son, Edward Baker Lincoln, died in infancy; his third son, William Wallace Lincoln, whom Abe Lincoln called Willie and perhaps loved most of the four boys, died at the age of eleven; and Thomas Lincoln, whom Lincoln called Tad, died at the age of eighteen.

  As everybody knows, Lincoln himself also had practically no formal education; his entire schooling when he was growing up in Kentucky and Indiana amounted to attendance of about a single year. But he was fortunate in one way, which was that his stepmother wasn’t the traditional ogre at all; Sarah Lincoln was a good-hearted woman who treated young Abe like one of her own children, and she believed in education and encouraged her stepson to do a lot of studying and reading on his own. (I’m sure you remember Lincoln’s famous statement: “All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my sainted mother.” I believe that statement refers to Sarah Lincoln rather than Nancy Lincoln, who died so young that she just didn’t have the time to be much of an influence on her son.) And it was certainly Lincoln’s private studies of everything from Aesop’s fables to law books to the Bible and the works of Shakespeare that eventually made him the well-informed, clear-thinking, eloquent man he proved to be as president.

  And still totting up all those odds against him, he certainly showed no signs in his early life that he’d eventually achieve success. His father made it clear that he considered his son capable of being nothing more than a farmer or a laborer, frequently loaning him out to other farms when he wasn’t using him personally, at salaries of around a quarter a day. When Lincoln served as a soldier, his military career wasn’t exactly distinguished; he was a captain for only one month and was reprimanded twice, once for firing off a gun by mistake and once for letting his men get drunk, after which he reenlisted as a private but saw no action. He later entered politics and ran for the state legislature, but came out eighth in a field of thirteen candidates. Then he left politics and opened a grocery store but went bankrupt after a few months, an experience that reminds me of another fellow who once decided to open a haberdashery. It took me twelve years, incidentally, to pay off my debts from that store; it took Lincoln seventeen to pay off his debts.

  Around 1831, Lincoln, who was then living in New Salem, decided to study law, a decision that required him to walk twenty miles to Springfield many times to borrow law books because there just weren’t any in New Salem. He supported himself with various odd jobs like that one as postmaster, which wasn’t too arduous because mail was delivered only once a week in that area, and in 1831, as a Whig, he tried politics again with another shot at the state legislature. This time he got himself elected and served four consecutive terms, and in 1836, he received his license to practice law and opened an office the following year in Springfield. But his defeats weren’t over yet. In 1843, he ran for the House of Representatives and was defeated; then he tried again in 1846 and was elected, but as I’ve mentioned, he talked so bitterly against Polk that he embarrassed his supporters, who walked away from him and returned him to private life. And then, in 1854, he decided to run for the Senate and lost once more.

  Would you have guessed, after all that, that Lincoln would become president of the United States just seven years later? I certainly wouldn’t have. But Henry Clay was gone by this time, having died in 1852, and so were all the other great leaders of the time, and we were left with people like those nincompoops Pierce and Buchanan. And meanwhile, Lincoln, despite his defeats, was developing a bigger and bigger reputation as a lawyer and as a bitter opponent of the theory, held by a lot of people, that the only way to end the controversy over slavery was to split the United States into two countries, one that permitted slavery and one that didn’t. He wasn’t an abolitionist; he felt, in fact, that abolitionists were unrealistic and doing more harm than good, and that the individual states where slavery already existed should decide for themselves, rather than have the federal government decide whether or not slavery should be continued there. But he hated slavery and was strongly against seeing it spread, a feeling that developed in his mind and heart when he was twenty-two.

  In May 1831, he took a boat trip to New Orleans, and the things he saw there stayed with him the rest of his life. Another young man who went with him - his name was John Hanks, and I believe he was a cousin of Lincoln’s - later reported, “We saw Negroes chained, maltreated, whipped, and scourged. Lincoln saw it; his heart bled . . . was silent from feeling, was sad, looked bad, felt bad, was thoughtful and abstracted . . . It run its iron in him then and there. I have heard him say so often . . .” And in 1858, having left the Whigs and joined the Republican Party, Lincoln decided to run for the Senate, mostly because his opponent would be the incumbent senator from Illinois, Stephen A. Douglas, who was running for reelection, and Douglas didn’t seem to care whether slavery spread into the new states or not.

  The contest between the two men brought on the famous Lincoln-Douglas Debates, a series of seven debates that took place in the small Illinois towns of Alton, Charleston, Freeport, Galesburg, Jonesboro, Ottawa, and Quincy. On the surface, Lincoln and Douglas weren’t all that far apart in their viewpoints. Both men hated slavery but felt that the preservation of the Union was more important than ending slavery, or at least ending it right away. Lincoln, in fact, stressed that in his speech accepting the senatorial nomination, his famous “House Divided” speech. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he said. “I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward until it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new, North as well as South.”

  And even during the war, on August 22, 1862, he wrote a letter to Horace Greeley in which he said, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”

  Both men - unpleasant when you think about it today, but not surprising for the period, especially since some of the same kind of thinking continued right up into modern times - wanted black people to be free but not necessarily equal; Lincoln, for example, stated openly in the fourth debate that he was against intermarriage between blacks and whites and against allowing blacks to vote, hold office, or be jurors. Both men felt there was a basic difference between the two races and wanted whites to continue to rule the roost, though Douglas indicated that he felt that that was the natural right of the white man and Lincoln admitted that he preferred it because he was white himself. “There is a physical difference between the two,” Lincoln said, “which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together on the footing of perfect equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I . . . am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position . . . But there is no reason why the Negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence - the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

  Speaking for myself, I could never see, even as a child, any more “physical difference” between whites and blacks than between people with brown eyes and blue eyes or black hair and blond hair, and as a friend of mine once said, none of us ask to come into the world and darned few ask to be allowed out of it, and we all look the same a few months or a few years after we’re out of it anyway. But that was the way both Lincoln and Douglas felt. The big difference between them, however, is that Douglas was pretty cagy in expressing his
feelings about slavery, never really coming out and saying that slavery was atrocious and evil, and being willing to allow new states to make their decisions about coming in as free states or slave states; whereas Lincoln, though his “House Divided” speech left it to the American people to reach the final decision on the subject, made it absolutely clear that the only correct and moral decision was an end of slavery, and therefore, new states must come in only as free states. He defined slavery and the acceptance of slavery in wonderful language. “It is the same spirit that says, ‘You toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor or from one race of men . . . enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”

  Lincoln lost the debates, I suppose; at any rate, Douglas took fifty-four state districts to Lincoln’s forty-six and was reelected, though there was a lot of talk at the time that Douglas won the election only because there had been some altering of district borders before the election to favor the Democrats. But Lincoln’s speeches made him famous nationally, and it was different, of course, when he again opposed Douglas, this time for the presidency.

  Lincoln didn’t just walk into the nomination: He was opposed by Senator William Henry Seward of New York, a very popular fellow who had also twice been governor of his state, and Seward beat Lincoln on the first two ballots, though not by a large enough margin to end the voting. But Lincoln won the nomination on the third ballot, and with Senator Hannibal Hamlin of Maine as the vice-presidential candidate, didn’t have too much trouble beating Douglas and his vice-presidential candidate, Senator Herschel V. Johnson of Georgia. In the popular voting, Lincoln got 1,866,352 votes, representing 40 percent, Douglas got 1,375,157 votes, representing 29 percent, and two splinter candidates, John C. Breckinridge of the National Democrat Party, who had been old James Buchanan’s vice president, and John Bell, candidate for the Constitutional Union Party, got 845,763, or 18 percent, and 589,581, or 13 percent, respectively. In the electoral votes, Douglas did much more poorly, carrying only one state, Missouri; Lincoln got a total of 180 electoral votes, Breckinridge seventy-two, Bell thirty-nine, and Douglas twelve.

  Seward became Lincoln’s secretary of state, as I’m sure most people remember from their reading and their history lessons. Douglas, who wasn’t a bad fellow in many ways, put his strong support behind Lincoln, once he knew he wasn’t destined to be president himself, and went on a speaking tour to try to help hold the country together. But he came down with typhoid fever after a speech in Springfield, Illinois, and died in Chicago on June 3, 1861.

  The official starting date of the War Between the States is April 12, 1861, when South Carolina soldiers captured Fort Sumter and Lincoln declared war and called for 75,000 Northern volunteers. But as a practical matter, the war really began a couple of months before Lincoln walked into the White House on March 4. On December 20, 1860, immediately after the news of Lincoln’s election reached the South, the South Carolina legislature voted unanimously to secede from the Union, and the Mississippi legislature followed on January ninth with a vote of eighty-four to fifteen, Florida on the tenth with a vote of sixty-two to seven, Alabama on the eleventh with a vote of sixty-one to thirty-nine, Georgia on the nineteenth with a narrower margin of 164 to 133, Louisiana on the twenty-sixth with a vote of 113 to seventeen, and Texas on February first with a vote of 166 to eight. The seven states immediately began to take over forts, arsenals, and outposts within their territories, and on February fourth, representatives of six states met in the state capital at Montgomery, Alabama, to form their own government, excluding only Texas, which couldn’t get there in time. And on the ninth, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was named president of the Confederate States of America and Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia was chosen as vice president.

  Then Lincoln entered the White House, rushed in by train at night because there was already talk of plots to assassinate him, and said in his inauguration speech that he wasn’t going to try to end slavery in the South but wouldn’t tolerate secession by southern states. And then he learned that Fort Sumter, deep in the heart of South Carolina, had only a few weeks’ worth of supplies and rushed more supplies down there, and South Carolina soldiers kept the supplies from getting there by firing on the fort, causing Fort Sumter to surrender. And the shooting war was on.

  Virginia, the richest and most prestigious of the southern states, hesitated for a while about joining the Confederacy, but finally agreed to secede by a vote of eighty-eight to fifty-five on April seventeenth; and even then, some pro-Union counties refused to accept the vote and formed their own state, West Virginia, which was formally admitted to the Union almost two years later, on January 1, 1863. Arkansas joined the Confederacy on May 6, 1861 and North Carolina on May 20. The three border states, Kentucky, Maryland, and my own state of Missouri decided to stay in the Union, though a lot of men from Kentucky and Missouri went and joined the Confederate forces on their own. And Delaware also decided to stay in the Union even though it was a slave state.

  In May, the Confederacy made its first big mistake by moving its capital from Montgomery to Richmond, Virginia, which moved it closer to northern forces and therefore easier to capture. But though I know that Civil War buffs would be happy to argue this with me from dawn until dusk, they really didn’t have a chance to win. The white population in the North was more than four times as large as the white population in the South, 22 million white northerners and 5.5 million white southerners; there were nine Confederate states and twenty-two Union states when the war started, and that doesn’t even include Kansas and West Virginia, which joined the Union later on. And the basically industrial North had far more money and far better transportation and communications facilities - 22,000 miles of railroads in the North, 9,000 miles in the South - than the basically agricultural South, and a very much better navy.

  The South probably had better generals, especially Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jonathan Jackson, who got the nickname of Stonewall Jackson because another commander, General Barnard Bee, said that he and his men stood like a stone wall at the Battle of Bull Run, but the North had some very good men, too. The best, of course, was old Ulysses S. Grant, who was, as I’ve said before, a failure and a drunk as a soldier in the Mexican War and in peacetime posts after that, a failure as a farmer and a real estate salesman and as a clerk in his father’s dry-goods store when he left the Army for a while, and an even worse failure as president after the Civil War, but a really first-rate commander during the war. But there were others, too: General Phil Sheridan, for example, who cut off Lee’s final retreat at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, and at last caused Lee to surrender; Admiral David G. Farragut, who bottled up New Orleans, the Confederacy’s biggest city, with his fleet and caused its surrender, and then did the same thing to the port of Mobile, Alabama; and General George B. McClellan, who was only thirty-four years old but another damn good officer, though perhaps not as tough and courageous as he should have been.

  I say this because he beat Lee in a battle at Antietam Creek, Maryland, on September 17, 1862, a battle that was probably the bloodiest day of the war and brought about a total of 23,000 deaths of men from both sides, but then let Lee retreat back into Virginia instead of chasing and capturing him. And a lot of historians believe that the war might have ended right then and there, with a tremendous saving of lives, two and a half years earlier than it did, if McClellan had had the courage and the sense to go after Lee. I know that’s Monday-morning quarterbacking, but this time I think the quarterbacks are probably right. McClellan, incidentally, became Lincoln’s Democratic opponent when Lincoln ran for reelection in 1864, but got only 1,808,725 votes, representing 45 percent, to Lincoln’s 2,216,067 votes, representing 55 percent.

  On July 13, 1862, Lincoln told the two men who were closest to him in his cabinet, Seward and his secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, that he’d wr
itten a document that, he said, would announce his decision on what must be done about slavery. This was, of course, his Emancipation Proclamation, but it wasn’t quite the sweeping or perfect decision that some people today half-remember it as being. Abolitionists had been urging Lincoln to free all slaves the moment the war started, and to a certain extent even before that, but Lincoln resisted doing so on the grounds that he didn’t want to upset the slave states that remained in the Union. And then, when he finally made his move in that direction, he limited it to the third alternative he had indicated in his letter to Horace Greeley, a gradual move that freed some of the slaves, with only the hope that all slaves would eventually be freed.

  The Emancipation Proclamation freed only those slaves in states or parts of states that were still “in rebellion” against the United States at the time the proclamation became law, using as a flimsy excuse for its limitations the fact that Lincoln was only able to do even that much by using his powers as commander in chief “as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion,” but it allowed the slave states loyal to the Union - Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Tennessee - to keep their slaves - and even allowed slave owners in recaptured areas to do the same.

  Lincoln read a preliminary draft of his proclamation to his cabinet on July 22, but then went along with Seward’s suggestion that he hold it back until Union forces had won a substantial victory over the Confederates. That came on September 22 with the Union victory at Antietam, and Lincoln then read a revised draft of his Emancipation Proclamation. It became law on January 1, 1863, but there was no real way to enforce it while the war was going on, and Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, desperate for reinforcements for the Confederate Army, countered it by inviting slaves to join up with the implied promise of freedom after the war if the Confederates won.