Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power

by Richard J. Carwardine

  In the event, the Democrats made impressive gains. They took control of the states across the lower North, from Illinois through Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to New Jersey and New York, where Horatio Seymour seized a stunning gubernatorial victory against a badly divided Republican state party. Even across the Republicans’ more natural terrain, in the upper Northwest around the Great Lakes, they advanced. In all, the Democrats won thirty-five Republican-held congressional seats and secured a bridgehead from which they could hope to advance to a presidential victory in 1864. The Republicans still comfortably controlled Congress, but, dazed by their political mauling, they feared the effect on Union morale. Sumner told Lincoln that the New York outcome was “worse for our country than the bloodiest disaster on any field of battle.” Writing from Illinois, Jesse Dubois took fright over results that “bode no good to the country,” warning Lincoln: “The rebels in Tennessee are as exultant over them as the Chicago Times and say openly that if they can sustain themselves this winter the Northern people will compel this Administration to abandon the contest.”48

  The postmortem cast an exhausted president into a deeper well of depression. Conservatives blamed government by proclamation. Since slavery’s death depended on military advance, insisted one western Republican, the only effect of an unnecessary emancipation order had been to resuscitate the Democrats “to active life.” Others lamented the order sanctioning arbitrary arrests, resulting in the harassment of loyal citizens by “a horde of irresponsible and contemptible detectives.” By contrast, radicals blamed the election defeat not on overzealousness or proclamations, but on Lincoln’s retaining in military command and appointive office the complacent, the inert, and the outright hostile. “Our armies must be pressed forward, & the proclamation must be pressed forward,” Sumner insisted, “& the country must be made to feel that there will be no relaxation of any kind.” Schurz declared McClellan, Buell, and Halleck out of sympathy with the true goals of the administration, and grumbled about the undue influence of foot-dragging Democrats. Lincoln demurred, reminding Schurz that only a broad-based, cross-party effort could suppress the rebellion. Instead, he argued, the Republicans’ vote had been depressed by the higher level of enlistments amongst their own supporters than the Demo-crats and had not been helped by the disparagement of the administration in the Republican press. He did, though, accept that “the ill-success of the war” underlay the defeat and implicitly accepted the need for more vigor.49

  There was a degree of self-deception in Lincoln’s analysis: the proclamations had been more damaging than he conceded. But he was right to see the stalled progress of the Union armies as the public’s chief concern, and he now geared for action. He removed the politically out-of-touch Buell as commander of the Army of the Ohio on October 24, but sensibly waited for all voting to be over before moving to dismiss McClellan, after further weeks of exasperation. Prominent Republicans and War Democrats rejoiced at this intimation of “energy” at last. “I have been forced to the conclusion,” Daniel Dickinson told Lincoln, that McClellan “is better suited to be superintendent of a cemetery where dead men require digging, than for the commander of an army of the living where movement is necessary to success.”50 There were obvious perils in removing a commander still very popular with his men, but Lincoln’s choice of Ambrose E. Burnside as his successor—Burnside was widely, if mistakenly, regarded as close to McClellan—helped neutralize the danger.

  Lincoln’s reaction to election defeat, then, was not to question the wisdom of his Emancipation Proclamation, and his changes in military command reinforced the view of conservatives that he had moved irrevocably onto radical terrain. Radicals themselves, however, took more persuading of an administration transfigured, and read into the events of the final weeks of 1862 evidence of its disastrous incompetence and hesitation over strategy, as well as intimations of backsliding from the antislavery high ground so recently scaled. They waited apprehensively for the president’s annual message of December 1 and found little reassurance in what they heard.

  Lincoln had worked hard at his text. Its most animated, earnest, and eloquent passages—over half the message—dealt with slavery and its future, but he barely mentioned the Emancipation Proclamation. Rather, having reiterated the sentiments of his inaugural address, that the “only great element of national discord amongst us” was the transitory differ-ence rooted in the rightness or wrongness of slavery, he set out a scheme by which that strife might be “hushed forever with the passing of one generation.” He proposed three constitutional amendments, providing for compensation in federal bonds to states that opted for a gradual emancipation by 1900; making “forever free” all slaves who “enjoyed actual freedom by the chances of war,” and compensating loyal owners; and authorizing federal funding “for colonizing free colored persons, with their own consent, at any place or places without the United States.” It was a scheme prefigured in his words of March and June to Congress and the border representatives.51

  Radicals gave a mainly chilly response to proposals they condemned as backward-looking. Was Lincoln, as his Democratic opponents charged, more or less conceding the unconstitutionality of his Emancipation Proclamation? The proposals were impracticable, too, for ratification would depend on the support of at least some of the rebel slave states. U.S. Representative Henry Winter Davis summed up a disquiet shared even by conservative Republicans when he described the plan as “illusory to the loyal states and ridiculous in relation to the disloyal states”; Chase told Lincoln it would “weaken rather than strengthen your administration.”52

  In deeming it a conservative message, the president’s critics had a case. Lincoln’s instinctive moderation and respect for constitutional process permeated proposals through which, however unlikely it was that they would be fully embraced, he wanted to be seen to be doing his presidential duty. A nation in revolutionary flux was on the brink of a war of subjugation, but until that moment arrived he had a responsibility to strive for the peaceful, graduated, compensated, conservative plan of emancipation that he had always favored—hence his emphasis on leaving the initiative with the states, on avoiding “vagrant destitution” and “the evils of sudden derangement,” on the justice of the whole nation paying the costs and on the benefits of the voluntary deportation of blacks.

  Lincoln’s proposals served two immediate political purposes. First, they were designed to encourage Unionists in rebel states to respond positively to the threat of the Emancipation Proclamation before it was too late. In particular Lincoln hoped to accelerate the moves toward the restoration of loyal governments that had accompanied the advance of Union forces. In Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, and especially Louisiana he had given instruction to his generals to build political support for the fall elections. The annual message gave him a further opportunity for pressure: wherever rebellion yielded to restoration and reconstruction, there September’s order would be stayed and a conservative course of reform substituted. Lincoln’s proposed amendments, then, have to be seen, as he saw them, as a peace measure. He may even have believed, as David Donald has suggested, that the combination of martial stick and reformist carrot would shortly secure a near-complete collapse of the rebel states by chain reaction. But whatever Lincoln’s expectations—and they are hard to read—he understood that wherever the proclamation was stayed an alternative plan of emancipation was required.53

  The gradualist scheme had a further purpose. The Republicans’ severe loss of support in the fall elections had flashed a warning signal. Although Lincoln had refused to be stampeded into revoking the Emancipation Proclamation, or maintaining McClellan in command against his better judgment, he needed in some way to recolonize the center ground that he seemed to have vacated. The annual message gave him a chance to reestablish his credentials for moderation.

  In the final analysis, however, the annual message was scarcely a conservative document. Lincoln looked forward as well as back. “As our case is new, so must we think anew,
and act anew. . . . The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present.” Not only did he stand by his September proclamation, by implication the most revolutionary of the war measures to date, but he had begun to think about how permanent constitutional law could secure the changes that the proclamation, a mere war measure, would effect. Equally, his proposals sought to energize emancipationists in the loyal border states and destroy slavery in places well beyond the proclamation’s remit. And—in a lengthy passage which confronted economic racism even more powerfully than it advocated voluntary deportation, and made a start in educating whites to tolerate a free black population in their midst—Lincoln challenged, as he had never done before, the “largely imaginary, if not sometimes malicious” argument that emancipation would depress the wages of white labor, and that freedmen would “swarm forth, and cover the whole land.”54

  Most striking of all, Lincoln not only presented emancipation as a necessary means “for restoring and preserving the national authority throughout the Union,” but now, however indirectly, he signaled the slaves’ freedom as one of the purposes of war. In a memorable climax, prefiguring his theme at Gettysburg, Lincoln acknowledged that there might be other ways of saving the Union, but believed his own plan offered the best hope. “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve.” Emancipation, initially only a weapon for securing a Union devoted to freedom, would, through the nobility of the action and the liberty it secured for those in bondage, itself become an essential element of that larger freedom of all Americans. “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth.”55

  Whatever modest reassurance the radicals might have drawn, in Chase’s words, from the “noble sentiments” of Lincoln’s peroration, it did not survive the Union catastrophe at Fredericksburg on December 13.56 Burnside’s battlefield misjudgment was scarcely Lincoln’s fault—indeed, Lincoln had sought to warn against the very course that brought disaster—but the loss of over twelve thousand men in the worst defeat to date plunged northern opinion into the darkest desperation and even defeatism. It also prompted the most profound government crisis Lincoln had faced. Popular anger against Halleck, Stanton, and even the president himself prompted a special caucus of thirty-two Republican senators. Focusing on the administration’s weakness, the cabinet’s chronic disharmony, and Lincoln’s seeming lack of system, they turned their most determined fire on Seward. From Chase in particular—in personality and policy the chalk to Seward’s cheese—they had learned of the secretary of state’s “back-stairs influence” over Lincoln and of the conservatism and halfheartedness which were widely deemed to have blocked an energetic prosecution of the war. Resolved to secure a reconstructed cabinet, they agreed to send a deputation to the White House. Anticipating their action, and unready to see the president put into a false position, Seward sent Lincoln his resignation.

  Stunned, but determined not to lose control of his administration, Lincoln rallied and skillfully played out the crisis with a calmness and urbanity that obscured his inner anxiety. If he let Seward go, he would be making a public statement that the radicals were in control, that the administration was no longer broad-based, and that the Union party consensus had fragmented into the polarized partisanship of a resurgent democracy and hard-line Republicanism. He surprised the deputation of senators by inviting the whole cabinet (without Seward) to the second of their two meetings with him, and then secured from a wrong-footed and deeply embarrassed Chase the admission that really there had been no disunity in the cabinet. Conscious that he was tarred with the charge of double-dealing, Chase spent an uneasy night before hesitantly producing a letter of resignation in the president’s office. Lincoln seized it, aware that it was the weapon to resolve the crisis: he would persuade both secretaries to withdraw their resignations, reassert his mastery, and above all—with “a pumpkin in each end of my bag”—maintain the administration’s balance. After two days of “hell,” he could smile a little.57

  The radicals’ attempt to take control of the administration had failed. If Lincoln needed confirmation of the meaning of his triumph, it came by way of a reported remark made by Jefferson Davis during the crisis “that there would soon be a rupture in the Cabinet of Lincoln’s, and that the appointment of men who favored the emancipation scheme”—thus alienating Kentucky—“together with the late Democratic victories, would ensure the ultimate triumph of Southern Arms.” In fact, the radicals’ defeat did not, despite the fervent hopes of opposition Democrats and stolid border Unionists, mean Lincoln’s abandonment of the promises of September, though the memorials that bombarded him during the final days of the year, including a barrage of letters from the Republican presidential electors of 1860, indicated that antislavery loyalists too were anxious about a last-minute presidential stumble. On New Year’s Day 1863, steadying his arm after a morning of vigorous handshaking, Lincoln signed the final proclamation of emancipation.58

  An authorized version of the Emancipation Proclamation, countersigned by Seward and Nicolay, designed to raise money for hospitals and the relief of soldiers, at the Philadelphia Great Central Sanitary Fair in June 1864.

  Far from retreating from the radicalism of his September order, Lincoln advanced a step further. As well as declaring free all slaves in states and parts of states still in rebellion, he authorized the enlistment of blacks, admitting them into the Union armed services “to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts.” Even before the onset of hostilities, free blacks had expressed their readiness to risk their lives for the Union, and their repeated demands that they—and the multiplying contrabands—be allowed to enlist were taken up by white radicals, including Schurz, Tilton, and Beecher. By July 1862 Lincoln had begun to acknowledge the case for allowing commanders to arm freedmen in specific locations and signed the Confiscation Act that gave him discretion to receive blacks into service. Some generals took pathbreaking initiatives: Hunter and Rufus Saxton with contrabands in the Department of the South; Butler with the free black citizens of New Orleans. But, fearing the effect on public opinion, Lincoln was not prepared to move to a general arming of African-Americans. In August, Browning, acting as the president’s ears in Illinois, endorsed Lincoln’s stance. “The time may come for arming the negroes. It is not yet.” Men repeatedly said, “If [Lincoln] . . . will accept one black Regiment he will lose twenty white Regiments by it.” When, that same month, Indiana offered to raise two black regiments, the president refused them, just as he did the Sixth Colored Regiment earnestly proffered by Rhode Island’s Governor Sprague in September.59 The Emancipation Proclamation was quite enough to ask conservative Unionists to digest for the moment; with elections in the offing in the fall of 1862, he would not ask them to swallow black enlistments, too.

  Still, arming blacks was a logical consequence of a proclamation justified as a military measure. Arguments that had begun to weigh in July tipped the scales by the close of the year, fusing opportunism and idealism. The Union army needed men. Heavy enlistments and drafts deprived the home front of its manpower. Putting freedmen in uniform would keep them off the northern labor market. It would also prepare them for the responsibilities of freedom and help remove “reasonless and unchristian prejudice against the African race.”60 If Lincoln shared the common anxiety that blacks were unequal to the task, it was assuaged by his reading the Boston antiquarian George Livermore’s recent pamphlet, a gift from Sumner, on their substantial role as soldiers during the Revolution. Addressing the fear that arming blacks might trigger slave insurrections, Lincoln enjoined those freed by the proclamation “to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence.”61

  Lincoln’s low-key declaration prompted no immediate transformation of policy toward black enlistments, but it was the critical turning point. Conservatives like Edward Bates may have been uneasy, at best, and border Unionists alarmed, but it met with delight am
ongst African-American spokesmen and radical Republicans. One intimation of the new direction in policy was the dog that did not bark: colonization, brandished as a policy in September, received no mention. Lincoln had not lost all interest in voluntary deportation—the Île-à-Vache scheme was still afloat—and his commissioner of emigration, James Mitchell, believed that the arming of “a few thousand negroes” would not stand in the way of their being “subsequently removed.”62 But Lincoln’s present silence eloquently intimated that he saw the internal contradiction in asking blacks to leave the country on whose behalf he was inviting them to risk their lives.

  Over sixteen months, by increments, Lincoln had moved. From firmly repudiating emancipation as a weapon of war, he had moved to declare the advancing Union forces the liberators of millions in bondage. From tolerating the return of fugitive slaves to rebel masters, he had moved to invite freedmen to take up arms against those who had shackled them. From defining the war’s purpose as the reestablishment of a Union committed to no more than a gradual melting away of the peculiar institution, he had moved to champion a nation energized by the prospect of slavery’s imminent and permanent removal. Whatever Lincoln would later say to Albert Hodges, this fundamental reformulating of objectives occurred not because the president was passively bobbing about on the tidal surges of events, powerful though these were, but because he took initiatives, bringing to bear a strong political will, a radar system acutely sensitive to public opinion, and a gift for timing. Not least, he thought so long and hard before taking a new position that, as Charles Sumner told Harriet Beecher Stowe, “it is hard to move him . . . once he has taken it.” This ratchet meant that the decision for emancipation, once presented to the cabinet on July 22, would not easily be retracted; it also explains why in November, two months after issuing the preliminary order, Lincoln said privately that “he would rather die than take back a word.”63 The ratchet was an expression both of Lincoln’s temperament and of his intellectual character. As such, it was also related to Lincoln’s understanding of his place within the workings of Providence, to which we must now turn.