Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power

by Richard J. Carwardine

  Articulating the aims and rationale of war was essential to Union victory. Lincoln’s authority as a democratic politician in antebellum America had derived very largely from his campaign oratory. Yet after his nomination for the presidency he never again took to the stump, and, once in the White House, he made only very limited use of a weapon that had done so much to win him the high regard of Republicans nationally. As president, he spoke in public nearly one hundred times. Mostly he made not full-blown speeches but modest remarks, often unscripted. They included short addresses to troops passing through Washington, impromptu responses to well-wishers who came to “serenade” him with music and speeches, and statements to visiting delegations—of clergymen, border-state representatives, free blacks, and others. Almost all these remarks were made in the capital. His two inaugural addresses and his speech at Gettysburg were rare, set-piece exceptions to this general practice.

  We may wonder about Lincoln’s reluctance to speak in public, given his proven record as a rhetorician, his confidence in the power of language, and his reiterated certainty that Americans responded well to the truth when logically and clearly presented. The explanation lies partly in his conventional attitude that it was not quite proper for a president to make speeches at all, and certainly not during election campaigns, when stump-speaking would smack of partisanship, not statesmanship. No less influential was the pressure of presidential business, whose schedule gave Lincoln few opportunities to prepare lengthy speeches. Almost all his great addresses, as at Springfield in June 1858 and at Cooper Union in New York in February 1860, followed careful deliberation, even sustained research. Protracted, meticulous preparation and several drafts preceded his First Inaugural. Once the war began, competing demands squeezed out time for writing speeches or traveling to speak outside Washington. Since, unlike modern presidents, he used no ghostwriter (though the secretary of state prepared what Lincoln should say when foreign ministers were presented), and since he feared he might be led into careless, offhand remarks (which explains why he fretted at the approach of serenaders, who always expected a few words), we should not be surprised that he spoke so little in public and that the two most celebrated speeches of his presidency, the Gettysburg address and the Second Inaugural, were his pithiest.

  The mass-produced, pocket-size cartes de visite turned Lincoln into a familiar and personal presence throughout the Union. Understanding their value, he readily sat to be photographed. The images here, including a tender study of “Father Abraham” with his son Tad, capture him from his arrival in Washington as president-elect, in February 1861, to the month before his assassination.

  Some have considered Lincoln’s reticence a probable mistake, a damaging and self-inflicted wound, to be contrasted with Jefferson Davis’s recourse to speaking tours to bolster Confederate morale.19 But what Lincoln lost in this respect he more than made up for by the use of other media, by which he became a ubiquitous presence, both visually and in words. The mass-produced woodcut and lithograph carried Lincoln’s image into thousands of homes, as did the newly arrived mass-produced photograph. Lincoln sat dozens of times for photographers, and many of the seventy or so wartime likenesses of him were reproduced in huge numbers as pocket-size photographs. The president was not a vain man and knew he was no pinup, but he was only too ready to meet the popular demand for an easily available likeness and to give those who had never seen him in the flesh a sense of personal encounter.

  Equally Lincoln made often brilliant use of the written word to communicate the purposes of the administration. The most formal of the president’s documents, his annual and special messages to Congress (which were forwarded from the White House, to be read out by a clerk in the legislative branch), naturally consumed much of his time and blended routine information, compact analysis of events, vigorous explanation of the administration’s course, and, occasionally, soaring rhetoric. Then there were the published accounts of the many less ceremonial, more informal occasions: Lincoln’s meetings and interviews with groups of visitors to the White House, for which he had often a scripted response. Probably most effective of all were Lincoln’s carefully crafted public letters to particular individuals or mass meetings, a device he used with increasing frequency after the slide in the administration’s political fortunes in the spring of 1862. Each was skillfully designed to rally opinion or prepare it for imminent changes in policy, and each addressed an issue crucial to the conduct and outcome of the war: emancipation and racial issues in his letters to Horace Greeley (August 1862), James C. Conkling, his Springfield friend (August 1863), and Albert Hodges (April 1864); conscription policy to New York Governor Horatio Seymour (August 1863); and treason, military arrests, and the suspension of habeas corpus to Erastus Corning, Matthew Birchard, and other New York and Ohio Democrats (June 1863). In some cases, as with his letter to a Union mass meeting in support of Maryland state emancipation in October 1864, the immediate and chief objective was local. On the other hand, his addresses to the workingmen of Manchester and London sought to rally overseas opinion. Some of the letters appeared not just in newspaper columns but as widely circulating pamphlets. Seen as a whole, the president’s pronouncements warrant the historian Phillip Paludan’s conclusion that for the duration of the war “Lincoln constantly manipulated public opinion”—albeit in the pursuit of a philosophically enhanced and rededicated Union, in the celebration of constitutionalism, and in the Whiggish, romantic belief that the statesman’s role was to appeal to “the better angels of [people’s] nature.”20

  Lincoln wrote his masterly letter to Albert G. Hodges, Kentucky editor of the Frankfort Commonwealth, intending that it be published—and circulated widely. Aimed particularly at border-state conservatives who were angered by black enlistments and the erosion of slavery, Lincoln’s explanation of his actions shrewdly and calculatingly stressed the reactive, not proactive, element in his policy making (“events have controlled me”).

  Lincoln surely regretted being unable to give voice to his own words. He was keenly alert to matters of intonation and emphasis, evident in his private recitation of Shakespearean soliloquies and in his canny advice to an actor playing Falstaff on how to get the best out of a line. Significantly, he accompanied his letter to Conkling, designed to be read out at a Union rally, with guidance on how it should be delivered. His enforced near-silence made him all the more attentive to the quality of his prose, which he sought to imbue with color, life, and energy. When, in his intended message to the special session of Congress in July 1861, Lincoln described the rebellion as “sugar-coated,” the government printer objected to what was then judged an undignified expression. Lincoln was unimpressed by the distinction his critic drew between the racy language appropriate for a mass meeting in Illinois and the prose of a historic, formal document: “That word expresses precisely my idea, and I am not going to change it. The time will never come in this country when the people won’t know exactly what sugar-coated means!” In his public letter to Greeley, to stress the difficulty in restoring the old Union unchanged, he had written: “Broken eggs can never be mended, and the longer the breaking proceeds the more will be broken.” Only reluctantly did he strike out a sentence which the editors of the National Intelligencer considered undignified. Sometimes Lincoln’s lively metaphors got the better of him: even the adoring Hay judged the letter to Conkling, with its allusion to the navy as “Uncle Sam’s web-feet,” to be scarred by “hideously bad rhetoric . . . [and] indecorums that are infamous.” However, these lapses came not from self-conscious cleverness, classical allusions, or showy erudition, but from striving to be plainly understood, and in the main Lincoln’s prose was arresting, lucid, and strikingly economical. For admirers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lincoln’s was the art that concealed art. By his careful avoidance of “fine writing,” as conventionally understood, and his embrace of language that had “the relish and smack of the soil,” he reached all classes, from the most sophisticated to “the lowest intellect.”21
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  In practice, it made no great difference whether Lincoln spoke or wrote. What really counted was that his words and ideas reached and moved the widest possible audience. Lincoln’s personal exertions in defining the administration’s objectives were only part of the overall exercise of tapping into the Union’s deep well of religio-patriotic sentiment. In seeking out the most potent agencies to harness that opinion, the government had to look beyond its official institutions, which had been chronically weak. The most powerful and extensive of the nation’s networks were voluntary associations. Preeminently these were twofold: the political party—its voluntarism supplemented and compromised by the rewards of government patronage—and the churches, with their associated philanthropic agencies. By energetically exploiting the steadfast loyalism of these institutions, a president tied to the White House was able to project himself and his cause into the heartland of the Union and beyond.

  Lincoln needed no lessons in how the power of party might promote a cause.22 His presidential victory in 1860 had depended far less on his individual appeal than on the skill with which Republican organizers had projected him as the embodiment of the party’s philosophy and platform. But Lincoln’s election and nominal leadership of the party did not mean that the organization, whatever its potential for war mobilization, would effortlessly fall into line behind him and then stay there. The Republicans were a fragile, decentralized coalition. There were few established Lincoln loyalists in Congress. Organizationally the party was, in practice, little more than an agglomeration of local and state bodies. Philosophically, too, it was divided, as internal conflicts over emancipation, the conduct of the war, and reconstruction would show. If the party was to become a truly effective rallying force for the administration, Lincoln had to bind it together and impose his authority on it.

  For these purposes he had to hand a potent weapon: presidential patronage. There was nothing new in a president fusing his roles as party leader and chief executive by distributing government jobs to the party faithful. But Lincoln had the added bonus of controlling appointments to the thousands of new offices thrown up by the wartime expansion of the army and government departments. An experienced and skillful party manager, who possessed a potent combination of tenacity, patience, and command of detail, he devoted an enormous slice of his time to disposing of these posts. It was a wearisome and even draining exercise, as he sought to avoid gratuitously upsetting the competitors for office while yet remaining evenhanded toward the various party factions, including his critics. But his attentiveness and refusal to be bullied undoubtedly paid off. He built up a bank of congressional indebtedness by meeting the patronage requests of interceding congressmen, and created such highly effective cadres of supporters at state level that he easily outmaneuvered those who had hoped to prevent his running for a second term.23

  The demonstrations of Union patriotism that immediately followed hostilities at Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call to arms would certainly have occurred without the encouragement of grassroots Republicans, though in fact local party leaders leaped to beat the martial drum, and mobilize men and resources, in an unyielding response to secessionist defiance. But as the early enthusiasm gave way first to frustration and then to war-weariness, the need to keep before the people the purposes of the Union grew increasingly urgent. Lincoln looked to his congressmen, governors, and local leaders to pursue within their constituencies the themes of his formal addresses and to sell each new statement of policy and national purpose: the Emancipation Proclamation, the use of black troops, the unacceptability of peace on the terms of “the Union as it was.” It was an expectation only partly realized, as Republican conservatives jibbed at emancipation, while radical hard-liners articulated more ambitious objectives in less emollient language. But an influential core of party loyalists, notably amongst the Republican governors, proved their persisting worth to Lincoln as interpreters of the administration’s purpose.

  The key northern governors in 1861 were loyal party men. They owed their office to the party; they had been agents of national victory in 1860. As the war progressed they encouraged the president to take more power into federal hands and became themselves increasingly dependent on Washington. Without War Department funds, Governor Morton of Indiana would have had to recall a Democratic legislature which, bitterly opposed to an emancipationist war, had refused appropriations. Yates of Illinois, fearing civil war in his state, asked Washington to supply four regiments. In the critical state elections of 1863, especially in Connecticut, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, Lincoln’s interventionism included dispensing patronage, getting troops furloughed home to vote, and ensuring that government clerks were given leave (and free railroad passes) to reach the polls. Thus the demands and protectiveness of the party increasingly bound state and national governments together, and their mutual dependence had huge implications for Washington’s communication of the Union’s purpose. For one thing, it made possible political stage management in cultivating public confidence. After McClellan’s retreat from Richmond in the summer of 1862, Lincoln feared that a call for a further 100,000 men, though badly needed, would provoke “a general panic and stampede . . . so hard it is to have a thing understood as it really is.” Instead, in a scheme involving Seward, Weed, and the Republican governors Morgan of New York and Curtin of Pennsylvania, Lincoln got the loyal governors to sign a memorial ostensibly emanating from them but actually drawn up by the administration.24

  The interdependence of state and national administrations, as the historian Eric McKitrick has famously argued, became even more salient after the midterm electoral setbacks of 1862: Democratic gains led state Republican organizations into the energetic defense of national policy—notably in justifying emancipation as essential and consistent with the original purpose of the war—and into lambasting their opponents, now encouraged to make bolder calls for peace, as traitors. In this context, Republicans read their victories in the fall elections of 1863 not simply as local successes but as a triumph for Lincoln’s administration. Candidates for even the lowest offices, in asking people to vote Republican, were urging an endorsement of the war, its purposes, and its leaders. Local fused with national, as ordinary citizens, male and female, gave vent to a patriotism sharpened by the sacrifices and upheavals of war. Nothing better revealed the vibrancy of the Union’s civic culture than the local proliferation of ad hoc partisan clubs and of loyalist organizations, which might disclaim a partisan intent, but in effect represented interests no different from those of the Lincoln administration. Wartime elections provided the arena, and the Republican party the means, for “continual affirmation and reaffirmation of [national] purpose.”25

  One of the most powerful ligaments of the party, and its ubiquitous instrument of political persuasion, was its newspaper press. Lincoln’s experience in antebellum Illinois and in the campaign of 1860 had revealed the power of the daily and weekly paper to draw its subscribers into a forceful political community. Equally, the ridicule that a hostile press heaped upon him for arriving for his Washington inaugural secretly, in disguise and by night, was a salutary reminder of its power to shape opinion for the worse as well as the better. Cultivating the press thus became a wartime priority, though Lincoln took considerably more interest in using the press as a broadcasting medium for the administration than in reading it for advice. Systematic news management and the modern press conference were developments for the future, of course, and even a loyal press was not necessarily uncritical or biddable. Lincoln thought the “vilifying and disparaging” of the administration in even the Republican press played a part in its election setback of 1862.26 He grew “mad enough to cry” when his letter to Conkling, despite a publishing embargo, appeared word for word in the trusted New York Evening Post two days before it was due to be first read at a Union meeting in Springfield, Illinois. John Hay sought unsuccessfully to get an “outrageously unfair” Republican correspondent removed from his job with the western Associated Press.27 Still, the pre
sident and his White House secretaries had at their disposal a variety of means to broadcast the administration’s purposes and to reward loyalty.

  Hay, for instance, acted anonymously as a political ventriloquist for the White House. Writing as a “special correspondent” for newspapers in New York, Washington, and St. Louis, he engaged in a sustained propaganda exercise for an administration which sought to bolster support within opposition strongholds, especially in the Midwest. There is no evidence that Lincoln put his young secretary up to this: zealous patriotism, admiring loyalty to his president, and a platform for literary exhibitionism were inducements enough. The journalist’s upbeat reports are in sharp contrast to the more sober musings of his private diary, and collectively provided as patriotic a commentary on events and as positive a gloss on the Union leadership as it was possible to find. Lincoln appears as an energetic, prudent figure, with broad vision and a genius for reading the public mood. He enjoys the support of vigorous, gifted departmental secretaries and a fundamentally united cabinet. Supposed abrasions between George McClellan and his political masters are smoothed over. Though Peace Democrats are natural targets for criticism, grumbling Republican radicals attract the sharpest barbs. Military delay and battlefield setbacks prompt no defeatism or panic. The fight for constitutional liberty in the western world will succeed, since “God and the heaviest artillery, . . . justice and a fat larder” are all on one side.28