The story of Lincoln’s presidential leadership is at heart the story of how he used the power at his disposal to redefine the Union’s explicit purposes to embrace liberty, and even equality, for all. But, as Lincoln explained, he had to exercise that power under constraint. Constitutional duty, the obstinate realities of the battlefield, and opinion on the home front severely hemmed in his freedom of action. These, however, were evolving, not static, constraints. Constitutional duty might seem to demand protection for slavery, but not at the expense of national integrity; indeed, duty to the spirit of the founding document might even require amendment of the Constitution itself. At the same time, the events of war churned public opinion, bringing many former anti-abolitionists to embrace military emancipation and the arming of the blacks. The challenge for any Union president in these circumstances was to identify the moment when the country would accept an advance to new ground. Lincoln’s great—possibly greatest—achievement was to take a stethoscope to Union opinion and read it with such skill that he timed to perfection his redefinition of national purpose. This unerring sense of timing was for political insiders the key to the president’s greatness. “Lincoln is the most truly progressive man of the age,” claimed Forney, “because he always moves in conjunction with propitious circumstances, not waiting to be dragged by the force of events or wasting strength in premature struggles with them.”5
The story of the evolving purposes of the Union’s war is also the story of Lincoln’s personal development. Those who withstood unmoved the buffeting of war were rare indeed. Inevitably, Lincoln’s private understanding of his moral obligations, and of the meaning of the conflict itself, evolved under the grueling burden of leadership, the wider suffering of wartime, and personal grief. Unfathomable as the private Lincoln has to remain, there is every sign that his understanding of providential intervention both shaped the thinking by which he reached the most profound of his decisions, for emancipation, and—even more powerfully—steeled his nerve to stand by the implications of that decision once made.
READING THE PUBLIC
Lincoln openly acknowledged that the steps by which he redefined the war for the Union as a war against slavery were guided by his reading of public opinion, and that he feared too early an embrace of emancipation would shatter the Union consensus. Not pushing mainstream sentiment toward emancipation faster than it wanted to go meant turning a deaf ear to the urgent appeals of antislavery radicals, while simultaneously nudging border-state conservatives toward greater realism. But the question arises: How could he be sure what that mainstream opinion was? As a state politician, the Illinois circuit lawyer and aspirant for elective office had enjoyed a face-to-face relationship with his constituents, but the nation’s president and commander-in-chief was mostly restricted to the executive mansion. Political friends saw the danger, warning him against the “disingenuous and selfish clamor at the Capitol.” But remote from his roots, increasingly exhausted by the unremitting burden of office, bombarded by conflicting advice, rarely straying from the vicinity of Washington, and prevented by convention from gauging the popular mood through stump-speaking, how could he know and track the turbulent thoughts of ordinary Americans and avoid, as an Indiana loyalist feared, “the possibility of loosing the public confidence”?6
Election returns offered a series of snapshots of political opinion. On average a significant congressional or state election occurred in the North every other month during the four years of war. Lincoln, whose grasp of electoral topography and arithmetic was second to none, spent many an hour in the telegraph office at the War Department, awaiting and analyzing outcomes. Broadly speaking, election results allowed the administration to chart its standing in public esteem throughout the war. Republicans’ success in New England in the spring of 1861 appeared to endorse the policy of coercion of the Confederacy. Later that year, the party’s winning several state contests outside New England with the support of War Democrats seemed to vindicate the conciliatory approach toward border-state conservatives. The satisfactory returns in the fall of 1863 could also be taken as a broad endorsement of the administration’s course and became the signal for a further call for volunteers. On the other hand, the state and congressional contests in the fall of 1862, the most serious electoral test of the war to date, provided the administration with an alarming popular rebuff. Significantly, however, there was no unanimity about what particular aspect of policy had chiefly caused the alienation. Using voting figures as a commentary on matters of national policy was little better than reading braille with a gloved hand.
Dealings with political leaders at the national and state levels held out for Lincoln opportunities for more nuanced analyses of popular mood. From his deliberately broad-based and inclusive cabinet he heard often dissonant voices advancing a range of views which ran the gamut of Unionist opinion—disharmony, in this case at least, acting as a source of presidential strength, not weakness. More sensitive still to public feeling were those in elective office, notably state governors and United States congressmen, whom Lincoln considered his eyes and ears in each constituency. From Andrew Curtin of Pennsylvania, Richard Yates of Illinois, Oliver P. Morton of Indiana, John Andrew of Massachusetts, William A. Buckingham of Connecticut, and other loyal governors, the president received commentaries on the general management of the war, on electoral prospects, and on the public’s view of particular administration policies across a range of salient issues: confiscation, colonization, emancipation, black troops, the draft, reconstruction. But, as Lincoln discovered to his cost, though they were closer than he to the grass roots, their judgments were not infallible. Thus, taking Ohio Governor William Dennison’s advice in the spring of 1861 to heed popular will and convert the ninety-day militiamen into three-year volunteers, Lincoln was forced into retracting his approval in the face of the men’s anger and threat of mutiny.7 Governors and other state politicians had their own axes to grind, of course, and Lincoln had always to remain on the lookout for self-interested pleading disguised as objective testimony. His grasp on the slippery confusion of events in Missouri, for instance, was undoubtedly weakened by the ambiguities and defects of his information. Unsurprisingly, he sent his own White House secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, on a variety of missions to assess local political feeling, just as he had used Lamon and Hurlbut to sound out opinion in South Carolina early in 1861.
Newspapers, the lifeblood of the American political system, provided Lincoln with another means of keeping his finger on the pulse of opinion. In his days as an aspiring Illinois politician he had been an insatiable reader of the party political press, but the rigors of office gave the harassed president far less time to indulge this appetite. Francis Carpenter, the portrait painter who observed Lincoln’s daily routine over a six-month period in 1864, recalled only one instance when he saw Lincoln casually browsing through a newspaper. Actually, papers abounded in the White House. In addition to the three Washington dailies (the Morning Chronicle, National Republican, and Star), which were laid out on Lincoln’s study table, a variety of the Union’s leading papers provided his secretaries with the materials from which they could mine the interesting editorial matter and items of political importance they judged they should bring to the president’s attention. When for a brief interlude early in the war events conspired to interrupt the daily flow of papers, a sense of isolation and even desperation seized the occupants of the executive mansion. Lincoln had a healthily skeptical attitude toward press criticism, which rarely moved him to anger and which he commonly dismissed as “noise” and “gas” generated by ignorance and editorial self-importance. On the biggest of issues, emancipation, he said “he had studied the matter so long that he knew more about it than they [the editors] did.”8
Still, Lincoln could not afford to ignore the journalistic corps altogether. Indeed, some journalists became friends and invaluable channels of information. Such was Noah Brooks, an acquaintance from Illinois days, who became a near-daily visi
tor at the White House after his posting to Washington by the Sacramento Daily Union. Like Simon P. Hanscom, the antislavery Bostonian who edited Lincoln’s favorite paper, the Washington National Republican, and also became a frequent caller, Brooks acted as a sounding board and source of political gossip.9 Others, like Henry Raymond of the New York Times, were less personally close to the president, but enjoyed his respect (despite Raymond’s having called for Lincoln’s deposition during his first months in office). When, in the dark days of the summer of 1864, Raymond brought him reports of opinion hardening against the administration, Lincoln came as close as he ever did to abandoning the high ground of antislavery Unionism.
Loyal editors also bombarded the president with unsolicited advice in hundreds of private letters. These, however, represented only a small fraction of the mail that at times threatened to submerge the White House secretariat. Nicolay handled Lincoln’s huge correspondence before his inauguration; subsequently the responsibility fell on Hay’s young shoulders. As the volume rose, to reach a peak of two mailbags (some five hundred letters) daily during the midpoint of Lincoln’s reelection year, an additional secretary was required. Much of the correspondence comprised requests for civil jobs and military commissions. There were diatribes and hate mail, too, from which Lincoln was generally shielded. But many letters came from those whom one secretary described as the “good and true,” often unlettered and humble, pouring out their “deepest heart sorrows” and offering their advice on the conduct of affairs. Of course, Lincoln had time to handle only a fraction of what arrived, perhaps a dozen or so letters a day; according to Hay, the president personally read no more than one letter in fifty. But those he did review, together with the summaries and annotations provided by his secretaries, gave him a chance literally to read public opinion. Each phase of the conflict prompted earnest suggestions about the best policies and strategy for victory.10
Lincoln’s mail also brought tides of formal representations and recommendations, a few from constitutional bodies, including state legislatures and city councils, but mostly from the regular meetings of voluntary organizations, and a variety of ad hoc gatherings convened to press a particular cause. Resolutions from chambers of commerce, Union Defense Committees, Republican and Union party meetings, and college alumni streamed into the White House. But it was the religious-humanitarian organizations, dominated by the mainstream evangelical church families and their radical offspring, which on occasion turned the stream into a torrent. It is unlikely that Lincoln read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested every one of the resolutions that actually reached his desk (themselves only a sample of a daunting total), but he undoubtedly noted their general tenor and the pulse of public concern that they represented.
Many correspondents wrote as an alternative to paying the personal call on the president that the constraints of geography, time, and expense prevented. Yet the most remarkable feature of Lincoln’s tenure of office was the throngs of ordinary citizens who came to the capital to pour through the White House doors, intent on a private interview on one of the president’s regular public days. Lincoln never lost his determination to remain accessible—to be “the attorney of the people, not their ruler.” William Seward remarked that “there never was a man so accessible to all sorts of proper and improper persons”; the president himself described his office hours as “the Beggars’ Opera.” He never lost his keen sense of his own ordinariness and his kinship with common folk. He cherished republican simplicity, shunned the imperial style, and protested strongly when Henry Halleck detailed a cavalry detachment, clattering along with sabers and spurs, to guard the presidential carriage.11
In consequence of what Henry Raymond called Lincoln’s “utter unconsciousness of his position,” ordinary men and women regarded him more as a neighbor to be dropped in upon than as a remote head of state. “Mr. Lincoln is always approachable and this is greatly in his favor,” explained the Washington correspondent of the New York Independent. “The people can get at him and impress upon him their views without difficulty.” Though his visitors included, in the words of one observer, “loiterers, contract-hunters, garrulous parents on paltry errands, toadies without measure, and talkers without conscience,” Lincoln was adamantly opposed to restricting access. “I feel—though the tax on my time is heavy—that no hours of my day are better employed than those which bring me again within the direct contact and atmosphere of the average of our whole people.” Each meeting, he maintained, served “to renew in me a clearer and more vivid image of that great popular assemblage out of which I sprung . . . I call these receptions my ‘public-opinion baths’; for I have but little time to read the papers and gather public opinion that way.” Sometimes he felt himself bombarded and besieged, but, even so, these encounters with ordinary folk worked to invigorate his “perceptions of responsibility and duty” and undoubtedly gave him more pleasure than the wearying formal White House receptions and “levees” which custom demanded. Probably more than any other single agency, they provided the oxygen lacking in the rarefied political air of wartime Washington, and seemed if anything to strengthen Lincoln’s faith in the wisdom of the common people, rather than undermine it. John Hay discerned a mark of genius in the president’s “intuitive knowledge of the feeling and wish of the people.”12 But that intuition depended as much on perspiration as inspiration, and on a careful, even laborious, reading of the confusing multiplicity of signals of the public mood.
“EVERY INDISPENSABLE MEANS”: TOWARD THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION
Lincoln, at various times, before different audiences, repeated that his oath of office obliged him to use “every indispensable means” to preserve the Union. Means that under normal conditions would be deemed unnecessary, even extraconstitutional, might in extremis become “an indispensable necessity” to achieve a lawful end. He used the phrase first in July 1861, when—even as he sought to reassure conservatives—he left the door open for a changing power relationship between the federal government and the rebel states.13 The current of events during the first half of 1862 led Lincoln to decide to override the peacetime guarantees of slave property and declare Confederate slaves the subjects of military emancipation.
Well before 1861 was out, millions of Unionists had already concluded that crushing slavery had become “indispensable” to victory. Lincoln was not one of them, but their urgent voices left him in little doubt that abolition had ceased to be the preserve of moral zealots alone. Many anti-southern pragmatists, Democrat as well as Republican, joined the radicals in declaring their enthusiasm for Frémont’s proclamation and even Cameron’s plan for arming blacks. And when the conservative Henry Halleck, replacing Frémont, issued his General Order No. 3 excluding runaway slaves from Union lines, on the implausible grounds that they acted as spies for the Confederacy, the western commander faced broad-based censure.
Across the Union, including the conservative lower North and the border, even those who wanted “nothing to do with ‘abolition’ in the common sense of that term” bombarded Lincoln with calls for bold and decisive measures against “the monster” slavery, “the real cause of this war,” “the Groundwork of the Rebellion,” and the Confederates’ “weak point.” To protect the human property of treasonous slaveocrats, whose resistance consumed the blood and dollars of loyal citizens, defied wisdom as well as morality. A Delaware loyalist complained about the inconsistency of “fighting Slavery with one hand and sustaining it with the other.” To the same end, a Virginia-born Unionist told the president: “I myself . . . have no prejudices against Slavry, as a local institution but when the question, is narrowd down to the existance of the Govement or Slavry, who will hesitate to make a choice?” Slavery’s days were numbered. “You will be forced before long to proclaim universal liberty—the people are ripe for it and the politicians are coming to it.”14
Lincoln was properly unpersuaded when loyalists variously reported that Frémont’s bold stroke enjoyed the acclaim of “every Re
publican and nine tenths of the Democrats,” of “99 out of every 100.” But he still had no reason to doubt what one Wisconsin correspondent told him, that “in the midst of this war . . . I am only one of thousands who have changed views very much.” Lincoln knew that the times were out of joint, that the conservative Cameron, through his report, had become the unlikely hero of Congressman Thaddeus Stevens and the “brimstone radicals,” and that his own cautious leadership now placed him to the right of those who had once criticized him as a backwoods abolitionist. Before the war, moderates had ridiculed the idea of an “irrepressible conflict,” denied that slavery and freedom were incompatible, and rebuked Lincoln for the radicalism of his statement that the nation could not endure “half slave and half free.” Now the roles were reversed. Rooting out slavery, the Democrat George Bancroft told Lincoln, was “the universal expectation and hope of men of all parties.” John Hay watched in wry wonderment: “It is a most instructive sight to see the Illinois emancipationist converted into an earnest conservative, and resolutely resisting the solicitations to abolition persistently urged by those who so bitterly denounced his radicalism a few years ago.”15
Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power Page 28