The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (113 page)

The popular voice was thunderous against the dread “money power” of the East, and in support of “the people’s champion.” Jackson was re-elected, and, thus sustained and heartened, he ordered that no more public funds be deposited with the Bank and was about to remove government money already there. 1’hereupon the Senate denounced Jackson’s course as lawless, and the President replied by a protest which the Senate refused to enter on its Journal—a situation which aroused deep anger on both sides.

Of necessity, the Bank began to call its loans, and to the discerning signs were already apparent of the financial storm and business disaster which soon were to sweep over the land. The Whigs denounced Jackson more bitterly than ever and the Democrats rallied to the cause of the “Old Hero” with fiery enthusiasm. Clay and other anti-Jackson Senators were mere attorneys of the oppressive corporation and “Menetekel is already written upon the Marble Palace,” declared the
Illinois Advocate
, voicing popular sentiment.

So came the one notable political contest that took place in
the Legislature of Illinois during the session of 1834–35, on a question which most concerned Lincoln for more than a decade. Those fundamental principles of national power under the Constitution, which Lincoln had already adopted and of which he was to become the greatest practical exponent, were the very crux of the Bank controversy.

On Monday, January 5, 1835, Jesse B. Thomas of Madison County introduced resolutions, with a long preamble, stating with vigor and ability the Democratic position on the Bank stoutly supporting the course of President Jackson, and particularly approving the Administration’s course toward France in relation to American claims upon that nation.

Soon the matter came to a head and the votes cast by Lincoln are of interest, showing his early views upon the grave constitutional and other questions involved in the Bank controversy. He voted against a motion to lay the resolutions on the table and for a Whig amendment declaring “a National Bank to be both useful and expedient.” Lincoln then voted against the preamble and against every resolution, except that condemning the Senate for refusing to enter Jackson’s protest upon its Journal and two others of a formal nature. The next day the Senate adopted similar resolutions by a vote of seventeen ayes to nine nays.

But the friends of the Bank would not acknowledge defeat. Twelve days later the Bank resolutions were again considered, amended and adopted, Lincoln voting for them. Still the matter was not settled. The vote was immediately reconsidered, and the fight renewed. After debate and a mass of parliamentary thrusts and parries, the resolutions as amended were again adopted, Lincoln once more voting aye. Seemingly his views were not clear, though favorable to the Bank.

Heated debates in the House were supplemented by continuous discussion in the lobby which was a place almost equal to the House itself in influencing legislative opinion. Indeed, this third House may have been more effective on members.
After adjournment, especially at night, the lobby was always thronged, speeches made, and debates held without parliamentary restraints. Thus for nearly three weeks Lincoln heard what was said on all phases of the National Bank and the currency; but it does not appear that he took part in the controversy.

Finally, by the dim light of candles, the General Assembly finished its work and, sometime before midnight, February 13, 1835, adjourned
sine die.
His first legislative experience thus ended, Lincoln went back to New Salem and again took up his surveying and handling of the scanty mail. The sum of his sojourn in Vandalia had been the making of friends, lessons in legislative procedure and manipulation, and the acquiring of knowledge of basic constitutional principles. He had heard great questions discussed by able and informed men. He had met cultivated women, too, and, in short, had visited a new world. Small wonder that, when he reached New Salem, he plunged into study with such abandon that his health suffered and friends thought him mentally affected. Henceforth the log cabin hamlet on the Sangamon held little or nothing that was attractive to the aspiring young Lincoln.

From
Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1858
, 1928

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and historian, a biographer of Lincoln, a novelist, a journalist, and children’s author. He was also a lecturer and folksinger. He was a part of the Chicago renaissance, which included such writers as Ben Hecht, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and Edgar Lee Masters. He devoted thirty years to collecting reminiscences and other material about Abraham Lincoln, whom he had loved since he was a child, and wrote his biography over the course of two decades—the first volume
, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years,
was published in 1926; the second
, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years,
was published in 1939 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Sandburg also put together one of the first collections of American folk music called
The American Songbag
(1927).

O
N THAT
Sunday [The surrender of Fort Sumter] of April 14, the White House had many visitors in and out all day. Senators and Congressmen came to say their people would stand by the Government, the President. The Cabinet met. A proclamation was framed. It named the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas as having “combinations too powerful to be suppressed” by ordinary procedure of government.

“Now therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, in virtue of the power in me vested by the Constitution and the laws, have thought fit to call forth, and hereby do call forth, the militia of the several States of the Union, to the aggregate number of seventy-five thousand, in order to suppress said combinations, and to cause the laws to be duly executed.”

He called on “all loyal citizens” to defend the National Union and popular government, “to redress wrongs already long enough endured.” The new army of volunteer soldiers was to retake forts and property “seized from the Union.” Also, “in every event, the utmost care will be observed, consistently with the objects aforesaid, to avoid any devastation, any destruction of, or interference with, property, or any disturbance of peaceful citizens.”

Also the proclamation called both Houses of Congress to meet at noon on the Fourth of July. The war of words was over and the naked test by steel weapons, so long foretold, was at last to begin.

From day to day since Lincoln was sworn in as President he had been moved toward war, saying casually to John Hay one day in April, “My policy is to have no policy.” Day to day events
dictated. How did he explain Sumter? “The assault upon and reduction of Fort Sumter was in no sense a matter of self-defense on the part of the assailants,” he wrote later. “They well knew that the garrison in the fort could by no possibility commit aggression upon them. They knew—they were expressly notified—that the giving of bread to the few brave and hungry men of the garrison was all which would on that occasion be attempted.”

The dilemma of a divided country Lincoln and Douglas discussed at the White House that Sunday of April 14, just after the flag came down at Sumter. Now Lincoln could be thankful that across the years of political strife between him and Douglas, the two had so spoken to and of each other that their personal relations had never reached a breaking point. The two foremost American political captains were closeted for a two-hour confidential talk, with only Congressman Ashmun in the room. Douglas read the proclamation to be published next morning, gave it his approval, though advising that he would call for 200,000 rather than 75,000 troops.

Douglas, at Willard’s, wrote out a dispatch which next day went to the country through the Associated Press. He had called on the President and had “an interesting conversation on the present condition of the country,” the substance of which was, on the part of Mr. Douglas, “that while he was unalterably opposed to the administration in all political issues, he was prepared to fully sustain the President in the exercise of all his constitutional functions, to preserve the Union, maintain the Government, and defend the capital. A firm policy and prompt action was necessary. The capital was in danger, and must be defended at all hazards, and at any expense of men and money.” He added that he and the President “spoke of the present and future without any reference to the past.” Douglas was a hoarse and worn man of dwindling vitality, but he struck with decisive words that sank deep in every one of his old loyal followers. He knew he had trumpets left, and he blew
them to mass his cohorts behind Lincoln’s maintenance of the Union.

Now came the day of April 15, 1861, for years afterward spoken of as “the day Lincoln made his first call for troops.” What happened on that day was referred to as the Uprising of the People; they swarmed onto the streets, into public squares, into meeting halls and churches. The shooting of the Stars and Stripes off the Sumter flagstaff—and the Lincoln proclamation—acted as a vast magnet on a national multitude.

In a thousand cities, towns and villages the fever of hate, exaltation, speech, action, followed a similar course. Telegrams came notifying officers and militiamen to mobilize. Newspapers cried in high or low key the war song. Then came mass meetings, speeches by prominent citizens, lawyers, ministers, priests, military officers, veterans of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, singing of “The Star-spangled Banner” and “America,” fife-and-drum corps playing “Yankee Doodle.” Funds were subscribed to raise and equip troops, resolutions passed, committees appointed to collect funds, to care for soldiers’ families, to educate or trouble the unpatriotic. Women’s societies were formed to knit and sew, prepare lint and bandages. Women and girls saw their husbands and sweethearts off to camp. Nearly every community had its men and boys marching away to the fifing of “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” In churches and saloons, in city crowds and at country crossroads, the talk was of the War and “What will the President do next?”

From
Abraham Lincoln: The War Years

J. G. Randall (1881–1953) was a distinguished Civil War historian and Lincoln biographer, and professor of history at the University of Illinois from 1920 until 1949. In 1937, he produced a major new
interpretation of the Civil War
, The Civil War and Reconstruction,
which treated theretofore neglected issues such as border problems, antiwar efforts, and propaganda, and challenged the older political and newer economic view that presented the war as inevitable. His four-volume Lincoln biography (1945–1955) received the Bancroft and Loubat prizes.

A
MONG THE
commonest gibes against the President was the assertion that he had no policy. In a roundabout manner such a taunt came to him from New Orleans through the wealthy Democratic leader, August Belmont. Lincoln must take a decisive course, said this writer. Trying to please everybody would satisfy nobody. Let the North declare officially for restoration of the Union as it was. This complaint, with a motive opposite to that of the religious brethren from Chicago, drew from Lincoln the suggestion that if the objector would but read the President’s speeches he would find “the substance of the very declaration he desires.” In a similar setting Lincoln wrote as to slavery that what was “done and omitted” was on military necessity, and that he was holding antislavery pressure “within bounds.”

With his mind full of anti-abolitionist complaints of a lack of policy, Lincoln now became the target for an editorial blast from the opposite direction. From Greeley’s resounding sanctum there came the reproachful admonition that “attempts to put down the Rebellion and at the same time uphold its … cause … [were] preposterous and futile.” In an editorial “Prayer of Twenty Millions” the
Tribune
pundit informed the President that an “immense majority of the Loyal Millions” of his countrymen required of him a frank execution of the laws in the antislavery sense. With bland equanimity for Greeley’s fervor and with balanced, noncommittal phrases for his heated rhetoric, Lincoln replied in the famous “paramount object” letter which showed, among other things, that he was not swayed by abolitionist outcries. Calm down, and get off your
dictatorial horse, would be an offhand paraphrase of his opening sentences. “I have just read yours of the 19th,” wrote Lincoln to Greeley. “… If there be in it any inferences … falsely drawn, I do not … argue against them. If there be perceptible in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend.…” Having thus set the pitch for his even-toned reply, Lincoln wrote:

Antislavery folk did not like the calculated restraint of this famous letter. They wanted no such even balance between action and forbearance. They wanted a crusade. One of them sarcastically wrote: “From his policy hitherto, we must infer, that the way he applies it is, to
save the Union with Slavery, if he can do it at whatever sacrifice of life & treasure.
If that is found impossible … [his policy is]
to save the Union without slavery
, unless it should be … too late. This is like the duel in which the terms … as prescribed by the challenged party were, that they should have but one sword between them, & that he should use it five minutes, & afterward the challenger should have it five minutes.”