Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (31 page)

Douglas, however, had by no means been alone in urging that his party “drop politics.” The Lincoln administration could rely on several other well-placed, nonpartisan “War Democrats” to deliver the same message over the coming months. They included the New Yorkers John A. Dix, John Cochrane, and, most notably, Daniel Dickinson, who proved tireless at Union rallies; the westerners John A. McClernand and David Tod; and, from the border, Andrew Johnson. Several of these staunch advocates of war had been Breckinridge men in November, as, too, had Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts, Daniel E. Sickles of New York, and a clutch of western editors. Their bitterness took on a sharper edge when Breckinridge himself chose to “go South.”

Even in the first flush of patriotic anger, however, many Democrats remained unpersuaded by Douglas’s strategy. The most hostile were Peace Democrats in the southern counties of the Old Northwest, in the border South, and in and around New York City. When Douglas reached Springfield at the end of April, he reported to Lincoln that he had “found the state of feeling here and in some parts of our State much less satisfactory than I could have desired or expected”: he had particularly in mind the “Egyptians,” the inhabitants of southern Illinois. Such party leaders as James A. Bayard of Delaware and Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio were oppositionists from the start, and could rely on editors like Samuel Medary of the
Columbus
Crisis
and Benjamin Wood of the
New York Daily News
to be trenchant in the cause of peace. Vallandigham promptly countered Douglas’s press release of April 15 with a polemic against Lincoln’s coercive war: “sober second thought,” he predicted, would calm the “surging sea of madness” and prevent “thirty millions . . . butchering each other.”
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Even Democrats who saw the need for war, and blamed the South for its onset, were not easily persuaded to drop party politics for the duration of hostilities. A generation’s political competition between Democrats and their Whig/Republican opponents had left a legacy of deep ideological and emotional antipathy, and an inability to see politics in any other terms. One aspect of this “partisan imperative,” as the historian Joel Silbey has termed it, was the culturally programmed hostility of Democrats to the party of Lincoln. Many continued to dismiss Republicans as Yankee-Puritan fanatics, bigots, zealots, meddlers, and ideological imperialists. Without them there would have been no political breakdown of the Union and thus no war. What guarantee was there that the “violent and revolutionary” abolitionists in the Republican party would not crush its “conservative and patriotic” wing?
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How would Democrats keep their independence on issues beyond the common pursuit of reunion if they lined up behind the administration? James Bayard feared that through the folly of nonpartisanship Democrats would be “swallowed up by the Republicans.” Douglas, of course, had no intention of winding up his party, but Bayard’s anxiety was realistic enough. Republican strategists did indeed see the advantages to Lincoln and the administration of “no-partyism,” as they called it. To “sink the partisan in the patriot” did little or no harm to Republicans, for it meant the terms “nation” and “administration party” became more or less synonymous; but at the same time the strategy threatened to paralyze and neuter the Democrats.

With the opposition party in some disarray, Lincoln maintained the pressure for cooperation by keeping or placing prominent Democrats in military command. During his first weeks in office he had followed convention, dismissing over a thousand of Buchanan’s political appointees and replacing them from the hordes of Republican loyalists hungry for a share of the patronage. Meanwhile cabinet secretaries and legislators were responsible for filling thousands of other federal government jobs. Sweeping away “corrupt” Democrats was no more than the party had promised when campaigning for the return of “honest Abe.” But it was also consistent with the custom of rewarding party activists, keeping them disciplined and loyal to the administration: this would take on particular significance as the 1864 election approached. More immediately, however, it did nothing to win the goodwill of Democrats: Irish-Americans felt hard done by, and Douglas himself thought Lincoln had “dealt hardly with me, in removing some of my friends from office.”
⁶³
But Lincoln had more freedom for cross-party bridge-building when it came to accepting regiments from Democratic strongholds, often largely Irish, and appointing generals, whose commissioning lay in the president’s hands.
⁶⁴
Democrats had been well represented amongst the officers of the regular army on the eve of secession, but during the subsequent crisis most of these went south. Their replacements came from the ranks of West Point professionals and from civilian life, and Lincoln acted to ensure an across-the-board political (as well as geographical and ethnic) representation. Many Democrats secured high-profile positions of command as a result, including Ben Butler, John Dix, John (“Black Jack”) Logan, John McClernand, Dan Sickles, and Lew Wallace: they in turn could open the door to fellow Democrats. The administration also signaled that the Democratic allegiance of those already in service would be no bar to advancement. Don Carlos Buell, Irvin McDowell, and Montgomery C. Meigs of the War Department staff, for example, all won promotion for preparing Washington against an expected attack.

Lincoln was keen to judge the strength of Democratic Unionism and the quality of its leadership when the special session of Congress convened. Republicans comprised two out of every three senators and enjoyed a comfortable majority in the House, but the minority of Democrats and border-state Unionists were his special concern. Lincoln had already begun thinking hard about his message by early May, when he tested some ideas on his secretaries. He knew he had to provide a compelling rationale for the war and to show that the administration’s purposes were essentially conservative. He began with a summary of the events that produced the Sumter crisis, to show his own forbearance and to underscore the unwarranted aggression of the rebels. Their assault on the Union raised profound issues—of universal import—relating to the integrity of popular government and to the rights of man. The question, explained Lincoln, in phrases that he would polish at Gettysburg in 1863, was “whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes.” Were all republics inherently and fatally flawed? “Must a government, of necessity, be too
strong
for the liberties of its own people, or too
weak
to maintain its own existence?”
⁶⁵

The rebels had chosen to abandon a government based on the popular will and had adopted a constitution which, “unlike our good old one,” omitted the phrase “We, the People.” Their declaration of independence had excised Jefferson’s words “all men are created equal.” They had, then, in “pressing out of view, the rights of men, and the authority of the people,” provoked “a People’s contest” on behalf of a Union committed to “maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”
⁶⁶

The war’s purpose was thus protective and conservative: to defend the values and political philosophy of Washington and the Founders in the face of national disintegration. For revolution, look south: secession was an illegal, insurrectionary act by rebellious individuals against a perpetual Union. And since that Union remained unbroken, there should be no “uneasiness in the minds of candid men, as to what is to be the course of the government, towards the Southern States,
after
the rebellion shall have been suppressed.” As president, Lincoln reassured conservatives, he would continue to be guided by constitutional law, and when peace returned “probably will have no different understanding of the powers, and duties of the Federal government, relatively to the rights of the States, and the people” than he had had on assuming office. That “probably” was a mark of his caution and intellectual honesty in the face of the imponderables of war, and perhaps a warning, too, but the essential message was clear: individuals might be punished for their rebellion, but the Constitution would continue to protect southern slaveholders in their property rights. The federal authorities would not instigate social revolution in the South.
⁶⁷

As a further nod toward the concerns of conservatives, Lincoln sought to show that he had fully complied with his constitutional duty both before and after the fall of Sumter. In what was a high-wire act of persuasion, he said nothing that would compromise his determination as chief executive and commander-in-chief to keep control of the war’s prosecution, but at the same time he looked to Congress to endorse what he had done since April 15. Pressing the argument that he had made his various proclamations, “whether strictly legal or not,” in response to “a popular demand, and a public necessity,” he asked that Congress ratify them, and added an extraordinary statement, “It is believed that nothing has been done beyond the constitutional competency of Congress.” More delicate still was the issue of Lincoln’s limited suspension of habeas corpus, which by now had come under the hostile scrutiny of Roger Taney. Given the Constitution’s silence on where the power of suspension lay—with the president or with Congress?—Lincoln volleyed the argument back to the chief justice: the president had indeed, as Taney had noted, taken an oath to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” but “are all the laws,
but one,
to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?”
⁶⁸

Lincoln gave notice that as president he would mix Jacksonian executive energy with a Whiggish understanding of the lawmaking authority of the legislature. This was a recipe for rallying broad cross-party support, both within Congress and beyond. With the exception of the suspension of the writ, which would remain a chronic source of division, legislators overwhelmingly approved Lincoln’s emergency measures. And they more than met his request for men and money, by authorizing the raising of up to half a million troops, and providing an appropriation of $500 million through bond issues, increased protective duties, and direct taxation, including an income tax. The same broad-based Unionism found expression, too, in the welcome proffered to the resolutions which two slave-state Democrats, John J. Crittenden and Andrew Johnson, introduced on the eve of the war’s first large-scale military engagement. After the numbing, humiliating Union defeat at Bull Run, the two chambers of Congress, echoing the president’s message, resolved almost unanimously “that this war is not waged, on our part, in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions” of the states.

The fusion of Lincoln’s declared conservative purposes and popular patriotism worked to contain and weaken the Democrats as an electoral force during the first year of the war. They fought the fall state elections hesitant and confused. In several instances, responding to the “no-party” initiative, the party’s local and state conventions stopped meeting. When they did convene, nominations for office did not inevitably follow. Many “War Democrats” believed they should run no candidates during the crisis, and effectively left the party, to be subsumed within Republicanism. Others did run, but on separate tickets against party regulars, and split the vote; by 1862 these troublesome separate tickets had given way in some areas to “Union party” organizations, by which Republicans sought to fight the opposition. War Democrats were an elite, not a mass movement, and left the core vote of the party undisturbed, but for Lincoln they represented a propaganda coup, valuable exemplars of a large-hearted Unionism. And although the Democratic party retained its organization, its dominating group of regulars comprised red-hot patriots who shared the stated priorities of the administration. Many of these flocked to the ranks in the spring and summer of 1861, often urged on by state-level Democratic officeholders, most notably Governor William Sprague of Rhode Island. For the time being, at least, Vallandigham and the Peace Democrats seemed to the White House only a minor irritant, not a significant threat.
⁶⁹

Despite Lincoln’s best efforts to present the secessionists as the aggressors, he was unable to prevent the departure of four more slave states after Sumter fell. He called up far fewer militiamen than he actually required, well short of the Confederate forces then in arms, but across the upper South state governors interpreted Lincoln’s call for troops as an aggressive preliminary to “invasion.” Virginia’s state convention passed an ordinance of secession on April 17, endorsed by a popular referendum five weeks later. Like-minded political leaders took similar energetic action in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas. There were substantial Unionist minorities in southern Appalachia, but by early June the Confederacy had formally embraced all of these states. They brought with them a combined population of over three and a half million people, and huge resources, mainly agricultural and mineral, but also the largest ironworks in the South. Soon afterward the Confederates seized the federal naval base at Norfolk and the arsenal at Harpers Ferry.