Rise to Greatness (27 page)

Whiting’s analysis matched Lincoln’s own growing sense of the way forward. He no longer doubted that he could steer around Chief Justice Taney by framing emancipation as a military necessity; the only question now was timing. The public, he feared, still wasn’t ready. On May 19, a week after his return from the peninsula, Lincoln rescinded Hunter’s order, while at the same time expressly reserving the authority to decide when and whether emancipation was necessary.

Never were the nuances of Lincoln’s strategy for dealing with slavery more fully exercised than on that day in Washington. By overruling Hunter, he signaled to conservatives that he would give them one last chance to adjust to the oncoming revolution. Along with his decision, he also renewed his appeal for gradual and compensated emancipation, warning against willfully ignoring the rapid changes afoot. “You can not be blind to the signs of the times,” he pleaded. Compared to a sudden military emancipation, his gradual approach “would come as gently as the dews of heaven, not rending or wrecking anything. Will you not embrace it?”

At the same time, by explicitly asserting his own emancipating power, Lincoln took the next big step toward the defining act of his presidency. Even as he did so, however, he sent a contradictory signal. On the very day that he countermanded Hunter’s proclamation, he also promised a delegation from the loyal slave state of Maryland that federal authorities in the District of Columbia would not ignore the Fugitive Slave Act, which required the arrest and return of runaways seeking freedom in the capital. This assurance, however heartless it might have seemed, served to underline Lincoln’s pledge to conform his actions to the law. Wherever citizens still respected constitutional authority, Lincoln would respect their right to own slaves—though he hoped they would freely choose emancipation. Once again, Lincoln sought to strike an almost impossible balance as he inched his way forward.

By now, Lincoln had come to believe that slavery could not survive the war; whether emancipation came gradually or suddenly, the move toward it had begun and could not be stopped. After overturning Hunter’s order, the president put Seward to work explaining this important reality to the European powers. Until this point, he and Seward had put a fence around the subject of slavery, even though doing so weakened the Union cause in Europe by making the effort to put down the rebellion look no more principled than a naked power play. But with Union forces effectively liberating slaves by the thousands from Fort Monroe to New Orleans, the time had come to take down the fence. Lincoln instructed Seward to write another long dispatch to U.S. diplomats laying out the strength of the Northern cause, this time focusing on economic and political matters—that is, on slavery.

Seward’s essay, reflecting the president’s “strong desire” to communicate “the true condition of the present strife,” offered a keen analysis of the inexorable course of the war. With each Federal advance, the South was growing weaker economically through the loss of slave labor and the erosion of its tax base. Its ports were being seized, its cotton and tobacco fields occupied. At least a hundred slaves per day, on average, were leaving their masters and coming into the Federal lines, “and as the army advances the number increases,” Seward wrote. Meanwhile, the North’s economy was growing stronger every day, thanks to unprecedented spending on ships, trains, guns, and uniforms. The muscle of the North was industry, which the war fed; the muscle of the South was land and slaves, which the war sapped. This process, the secretary of state argued, had become irreversible: the North was winning, the slaves were gaining freedom, and the only question remaining was how long and how bloody the struggle would be. Would Europe continue to encourage the hopes of the Rebels, even at the risk of sparking a violent uprising by impatient slaves?

Lincoln’s careful steps toward emancipation were closely observed in the capital. After reflecting on the president’s actions, Charles Sumner assured his abolitionist friends that the end of slavery was not far off. Critical, in his view, was the strategy of turning the war into a cause, for that was the only way to prevent a foreign intervention. “Give us emancipation & the terrible strife will be glorified,” he wrote. In another letter, while praising Lincoln’s “calmness, sagacity & firmness,” Sumner reported with emphatic underlining: “
Stanton told me this morning that a decree of emancipation would be issued within two months.
”

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Sumner wasn’t alone in feeling hopeful. For this brief moment, buoyed by the capture of New Orleans and the movement toward Richmond, something like genuine optimism surged through Washington and the North. It was not the bravado and false hopes so familiar to Unionists, but a well-founded confidence that the United States would soon triumph over the rebellion and embark on a happier future.

Lightheartedness bloomed in the normally sour and quarrelsome Lincoln cabinet. Jealous, perhaps, of Stanton and Chase after their adventure with Lincoln on the peninsula, Gideon Welles organized his own reconnaissance, with Seward and Bates in tow. Accompanied by friends and family, the three men made a jaunty tour of McClellan’s army (“Such visits are always a nuisance,” huffed Little Mac) and traveled to Norfolk, where the citizens “looked sulky and dogged.” The secretaries sparred and poked fun at one another: Welles teased Seward for being afraid to get too close to the Rebel army, while Seward was delighted when rats raided Bates’s luggage, stealing a tie and a sock. Seward wrote a little poem celebrating the theft, and doodled pictures to illustrate it. All three men joined in making fun of the absent Lincoln’s eccentricities.

Congress, feeling bullish, looked ahead, not just to the next battle, but to the distant future of a Union that now seemed likely to endure. West of the Mississippi lay millions of acres of new and rich frontier—land that set the fuse on the current conflict. Previous generations of Americans had been able to live with uneasy compromises over slavery, but those compromises broke down when the time came to open the West. As early as 1856, small armies of pro- and antislavery men were waging bloody battles over the fate of slavery in the Kansas Territory. In a sense, the Civil War began on the frontier, so it was appropriate that in the midst of a conflict pitting North against South, Washington never lost sight of the West.

Three bills before the Congress spoke to the Union’s expansive view. There was the Homestead Act, championed by Speaker of the House Galusha Grow of Pennsylvania; in May, it cleared the Senate by a wide margin, having sailed through the House in February. There was a bill, introduced by Congressman Justin Morrill of Vermont, to make large grants of land in the West to every loyal state for the purpose of endowing public colleges. Morrill’s bill moved smoothly through the committee system, meeting scant resistance. And finally, there was the bill to authorize and fund the transcontinental railroad. Ever since gold was discovered in California in 1848, the idea of building a railroad that would extend all the way to the Pacific had been endlessly debated, but the project had always been stymied by regional strife. As secretary of war under Franklin Pierce, Jefferson Davis tried to site the railroad in the South, while the Republican hero Frémont scouted a more northerly route with the support of his father-in-law, Senator Thomas Hart Benton. Secession had broken the stalemate; a railroad would be built. A multitude of lobbyists descended and a frantic and often underhanded free-for-all broke out over the contracts to build this colossal infrastructure project; in May, the necessary bill passed the House and moved over to the Senate.

So many grand designs were launched in these fateful months that they began to overlap and blur. A case in point: In late April and early May, a forward-thinking businessman named A. J. Isacks, a partner in one of the many ventures aiming to cash in on the transcontinental railroad, got to thinking about how, exactly, his firm would do the work, given that no one in it had ever laid an inch of track. As he pondered, it dawned on him that the matter of slavery, which had seemed entirely separate from his business concerns, was in fact quite relevant. Suppose his putative railroad line employed former slaves to build its tracks, he speculated. Contrabands could be hired for “a small amount of money.” And when he said “small,” he meant it: he proposed paying the former slaves perhaps as little as “one dollar per month each,” along with clothing and provisions, “which it is supposed would amount to four or five dollars per month to each person.” Perhaps realizing that $60 a year was not much different from slavery, Isacks added halfheartedly that his company could pay “the remainder in land.” But this notion was little short of fantastical, because even in the West, ex-slaves weren’t likely to be welcome after the war. As Isacks himself allowed: “The greatest objection to the plan would be in permitting them to settle upon the land.”

Lincoln was keenly aware of this problem of the freed slaves; in fact, he had been thinking about it since he was a young man. In his early twenties, as he put down the roots of his political philosophy, he impressed his neighbors in tiny New Salem, Illinois, by reading a biography of Henry Clay written by the famous Kentucky newspaper editor George Prentice. It was 1831, and the impending presidential election would prove to be a catalyst of the American two-party system. Clay’s attempt to unseat the Democratic incumbent, Andrew Jackson, fell far short, but it further crystallized the Whig vision of an entrepreneurial American system of free enterprise, robust manufacturing, and equal opportunity. The idea of a society by and for self-made men, bootstrappers like himself, inspired the young Lincoln and convinced him that Clay was “my ideal of a great man.”

In his biography, Prentice devoted careful attention to Clay’s nuanced views on slavery. The Great Compromiser abhorred the institution, Prentice wrote, considering it “a deadly vampyre draining away the life blood of the republic.” But Clay didn’t blame slaveholders for an evil that they themselves did not create. Nor did Clay believe that the Constitution gave power to the federal government to end slavery. Time, plus “stream upon stream of philanthropy,” would gradually emancipate the slaves, Clay asserted. And when that time came, the next step would be to relocate the freed slaves in distant colonies set up to receive them. Clay was a driving force behind the American Colonization Society, which argued that blacks were better off in Africa, where they could “introduce the blessings of civilization into … the darkened moral atmosphere of that ill fated continent.” The colony of Liberia was the society’s most enduring project.

Lincoln’s own gradualist approach to ending slavery was strongly shaped by the views of his political idol. Through the spring of 1862, Lincoln pressed the advantages of voluntary colonization. If necessary, he suggested, Congress should appropriate money to buy territory for a black colony “in a climate congenial to them,” because white Americans weren’t ready to share their society with large numbers of free blacks. As he explained in a speech long before he became president: “What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially, our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.” But in that same 1854 speech Lincoln acknowledged the monumental difficulties involved in relocating millions of people to adequate homes in a distant colony. Eight years later the idea remained utterly impractical, and despite Lincoln’s appeals, Clay’s prescriptions gained little traction with either Congress or the public.

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Just as the Union’s cause seemed to be surging, the rush of events abruptly slowed to a creep, or so it seemed as McClellan drew up his lines within earshot of Richmond’s church bells and Halleck crawled slowly with his massive army toward Beauregard’s Rebels at Corinth. Having urged speed for so many months, Lincoln himself turned suddenly cautious, warning Halleck to “be very sure to sustain no reverse in your Department.”

Old Brains was very sure indeed, pausing every thousand yards or so to entrench his 100,000 men. His advance was less an attack than “a siege from start to close,” in the words of Ulysses Grant. The aggressive Grant chafed miserably in the ceremonial position of second in command; while his conduct at Shiloh was under review, he was, as he later reflected, “little more than an observer” to Halleck’s tedious exercise. Ground covered in two days by the raw Rebels attacking Shiloh in early April was a matter of a monthlong journey for the tiptoeing Union forces. John Pope—fresh from his victory at Island No. 10 and advancing on the left wing—couldn’t bear the pace and kept sidling forward to skirmish with the enemy. Each time, Halleck hauled him back.

Sherman was more contented. His reputation had survived the Shiloh imbroglio; having been promoted to major general for his stalwart conduct at the great battle, Cump was “in high feather” and felt “fully vindicated,” according to his wife; also, he greatly admired Halleck’s skills. The slog to Corinth, in fact, revealed enduring personality signatures in both Sherman and Grant. The high-strung Sherman tended to see worst-case scenarios wherever he looked. On the road to Corinth, he fretted over the catastrophic cost of a defeat at this delicate moment, and he therefore praised Halleck for taking every precaution. Sherman was perhaps too intense for any experience short of pitched battle; gunfire seemed to calm his jitters.

Grant, on the other hand, was an optimistic sort, whose motor ran only in forward gears. With every trudging step of Halleck’s army, Grant saw the opportunities that might have been: he imagined dashing into Corinth, racing over to Chattanooga, or sweeping down on Vicksburg before the Confederates could fortify the imposing bluffs of that last potential Mississippi River citadel. Grant’s misery over the loss of his combat command caused him to overestimate the likely success of these potential initiatives—none was remotely as easy as he suggested—and he fell into such a funk that he considered quitting the army. On May 11, he wrote to Halleck asking to be given a real command or “to be relieved entirely from further duty.”