Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (52 page)

Additionally, Lincoln had close-quarter meetings with his men serving in Washington. Quite apart from his offering impromptu remarks to particular units passing by the executive mansion, he met very many Union volunteers individually. Early in the war he earnestly promised his troops that he would take care of them, urging even the lowliest privates to bring their problems and grievances to him. He and his secretaries found themselves bombarded by letters and speculative visitors, as soldiers and their families sought help in cases that most often related to sickness, pay, furlough, or military punishment. Lincoln held perhaps two thousand or more private interviews with Union soldiers.
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This was a tiny proportion of the enlisted men, but it did not take long for the impressions of those who had seen or met the president to be broadcast throughout the close-knit regimental communities that made up the federal army.

By these means Lincoln became a powerful virtual presence amongst his men. What they saw and generally admired was the common touch of a president who lacked airs and graces, who remained accessible, approachable, and amiable, and who mixed charm with good humor, joke-telling, and easy familiarity. He “aint proud,” thought one; “he belongs to the common people,” judged another. His quaint, awkward, even ugly physical appearance and manner generally served to reinforce the sense of his ordinariness and lack of affectation. Some found him comical—on horseback in coattails and stovepipe hat he cut a ludicrously elongated figure—but his ungainliness only increased the affection. “His riding I can compare to nothing else than a pair of tongs on a chair back,” reported a Pennsylvanian, “but notwithstanding his grotesque appearance, he has the respect of the army.”
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Even more important in cementing the soldiers’ trust was their widespread belief that Lincoln made their well-being his chief concern. Firsthand reports of the president’s sympathy crackled swiftly through the mass medium of the army’s ranks. They told of his concern for the wounded, his provision of field and hospital chaplains, his finding government jobs for disabled veterans and amputees, and his support for the work of the soldiers’ aid organizations (though he had initially shared the War Department’s skepticism over the value of these civilian bodies). His reputation for kindliness burgeoned as he agonized over the hundreds of court-martial cases that ended up on his desk. Having ordered that no soldier should be executed for any crime without his first reviewing it, Lincoln sought to avoid the “butchery” of capital sentences whenever possible and early in 1864 commuted all such sentences in cases of desertion (what he called his “leg-cases”) to imprisonment for the war’s duration. That his troops saw a president ever more physically ravaged by the grind of office naturally sharpened their sense of a leader who shared their trials, anxieties, and sorrows. Watching him in the biting wind during the review days of April 1863, men recognized a fellow casualty of the war, “thin and in bad health.” As one soldier put it, in terms widely echoed, “He is to all outward appearances, much careworn, and anxiety is fast wearing him out, poor man.”
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Lincoln thus came to be personally loved and admired, as Jefferson Davis never was. Understandably cautious as he was about dismissing McClellan, when the time came to do so in the fall of 1862 he was confident that he enjoyed the trust of the rank and file, even if his stock was low amongst the Democrats in the general’s officer corps. Whatever the “headquarters bluster”—as Schurz called it—and the indignation of some volunteers, few blamed Lincoln personally for the change of command.
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Thereafter the president became the unchallenged recipient of most soldiers’ loyalty. To the common terms of endearment—“Old Abe,” “Uncle Abe”—a new one was added. The commander-in-chief who referred to the Union troops as “my boys” and whose paternalistic devotion inspired such confidence came increasingly to be called “Father Abraham.”

The soldiers to whom Lincoln became a father figure had grown to young manhood in highly politicized and democratic local communities whose inhabitants were instilled with an active sense of civic duty. The historians James McPherson and Joseph Allan Frank have justly described the Union’s volunteers as “citizen-soldiers.” However much human feelings—loyalty to comrades-in-arms, a generalized sense of duty and honor, a concern to carry on the fight on behalf of their slain fellows, and a desire to punish the enemy—helped carry soldiers through their bloody ordeal, the Union’s troops were no less energized by the political meanings they attached to the struggle. Soldiers read newspapers, set up debating societies that mirrored the lyceums of their home communities, and discussed the larger issues at play in the war. The camps, according to an Illinoisan, were “filled with grave reasoners”; after the war Ulysses S. Grant was quite clear that the Union had benefited from having armies “composed of men who were able to read, men who knew what they were fighting for.”
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African-American troops naturally brought their own ideological fervor to a struggle for universal emancipation and black rights. But white troops, too, shared a firm grasp of the political significance of the conflict.

Thus, when Lincoln’s fighting men thought about their president, they conjured up more than a personally sympathetic figure. He became, too, the embodiment of the nation’s cause. Soldiers saw in the Union a set of political and moral principles, secured by the sacrifices of the revolutionary generation, which now made the republic what one described as “a beacon of hope to the nations of the world.” When the armies observed Washington’s birthday and listened on July 4 to the public reading of the Declaration of Independence, they affirmed their faith in republican liberty and “the best government ever organized by man.” At the same time, deep state, local, and personal allegiances reinforced this devotion to abstract principles: the Union’s power partly derived from its being, in one historian’s words, “the family writ large.”
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As its head and cogent expounder of its meaning, Lincoln was truly “Father Abraham.”

The unified political purpose that Lincoln encouraged amongst his troops by arousing “their slumbering patriotism,” as one private put it, was challenged but not fundamentally compromised by his role as the Great Emancipator. The president recognized that the army was not a political monolith, that slavery was a divisive issue, and that an emancipation policy would alienate many serving men. The proclamations of September 22, 1862, and January 1, 1863, were indeed seen as an expression of “niggerism,” especially amongst volunteers from the lower North and the western states. “Ask any solder what he thinks of the war,” one reported. “He will answer, ‘I don’t like to fight for the damned nigger.’ It’s nothing but an abolition war, and I wish I was out of it.” A captain wrote bitterly, “Old Abe Lincoln is a god damned shit and if I had to choose between him and Jeff Davis, I don’t know who I’d vote for. I hope to sink in hell if I ever have to draw my sword to fight for the negroes.” But Lincoln calculated that, on balance, a policy of emancipation would do more good than harm within the ranks. According to James Stradling, a cavalry sergeant who visited the White House in March 1863, the president expected his troops to wake up to the military benefits of an assault on slavery and of the use of blacks in front-line service. Lincoln’s belief that the proclamation would serve to inspire, not alienate, the common soldier proved well founded. If an Indiana sergeant spoke with uncommon force when he said “he was in for emancipation subjugation extermination and hell and damnation” if they would bring the war to a speedy end, his underlying sentiment was common enough amongst ordinary soldiers. Pragmatic calculation fused with abolitionist idealism to create a swelling tide of pro-emancipation sentiment from the spring of 1863, drowning out the shrinking minority of antis who nursed a bitter sense of betrayal.
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Union soldiers did not keep their views to themselves. The bonds between northern communities and “their” regiments—symbolized by the flag which each departing unit received in patriotic civic rituals and which it subsequently carried into battle as a potent emblem—remained extraordinarily powerful throughout the war. Even the developing emotional gap, described by the historian Gerald Linderman, between battle-scarred troops and the people back home could not destroy the mutually sustaining reciprocities of army camp and domestic community. For their part, home localities provided their volunteers with emotional and practical succor, bolstered their morale, articulated the meaning of war, and held hostage their soldiers’ reputations. In return soldiers actively encouraged a “fireside patriotism” on the home front. They worked directly, through private correspondence and letters to newspapers, and in public meetings, church services, sanitary fairs, and other fund-raising occasions. But they also effected an influence at a remove, through the patriotic army reports of journalists, agents of the sanitary and Christian commissions, and others whose wartime activity took them into the field. And through their deaths, and the community mourning that followed, Union troops prompted large questions about the political and religious meaning of the war. Thus it was that a New York captain could tell his wife, “It is the soldiers who have educated the people . . . to a just perception of their duties in this contest.”
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From the pens and mouths of thousands of federal soldiers came a message of the justice of the Union cause, of the nation’s being on God’s side, and of the religious significance of the struggle for republican government. As an Ohio corporal explained late in the war, there was a “
big Idea
” at stake, namely “the principles of Liberty, of Justice, and of the Righteousness which exalteth a Nation.” One wrote to his wife, “Every day I have a more religious feeling, that this war is a crusade for the good of mankind.” Men wrote on stationery bearing printed verses that fused the religious and the patriotic: “For right is right, as God is God / And right will surely win; To doubt would be disloyalty— / To falter would be sin.” The federal army, then, functioned as a surrogate pulpit. Soldiers explained that Lincoln’s administration could “claim the divine blessing” because of its “manifest desire . . . to do what is right for the sake of right.” Echoing Lincoln and the jeremiads of Protestant preachers, they also presented the war as a punishment for the Union’s chronic sins of national pride, neglect of God, and black enslavement. But the cause itself was not wrong, and the army itself, not only in the words of its own men but in the potent images of the abolitionist writer Julia Ward Howe, became a symbol of Christian triumph. In the resounding “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the Union forces carried the unsheathed sword of the Lord; their watch fires in the “hundred circling camps” stood as altars; their “burnished rows of steel” announced the gospel; they, like Christ, died “to make men free.”
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Union soldiers—responding to the trumpet call of a wrathful, judgmental God—were engaged in a millennial struggle for both national and religious salvation.

At the same time, the Union army exercised its enormous moral and political authority more prosaically, sustaining the administration by encouraging enlistments, invigorating the Union-Republican party, and demonizing the Peace Democrats. Soldiers broadcast in their home communities their contempt for the cowardly and selfish who sought to avoid service: “Are they afraid of a little danger of hardship?” asked one volunteer. “If they are, they are not fit to be called
free Americans.
” The 1863 Conscription Act won the warm support of serving men. “All men in the Army believe in the Draft,” declared a New York officer. “I think that some of them do not believe in much else beside the President and Drafting.” As well as encouraging recruits for the front line, many soldiers sought to beef up the administration party at home, by calling on wives, sisters, and other womenfolk to expand their notions of civic duty. “I know ladies are not usually interested in such matters [as politics],” wrote an army surgeon to his wife ahead of state elections in 1863, “but the time has come when they as well as the sterner sex must put a shoulder to the wheel.”
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Extreme circumstances—treachery on the home front—seemed to demand extraordinary measures. Troops “choked with rage” at Copperhead opponents of the war. “I believe I
hate
them worse than the
rebels
themselves,” wrote one. Soldiers urged home front loyalists to control “every Fop Editor of a Penny Sheet” who warred against the administration’s emergency measures. Whenever they heard a “traitor letting loose his sympathizing slang, they should
bust his crust.
” Peace men “have no rights
But to be hung.
” At times, indeed, soldiers’ burning anger turned moral force into physical coercion. Southern and central Illinois in the early weeks of 1864 witnessed daily “affrays” between Peace Democrat residents and furloughed volunteers: “that the soldiers would take but little copperhead lip before proceeding to knock the tories down is hardly a matter of surprise,” a loyalist editor reflected. Soldiers helped divide local communities to a degree not seen since the revolutionary era, sure that, as a gathering of Iowans insisted, “in this crisis there can be but two classes of men ‘Patriots and Traitors.’ ”
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The soldiers’ role as sustainers of the Union administration achieved its most practical expression at the polls. The experience of war served only to confirm the political loyalties of those who had been Republicans at the outset. “If people expect me to come home less a Republican than I went out they will be disappointed,” an Ohio private told his wife as the second year of war drew to a close. “I may not then support Abraham Lincoln as ardently as I did but Republicanism does not consist in the support of Abraham Lincoln.”
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At the same time, large numbers of the 40 percent or so of troops who in 1860 had cast Democratic ballots responded to the rise of Copperheadism and calls for a negotiated peace by cutting their traditional ties and actively sustaining the Union-Republican ticket in the watershed state elections of 1863. Troops tactically furloughed by Lincoln’s War Department lieutenants swept Andrew Curtin to power in Pennsylvania and John Brough in Ohio. As Lincoln looked ahead to the presidential election year of 1864, he could take much comfort from knowing that he had in his army not only a staunchly loyal political force but one which would play its part in energizing and mobilizing the wider Union public.