by H. W. Brands
Lincoln remarked that some Democrats had urged him to show good faith toward the South. “There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson and Olustee”—where former slaves had performed with conspicuous gallantry—“to their masters to conciliate the South.” He would do no such thing. “I should be damned in time and in eternity.” Some Democrats were alleging that abolition had supplanted the Union as Lincoln’s chief war aim. This was not true, he said; the Union remained his guiding star. “But no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the emancipation lever as I have done. Freedom has given us the control of two hundred thousand able-bodied men, born and raised on Southern soil. It will give us more yet. Just so much it has subtracted from the strength of our enemies.” The Democrats were full of bluster. “My enemies condemn my emancipation policy. Let them prove by the history of this war that we can restore the Union without it.”
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THE BLUSTER OF the Democrats reflected a new division in their party. The sectional division of 1860 had put Lincoln in the White House; the new division, between peace Democrats and war Democrats, might put him back there if they weren’t careful. The peace Democrats were ready to abandon the war effort, leaving the Confederacy and slavery intact. The war Democrats wanted to keep fighting but demanded more effective leadership than Lincoln was giving the country. The split could easily have produced another bolt from the convention if the leaders of the party hadn’t been so desperate to prevent it. “Let us, at the very outset of our proceedings, bear in mind that the dissensions of the last Democratic convention were one of the principal causes which gave the reins of government into the hands of our opponents, and let us beware not to fall into the same fatal error,” the chairman of the convention chided his colleagues.
The error was avoided by giving the platform to the peace faction and the nomination to the warriors. George McClellan, the thirty-seven-year-old “Young Napoleon,” still looked the part of a military hero despite having been sacked by Lincoln, and the Democrats were more than happy to blame Lincoln rather than McClellan for the demotion. They placed McClellan, fully uniformed, at the head of their ticket, where he vowed to fight the war to victory. In doing so, he contradicted the platform, which resolved that “justice, humanity, liberty and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities.”
The finesse might have worked to elect McClellan. Lincoln thought it would, though he was certain it couldn’t win the war. Should the Democrats win, the pressure for a cease-fire, at least, would be overwhelming. The South would use the time to replenish, while the North would become accustomed to peace. The peace party in the North would grow, and the war would likely never be resumed. The Union would be permanently lost.
August began dismally for Lincoln. Grant still struggled to find traction in Virginia; Atlanta stubbornly defied Sherman. Thurlow Weed, as astute an observer of politics as existed in the North, visited the White House to deliver a bleak forecast. “I told Mr. Lincoln that his reelection was an impossibility,” Weed afterward informed William Seward. “Nobody here doubts it”—Weed was writing from New York—“nor do I see anybody from other states who authorizes the slightest hope of success.” Lincoln’s insistence on emancipation was an anchor dragging the party down. “The people are wild for peace. They are told that the President will only listen to terms of peace on condition that slavery be abandoned.” Weed’s confidants were imploring him to get the president to soften his stance. “Commissioners should be immediately sent to Richmond offering to treat for peace on the basis of Union.” Weed endorsed the idea. “That something should be done and promptly done to give the administration a chance for its life is certain.”
Others brought the same message. Alexander Hamilton was a grandson of the famous treasury secretary, a general in the Union army, and a man of sound political instincts and solid connections. He answered a summons from Lincoln, who requested that he give speeches on behalf of the war effort and the administration. “No, sir,” Hamilton replied. “As things stand at present I don’t know what in the name of God I could say, as an honest man, that would help you.” Lincoln needed to make drastic changes. “Unless you clean these men away who surround you, and do something with your army, you will be beaten overwhelmingly.”
Lincoln responded that this was plain talk. But it was nothing he hadn’t thought of himself. “You think I don’t know I am going to be beaten,” he said. “But I do, and unless some great change takes place, badly beaten.” He reflected on public disappointment with the war. “The people promised themselves when General Grant started out that he would take Richmond in June. He didn’t take it, and they blame me. But I promised them no such thing. And yet they hold me responsible.”
Hamilton reiterated that big changes had to be made. He recommended tossing out nearly the entire cabinet. “No matter whether you like the men or not. You must send them away at once. If they are friends, they’ll go cheerfully for your sake. If they are enemies, what the hell do you care what they think?”
“That’s very plain talk,” Lincoln repeated.
“Regular backwoods,” Hamilton acknowledged. “But I do not mean to deceive you.”
Lincoln asked again whether Hamilton would speak on the administration’s behalf.
Hamilton once more declined. “It would not look well for me to go out canvassing for you in uniform, and I think if I take it off it will be to make speeches against you.” He looked directly at Lincoln. “If I tender you my resignation you will know what it means.”
“Yes, I’ll not misunderstand you,” Lincoln said.
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FREDERICK DOUGLASS MET with Lincoln during the dark days. “The President’s ‘To whom it may concern’ frightened his party and his party in return frightened the President,” Douglass wrote in a letter to an abolitionist ally. “The country was struck with one of those bewilderments which dethrone reason for the moment. Everybody was thinking and dreaming of peace, and the impression had gone abroad that the President’s antislavery policy was about the only thing which prevented a peaceful settlement with the rebels. McClellan was nominated and at that time his prospects were bright as Mr. Lincoln’s were gloomy.” From every side the president was pressed to modify his policy. He invited Douglass to the White House and sought his counsel. “He showed me a letter written with a view to meet the peace clamor raised against him. The first point made in it was the important fact that no man or set of men authorized to speak for the Confederate government had ever submitted a proposition for peace to him. Hence the charge that he had in some way stood in the way of peace fell to the ground. He had always stood ready to listen to any such propositions. The next point referred to was the charge that he had in his Niagara letter committed himself and the country to an abolition war rather than a war for the Union, so that even if the latter could be attained by negotiation, the war would go on for abolition. The President did not propose to take back what he had said in his Niagara letter but wished to relieve the fears of his peace friends by making it appear that the thing which they feared could not happen and was wholly beyond his power.”
Lincoln explained his reasoning to Douglass. “Even if I would, I could not carry on the war for the abolition of slavery,” he said. “The country would not sustain such a war, and I could do nothing without the support of Congress. I could not make the abolition of slavery an absolute prior condition to the reestablishment of the Union.” He asked Douglass directly, “Shall I send forth this letter?”
“Certainly not,” Douglass answered. “It would be given a broader meaning than you intend to convey. It would be taken as a complete surrender of your antislavery policy and do you serious damage.”
Commenting to his abolitionist friend, Douglass wrote, “I have looked and feared that Mr. Lincoln w
ould say something of the sort, but he has been perfectly silent on that point and I think will remain so. But the thing which alarmed me most was this: The President said he wanted some plan devised by which we could get more of the slaves within our lines. He thought that now was their time—and that such only of them as succeeded in getting within our lines would be free after the war is over. This shows that the President only has faith in his proclamations of freedom during the war and that he believes their operation will cease with the war.”
Douglass went on to say to his friend that he himself was lying low during the election campaign. “I am not doing much in this presidential canvass for the reason that Republican committees do not wish to expose themselves to the charge of being the ‘Niggar’ party. The negro is the deformed child which is put out of the room when company comes. I hope to speak some after the election, though not much before, and I am inclined to think I shall be able to speak all the more usefully because I have had so little to say during the present canvass.” Douglass supported Lincoln, but ambivalently. “When there was any shadow of a hope that a man of more decided antislavery convictions and policy could be elected, I was not for Mr. Lincoln, but as soon as the Chicago convention my mind was made up and it is made up still.”
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LINCOLN DIDN’T SEND the letter. Instead, on August 23 he wrote what amounted to an obituary for his administration and its hopes. “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected,” he said. “Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration, as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards.”
Lincoln signed, folded and sealed the note. He carried it to a meeting of the cabinet and, without divulging the contents, had each of the members sign its back. Lincoln intended to unseal the note after McClellan’s victory, as an explanation of the course he would then follow. He would invite the president-elect to the White House. “I would say, ‘General, the election has demonstrated that you are stronger, have more influence with the American people than I. Now let us together, you with your influence and I with all the executive power of the government, try to save the country. You raise as many troops as you possibly can for this final trial, and I will devote all my energies to assisting and finishing the war.’ ”
William Seward, on hearing this, objected, “And the general would answer you ‘Yes, yes,’ and the next day when you saw him again and pressed these views upon him, he would say, ‘Yes, yes,’ and so on forever, and would have done nothing at all.”
“At least,” replied Lincoln, “I should have done my duty and have stood clear before my own conscience.”
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TO LINCOLN’S SURPRISE, it didn’t come to that. The president thought William Sherman had fallen off the map, so little did he hear from Georgia. The Confederate commander John Bell Hood couldn’t find Sherman either—until Sherman showed up on the back side of Atlanta, having severed the last rail link to the city. Hood had to scramble simply to save his army; he left to Sherman the Georgia capital. At nearly the same moment David Farragut and his Union gunboats took Mobile, essentially closing Confederate access to the Gulf of Mexico.
After months of bad news from the battlefront, the good news bathed the North in relief and gratitude. Lincoln formally thanked God and the Union’s gallant soldiers. The recent victories, he said, called for “devout acknowledgment to the Supreme Being in whose hands are the destinies of nations.” The president declared a day of remembrance, requesting “that on next Sunday, in all places of public worship in the United States, thanksgiving be offered to Him for His mercy in preserving our national existence against the insurgent rebels who so long have been waging a cruel war against the government of the United States, for its overthrow, and also that prayer be made for the Divine protection to our brave soldiers and their leaders in the field.”
In private Lincoln recalculated the likely votes in the coming election. The Union victories cut the legs from beneath McClellan’s candidacy. McClellan’s complaint against Lincoln had been that the Union wasn’t winning the war. Suddenly it was winning, and McClellan’s challenge to the president—by a general, no less—appeared unseemly at best, unpatriotic at worst. Voters and then states that had looked certain to reject the president now embraced him. When Union cavalry commander Phil Sheridan rolled up Confederate forces in the Shenandoah Valley, the turn of the tide was complete. “It does look as if the people wanted me to stay here a little longer,” Lincoln told a visitor. “And I suppose I shall have to, if they do.”
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THEY DID, and he did. Lincoln defeated McClellan handily in the popular vote and overwhelmingly in the electoral vote. The victory brought supporters to the White House to cheer for the reelected president. Lincoln was in a thoughtful mood. “It has long been a grave question whether any government, not too strong for the liberties of its people, can be strong enough to maintain its own existence in great emergencies,” he said. The election had been held, the war notwithstanding, and the people had delivered their verdict. “But the rebellion continues; and now that the election is over, may not all, having a common interest, reunite in a common effort to save our common country?”
Amid the campaign, Maryland had decided to abolish slavery. Maryland Unionists, whose numbers had grown with the rising fortunes of the Union army, made emancipation a central issue in efforts to revise the state’s constitution, and with the help of Union soldiers given leave to vote, they carried the day. A delegation personally delivered the good news to Lincoln at the White House.
“Most heartily do I congratulate you, and Maryland, and the nation, and the world, upon the event,” Lincoln declared in response. “I regret that it did not occur two years sooner, which I am sure would have saved to the nation more money than would have met all the private loss incident to the measure. But it has come at last, and I sincerely hope its friends may fully realize all their anticipations of good from it, and that its opponents may, by its effects, be agreeably and profitably disappointed.”
A few weeks later another group of Maryland Unionists paid him a visit. Lincoln congratulated them anew on their accomplishment, saying it was more significant that Maryland had voted to end slavery than that it had voted to retain him in office. Presidential elections came every four years, he said, but emancipation was permanent.
The outcome of the war was nearly certain, though the end was not yet in sight, when Lincoln issued his fourth annual message in early December. He urged Congress to deliver the final blow to slavery. An emancipation amendment had been introduced by Republicans in the Senate earlier that year. The senators debated the form and wording of the measure before approving it by the necessary two-thirds majority. The House of Representatives balked, however; with every seat up for grabs in the approaching election—not just a third of the seats, as in the Senate—proportionately fewer members were willing to make the irretrievable step. The outcome of the election, in which the Republicans gained fifty House seats, changed the reckoning. The pro-amendment forces took heart, and the antis, many now lame ducks, saw little reason to stand in the way of history.
Lincoln gave the process a nudge. Almost certainly the next Congress would approve the amendment if the present one did not, he said. “Hence there is only a question of time as to when the proposed amendment will go to the states for their action. And as it is to so go at all events, may we not agree that the sooner the better?” He conceded that the recent elections did not bind the current members of Congress. But it did reveal the sense of the country. “It is the voice of the people now for the first time heard upon the question. In a great national crisis like ours, unanimity of action among those seeking a common end is very desirable, almost indispensable.” The peo
ple had spoken; Congress must listen. Lincoln didn’t presume to dictate; the Constitution gave no role to the president in amendments. Nor did he propose to make emancipation an explicit condition of peace. Yet he repeated what he had said earlier: “While I remain in my present position I shall not attempt to retract or modify the emancipation proclamation, nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation or by any of the acts of Congress.” He now added, “If the people should, by whatever mode or means, make it an executive duty to re-enslave such persons, another, and not I, must be their instrument to perform it.”
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WHEN THE HOLDOVER House took up the measure in January 1865, the president prodded wavering members, despite his disclaimer of an executive role in amending the Constitution. He buttonholed a Democrat whose brother had been mortally wounded in the Battle of Chancellorsville. Lincoln had visited the dying man in the hospital and done what he could to ease his pain. “Your brother died to save the republic from death by the slaveholders’ rebellion,” he now observed to the lawmaker. “I wish you could see it to be your duty to vote for the constitutional amendment ending slavery.” The member voted in favor.