Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (39 page)

Lincoln later said that he had not expected the proclamation to achieve very much at first, but he was surely not prepared for the political rapids that threatened to capsize the administration over the next three months.
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If the events themselves, including a serious electoral setback and a dramatic cabinet crisis, were not primarily or directly caused by the measure itself, the larger issue that they raised—Lincoln’s objectives—was intimately connected to it. The unsettled political landscape led to fears (and hopes) that the president would renege on his commitment to freedom, withdraw his proclamation, and revert to a strategy for a more limited war. How close did he come to a reversal of policy?

Opposition Democrats had high hopes of the fall elections. McClellan, who when the proclamation was issued had considered a public protest against it, or even resigning, chose to issue his own address to the Army of the Potomac. He cautioned against hotheaded discussion of the new policy, but added that “the remedy for political errors, if any are committed, is to be found . . . in the actions of the people at the polls.” Republicans braced themselves. The Democrats had been preparing since the summer to capitalize on the “imbecility” of the administration. In July Congressman William D. Kelley had told Lincoln that locally, in Philadelphia, the Democrats were “more perfectly organized than I have ever known.” None of their men were enlisting. “If they can retain their own people while 30,000 or more of ours go to the field they achieve a grand political result.” Now, as McClellan implied, the Emancipation Proclamation handed Democrats an additional weapon. They were experts at playing the race card and stirring white fears about the “Africanizing” of the North. In Illinois especially, where Stanton had ordered the settlement of “contrabands” in farms across the central belt, David Davis predicted serious electoral damage. Then, on September 24, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus nationwide, placing under martial law “all persons discouraging volunteer enlistments, resisting militia drafts, or guilty of any disloyal practice, affording aid and comfort to Rebels.” This, and the hundreds of arbitrary arrests which had followed Stanton’s enforcement of the recent Militia Act, laid Lincoln open to a charge of “dictatorship.” “We shall now be assailed front, flank and rear by our enemies,” John Forney sighed, as he contemplated the two proclamations.
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In the event, the Democrats made impressive gains. They took control of the states across the lower North, from Illinois through Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to New Jersey and New York, where Horatio Seymour seized a stunning gubernatorial victory against a badly divided Republican state party. Even across the Republicans’ more natural terrain, in the upper Northwest around the Great Lakes, they advanced. In all, the Democrats won thirty-five Republican-held congressional seats and secured a bridgehead from which they could hope to advance to a presidential victory in 1864. The Republicans still comfortably controlled Congress, but, dazed by their political mauling, they feared the effect on Union morale. Sumner told Lincoln that the New York outcome was “worse for our country than the bloodiest disaster on any field of battle.” Writing from Illinois, Jesse Dubois took fright over results that “bode no good to the country,” warning Lincoln: “The rebels in Tennessee are as exultant over them as the Chicago Times and say openly that if they can sustain themselves this winter the Northern people will compel this Administration to abandon the contest.”
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The postmortem cast an exhausted president into a deeper well of depression. Conservatives blamed government by proclamation. Since slavery’s death depended on military advance, insisted one western Republican, the only effect of an unnecessary emancipation order had been to resuscitate the Democrats “to active life.” Others lamented the order sanctioning arbitrary arrests, resulting in the harassment of loyal citizens by “a horde of irresponsible and contemptible detectives.” By contrast, radicals blamed the election defeat not on overzealousness or proclamations, but on Lincoln’s retaining in military command and appointive office the complacent, the inert, and the outright hostile. “Our armies must be pressed forward, & the proclamation must be pressed forward,” Sumner insisted, “& the country must be made to feel that there will be no relaxation of any kind.” Schurz declared McClellan, Buell, and Halleck out of sympathy with the true goals of the administration, and grumbled about the undue influence of foot-dragging Democrats. Lincoln demurred, reminding Schurz that only a broad-based, cross-party effort could suppress the rebellion. Instead, he argued, the Republicans’ vote had been depressed by the higher level of enlistments amongst their own supporters than the Demo-crats and had not been helped by the disparagement of the administration in the Republican press. He did, though, accept that “the ill-success of the war” underlay the defeat and implicitly accepted the need for more vigor.
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There was a degree of self-deception in Lincoln’s analysis: the proclamations had been more damaging than he conceded. But he was right to see the stalled progress of the Union armies as the public’s chief concern, and he now geared for action. He removed the politically out-of-touch Buell as commander of the Army of the Ohio on October 24, but sensibly waited for all voting to be over before moving to dismiss McClellan, after further weeks of exasperation. Prominent Republicans and War Democrats rejoiced at this intimation of “energy” at last. “I have been forced to the conclusion,” Daniel Dickinson told Lincoln, that McClellan “is better suited to be superintendent of a cemetery where dead men require digging, than for the commander of an army of the living where movement is necessary to success.”
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There were obvious perils in removing a commander still very popular with his men, but Lincoln’s choice of Ambrose E. Burnside as his successor—Burnside was widely, if mistakenly, regarded as close to McClellan—helped neutralize the danger.

Lincoln’s reaction to election defeat, then, was not to question the wisdom of his Emancipation Proclamation, and his changes in military command reinforced the view of conservatives that he had moved irrevocably onto radical terrain. Radicals themselves, however, took more persuading of an administration transfigured, and read into the events of the final weeks of 1862 evidence of its disastrous incompetence and hesitation over strategy, as well as intimations of backsliding from the antislavery high ground so recently scaled. They waited apprehensively for the president’s annual message of December 1 and found little reassurance in what they heard.

Lincoln had worked hard at his text. Its most animated, earnest, and eloquent passages—over half the message—dealt with slavery and its future, but he barely mentioned the Emancipation Proclamation. Rather, having reiterated the sentiments of his inaugural address, that the “only great element of national discord amongst us” was the transitory differ-ence rooted in the rightness or wrongness of slavery, he set out a scheme by which that strife might be “hushed forever with the passing of one generation.” He proposed three constitutional amendments, providing for compensation in federal bonds to states that opted for a gradual emancipation by 1900; making “forever free” all slaves who “enjoyed actual freedom by the chances of war,” and compensating loyal owners; and authorizing federal funding “for colonizing free colored persons, with their own consent, at any place or places without the United States.” It was a scheme prefigured in his words of March and June to Congress and the border representatives.
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Radicals gave a mainly chilly response to proposals they condemned as backward-looking. Was Lincoln, as his Democratic opponents charged, more or less conceding the unconstitutionality of his Emancipation Proclamation? The proposals were impracticable, too, for ratification would depend on the support of at least some of the rebel slave states. U.S. Representative Henry Winter Davis summed up a disquiet shared even by conservative Republicans when he described the plan as “illusory to the loyal states and ridiculous in relation to the disloyal states”; Chase told Lincoln it would “weaken rather than strengthen your administration.”
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In deeming it a conservative message, the president’s critics had a case. Lincoln’s instinctive moderation and respect for constitutional process permeated proposals through which, however unlikely it was that they would be fully embraced, he wanted to be seen to be doing his presidential duty. A nation in revolutionary flux was on the brink of a war of subjugation, but until that moment arrived he had a responsibility to strive for the peaceful, graduated, compensated, conservative plan of emancipation that he had always favored—hence his emphasis on leaving the initiative with the states, on avoiding “vagrant destitution” and “the evils of sudden derangement,” on the justice of the whole nation paying the costs and on the benefits of the voluntary deportation of blacks.

Lincoln’s proposals served two immediate political purposes. First, they were designed to encourage Unionists in rebel states to respond positively to the threat of the Emancipation Proclamation before it was too late. In particular Lincoln hoped to accelerate the moves toward the restoration of loyal governments that had accompanied the advance of Union forces. In Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, and especially Louisiana he had given instruction to his generals to build political support for the fall elections. The annual message gave him a further opportunity for pressure: wherever rebellion yielded to restoration and reconstruction, there September’s order would be stayed and a conservative course of reform substituted. Lincoln’s proposed amendments, then, have to be seen, as he saw them, as a peace measure. He may even have believed, as David Donald has suggested, that the combination of martial stick and reformist carrot would shortly secure a near-complete collapse of the rebel states by chain reaction. But whatever Lincoln’s expectations—and they are hard to read—he understood that wherever the proclamation was stayed an alternative plan of emancipation was required.
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The gradualist scheme had a further purpose. The Republicans’ severe loss of support in the fall elections had flashed a warning signal. Although Lincoln had refused to be stampeded into revoking the Emancipation Proclamation, or maintaining McClellan in command against his better judgment, he needed in some way to recolonize the center ground that he seemed to have vacated. The annual message gave him a chance to reestablish his credentials for moderation.

In the final analysis, however, the annual message was scarcely a conservative document. Lincoln looked forward as well as back. “As our case is new, so must we think anew, and act anew. . . . The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present.” Not only did he stand by his September proclamation, by implication the most revolutionary of the war measures to date, but he had begun to think about how permanent constitutional law could secure the changes that the proclamation, a mere war measure, would effect. Equally, his proposals sought to energize emancipationists in the loyal border states and destroy slavery in places well beyond the proclamation’s remit. And—in a lengthy passage which confronted economic racism even more powerfully than it advocated voluntary deportation, and made a start in educating whites to tolerate a free black population in their midst—Lincoln challenged, as he had never done before, the “largely imaginary, if not sometimes malicious” argument that emancipation would depress the wages of white labor, and that freedmen would “swarm forth, and cover the whole land.”
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Most striking of all, Lincoln not only presented emancipation as a
necessary means
“for restoring and preserving the national authority throughout the Union,” but now, however indirectly, he signaled the slaves’ freedom as one of the
purposes
of war. In a memorable climax, prefiguring his theme at Gettysburg, Lincoln acknowledged that there might be other ways of saving the Union, but believed his own plan offered the best hope. “In
giving
freedom to the
slave,
we
assure
freedom to the
free—
honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve.” Emancipation, initially only a weapon for securing a Union devoted to freedom, would, through the nobility of the action and the liberty it secured for those in bondage, itself become an essential element of that larger freedom of all Americans. “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth.”
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Whatever modest reassurance the radicals might have drawn, in Chase’s words, from the “noble sentiments” of Lincoln’s peroration, it did not survive the Union catastrophe at Fredericksburg on December 13.
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Burnside’s battlefield misjudgment was scarcely Lincoln’s fault—indeed, Lincoln had sought to warn against the very course that brought disaster—but the loss of over twelve thousand men in the worst defeat to date plunged northern opinion into the darkest desperation and even defeatism. It also prompted the most profound government crisis Lincoln had faced. Popular anger against Halleck, Stanton, and even the president himself prompted a special caucus of thirty-two Republican senators. Focusing on the administration’s weakness, the cabinet’s chronic disharmony, and Lincoln’s seeming lack of system, they turned their most determined fire on Seward. From Chase in particular—in personality and policy the chalk to Seward’s cheese—they had learned of the secretary of state’s “back-stairs influence” over Lincoln and of the conservatism and halfheartedness which were widely deemed to have blocked an energetic prosecution of the war. Resolved to secure a reconstructed cabinet, they agreed to send a deputation to the White House. Anticipating their action, and unready to see the president put into a false position, Seward sent Lincoln his resignation.

Stunned, but determined not to lose control of his administration, Lincoln rallied and skillfully played out the crisis with a calmness and urbanity that obscured his inner anxiety. If he let Seward go, he would be making a public statement that the radicals were in control, that the administration was no longer broad-based, and that the Union party consensus had fragmented into the polarized partisanship of a resurgent democracy and hard-line Republicanism. He surprised the deputation of senators by inviting the whole cabinet (without Seward) to the second of their two meetings with him, and then secured from a wrong-footed and deeply embarrassed Chase the admission that really there had been no disunity in the cabinet. Conscious that he was tarred with the charge of double-dealing, Chase spent an uneasy night before hesitantly producing a letter of resignation in the president’s office. Lincoln seized it, aware that it was the weapon to resolve the crisis: he would persuade both secretaries to withdraw their resignations, reassert his mastery, and above all—with “a pumpkin in each end of my bag”—maintain the administration’s balance. After two days of “hell,” he could smile a little.
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