Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (35 page)

George Brinton McClellan (1826–85) succeeded Scott as general-in-chief of the Union armies in November 1861. Lincoln became increasingly exasperated by McClellan’s reluctance to fight and questioned his strategy, but recognized his strengths as an organizer and the devotion he won from his troops. Out-generaled in the Peninsula campaign, McClennan secured a timely victory at Antietam. Lincoln finally removed him from military command after the fall elections of 1862.

Had the public been privy to McClellan’s near-contempt for his commander-in-chief, they would have been even more deeply concerned. McClellan came to an early view that Lincoln was “an idiot,” a restrained judgment compared with his later scathing allusions to the president as “a well meaning baboon” and “the
original gorilla.
” He found the president’s efforts to master strategy and the technicalities of war to be as ridiculous as they were exasperating; and as a natural Democrat he had little respect for “the imbeciles” who comprised the rest of the administration. Only Blair, who shared the general’s Negrophobia and conservative view of war aims, earned his good opinion. Driven by a mix of self-esteem and a Calvinistic conviction of his preordained role as the nation’s deliverer, McClellan had no qualms about snubbing the president and on at least one occasion treated him with such insolence that John Hay accurately read it as “a portent of evil to come.”
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Characteristically, Lincoln resisted the temptation to stand on his dignity, and continued for longer than was prudent to reassure the cautious McClellan that he would shield him from impetuous critics: “You shall,” he said in mid-October, “have your own way in the matter.” The Bull Run episode, with its bloody retreat to Washington, had left Lincoln emotionally raw and declaring that, in its aftermath, “hell . . . has no terror for me”; he took on his own shoulders the blame for what Winfield Scott judged a premature fight, brought on by the urgent demands of press and public to move “forward to Richmond.” This experience went some way toward explaining Lincoln’s tolerant response to McClellan’s planning and operations, yet he also knew it was unwise to lose sight of public morale. McClellan complained when Benjamin F. Wade, soon to become the first chairman of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, opined that defeat was no worse than delay and “could easily be repaired, by the swarming recruits.” But Lincoln’s response was revealingly ambivalent. He “deprecated this new manifestation of popular impatience but . . . said it was a reality and should be taken into the account. At the same time General you must not fight till you are ready.” Eventually, in early 1862, he began to exert his authority in an attempt to prod McClellan into action.
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The shortcomings in military operations cast doubt on Lincoln’s own leadership. A chorus of Unionist voices, moderate as well as radical, questioned the competence of the president and his administration’s resolve. The loyalist press sadly identified drift, inefficiency, and ignorance. “They are blundering, cowardly, and inefficient,” Wade complained. “You could not inspire Old Abe, Seward, Chase, or Bates with courage, decision, and enterprise with a galvanic battery.” Lincoln’s first annual message to Congress on December 3 disappointed those who looked for a forceful expression of government purpose to lift the country’s mood. As a calm synthesis of administrative reports, it won two cheers for showing the “business-as-usual” strength of the Union, but only its closing discussion of the merits of free labor and republican government went any way toward stirring a public increasingly desperate for a signal of governmental energy. When Lincoln acted to demand that Cameron withdraw his well-publicized proposal to arm the slaves, it only confirmed that the president was an “old fogy.” “Old Abe is now unmasked, and we are sold out,” grieved the
Chicago
Tribune.
Doubts marked the cabinet itself. Chase had no great faith in the president, and Bates ended the year confiding that Lincoln, though “an excellent man,” lacked “
will
and
purpose,
and . . . the
power
to
command.
”
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Lincoln felt understandably desperate as 1862 dawned. With McClellan bedridden, military operations were frozen. No one, not even the president, knew his plans. The western forces under Henry W. Halleck and Don C. Buell stood paralyzed. The costs of raising and maintaining 700,000 Union men in arms were bleeding the Treasury dry. Banks suspended specie payments. The president spoke of “borrowing” McClellan’s army and even taking the field himself. On January 10, the day that he would hold the first of four meetings of an ad hoc war council, he starkly summed up his predicament in conversation with Montgomery C. Meigs: “General, what shall I do? The people are impatient; Chase has no money and he tells me he can raise no more; the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub.”
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The people were indeed impatient, but they were scarcely defeatist. Whatever their disappointment and frustrations, Union loyalists felt no irremediable sense of alienation. Lincoln could draw on reservoirs of goodwill and on feelings of patriotic obligation directed less at himself personally than at his office and the associated institutions of government. Republican editors counseled patience. The
New
York
Independent
defended Lincoln against the charge of promise-breaking: “He has simply found out how much faster one can speak than act—how much easier it is to criticize administrations, than to administer.” A prominent spokesman for northwestern antislavery, Thomas M. Eddy, coupled expressions of concern over the Union’s confused policy toward rebels’ slaves with 24-carat loyalty to the administration: “We will sustain the government with the last dollar, and to the last extremity; we will not doubt the honest intent of its officers.”
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Here, within this ethically driven patriotism, lay the most potent long-term resource of the Union in what was now becoming a protracted war. If Lincoln were to prevent a permanent division of the nation—and he began to contemplate such a sundering during these stressful days
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—his task was to nurture and exploit these sources of patriotism. The war to date, during 1861, had demanded a strategy that maximized Union support. Lincoln’s keen insight into the overriding importance of the border had determined his policy since April. But the conservatism that suited the men and women of the border would provide inadequate inspiration in the longer term for the Union as a whole. Over the course of the conflict Lincoln would have to reshape and rearticulate the war’s stated purposes, and thereby seek to inspire the devotion of the mass of instinctive Unionists in the face of setbacks, suffering, and loss. He came to see that his power ultimately depended on harnessing the freely offered energies of loyal citizens who were driven more by “Yankee” religious imperatives than by the pragmatic conservatism of the lower North.

CHAPTER 5

The Purposes of Power: Evolving Objectives, 1861–65

T
he president who five months into the war told Jessie Benton Frémont that the African-American had “nothing to do with” the conflict and should not be “dragged” into it would eventually, of course, enter the American pantheon as the Great Emancipator. A year after rescinding his western commander’s proclamation of freedom, the president issued his own ultimatum to rebel slaveholders. The landmark Emancipation Proclamation that followed was succeeded by state-level political action against slavery in various parts of the loyal and reconquered South. Urged on by the president, Congress eventually approved an antislavery amendment to the federal Constitution. A war that had begun as an effort to save the Union evolved under Lincoln’s leadership into an agency of the slaves’ freedom.

Thirty months after his crisp words to Mrs. Frémont, Lincoln reflected in a letter to a Kentucky editor, Albert G. Hodges, that unexpected and unplanned “events,” not he, had controlled his policy toward emancipation.
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In tandem, these two sets of remarks seem to invite the conclusion that the “Great Emancipator” was no more than the accidental beneficiary of haphazard wartime developments. Indeed, in the judgment of the most polemical of modern critics, Lincoln was a foot-dragging liberator, “forced into glory” against his conservative, white-supremacist instincts.
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A more substantial and subtle assault on the mythic Lincoln derives from the argument that it was above all through the African-Americans’ own actions that the slaves won their freedom. The tens of thousands of blacks who streamed into Union camps from both loyal and rebel regions of the South forced an issue on federal authorities that they could not duck. Well before Lincoln acted, colluding military officers and congressmen moved to treat these runaways as confiscated property, or contraband, to be sheltered and employed in the northern armies. At the same time, well away from the military arena, a change took place in the balance of racial authority on southern farms and plantations, weakening slavery from within, as enlisted white overseers and owners left increasingly assertive slaves under the control of women and old men.

To argue, as some have done, that the slaves freed themselves and that Lincoln’s role was hesitantly to catch up with events is, however, to oversimplify a complex historical process. Final, irreversible freedom required the defeat of the Confederates and a new constitutional settlement. Slaves certainly played a role in weakening the Confederacy from within, while from without the 200,000 African-Americans who served as federal soldiers, sailors, servants, teamsters, and laborers may well have tipped the advantage toward the Union. But there was more to northern victory than that. Of paramount importance was the leadership of a president and commander-in-chief who understood that there could be no certain freedom without a restored Union and that prematurely making emancipation the formal goal of war would shatter the broad-based coalition on which that very restoration depended.

In reality, Lincoln was not a passive figure buffeted by forces beyond his control. His administration is the story of a president who kept his focus on strategic essentials; who chose not to pursue diversions, however worthy (as with reform of the corrupt Indian service); who was capable of pulling surprises; and who was quite capable, when the time came, “of laying strong hand upon the colored element.”
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Though ready to leave important tracts of the policy domain—notably foreign affairs and the national finances—largely to the direction of trusted ministers, Lincoln resolutely kept in his own hands all decisions bearing upon slavery, emancipation, and race. He achieved a mastery over his cabinet, occasionally soliciting opinions but mostly informing his ministers of decisions already reached. Jealous of the constitutional powers of the executive, as he understood them, he resisted legislative encroachment and took advantage of the long intervals between congressional sessions to keep the initiative. John W. Forney watched in admiration as Lincoln grew in political office to become “that great, wonderful mysterious inexplicable man: who holds in his single hands the reins of the republic: who keeps his own counsels: who does his own purpose in his own way no matter what temporizing minister in his cabinet sets himself up in opposition to the progress of the age.”
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The story of Lincoln’s presidential leadership is at heart the story of how he used the power at his disposal to redefine the Union’s explicit purposes to embrace liberty, and even equality, for all. But, as Lincoln explained, he had to exercise that power under constraint. Constitutional duty, the obstinate realities of the battlefield, and opinion on the home front severely hemmed in his freedom of action. These, however, were evolving, not static, constraints. Constitutional duty might seem to demand protection for slavery, but not at the expense of national integrity; indeed, duty to the spirit of the founding document might even require amendment of the Constitution itself. At the same time, the events of war churned public opinion, bringing many former anti-abolitionists to embrace military emancipation and the arming of the blacks. The challenge for any Union president in these circumstances was to identify the moment when the country would accept an advance to new ground. Lincoln’s great—possibly greatest—achievement was to take a stethoscope to Union opinion and read it with such skill that he timed to perfection his redefinition of national purpose. This unerring sense of timing was for political insiders the key to the president’s greatness. “Lincoln is the most truly progressive man of the age,” claimed Forney, “because he always moves in conjunction with propitious circumstances, not waiting to be dragged by the force of events or wasting strength in premature struggles with them.”
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The story of the evolving purposes of the Union’s war is also the story of Lincoln’s personal development. Those who withstood unmoved the buffeting of war were rare indeed. Inevitably, Lincoln’s private understanding of his moral obligations, and of the meaning of the conflict itself, evolved under the grueling burden of leadership, the wider suffering of wartime, and personal grief. Unfathomable as the private Lincoln has to remain, there is every sign that his understanding of providential intervention both shaped the thinking by which he reached the most profound of his decisions, for emancipation, and—even more powerfully—steeled his nerve to stand by the implications of that decision once made.

READING THE PUBLIC

Lincoln openly acknowledged that the steps by which he redefined the war for the Union as a war against slavery were guided by his reading of public opinion, and that he feared too early an embrace of emancipation would shatter the Union consensus. Not pushing mainstream sentiment toward emancipation faster than it wanted to go meant turning a deaf ear to the urgent appeals of antislavery radicals, while simultaneously nudging border-state conservatives toward greater realism. But the question arises: How could he be sure what that mainstream opinion was? As a state politician, the Illinois circuit lawyer and aspirant for elective office had enjoyed a face-to-face relationship with his constituents, but the nation’s president and commander-in-chief was mostly restricted to the executive mansion. Political friends saw the danger, warning him against the “disingenuous and selfish clamor at the Capitol.” But remote from his roots, increasingly exhausted by the unremitting burden of office, bombarded by conflicting advice, rarely straying from the vicinity of Washington, and prevented by convention from gauging the popular mood through stump-speaking, how could he know and track the turbulent thoughts of ordinary Americans and avoid, as an Indiana loyalist feared, “the possibility of loosing the public confidence”?
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Election returns offered a series of snapshots of political opinion. On average a significant congressional or state election occurred in the North every other month during the four years of war. Lincoln, whose grasp of electoral topography and arithmetic was second to none, spent many an hour in the telegraph office at the War Department, awaiting and analyzing outcomes. Broadly speaking, election results allowed the administration to chart its standing in public esteem throughout the war. Republicans’ success in New England in the spring of 1861 appeared to endorse the policy of coercion of the Confederacy. Later that year, the party’s winning several state contests outside New England with the support of War Democrats seemed to vindicate the conciliatory approach toward border-state conservatives. The satisfactory returns in the fall of 1863 could also be taken as a broad endorsement of the administration’s course and became the signal for a further call for volunteers. On the other hand, the state and congressional contests in the fall of 1862, the most serious electoral test of the war to date, provided the administration with an alarming popular rebuff. Significantly, however, there was no unanimity about what particular aspect of policy had chiefly caused the alienation. Using voting figures as a commentary on matters of national policy was little better than reading braille with a gloved hand.

Dealings with political leaders at the national and state levels held out for Lincoln opportunities for more nuanced analyses of popular mood. From his deliberately broad-based and inclusive cabinet he heard often dissonant voices advancing a range of views which ran the gamut of Unionist opinion—disharmony, in this case at least, acting as a source of presidential strength, not weakness. More sensitive still to public feeling were those in elective office, notably state governors and United States congressmen, whom Lincoln considered his eyes and ears in each constituency. From Andrew Curtin of Pennsylvania, Richard Yates of Illinois, Oliver P. Morton of Indiana, John Andrew of Massachusetts, William A. Buckingham of Connecticut, and other loyal governors, the president received commentaries on the general management of the war, on electoral prospects, and on the public’s view of particular administration policies across a range of salient issues: confiscation, colonization, emancipation, black troops, the draft, reconstruction. But, as Lincoln discovered to his cost, though they were closer than he to the grass roots, their judgments were not infallible. Thus, taking Ohio Governor William Dennison’s advice in the spring of 1861 to heed popular will and convert the ninety-day militiamen into three-year volunteers, Lincoln was forced into retracting his approval in the face of the men’s anger and threat of mutiny.
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Governors and other state politicians had their own axes to grind, of course, and Lincoln had always to remain on the lookout for self-interested pleading disguised as objective testimony. His grasp on the slippery confusion of events in Missouri, for instance, was undoubtedly weakened by the ambiguities and defects of his information. Unsurprisingly, he sent his own White House secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, on a variety of missions to assess local political feeling, just as he had used Lamon and Hurlbut to sound out opinion in South Carolina early in 1861.

Newspapers, the lifeblood of the American political system, provided Lincoln with another means of keeping his finger on the pulse of opinion. In his days as an aspiring Illinois politician he had been an insatiable reader of the party political press, but the rigors of office gave the harassed president far less time to indulge this appetite. Francis Carpenter, the portrait painter who observed Lincoln’s daily routine over a six-month period in 1864, recalled only one instance when he saw Lincoln casually browsing through a newspaper. Actually, papers abounded in the White House. In addition to the three Washington dailies (the
Morning Chronicle, National Republican,
and
Star
), which were laid out on Lincoln’s study table, a variety of the Union’s leading papers provided his secretaries with the materials from which they could mine the interesting editorial matter and items of political importance they judged they should bring to the president’s attention. When for a brief interlude early in the war events conspired to interrupt the daily flow of papers, a sense of isolation and even desperation seized the occupants of the executive mansion. Lincoln had a healthily skeptical attitude toward press criticism, which rarely moved him to anger and which he commonly dismissed as “noise” and “gas” generated by ignorance and editorial self-importance. On the biggest of issues, emancipation, he said “he had studied the matter so long that he knew more about it than they [the editors] did.”
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Still, Lincoln could not afford to ignore the journalistic corps altogether. Indeed, some journalists became friends and invaluable channels of information. Such was Noah Brooks, an acquaintance from Illinois days, who became a near-daily visitor at the White House after his posting to Washington by the
Sacramento Daily Union.
Like Simon P. Hanscom, the antislavery Bostonian who edited Lincoln’s favorite paper, the
Washington National Republican,
and also became a frequent caller, Brooks acted as a sounding board and source of political gossip.
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Others, like Henry Raymond of the
New York Times,
were less personally close to the president, but enjoyed his respect (despite Raymond’s having called for Lincoln’s deposition during his first months in office). When, in the dark days of the summer of 1864, Raymond brought him reports of opinion hardening against the administration, Lincoln came as close as he ever did to abandoning the high ground of antislavery Unionism.

Loyal editors also bombarded the president with unsolicited advice in hundreds of private letters. These, however, represented only a small fraction of the mail that at times threatened to submerge the White House secretariat. Nicolay handled Lincoln’s huge correspondence before his inauguration; subsequently the responsibility fell on Hay’s young shoulders. As the volume rose, to reach a peak of two mailbags (some five hundred letters) daily during the midpoint of Lincoln’s reelection year, an additional secretary was required. Much of the correspondence comprised requests for civil jobs and military commissions. There were diatribes and hate mail, too, from which Lincoln was generally shielded. But many letters came from those whom one secretary described as the “good and true,” often unlettered and humble, pouring out their “deepest heart sorrows” and offering their advice on the conduct of affairs. Of course, Lincoln had time to handle only a fraction of what arrived, perhaps a dozen or so letters a day; according to Hay, the president personally read no more than one letter in fifty. But those he did review, together with the summaries and annotations provided by his secretaries, gave him a chance literally to read public opinion. Each phase of the conflict prompted earnest suggestions about the best policies and strategy for victory.
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