1861 (62 page)

In choosing to share these ideas with the Sammarinesi rather than with political associates closer at hand, Lincoln was being characteristically
discreet; he was not yet ready to address the American public, and the regent captains were unlikely to be in regular communication with
James Gordon Bennett or
Horace Greeley. Yet he also revealed a deep belief that the conflict in
America was one of critical significance to the rest of the world, and that in his July Fourth message he needed to speak not only to Congress, not only to the American people, but perhaps, in a sense, to all of humanity. Perhaps posterity, too. In 1861, republics were still rarities: tiny San Marino was one of only two in Europe. Since they were so few, the American Civil War would matter not so much in terms of preserving existing democracies (clearly the Sammarinesi were doing
just fine) as in stimulating or inhibiting the birth of future ones. Like the
Forty-Eighters in St. Louis, Lincoln was well aware of the impact that the Union’s ultimate victory or defeat might have among the restless nations of Europe and even beyond.

By mid-June, Lincoln was “engaged almost constantly in writing his message,” Nicolay recorded. On the 19th, with two weeks left, the president took the extraordinary step of announcing publicly that he would receive no visitors until after submitting it to Congress.
¹⁴
(Indeed, Lincoln worked far harder on his July Fourth document than Jefferson
had done on his own, more famous one; the
Declaration of Independence was written and revised over the course of seventeen days at most.) By this point, Lincoln had developed a keener appreciation of the potential damage of ill-considered remarks. “Nobody hurt,” a quotation from one of Lincoln’s ill-considered speeches during his train trip through
Ohio, was still a national catchphrase, a
barbed joke that grew sharper-edged with each fresh report of war casualties. He would not allow himself a second such rhetorical disaster.

Even so, many Americans shook their heads in disbelief at how much time the president was spending on his message. Would this end up like the last presidential epistle to Congress, Buchanan’s fourteen thousand words of ineffectual wind? No less a literary craftsman than Emerson himself wrote reproachfully in his journal that Lincoln “writes his own message instead of borrowing the largest understanding as he so easily might.” The apostle of
self-reliance was arguing in favor of crowdsourcing, or at least the time-honored American habit of plagiarism.
¹⁵

As the momentous date grew near, Lincoln shared a rough draft with a few select counselors. One, predictably, was Seward, who did not stint in offering suggestions, although he would play a far smaller role than he had in drafting the inaugural address: the secretary of state prevailed upon the president to tone down several passages, substituting
more tactful language in places. But the president’s other sources of advice were somewhat
surprising. Among them was
Charles Sumner, to whom he read his draft aloud in late June; the two men were hardly close, and in fact their few face-to-face encounters had left each somewhat put off by the other. Another of Lincoln’s chosen confidants was a man he had never even met before, the eminent historian
John Lothrop Motley, who was visiting the capital and dropped by the
White House to call on the president; Lincoln not only broke his vow of seclusion but impulsively scooped up the scattered sheets of manuscript on his desk and read Motley nearly the entire draft. Finally, the night before sending off the message, still engrossed in last-minute revisions, he shared it with Orville H. Browning, the old Illinois friend who had written him that fierce letter about emancipating the slaves.
¹⁶

One cannot help looking to Lincoln’s choices to find clues to his thoughts and preoccupations at the time. Sumner and Browning, of course, were both ardent antislavery men. Sumner and Lothrop, meanwhile, shared an expertise in European affairs, an area of weakness for Lincoln: the former had recently become chairman of the Senate’s committee on foreign relations, while the latter had spent much of his adult life on the Continent and was best known for his
widely acclaimed history of the defunct Dutch Republic. Yet none of Lincoln’s various drafts of the July Fourth message mentioned slavery directly at all, nor did any address foreign relations in anything but the most brief and perfunctory fashion. (Sumner, for this reason, was disappointed by the document; Lothrop was impressed by the “untaught grace and power” of Lincoln’s writing; Browning did not record his own response.) Could it be, however, that by
selecting these three men, Lincoln was sounding out—more for himself than for them—the unspoken but implicit parts of what he wanted to communicate to Congress, the nation, and the world?

At last the document was complete, and Lincoln put it into Nicolay’s hands to deliver it to the Capitol. In keeping with the tradition of that time, it would be read aloud not by the president himself but rather by the clerks of the respective chambers. (The Senate clerk performed his duty in a nearly inaudible monotone.)
¹⁷

In a sense, Nicolay’s simple trip down Pennsylvania Avenue was an eloquent statement of its own. This ritual of the
democracy reaffirmed the chief executive’s accountability to Congress and to the American people. And the grueling labor that Lincoln had put into his message attested to his faith in the power and necessity of words, of arguments, of explanations, in a democratic system. By contrast, the lackluster,
shopworn rhetoric of the new Southern republic’s leading statesmen was not merely a failure of aesthetics, but proof of the intellectual poverty and moral laziness undergirding their entire enterprise. The
Confederacy was never truly much of a cause—lost or otherwise. In fact, it might better be called an effect; a reactive stratagem tarted up with ex post facto justifications. This was borne out in the practices
of the two national legislatures. Over the next four years, the
Confederate Congress would transact nearly all its important business in secret, and even some of the most fervent
secessionists would decry its lack of true accountability to the Southern public. (Indeed,
Robert Barnwell Rhett, a leading fire-eater in 1860 and 1861, ultimately blamed the South’s loss on the
absence of any informed public debate within the Confederacy that might have held the Davis administration’s policies up to scrutiny.) By contrast, the Congress of the United States—notwithstanding all the bitter infighting that lay ahead—would never once go into closed session during the course of the war.
¹⁸
President Davis opened his executive
messages (like his inaugural address) with the words “Gentlemen of the Congress of the Confederate States of America.” President Lincoln began his with “Fellow-citizens.”

The first half of the July Fourth message was a historical narrative. Lincoln recapitulated the events that had transpired since the start of his presidency, exactly four months earlier. He made clear, to begin with, that he had held firm to the pledge of his inaugural address: not to fire the war’s first shot. Indeed, he deftly turned the Union’s relative military unpreparedness into evidence of its honorable intentions: while the rebels had been arming
for war, the North’s citizens had continued striving for peace, keeping faith in the instruments of democracy—“time, discussion, and the ballot-box”—to resolve the national crisis. Lincoln described the letter from Major Anderson that had arrived on his first full day in office, presenting him with the stark choice of surrendering the fort or trying to supply it with fresh provisions. (In a very early draft, the president had even mentioned General
Scott’s support for evacuating Sumter, heedless, it seems, of how this revelation would publicly humiliate the general-in-chief; clearly he was still working through the last remnants of his political naïveté.)
¹⁹
He spoke of Captain Fox’s relief expedition and the advance notice he had given the rebels, casting their bombardment of Sumter as an
act of deadly aggression provoked merely by “the [attempted] giving of bread to the few brave and hungry men of the garrison.”

As conciliatory as Lincoln made his military policies sound, he was unwilling to concede a single inch of rhetorical ground to the enemy.
From his experience as a lawyer, he knew the fatal effect of allowing one’s opponent to define the terms of an argument. Whereas the Northern press and public had more or less automatically begun referring to “the Confederate States,” Lincoln pointedly referred to “this illegal
organization in the character of confederate States.” The lowercase spelling and lack of a definite article made clear that he was using the word
confederate
as it might apply to a member of a gang of highway robbers.

In fact, this idea lay at the core of Lincoln’s argument: that the very existence of the Southern
Confederacy (or confederacy) was not merely a threat but a crime. And not a victimless crime, either—not, as the rebel leaders would have it, a benign act of withdrawal from a voluntary political compact. It was a crime against their fellow citizens, collectively and individually. It was an act of theft: the rebels had
appropriated federal property paid for by loyal taxpayers, while defaulting on their own share of the federal debt and leaving their former countrymen holding the bag. More important, though,
secession was an act of vandalism—terrorism even—against the very foundation of democratic government: the concept of obedience to majority rule. “If we now recognize this doctrine, by allowing the seceders to go in peace,” Lincoln
wrote, “it is difficult to see what we can do, if others choose to go, or to extort terms upon which they will promise to remain.” (Such an act of extortion, this Congress knew well, had come quite close to success.)

Indeed, secession would render
democracy’s survival impossible, not just in the Northern states but, ironically, in the Southern ones, too: what besides force could keep
Virginia or
Louisiana in the Confederacy as soon as they found themselves in the minority on some important national issue?

Here was the difference between the American colonies’ revolution and the Southern states’ rebellion. The colonists had been subjects, not citizens; they were parties to no formal political compact with the mother country; they were not voters in parliamentary elections even to the limited extent allowed to their English cousins, suffering taxation without representation among other tyrannies of government without consent of the governed. Their withdrawal
from the British Empire may have hurt that empire economically, but it did not threaten it existentially. Lincoln directly refuted the Southerners’ claim to be Jefferson’s legitimate heirs. Referring to the various state ordinances of secession, he wrote:

Lincoln returned again and again to the idea of “the people.” He was determined to prove that the Union was not fighting against the cause of freedom, as the Confederates maintained, but actively for it—and according to a very different understanding of the word. To the secessionists, freedom meant the ability to elude authority. To Lincoln, freedom was in itself a form of authority—indeed, the only legitimate form of authority, as the only
alternative was authoritarianism. “And this issue embraces more than the fate of these United States,” he wrote.

Here Lincoln was not merely echoing, more eloquently, what he had told the regent captains of
San Marino two months earlier. He was also foreshadowing what he would tell a crowd of Americans at Gettysburg two years hence.
A government of the people, by the same people.
That superfluous word
same,
like a lead weight, tethers the phrase to earth, keeping Lincoln’s prose from rising into poetry; the reader longs
to cut it loose. But Lincoln’s thought is the same, and would remain a lodestar for him throughout the stormy years to come. Although he might not have scribbled his 1863 address on the back of an envelope,
as legend would have it, it should be no surprise that he wrote it fairly quickly. Lincoln had already done the hard work of the Gettysburg Address, the heavy intellectual lifting, in 1861. The two intervening years would go to pare away the
nonessentials, to sculpt 6,256 words of prose into 246 words of poetry.