by H. W. Brands
Lincoln wasn’t finished. The next day he issued instructions to federal tax officials in South Carolina regarding the disposal of plantations on the Sea Islands abandoned by their rebel owners and seized for nonpayment of taxes. He gave various orders about the surveying and recording of lots and parcels of land, and then declared, “You are further directed to issue certificates for the said lots and parcels of land to the heads of families of the African race, one only to each, preferring such as by their good conduct, meritorious services or exemplary character, will be examples of moral propriety and industry to those of the same race.” The plots set aside for African Americans weren’t without cost; the price was pegged at the going rate for federal land of $1.25 per acre. Yet neither were they large: twenty acres. For $25 a former slave could become a landowner.
Lincoln’s policy for the Sea Islands suggested a broader approach to the conundrum of what to do about the freedmen—the former slaves—after the war. He had long favored emigration to Africa or colonies in some other foreign land, but he wasn’t finding many takers. So why not internal colonies, on land the slaves had been working for generations? There were problems with this approach, starting with the fact that most Southern plantations had not been abandoned and weren’t likely to be. Yet there would be problems with any approach to such a difficult issue. One had to start somewhere.
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AFTER THE FOUL-UP with his letter to James Conkling, Lincoln sought another opportunity to air his ideas on the war and emancipation. The conflict had started, on the Northern side, as a narrow effort to preserve the Union, but it had grown into a broader crusade for freedom. Lincoln gave the transformation much thought, and in November 1863 he put his thoughts into public words.
A cemetery had been created for the thousands killed at Gettysburg; Lincoln was invited to the dedication. His staff laid plans for him to leave the capital early in the morning, transfer trains at Baltimore and arrive at Gettysburg by noon for the two o’clock ceremony. He would return to Washington afterward.
Lincoln vetoed the schedule. “I do not like this arrangement,” he said. “I do not wish to so go that by the slightest accident we fail entirely, and, at the best, the whole to be a mere breathless running of the gauntlet.” He had something important to say, and he didn’t want to be rushed or prevented entirely.
The itinerary was changed to get him to Gettysburg the day before the ceremony. The locals put on a dinner with patriotic music. They naturally asked Lincoln to speak. He declined—“for several substantial reasons,” he said. “The most substantial of these is that I have no speech to make.”
The audience laughed.
“In my position it is somewhat important that I should not say any foolish things.”
“If you can help it!” a voice shouted.
“It very often happens that the only way to help it is to say nothing at all.”
More laughter.
“Believing that is my present condition this evening, I must beg of you to excuse me from addressing you further.”
The next day a great crowd converged to hear a moving oration by Edward Everett, a Bostonian famed for his command of Greek, Latin and the other well-springs of high rhetoric. He recounted the battle, memorialized the fallen and prayed for reconciliation between North and South. The audience wept, laughed and cheered, convinced after two hours that they had heard a speech for the ages.
As the applause for Everett died down, Lincoln was introduced. The audience hoped he wouldn’t speak long, after all they had sat through. He didn’t. But he spoke profoundly. In less than three minutes he recast his original war aim in a fresh mold, fusing freedom and equality to Union as the triadic core of a new vision of what should come out of the conflict. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” Lincoln said. “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” He praised the fallen, and he summoned his listeners to dedicate themselves to the cause the soldiers had so gallantly served—“that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
51
UNION SOLDIERS HAD BEEN carrying the Constitution in their haversacks since the war began, so to speak; with his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln added the Declaration of Independence. His opening “four score and seven years ago” was the first clue; quick calculators immediately arrived at 1776, rather than the Constitution’s 1789. The Declaration’s—and now Lincoln’s—emphasis on liberty and equality made his new war aims far more ambitious than simply preserving the Union. Months after the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln was promising no less than the revolutionizing of Southern—and American—society.
If the Union won the war, that is. Lincoln believed he had found his winning general in the relentless Grant, whom he brought east to handle the clever Lee. And he thought Grant had discovered a winning strategy in loosing the implacable William Sherman against Georgia. Other Union generals and admirals would attack the Confederacy elsewhere, exploiting the advantages of the North in men and resources, with all to culminate in the collapse of the rebellion.
The final offensive—or so Lincoln hoped it would be—commenced in May 1864. Sherman drove toward Atlanta, Grant toward Richmond. Sherman’s campaign proceeded as planned, but Grant’s bogged down in the convoluted region called the Wilderness, where Lee capitalized on his local knowledge and dealt Grant daunting blows. Grant never wavered; he continued to pound forward. But any hope of a quick end to the fighting vanished in the humid Virginia air.
Francis Carpenter was painting Lincoln’s portrait during this period, and he saw the president’s spirits sag. “Absorbed in his papers, he would become unconscious of my presence, while I intently studied every line and shade of expression in that furrowed face,” Carpenter recalled. “In repose, it was the saddest face I ever knew. There were days when I could scarcely look into it without crying. During the first week of the battles of the Wilderness he scarcely slept at all. Passing through the main hall of the domestic apartment on one of these days, I met him, clad in a long morning wrapper, pacing back and forth a narrow passage leading to one of the windows, his hands behind him, great black rings under his eyes, his head bent forward upon his breast—altogether such a picture of the effects of sorrow, care, and anxiety as would have melted the hearts of the worst of his adversaries.”
It wasn’t simply the war that weighed on Lincoln’s soul. He and Mary had lost another son, Willie, two years earlier, to disease, and the gloom that settled upon them at that time had never lifted. Lincoln had his work to distract him, but the effect was only fleeting. As for Mary, Willie’s death seems to have caused a kind of nervous breakdown. Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave who became a successful dressmaker in Washington and a member of the Lincoln household, recalled Lincoln urging Mary to pull herself together. “Mother, do you see that large white building yonder?” he said, pointing to the insane asylum. “Try and control your grief, or it will drive you mad, and we may have to send you there.” When the war went well, Lincoln’s personal sorrow lightened; when it went badly, the background heartache returned.
And then there was the political opposition. Grant’s setback bolstered Lincoln’s critics, not least within his own party. A group of Radical Republicans, as the most antislavery Republicans called themselves, plotted a break with the administration. The Radicals resented Lincoln’s slowness to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, and they feared backsliding should progress toward victory stall, as it was doing. Some of the resentment was personal: John Frémont still smarted from being overruled by Lincoln on slavery in Missouri, and from subsequent relief from command. Frémont let out that h
e’d be happy to reprise his role as presidential nominee from eight years earlier. The Radicals called a convention ahead of the regular Republican convention; in the company of disaffected pro-war Democrats they made Frémont the nominee of the Radical Democracy party. The nomination won the support of many Republican abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass.
The regular Republicans met a week later under a new banner of their own. Inviting pro-war and Southern Unionist Democrats, they branded themselves the National Union party. Their nomination of Lincoln was no surprise, but the replacement of Hannibal Hamlin in the vice presidential slot by Tennessean Andrew Johnson raised eyebrows among those unfamiliar with Hamlin’s Radical affinities. The maneuver elicited jeers from Radicals who said Lincoln was going soft on the South, in that Johnson was a slaveholder. But then the convention adopted a hard-line position on slavery. “Resolved,” the platform declared, “that as slavery was the cause, and now constitutes the strength of this rebellion, and as it must be, always and everywhere, hostile to the principles of republican government, justice and the national safety demand its utter and complete extirpation from the soil of the republic.” The convention applauded Lincoln’s policy toward slavery and the slaves. “We approve, especially, the Proclamation of Emancipation, and the employment as Union soldiers of men heretofore held in slavery.” Finally, the platform insisted that emancipation be written into the Constitution. “While we uphold and maintain the acts and proclamations by which the government, in its own defense, has aimed a deathblow at this gigantic evil, we are in favor, furthermore, of such an amendment to the Constitution, to be made by the people in conformity with its provisions, as shall terminate and forever prohibit the existence of slavery within the limits of the jurisdiction of the United States.”
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THE PLATFORM DIDN’T SATISFY Horace Greeley, who remained a regular Republican but hectored Lincoln throughout the summer of 1864. The voluble editor asserted that the people of the North were crying out for peace and that the president must convince them he was seeking it. The alternative was a Democratic victory in the fall elections, which would doom the war effort and mortally wound the Republican party—not to mention Greeley’s Republican Tribune. As full of himself as ever, Greeley offered to move things along. During the summer of 1864 he heard of two men at Niagara Falls who claimed to have contacts with the Confederate government; these contacts were interested in facilitating peace negotiations between the Union and the Confederacy. Greeley urged Lincoln to respond to this overture and tendered his own services in the venture.
Lincoln doubted that the contacts, if they existed, had any standing with the Confederate government. But he did not doubt that Greeley would excoriate him if he failed to pursue the possibility. So he sent Greeley a letter, via his personal secretary John Hay, stipulating his conditions. “To Whom It May Concern,” Lincoln wrote. “Any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery, and which comes by and with an authority that can control the armies now at war against the United States, will be received and considered by the Executive government of the United States, and will be met by liberal terms on other substantial and collateral points; and the bearer, or bearers thereof shall have safe-conduct both ways.”
Lincoln expected this letter to be published, as it was. He knew there was no chance it would lead to anything, for it required the Confederacy to sign its own death warrant and Southern slaveholders to give up their slaves. The South would have to be beaten on the battlefield before this would happen. But at least Lincoln got credit for making an offer.
Yet he didn’t get much credit. The New York Herald, the nation’s leading Democratic paper, accused Lincoln of rank partisanship. “What is the sine qua non demanded by Mr. Lincoln of the rebellious states as a condition precedent to the re-establishment of peace and the Union?” the paper cried. “Nothing less than the abolition of slavery. The rebellious states must make good his emancipation proclamation before Abraham Lincoln can agree to any peace with them.” Until recently Lincoln had declared the restoration of federal control in the Southern states to be his primary goal, with slavery a secondary matter. Why the change? “We can only conclude that, without requiring the abolition of slavery therein as an essential condition, Mr. Lincoln is afraid that peace and reunion may come too soon to suit his ambitious purposes and the grasping designs of his party.” The war had been the making of the Republican party, the Herald said; peace would be its unmaking. Hence Lincoln’s embrace of emancipation, which made peace impossible.
Jefferson Davis had recently been quoted as saying the war was not about slavery. “This war must go on till the last of this generation falls in his tracks, and his children seize his musket and fight our battle, unless you acknowledge our right to self-government,” Davis had said. “We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for independence, and that, or extermination, we will have.”
The editors of the Herald took Davis at his word. “Jeff Davis was perfectly right,” they said. The war was not about slavery, on either side. “The Southern politicians are merely fighting for power. They employed the slavery question to induce the Southern people to sustain them, just as they used the tariff question in Jackson’s time. With the same truth it may be said that the Northern people are not fighting for anti-slavery. Anti-slavery was the pretext used by Northern politicians to get office and to turn the Southerners out of office.”
Republicans as a party were culpable, the Herald said, but Lincoln was the most culpable, and his policy of arming slaves the most cynical. “Niggers are not fit for soldiers. They can dig, and drive mules; they cannot and will not fight.” News reporting to the contrary was one big partisan lie. “They never have fought well in any battle. To insist that the niggers should be in the army was to insist that there should be a weak point in every line of battle with which we faced the enemy.” For the recent troubles of the Union army, Lincoln had only himself to blame. “Abolitionism is, therefore, the real difficulty now; and unless the President soon finds out how to do away with this difficulty he may be sure that the people will find out how to do away with him.”
The New York Times cut Lincoln more slack than the Herald did, but even the Times thought Lincoln pushed things too far by making abolition a requirement for peace. “The President has a right, and it is his duty, to insist upon the integrity of the Union as a sine qua non,” the paper declared. “But it is not so with slavery.” Lincoln had no constitutional mandate to free slaves, nor did he have constitutional authority to do so, beyond his authority as commander in chief. Yet that authority was a consequence of the war, and it would vanish with the war’s end. To confiscate slaves for employment by the Union army was one thing, not unlike the confiscation of mules. But at war’s end the mules would revert to their owners, and so would the slaves. The Times urged Lincoln to return to his original justification for the war. “The South should understand that the one thing and the only thing which shuts them away from us, which builds up between us and them an impassable wall of separation, which shuts our ears to every claim or demand they can make upon us, which steels our hearts against them and strengthens our arms for their destruction, is that they are waging war for the destruction of the Union.”
Some of Lincoln’s own military officers joined the chorus against making abolition a condition of peace. George Meade, the hero of Gettysburg, read the president’s “To Whom It May Concern” letter with dismay, believing it would lengthen the war. “It is a pity Mr. Lincoln employed the term ‘abandonment of slavery,’ as it implies its immediate abolition or extinction, to which the South will never agree, at least not until our military successes have been greater than they have hitherto been, or than they now seem likely to be,” Meade wrote to his wife. “Whereas had he said the final adjustment of the slavery question, leaving the door open to gradual emancipation
, I really believe the South would listen and agree to terms.” Perhaps the president would change his mind. “God grant it may be so, and that it will not be long before this terrible war is brought to a close.”
52
LINCOLN HEARD the complaints but refused to heed them. Alexander Randall was a former governor of Wisconsin; Joseph Mills was his friend and fellow Republican. The two visited Lincoln in the White House in August 1864. Mills was favorably surprised by Lincoln. “The President appeared to be not the pleasant joker I had expected to see, but a man of deep convictions and an unutterable yearning for the success of the Union cause,” he noted in his diary. “His voice was pleasant—his manner earnest and cordial. As I heard a vindication of his policy from his own lips, I could not but feel that his mind grew in stature like his body, and that I stood in the presence of the great guiding intellect of the age, and that those huge Atlantian shoulders were fit to bear the weight of mightiest monarchies. His transparent honesty, his republican simplicity, his gushing sympathy for those who offered their lives for their country, his utter forgetfulness of self in his concern for his country, could not but inspire me with confidence that he was Heaven’s instrument to conduct his people through this red sea of blood to a Canaan of peace and freedom.”
Alexander Randall thought Lincoln looked tired. He suggested the president take a summer holiday. A few weeks would do him good.
Lincoln replied that he could leave Washington but Washington wouldn’t leave him. “My thoughts, my solicitude for this great country follow me where ever I go,” he said. The looming election compounded the problem. “I don’t think it is personal vanity, or ambition, but I cannot but feel that the weal or woe of this great nation will be decided in the approaching canvas. My own experience has proven to me that there is no program intended by the Democratic party but that will result in the dismemberment of the Union.” The Democrats wanted to appease the South by restoring slaves to their masters. “There are now between one and two hundred thousand black men now in the service of the Union,” Lincoln said. “These men will be disbanded and returned to slavery and we will have to fight two nations instead of one.” Lincoln shook his head. “You cannot conciliate the South when the mastery and control of millions of blacks makes them sure of ultimate success.” The Democrats didn’t understand, or wouldn’t admit, how fully the fortunes of the Union now depended on the military service of the former slaves. “Abandon all the posts now possessed by black men, surrender all these advantages to the enemy, and we would be compelled to abandon the war in three weeks.”