Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power

by Richard J. Carwardine

  Simultaneously, however, parallel events in neighboring Missouri threatened to undo all of Lincoln’s tactful good work in Kentucky. At St. Louis on August 30, John C. Frémont, commander of the Department of the West, issued a stunning proclamation. Desperate to quell guerrilla savagery and reduce Confederate support, particularly in the slaveholding counties, Frémont acted by putting Missouri under martial law, threatening to court-martial and execute civilians in arms, to confiscate the property of citizens who aided the enemy, and to free the slaves of rebels. It was the measure of a general increasingly out of his depth, alienated from his initial patron, Frank Blair, and now under the radical influence of Owen Lovejoy, John A. Gurley, and his wife, Jessie Frémont. Frémont later recalled that Lincoln had told him, as he left to take up his western command in July, “I have given you carte blanche; you must use your own judgment and do the best you can.” In this spirit, he now chose not to warn the president about a development which threatened to destabilize Unionism in Kentucky and constituted Lincoln’s greatest political challenge of the wartime months of 1861.

  Lincoln responded promptly, sending a special messenger with a confidential letter to Frémont. Afraid of Confederate retaliation, he ordered the general to secure his prior approval before shooting anyone under the terms of the proclamation. Then, alert to the “great danger” that confiscation and freeing of slaves “will alarm our Southern Union friends, and turn them against us—perhaps ruin our rather fair prospect for Kentucky,” Lincoln asked Frémont to bring the proclamation into line with the terms of the Confiscation Act that Congress had passed in early August.83 That enactment allowed the Union, through judicial proceedings, to confiscate and free those slaves assisting Confederate forces.

  Reports from trusted Unionists soon confirmed Lincoln’s fear that the proclamation could torpedo his border-state strategy, at the very moment that events at Columbus promised a successful denouement. The Speed brothers sent urgent and distressed warnings that Kentuckians, loyalist and disunionist alike, would resist an edict which threatened to free perhaps twenty thousand of their slaves. Joshua, sleepless with anxiety, predicted that Frémont’s folly would “crush out every vestage of a union party in the state” if not annulled: “you had as well attack the freedom of worship in the north or the right of a parent to teach his child to read—as to wage war in a slave state on such a principle.” Others insisted that without Lincoln’s immediate disavowal of emancipation, “Kentucky is gone over the mill dam.” From Anderson the president learned that, on hearing that Frémont had “actually issued deeds of manumission, a whole company of our Volunteers threw down their arms and disbanded.”84

  Frémont, however, remained blind to Lincoln’s larger strategy. Angered by what he saw as a rebuke, he refused to do what the president had privately requested and instead asked, in a letter that his wife took personally to the White House, that he be publicly ordered to retreat. Although a far more formidable politician than her husband, Jessie Frémont met her match in Lincoln and failed to shift the humorlessly smiling president during an uncomfortable interview. “The General should never have dragged the Negro into the war,” she recalled Lincoln telling her. “It is a war for a great national object, and the Negro has nothing to do with it.” Responding in a public letter to Frémont’s demand that he be openly countermanded, Lincoln “very cheerfully” modified the original proclamation to make it conform to the terms of the Confiscation Act. He knew that deleting the most objectionable parts of the document was essential for the continued loyalty of Kentucky. Conservatives rushed to pay tribute to a president whose “consistent, prudent, & just” intervention had shored up Unionism. “There is a good deal of old Whig left in me yet,” he acknowledged.85

  As horror yielded to celebration in Kentucky, popular sentiment in the wider Union moved in the other direction. Frémont’s proclamation had dazzled the country, earning plaudits well beyond the confines of radical antislavery for recognizing the logic of the war. From the outset, Lincoln’s correspondents had peppered him with entreaties to turn the weapons of war on slavery itself. Carl Schurz told Hay early on that even many Democrats judged that “now is the time to remove the cause of all our woes,” namely slavery. Ben Butler’s military expedient of treating the runaway slaves of rebel slaveholders as “contraband” of war drew applause, as part of “the logic of events.” The argument generated even more force amongst political leaders after the shock of the Bull Run defeat. At the same time as the conservative resolutions of Crittenden and Johnson were securing broad-based support in Washington, the military imperative of an assault on rebel slaveholding found favor, too. The Confiscation Act, passed after fierce debate and against the remonstrations of Kentucky’s Crittenden, sprang from this widespread desire to punish treason and weaken “the commissariat of the rebel army.”86

  In countermanding the edict, Lincoln stirred up a storm of indignation. An “old fogy” president had effectively sawed his dynamic general off at the knees. The Unitarian minister and abolitionist Moncure D. Conway told Greeley that Lincoln’s name now prompted public groans, not cheers. Protests inundated the White House, particularly from the Northwest. “No disaster—not even the fearful one at Bull Run—has so dispirited and paralysed the friends of the Union,” lamented an Illinoisan. There were fears for the effect on recruitment. While some anti-abolition nationalists, commonly Democrats, tendered Lincoln their support, far more striking was the cross-party chorus of criticism from conservatives who lauded a decisive act of war. The National Intelligencer, the St. Louis Republican, the Chicago Times, and even Bennett’s New York Herald had all hailed Frémont’s action. None of the anguished noises of the conservative press surprised Lincoln any more than the letter of regret from his old associate and fellow Kentuckian Orville Browning, who wanted the president to understand “the unqualified approval” which “every true friend of the Government” afforded the edict. True, Browning acknowledged, “there is no express, written law authorizing it; but war is never carried on, and can never be, in strict accordance with previously adjusted constitutional and legal provisions.” Traitors who warred upon the Constitution and the laws had no right to invoke their protection. The government had the power to dispose of a traitor’s life. “Is a traitor’s negro,” he asked, “more sacred than his life?”87

  Lincoln professed astonishment that his friend’s customary legal caution should have deserted him. His response began by showing Browning how the proclamation failed rudimentary legal and constitutional tests. Confiscating property in perpetuity and liberating slaves was “purely political, and not within the range of military law, or necessity”; it trespassed on the domain of lawmakers and was “simply ‘dictatorship.’” Then, in the core of the letter, he set out with crystal clarity the essence of his strategic thinking, as formulated and applied in 1861. He knew that he could win easy popularity by endorsing Frémont’s action. “No doubt the thing was popular in some quarters,” he reflected, “and would have been more so if it had been a general declaration of emancipation.” But he would do nothing that would hazard the loss of Kentucky and, with it, “lose the whole game.” A “restlessness for new positions” must not destabilize the broad coalition. Rather, he urged Browning, “back me manfully on the grounds upon which you and other kind friends gave me the election, and have approved in my public documents, [and] we shall go through triumphantly.”88

  Whatever its shortcomings, Lincoln’s border policy proved remarkably effective. By the time Lincoln sent his message to Congress in December, the non-Confederate South had been very largely secured. He pointed with legitimate satisfaction to the constancy of “noble little Delaware,” to Marylanders’ endorsement of the Union at the ballot box, to Kentucky’s being “decidedly, and, I think, unchangeably, ranged on the side of the Union”; to the comparative pacification of Missouri; and to western Virginia’s loyalists being “masters of their own country.” Having initially refused to supply a single soldier, Maryl
and, Kentucky, and Missouri had now put over forty thousand troops into the Union army, three times the number they had sent to the Confederacy. Further, he urged the military construction of a railroad to connect Unionists in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina with Kentucky and the other loyal areas.89 As it happened, Lincoln was far too sanguine about Missouri, and would be chronically disappointed by efforts to liberate important pockets of Appalachian Unionism. But in the main he was right to believe that events had vindicated his course. The upper South would continue to play its part in the evolution of his thinking during and after 1862, while gradually losing its overall strategic importance.

  Cementing non-Republican northerners and border-state loyalists into the Union coalition would make little difference to the balance of advantage if one or more of the great European powers should throw its resources behind the South. Lincoln had no firsthand knowledge of foreign affairs, but he knew enough to understand that civil wars left nations prey to outside interference. “A nation which endures factious domestic division, is exposed to disrespect abroad,” he told Congress, “and one party, if not both, is sure, sooner or later, to invoke foreign intervention.”90 Lincoln had no intention of involving himself in the day-to-day business of foreign policy: this would be left to his accomplished secretary of state. But he was equally ready to intervene whenever events threatened his larger strategic objective. Ideally, foreign powers should recognize that the Union was involved in putting down an internal insurrection, accept that the Confederate “government” was illegitimate, offer the rebels no material or moral support, and respect the blockade of southern ports. But the bottom line was avoidance of war.

  The Union’s key relationship, the administration knew, was with Great Britain, the world’s greatest naval power. France, too, was a significant force, but was unlikely to take any action independent of Britain. It was, then, alarming that within weeks of the fall of Sumter, on May 14, Lord Palmerston’s government issued a proclamation of neutrality, recognizing the Confederates as belligerents. Other European powers followed suit. Seward, raging “like a caged tiger” and swearing as only he could, saw this as overt encouragement of the rebels.91 For the Europeans, however, it was little more than a conventional response in time of war, falling well short of diplomatic recognition and flowing logically from Lincoln’s blockade of the southern ports, a measure they were ready to recognize. A blockade had status in international law: it was the action of one sovereign power against another and, when effective, it demanded the respect of neutrals. In imposing it, Lincoln undercut his claim that the Union was simply putting down a domestic uprising. A nation could not, after all, blockade itself. After consulting Charles Sumner, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Lincoln set about tempering the militant dispatch which Seward—in warmongering mode—had composed for Charles Francis Adams, the United States minister in London. The president’s revisions revealed a sharp eye for diplomatic nuance, without yielding the substance of the American position. Lincoln also ordered the urbane Adams to communicate only the substance of the document, and not to read or show it to the British foreign secretary, Lord John Russell.

  Simmering resentment continued to mark relations between the two countries for the next six months, boiling into a diplomatic crisis in December over the celebrated Trent affair. The Union navy’s seizure from a British mail packet of two Confederate commissioners bound for diplomatic service in Europe became the occasion of wild, patriotic rejoicing at home and white-hot indignation in Britain. Generally regarded as an ocean bully, long disdainful of neutral rights, Britain now found itself in the unaccustomed role of victim. The technicalities of Captain Charles Wilkes’s action in removing James M. Mason and John Slidell from the Trent were far from clear-cut, though the balance of legal advantage lay with the British: by removing the commissioners in a search-and-seize operation, without taking the vessel to a prize court for adjudication, the Americans seemed to be in breach of international law. But it was the affront to the Union Jack and injured pride, as much as points of law, that moved Palmerston and Russell to rattle their sabers.

  Only slowly, while Britain ordered naval and military reinforcements to Canada and the western Atlantic, did Lincoln come to appreciate the depth of the crisis. Once more he benefited from regular discussions with Sumner, whose friendship with the English Liberal reformers John Bright and Richard Cobden made the senator a barometer of British opinion. There was real risk, Sumner knew, that the hysteria of the “Rule Britannia” political class might force Palmerston to act in defense of British honor. Seward’s alter ego and government agent, Thurlow Weed, was also in Britain taking the political temperature, and urged forbearance on Lincoln. The president’s preferred escape route, one which would have had the merit of cooling passions on both sides and making the prisoners’ release more palatable to American public opinion, was arbitration by an international third party. He composed a draft dispatch which proposed settling the immediate affair by these means, on the understanding that whatever the arbiters determined should settle “the law for all future analogous cases, between Great Britain and the United States”: in other words, by yielding now America would at least protect its own neutral rights in the years ahead. He was evidently still serious about an initiative along these lines when he privately read his draft to an approving Orville Browning on December 21; both men “agreed that the question was susceptible of a peaceful solution if England was at all disposed to act justly with us.”92

  Lincoln’s intended approach was put in question two days later, however, when the British minister to Washington, Lord Lyons, presented the British government’s formal demand for an apology and for the release of the envoys within a week. In the sobering knowledge that France would side with Britain, the president called his cabinet together on Christmas Day. Seward—“loaded to the muzzle” with international law—took the lead in arguing the case for releasing the Confederate envoys, on the technical grounds that Wilkes had had every right to detain and search the Trent, but that he should have taken the vessel to a prize court. Sumner, present at Lincoln’s invitation, read out letters from Cobden and Bright to a similar purpose. Chase, too, tasting wormwood and gall as he did so, conceded the justice of the secretary of state’s argument. Bates, though unimpressed by the legal arguments (he had initially judged the seizure of the diplomats wholly lawful), did see the force of necessity: “We cannot hope for success in a super added war with England, backed by the assent and countenance of France.”93

  There was, however, no immediate agreement. After four hours the cabinet adjourned. According to the attorney general, Lincoln, along with some others, showed a “great reluctance” to acknowledge that “to go to war with England now, is to abandon all hope of suppressing the rebellion.” It is certainly true that as the meeting broke up Lincoln told Seward that he would put together a case for not releasing the envoys, and asked the secretary of state to press ahead with a concessive answer for Lord Lyons: the reconvened cabinet could then compare the cases the next day. But this did not mean that Lincoln was prepared to risk war, or that he had failed to understand the undoubtedly ruinous consequences of a conflict with Britain. Rather, he seems to have been using debate, as he did with big issues at other times, to test the very ground on which he intended to stand. In the event, he offered no counterargument to Seward’s, telling Seward that he had found it impossible to construct one. That evening he assured Browning that there would be no conflict, just as he had told Sumner two days earlier: “There will be no war unless England is bent on having one.”94 Lincoln’s chief anxiety had for some time ceased to be whether to release the envoys; rather, as his arbitration proposal suggested, it had become how to do so with the least damage to national dignity. Seward gave his colleagues a way out by producing a legal rationale for backing down. On December 26 the reconvened cabinet swallowed the bitter pill and agreed to surrender the Confederate prisoners. The next day Seward informed Ly
ons that the United States—delighted that Britain now embraced the freedom of the seas and respect for the rights of neutrals—would free the captives and make reparation for Wilkes’s illegal act, but would offer no apology for a deed not authorized by the administration. Honor had been maintained, at least in part.

  Hindsight suggests that the rhetorical smoke and thunder of the Trent affair obscured a cold, sharp calculation of national advantage in both the Union and the British governments. It was in the strategic interests of neither to be swept into war. But rational action follows only from rational thought, and for that the decision-makers on both sides can take credit. Of these, none was more responsible than Lincoln for the preservation of a wary peace. Throughout he was a restraining influence, dampening rather than stoking the fires of chauvinism. Sensibly, in his annual message to Congress, he avoided all reference to the brewing crisis. He readily listened and deferred to those from whom he could learn, notably Sumner and a now statesmanlike Seward, who well knew when and when not to be bellicose, and who enjoyed good personal relations with Lord Lyons. However attached Lincoln might have been to his own arbitration proposal, he chose not to press it when circumstances moved on. By these means he charted a course through stormy seas to calmer but still choppy waters beyond. Other perils lay ahead in the Union’s international relations, especially relating to the blockade, to the construction of Confederate raiders in European shipyards, and to British and French efforts at mediation. But Lincoln had navigated past the greatest point of danger, determined that he would not have “two wars on his hands at a time.”95