Lincoln's Legacy of Leadership

Lincoln’s Legacy of Leadership

Jepson Studies in Leadership Series Editors: George R. Goethals, Terry L. Price, and J. Thomas Wren Jepson Studies in Leadership is dedicated to the interdisciplinary pursuit of important questions related to leadership. In its approach, the series ref lects the broad-based commitment to the liberal arts of the University of Richmond’s Jepson School of Leadership Studies. The series thus aims to publish the best work on leadership not only from management and organizational studies but also such fields as economics, English, history, philosophy, political science, psychology, and religion. In addition to monographs and edited collections on leadership, included in the series are volumes from the Jepson Colloquium, which brings together inf luential scholars from multiple disciplines to think collectively about distinctive leadership themes in politics, science, civil society, and corporate life. The books in the series should be of interest to humanists and social scientists, as well as to organizational theorists and instructors teaching in business, leadership, and professional programs. Books appearing in this series: The Values of Presidential Leadership edited by Terry L. Price and J. Thomas Wren Leadership and the Liberal Arts: Achieving the Promise of a Liberal Education edited by J. Thomas Wren, Ronald E. Riggio, and Michael A. Genovese Leadership and Discovery edited by George R. Goethals and J. Thomas Wren Lincoln’s Legacy of Leadership edited by George R. Goethals and Gary L. McDowell

Lincoln’s Legacy of Leadership Edited by George R. Goethals and Gary L. McDowell

LINCOLN’S LEGACY OF LEADERSHIP

Copyright © George R. Goethals and Gary L. McDowell, 2010. All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–62283–8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lincoln’s legacy of leadership / edited by George R. Goethals and Gary L. McDowell. p. cm.—(Jepson studies in leadership) Includes index. ISBN 978–0–230–62283–8 1. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865—Philosophy. 2. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865—Political and social views. 3. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865— Military leadership. 4. Political leadership—United States—History— 19th century. 5. Presidents—United States—Biography. I. Goethals, George R. II. McDowell, Gary L. E457.2.L8425 2010 973.7092—dc22

2009022263

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: January 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

CON T E N T S

List of Tables and Figures

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction George R. Goethals and Gary L. McDowell One

Two

What Lincoln Was Up Against: The Context of Leadership Edward L. Ayers Lincoln’s Construction of the Consent Principle and the Right of Revolution in the Secession Crisis Herman J. Belz

Three Abraham Lincoln and the Search for American Identity Jeffrey Leigh Sedgwick Four

The Magnanimity of Abraham Lincoln: “What I Deal with Is Too Vast for Malicious Dealing” William Lee Miller

1

9

29 57

73

Five

Abraham Lincoln’s Opposition to the Mexican War Daniel Walker Howe

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Six

Wonderful Self-Reliance: Abraham Lincoln’s Leadership 101 Richard Carwardine

Seven

Lincoln and the Copperheads Jennifer L. Weber

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Eight

Abraham Lincoln and the Shaping of Public Opinion Douglas L. Wilson

139

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Contents

Nine Genius or Talented Amateur: Lincoln as Military Strategist Joseph T. Glatthaar

159

Ten

187

Abraham Lincoln as War Leader, 1861–1865 Brian Holden Reid

Epilogue George R. Goethals

211

Notes on Contributors

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Index

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TA BL E S

A N D

F IGU R E S

Tables 1.1 Key words of Civil War era newspapers 1.2 Most frequently used key words during war years in papers in the “Valley of the Shadow” project

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Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

Counties won in popular vote, 1860 Counties won in popular vote, 1864 Margin of victory in presidential election, 1864 Words associated with the word “negro” in the newspapers of Franklin County, Pennsylvania, from January 1, 1859 to April 12, 1861 1.5 Appearances of the word “negro” in articles that also contain the word “people” in the newspapers of Franklin County, Pennsylvania, from January 1, 1859 to December 31, 1870 1.6 Words appearing near the word “negro” in articles in the newspapers of the “Valley of the Shadow” Project, April 1865 through December 1870, shown for each paper

15 18 20 21

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AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S

During the 2008–2009 academic year, the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond was fortunate to sponsor an exceptional set of papers and lectures on Abraham Lincoln. Honoring the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth on February 12, 1809, the Jepson School focused its yearlong Jepson Leadership Forum on “Lincoln’s Legacy of Leadership.” The chapters in this, the fourth volume in the Jepson Studies in Leadership series, present ten exceptionally insightful perspectives on Lincoln’s leadership. First and foremost, we are grateful to the talented group of scholars who contributed to our efforts to better understand Lincoln. Working with them has been a great pleasure, and it has deepened our understanding of Lincoln and his time. The chapters by Herman Belz, Jeffrey Sedgwick, Daniel Walker Howe, Jennifer Weber, Joseph Glatthaar, and Brian Holden Reid were presented at a colloquium on Lincoln held at the University of Richmond’s Jepson School on September 12–13, 2008. We are grateful to each of them for preparing excellent essays, and for contributing to the many lively discussions we had during our time together. Richard Carwardine presented the James MacGregor Burns Lecture on Leadership Studies and Biography as an additional part of the September colloquium. We are grateful to him as well for a magnificent essay on Lincoln’s “wonderful self-reliance.” Of course, neither the colloquium nor the Burns Lecture would have been possible without the assistance of Nancy Nock and Sue Robinson Sain. Nancy made all the travel, dining, and lodging arrangements for both our visitors and local participants in the colloquium. These events would not have happened without her. Sue deftly handled the arrangements for Professor Carwardine’s lecture.

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Acknowledgments

Later in the year, University of Richmond president Edward L. Ayers, Professor Douglas L. Wilson of the Lincoln Studies Center in Galesburg, Illinois, and University of Virginia professor William Lee Miller presented wonderfully rich lectures on aspects of Lincoln’s character and leadership. Their presentations usefully complemented the papers given in September. Shannon Short Best was exceptionally helpful in assisting Sue Robinson Sain in arranging those three lectures. Tammy Tripp has done a wonderful job in keeping the editors more or less on schedule and on-task. We are grateful for her well-calibrated nudging, and her wise suggestions. And we have benefited greatly from her skillful editing of the entire manuscript. In addition to the Jepson School staff members, we are pleased to thank Dean Sandra Peart for her encouragement and strong support. We are lucky to be on the Jepson faculty, and Sandra’s leadership has contributed greatly to our good fortune. We also thank the Jepson Studies in Leadership series editors Terry L. Price and J. Thomas Wren for helping us plan the fall colloquium and for their wise counsel in coordinating this set of essays with the earlier series volumes. Our editor at Palgrave Macmillan, Laurie Harting, has been unusually wise and patient in helping us sort out various contractual questions and in guiding the project to completion. We are also grateful to Laura Lancaster at Palgrave for her assistance in cheerfully working with us through the book’s final publication. Finally, we want to thank our wives, Marion and Brenda, for their understanding, patience, and support. They make it all possible.

Introduction Georg e R . Goethal s and G ary L . M cD owe l l

As president-elect Abraham Lincoln stood on the platform that February day in 1861, preparing to board the train that would take him east to Washington, he faced a future so uncertain that even a man of his towering ambition and sturdy self-confidence found it daunting. Not only was his trip to assume the duties of the presidency fraught with threats of assassination or kidnapping, but the republic itself was disintegrating. The friends of states’ rights and slavery, those who were committed, as he had put it on more than one occasion, to “blowing out the moral lights around us,” had begun their move to dissolve the Union and to form their own confederation where their “peculiar institution” would be safe. And now it fell to this largely unseasoned and relatively unknown western politician to do something about it. Little wonder he took his leave from Springfield by imploring the people gathered there to pray for God’s guidance as he prepared to lead the nation through its “fiery trial.” Lincoln knew that many of those countrymen doubted he was up to the task. He had, after all, largely come out of nowhere to win the presidency over men clearly better prepared for that high office. A one-term congressman and a twice-failed senatorial candidate, Lincoln had begun to gain a national name for himself only two years earlier after he had dragooned Stephen A. Douglas into a series of debates across Illinois. Although he lost that campaign to Douglas, the leaders of his young Republican Party took notice. However rough his edges, here was a man who could give political voice to a moral vision that made his f ledgling party a true alternative to Douglas’s Democrats.

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And after he delivered a stunning address in New York City at the Cooper Institute in February 1860, Lincoln became a national figure with whom all others would have to reckon. The essence of Lincoln’s vision that propelled him to the top of national politics was, of course, his stance on the slavery question. If slavery was not wrong, he insisted, nothing was wrong. In a nation founded on the natural rights principles of the Declaration of Independence there was, in his view, no room for the moral indifference over slavery that was urged by Douglas. Yet he was no abolitionist. While personally against slavery as a great moral, political, and social wrong, he also believed that, as president, he had no power to interfere with slavery where it legally existed. Thus as he pulled out of Springfield that day, the newly elected president was committed not to the extirpation of that noxious institution but to the preservation of the Union. While he might have to endure slavery, he could not endure secession. And “the war came.” Lincoln’s entire presidency was a wartime presidency. The South had seceded before he could take the oath of office; Lee’s surrender to Grant took place less than a week before Lincoln was struck down by John Wilkes Booth. Appreciating the enormity of what he faced as president is, in many ways, the key to understanding his legacy of leadership. The essays that follow seek to explicate and explain Lincoln as a leader within the maelstrom of the events that he insisted controlled him. To understand him properly, then, requires an effort to understand Lincoln as he understood himself, to free him from the myths and misrepresentations history has imposed upon him. The Lincoln of American memory, as Edward Ayers makes clear, is in many ways far removed from the historical Lincoln. Not only did many of his most eloquent words—words which still resonate in the national moral imagination—not penetrate very deeply with his own generation, but his administration was not infrequently indicted in the public prints for its “imbecility, corruption and fanaticism.” As Ayers points out, had the presidency been at stake in 1862 instead of in 1864, Lincoln would have lost his bid for reelection. And even in 1865 the now-celebrated second inaugural address was dismissed in the party press as “unworthy of comment.” In the view of his critics, the paper went on, Lincoln “had nothing to say, and he has said it.” Yet, looking back, his leadership is clear. The secret to Lincoln’s success, Ayers shows, was his instinctive ability to capture “what he could from each moment of possibility” and to avoid “the worst in each moment of disaster.” His task as a wartime leader was to confront a

Introduction

3

constant and unrelenting f lood of “desperate challenges.” The ferocity of the war and the mounting losses of life were staggering, far exceeding anything anyone might have guessed that day he left for Washington. And the reason was perhaps as clear then as it is now. “The North and the South fought each other so bitterly,” Ayers argues, “because they fought for a shared patrimony.” As Herman Belz makes clear, that “shared patrimony” comes into sharpest focus when it is viewed through the prism of popular selfgovernment. A large part of the dilemma Lincoln faced was not merely political but deeply philosophical. The fact was the Constitution in “express and literal terms” did not answer the question of whether there existed a right for the states to leave the Union. While the Declaration Lincoln so celebrated surely formed what Belz describes as “the moral basis of government by the consent of the governed,” it also did more. Jefferson’s “merely revolutionary document,” as Lincoln would describe it, also provided for the right of revolution whenever any government might become destructive of the ends for which it was constituted. “The moral dimension of the right to revolution did not confine, but rather opened it to wide if not promiscuous application in the increasingly aggressive and pluralistic controversy over slavery in American society.” In the deepest sense, Belz shows, Lincoln’s “project of preserving popular self-government . . . defined his achievement as a democratic statesman.” He succeeded in this because he “rightly understood the nature of popular self-government.” Armed with that understanding, and “through judgments of practical reason and acts of prudential statesmanship,” Lincoln “was able to conform government by consent to the demands of justice in making a more perfect Union in the face of secessionist rebellion.” Douglas’s theory of popular sovereignty and his indifference to whether slavery was voted up or voted down in the states was “insidious” in Lincoln’s view not simply at the level of policy but at the level of fundamental principle. It undermined government by consent properly understood. Lincoln’s ability to resolve the theoretical ambiguities of the American constitutional order was due in no small measure to his own selfeducation. That education was, as Jeffrey Sedgwick argues, the context of Lincoln’s search for America’s true identity. Thus one can learn much about Lincoln’s leadership not simply by assessing his presidency but also by casting a glance back at his earliest writings and considering the cultural context of the America in which he grew to manhood. One sees in his speech of 1838 before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield

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the earliest evidence of Lincoln’s deepest political understanding as to the nature of the regime itself. In his exhortation to the young men gathered before him to commit themselves to “the perpetuation of our political institutions,” Lincoln grappled with the unfinished business of the American founding in ways that foreshadowed his intellectual and rhetorical efforts as president. In the end, as Sedgwick points out, institutions alone are not enough to make a republic endure; it takes something deeper, something akin to friendship. It takes, as Lincoln would put it, an appreciation for, and a dedication to, those “mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land.” It seems clear that this view of the American character gave both form and direction to what William Lee Miller calls Lincoln’s “giant battle for national self-definition.” It is also this reliance on what Lincoln called simply “the better angels of our nature” that prepared him to be the kind of leader he became. He was possessed, as Miller makes clear, of a rare degree of magnanimity. Power simply did not corrupt him. Rather, the “higher he rose and the greater the power he gained, the worthier his conduct would become.” As a result, he was able to combine as no one else a sense of resolve along with an unfaltering magnanimity. “I shall do nothing in malice,” Lincoln famously said. “What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.” Lincoln’s “grounding in reason, duty, and truth rather than ego and will,” Miller argues, meant that the president “could be resolute without being ruthless, he could admit mistakes, he could change his mind; and . . . he could combine generosity with his steadfast resolve.” Lincoln’s virtues were not simply honed in the fires of the civil war, of course. He had been a political man from his earliest years, but always a self-ref lective political man. In what has come down to us as his first political utterance, the young Lincoln confessed to the people of Sangamo County, Illinois, not only his ambition to be esteemed by his fellow citizens, but his loftier ambition to be worthy of that esteem. He seems never to have departed from holding that ideal as central to his political life. As Daniel Walker Howe shows, much can be learned about Lincoln and his political skills and quest for esteem by taking seriously his one term in the U.S. House of Representatives and especially his arguments against the Mexican War. Lincoln was convinced that the war was not only one of aggression, but that it had been deliberately provoked by President James K. Polk in order to get around the Constitution’s clear grant of the war-making power to Congress alone.

Introduction

5

Lincoln’s efforts against the war were designed to correct the misguided policies of a president he considered to be “a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man.” His speeches as a junior congressman were spawned not by personal malice but were the result of the fact, as Howe makes clear, that Lincoln “sincerely hated war, international aggression, and duplicity of all kinds.” His speeches “represented a conf luence of sincerity and ambition” and thus were a matter of passion that was tamed by Lincoln’s “practical political goals.” As a result, these speeches, which for too long have been largely ignored, can be very helpful in coming to grips with Lincoln’s “values, his principles, [and] his social and political outlook.” Perhaps not least that one term in Congress contributed to the future president’s “wonderful self-reliance.” That wonderful self-reliance, as Richard Carwardine argues, stemmed in part from the fact that Lincoln was in the strictest sense a “self-made man” whose own “self-making gave him added confidence in his innate faculties.” He seems never really to have doubted his own judgment, often choosing to keep his own counsel. Moreover, his selfconfidence in some ways gave birth to what Miller has praised as his magnanimity. “This confidence in the rightness of his own position,” Carwardine points out, “toughened him against chronic wartime criticism, but stopped short of becoming an overdeveloped self-regard.” In the end, his wonderful self-reliance is what rendered Lincoln “a political master whose capacities bordered on genius.” Jennifer Weber demonstrates how well this genius served Lincoln in his dealings with the Democratic opponents of the war, the so-called Copperheads. His ability to navigate the often treacherous waters of his presidency, Weber insists, was not merely attributable to his genius but to his extraordinary sense of political timing. It took supreme selfconfidence in his own judgment to play the game he often played with his critics. His reticence was often so great as to make it seem he had ceded the ground to the conservative Democrats in Congress. In truth, it was simply a way to keep his options open. However dangerous the game was, it allowed him to control events to at least some degree, announcing policies and decisions only when he was ready to do so. The core of Lincoln’s greatness as a leader, and, perhaps, the basis of his reputation in the collective American memory is his eloquence, both in the spoken and the written word. His greatest skill, Douglas Wilson argues, was his “ability to shape public opinion with his pen.” He had trained himself in the skills of rhetoric for one simple reason. “Public opinion in this country is everything.” Lincoln knew that

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to inf luence, if not control that opinion was, in the highest political sense, the very essence of leadership. While best known for his famous speeches such as that at Gettysburg, Lincoln was also the master of the well-timed public letter. In this he displayed time and again that same “shrewd sense of timing” Jennifer Weber noted in his dealing with his congressional opponents. Over the course of his presidency his carefully orchestrated “public letters hit their target audience with maximum force.” This was not simply luck. Lincoln was, as Wilson makes clear, a committed and disciplined writer and his own best editor. His patience to search for just the right word was the true secret to his success in getting his points across. His habit of jotting down his thoughts and keeping them in his drawer (or even in his hat) until the time was right served him well. He never ceased thinking about what he needed to say and how, exactly, he needed to say it. The one area where Lincoln’s natural gift of leadership did not always serve him well was in his role as commander in chief. A string of uncooperative or incompetent or self-absorbed and usually unsuccessful generals was his nightmare. This was a problem that was exacerbated by his own lack of any real military experience. While he set about to teach himself as much as he could about the theory and practice of warfare, he remained, by and large, in the view of Joseph Glatthaar, little more than “a talented novice.” Lincoln’s “searing mind” did not lend itself to military ways of thinking. While Lincoln was, in Glatthaar’s view, undoubtedly “the greatest American wartime president,” that was the result of his political judgments rather than his military ones. While he could often see the weakness and fallacies of his generals’ plans and decisions, he simply was not a “natural military strategist.” Throughout the war he remained “an amateur” who was constantly handicapped by “his lack of knowledge.” Yet, as Brian Holden Reid argues, war is “first and foremost a matter of instinct,” and Lincoln, while he might have lacked technical knowledge in military matters, had instincts that were “pronounced and sensitive to the military environment around him.” Those instincts, in part, contributed to his willingness to delegate authority and then stand out of the way. While a dominant force in his administration of the war, the president resisted the impulse to interfere. His greatest skill was his “profound grasp of the popular dimensions of the conf lict,” a grasp that “allowed him to adapt his outlook as his own opinions and public opinion shifted.” He did not need to be a minutely attuned battlefield strategist but rather had to be a political leader who was able “to articulate in powerful and timeless eloquence what the war was

Introduction

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actually about, culminating in the Gettysburg and second inaugural addresses.” Such a task, Holden Reid reminds us, is “fiendishly difficult in practice,” but in this Lincoln was nothing less than a “triumphant success.” When Lincoln left Springfield for his new life he noted that he was leaving, “not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return.” Eleven days later, in a stop at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the presidentelect took the opportunity to say again that he “had never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” The deepest sentiment was the fact that the Declaration was a beacon of “hope to the world for all future time.” The most fundamental principle for that future world was the moral commitment “that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.” It was a principle so profound and so important, he declared, that he “would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.” Lincoln fought the war for the Union, and then a war against slavery, in light of this principle for four long and bloody years. He never surrendered it, and never doubted that it was a principle truly worth fighting for. In the end, he knew that this was the principle that defined his beloved republic, a nation not only “conceived in liberty” but one “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” It was a war being fought, as he said that cold day at Gettysburg, for “a new birth of freedom,” a war that would guarantee that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” In the end, it was a principle to which he, no less than the “honored dead” at Gettysburg, would be called upon to give his “last full measure of devotion.” And as the train bore his remains back to Springfield in April 1865 America had already begun to understand that history would make clear that this man, too, “shall not have died in vain.”

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CH A P T E R

ON E

What Lincoln Was Up Against: The Context of Leadership Edward L . Aye r s

In the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, we justly celebrate his character, ideals, and strategies, finding new depths in his virtues. It is tempting to imagine that the halting and hard-won evolution of Lincoln’s ideas and strategies on emancipation marked the moral growth of white America during the Civil War. But that story, implicit and explicit in many portrayals of Lincoln, embodied in our monuments to him and inscribed in our favorite quotations, underestimates Lincoln’s greatest accomplishment. Abraham Lincoln faced desperate challenges from the moment he took office until the day he was killed. While Union armies in the field struggled for four years against dismayingly effective Confederate forces, Lincoln fought to keep the North from breaking apart. The task proved unrelenting. Abolitionists and Radical Republicans pressed Lincoln to act more boldly against slavery while many Democrats swore, start to finish, that they would not fight a war on behalf of black Americans. Lincoln could never be confident that the gains he won would long endure—or would even endure through the next election. Despite his eloquence and skill, and despite the Union’s growing success on the battlefield, white public opinion in the North refused to consolidate behind Lincoln’s leadership on the key issue of black Americans and their future. A wary egalitarianism among some Republicans early in the war grew into genuine respect for black Americans, especially

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black soldiers, but in turn Democrats developed ever more contemptuous and systematic arguments and rhetoric against black people. The Republicans, as a matter of political calculation if nothing else, talked of black Americans cautiously and intermittently. The Democrats, by contrast, sneered and raged about “negroes” at every opportunity and found receptive audiences across the North whether events on the battlefield went well or not. The war divided the white North ever deeper even as black freedom grew closer, compromising reconstruction before it ever began. As much as we would like to imagine that the eloquent words from the Gettysburg Address and the second inaugural spoke for a white North made greater and more self-aware through the sacrifices of the Civil War, those words do not seem to have penetrated very deeply into the consciousness of those not already inclined to agree with them. Lincoln’s great speeches, when not ignored, were ridiculed and dismissed by his many enemies. His words gained their resonance in decades and generations that followed, when the nation told the story of the Civil War back to itself, trying to make the shattering experience coherent and whole.1 None of this diminishes Abraham Lincoln. His actions against slavery, driven by military necessity, outran his commitment to black Americans early on, but his faith and understanding grew as he witnessed the bravery of African American soldiers and as enslaved people made clear their determination to be free, regardless of the cost. Lincoln grew morally over the course of the war and he shared that growing understanding in ever more eloquent words. Lincoln’s most important triumph lay, however, in leading the nation to a place many did not choose to go, in navigating through the political, ideological, and emotional minefield that was wartime America. Though Democrats and other opponents fought against white Southerners on the battlefield and believed in the Union, they shared white Southerners’ views of black Americans. They did not undergo a conversion experience in the Civil War, despite the often lonely and brave eloquence of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln realized better than anyone how much public opinion mattered. “In this age, and this country, public sentiment is every thing,” he said. “With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.” If we want a clear sense of Lincoln’s actual accomplishments, then, we must deal with public opinion more systematically than we have. There were no opinion

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polls in the nineteenth century, but votes and words give us a good sense of what changed and what did not.2 Americans—even generals and presidents—understood the larger shape and meaning of the Civil War through printed words. Only a tiny fraction would have seen or heard Abraham Lincoln and most white Northerners would never have seen an enslaved person or a battlefield. The war came in long gray columns of text, chosen and framed by local editors. A new system of telegraph stations, railroads, and press organizations spread words with unprecedented speed and in enormous quantity. Reports from the battlefield poured out in brief messages and long torrents, editorials commenting on every event and utterance. As desperate as the war was, and as bitterly as people disagreed, the Lincoln administration largely allowed the opposition press to say what it wished.3 The bland appearance of the newspapers belied the passions within. The things people wrote about, the words they habitually paired, the ideals they named, the slurs they cast—all were strongly patterned. No matter how passionate they might be, no matter how unique the situation might appear, people returned time and again to the same words to express themselves. The patterns those key words made became as distinct as fingerprints. We are just beginning to learn how to use new tools that allow us to see these patterns in the vast amount of text produced in wartime America. An increasing number of newspapers are being translated into digital form and offer exciting new ways to understand some of the most written-about subjects in American history. As we begin to think about what this kind of history might look like, perhaps we can take our bearings from four newspapers based in places that embodied within themselves many of the struggles the nation experienced. Two counties—Augusta in Virginia and Franklin in Pennsylvania—lay about two hundred miles apart in the Great Valley that stood as a major corridor of trade, migration, and war. We know a great deal about those two counties, embodied in a large digital archive, and we know that their experiences and expressions, while unique in their particulars, echoed those used by people across the United States and the Confederacy.4 Each county sustained two newspapers over the era of the sectional conf lict. Augusta County supported a paper that had been strongly Unionist before the war and another that had inclined toward secession. Franklin County supported a Republican paper and a Democratic paper. Together, these newspapers staked out the four corners of white

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public opinion, North and South, before, during, and after the Civil War. Gathering articles from other papers from all over the United States, including those they detested, those papers ref lected and shaped their readers’ opinions week by week. They carried the ever-changing currents and temperature of public sentiment. A matrix of the most commonly used key words in the four newspapers, drawn from hundreds of thousands of words across the years between 1859 and 1870, maps the dominant patterns in the language people read week in and week out (table 1.1). The North and the South shared more than it might seem possible for two warring entities to share. Northerners talked of rebels while Southerners talked of the enemy, but otherwise their newspapers spoke in the same elemental Table 1.1 Key words of Civil War era newspapers (ranked by order in which they appear in articles published between 1859 and 1870)

People Party Rights Government Negro Enemy Duty White Rebel Colored Honor Constitution President God Wound Slavery Lincoln Freedom Davis

Northern Republican

Northern Democrat

Southern Union

Southern Secession

Total

1 2 3 5 10 11 8 16 4 9 6 12 7 14 15 13 17 18 19

1 2 3 4 5 6 8 9 7 13 11 12 10 14 15 17 16 18 19

1 5 3 6 7 4 2 8 15 12 11 9 14 10 13 17 18 16 19

1 2 4 7 3 9 6 5 15 8 16 14 11 10 12 13 18 17 19

4 11 16 22 25 30 31 38 41 42 44 45 45 48 55 60 69 69 76

Note: This list grows from an iterative process in which I studied frequency counts of the words in the four newspapers and then looked to see how those words were used in context. I excluded some words from this list because they were often used as simple labels (state, men, county, man, law, elect, or general, e.g.) or parts of speech (now, time, shall, great, make, day, or office, e.g.). Frequently used words employed in more meaningful ways appear here, ranked by their total rankings across the four newspapers rather than total word counts, so that the larger newspapers did not count disproportionately. Various strategies reveal the same general patterns. To see how these newspapers correspond with major national newspapers and publications in both the North and the South, please visit http://americanpast.richmond.edu/textmapping/jah.

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language. They saw the world through the same lenses of the constitution and government. They believed that the people held sacred rights that had to be defended. Protecting those rights was their duty, to be upheld by their honor. They believed they were fighting for freedom. No obvious cultural differences appear in these papers. Honor appears as at least as much a Northern value as a Southern, freedom as much as Southern value as a Northern. Northerners and Southerners framed their Civil War in political terms that became personal terms. They spoke the same language of loyalty and sacrifice. When they spoke of duty they accompanied that word with powerful correlates: imperative, solemn, patriotic, owe, and discharge. When they spoke of honor, they spoke of integrity, glory, sacrifice, and brave. Larger purposes and private purposes became one and the same. They appealed to the same God in an identical language of supplication. They spoke of Almighty God and thanked Him and blessed Him and trusted Him. They begged for His speed and help. They stood before Providence and hoped they might serve as instruments of divine will.5 And yet Northerners and Southerners, speaking exactly the same language of war, killed each other in ever-escalating numbers. Precisely because they shared a vocabulary and all the history it embodied, the North and the South hated those on the other side with a hatred all the deeper for being directed at people so like themselves. The North and the South fought so bitterly because they fought for a shared patrimony. Most striking and significant are the differences within the North. Franklin County affords a revealing perspective on the internal struggles that determined whether Lincoln would succeed or fail. The Republican paper in Franklin came to be edited by the head of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania, one of Lincoln’s earliest and strongest supporters. Franklin County voted for Lincoln in 1860 in exactly the proportion he won across the North: 56 percent. The Democrats’ paper, by contrast, spoke very clearly in the distinctive idiom of that party, an idiom heard all across the Union, an idiom of race and outrage against everything Republican. Democrats in Franklin proudly proclaimed their county the boyhood home of former Democratic president James Buchanan and deployed the Democrats’ vocabulary of vitriol with force and f luency. Northern politicians and editors inhabited a world of harsh words, shifting alliances, and desperate gambles. That world had been unsettled throughout the 1850s and Lincoln could win the presidency with a new party because the old parties fractured and exploded. The Democrats

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split at their convention and put two competitors in the field in 1860; then a new Constitutional Union joined the fight, leaving Lincoln and his f ledgling Republican Party to take office with only 40 percent of the votes cast. A map of voting in 1860 shows that not only did voters in the future Confederacy leave Lincoln off their ballots, but men voted against him in large areas of the states, free and slave, that would remain in the Union. In counties across the North, Lincoln often won narrow victories even in states he carried (figure 1.1). War descended before Lincoln had a chance to win over the Democrats or the Constitutional Unionists, before he had a chance to show what sort of leader he would be. Northern Democrats stood with Lincoln at the beginning of the war when they imagined that a brief conf lict would restore the Union. When he issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, however, the Democrats proclaimed that Lincoln had handed the Confederacy a great gift. The entire white South, they warned, would now be unified as it had never been unified before. Jefferson Davis, the Democrats’ paper in Franklin declared, “would have given the last dollar in the Confederate Treasury to have just such a proclamation emanate from the President of the United States.” There was truth to the claim. The Confederacy, fractious on the home front, solidified in the face of the Proclamation.6 The local and state elections that followed the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 gave voters across the North a chance to express their opinions on Lincoln’s policies. Many moderate Republicans accepted the proclamation as the war aim it was. Democrats, by contrast, declared that the election that followed would be “the most important one that has occurred in the history of our country.” The issue, as they saw it, was clear: “Abolitionism threatens the overthrow of the Constitution, the disruption of the Union and the elevation of the negro to an equality with the white man.” The true men of the Democracy thus had to fight two evils at once. “Whilst the army of the Republic is crushing out Secessionism in the field, do not forget that you have a duty to perform by voting down Abolitionism at the Polls.”7 In the state and local elections of 1862 and 1863, the Democrats stormed back. Five of the most important states Lincoln had carried in 1860—New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois—sent Democratic majorities to Congress. The Republicans held on to their small edge in the House of Representatives only because large and loyal Republican majorities turned out in New England and in the border states where the Union army maintained a presence. If the

Presidential Election Voting Lincoln Douglas Bell Breckinridge

Figure 1.1

Counties won in popular vote, 1860.

Presidential Elections: Abraham Lincoln 39.8% Republican Stephen A. Douglas 29.5% Democrat John C. Breckinridge 18.1% Southern Democrat John Bell 12.6% Constitutional Union Events in History: 1861-65: American Civil War 1863: Emancipation Proclamation Issued

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Edward L. Ayers

presidency had been at stake in 1862, and if voters had cast ballots for president as they did for state officials, Lincoln would have lost, 127 electoral votes to 86.8 The election returns of 1862 hung as a threat over the coming months. Should the Lincoln administration fail to crush the rebellion, Democrats warned, “the Democratic party will, when it gets hold of the reins of Government, use all power, and all the statesmanship it can muster to its aid, to restore the Constitution in its ancient spirit and vigor.” That meant restoring the South to the Union and restoring the constitutional right of slavery. Given the opportunity, the Democrats would seize power and then “reunite our shattered and bleeding Union, as it was before the reckless fanaticism and uncompromising, revengeful spirit of the present day severed the holy bonds which bound us in one brotherhood.” The crusade against slavery, in other words, would come to an end.9 The defeats and delays of the U.S. army in 1862 and the first half of 1863, coupled with a draft, growing taxes, and unpopular laws, threatened to break the North from within. The South smothered its political divisions, but the North paraded its differences in one election after another. The Democrats refused to let up on Abraham Lincoln, refused to soften criticism of generals and their failures, refused to accept that emancipation might become a principal war aim or that the war would be prolonged to bring slavery to an end. The Democrats filled newspapers with their denunciations and attracted voters to the polls in undiminished numbers despite Republican calls for wartime unity. “Party” was second only to “people” as the word most commonly used in both newspapers of Franklin County. Lincoln issued a draft call for half a million more men in July 1864. Since the draft came on the eve of important state elections in Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, conscription threatened the greatest blow yet against the prospects of Union victory. The Democrats smelled blood and went on the attack: “In short his administration has cost the nation one million men and three thousand million dollars, leaving the country in a tenfold worse condition than it was on the day he assumed the chair of State,” the party’s Franklin paper spat, “and it is fair to presume that four years more of the imbecility, corruption and fanaticism that have prevailed during the last three would result in, not only the complete ruin and exhaustion of the country, but in division, and the total overthrow of republican institutions. Will the people try the experiment? We trust not.” By August, prominent Republicans had concluded that Lincoln would be defeated. Their only hope, many

What Lincoln Was Up Against

17

believed, was to nominate a different candidate. “Nobody here doubts it,” one admitted to Lincoln. “Nor do I see anybody from other states who authorizes the slightest hope of success.”10 The political parties warred in the North in 1864 while the armies warred on the battlefield. Although the Democrats were profoundly disorganized, hobbled by desperately competing factions, no national leader, and no national patronage, the party found wide support across the North. Not only did many white voters hate the idea of abolition and dread the idea of free black people, but they also hated what they saw as the tyranny of the Lincoln administration, with high taxes, conscription, and rationing of the news from the battlefields.11 The Republicans managed to submerge their differences long enough to renominate Lincoln, but to signal their central purpose to skeptical voters they changed their name to the Union Party and nominated a former Democrat, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, for the vice presidency. Lincoln held many advantages and he used patronage adroitly to discipline his splintered party. Voters in occupied areas of Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, where the Republicans had barely appeared in 1860, voted for Lincoln. So did voters in the new states of West Virginia, Nevada, and Kansas, while popular Republican projects such as the Homestead Act won support for the party in the West. For the first time, too, soldiers in the field voted and about three-fourths of the million who cast ballots voted in support of their commander in chief. Despite these advantages and crucial military victories in Georgia and Virginia on the eve of the election, Lincoln won 55 percent of the vote in 1864. That is considered a landslide in American politics, but it nevertheless meant that nearly half of all voters refused to support the president even in the desperation of wartime. Though the election signaled that the North under Lincoln would fight until Confederate surrender, Lincoln’s overall share of the vote barely changed between 1860 and 1864. Even after the most important victories in the Civil War and after the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address, even with all the power of the patronage and vast government spending at his command, even in the middle of an enormous war commanding the loyalty of an immense army of soldiers, Lincoln began his second term with nearly half the electorate opposed to him (figure 1.2).12 Lincoln remained as president because the Electoral College created a convincing mandate from a narrow popular difference, just as it was designed to do. He won because the two-party system suppressed fragmentation and dissent and because fixed election cycles prevented

Presidential Elections: Abraham Lincoln 55.0% Republican George B. McClellan 29.5% Democrat

Presidential Election Voting Lincoln McClellan

Figure 1.2 Counties won in popular vote, 1864.

Events in History: 1865-77: Reconstruction 1865: Abraham Lincoln Assasinated

What Lincoln Was Up Against

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his opponents from seizing moments of despair and crisis to launch challenges to him. All across the North, in one county after another, Lincoln won only by a few dozen votes, by a small percentage of the electorate. In 1864 Franklin County, like many others across the North, shifted toward the Democrats even as it stayed in the Republican column. Lincoln won Franklin by forty-seven votes out of more than seven thousand cast, just as he won Pennsylvania by the narrowest of margins (figure 1.3). General histories of the Civil War and biographers of Lincoln acknowledge the challenge of 1864 and the sudden turn at the end, of course, but they emphasize that the victory at the polls removed the Confederates’ last hope of a negotiated peace. While true, such a perspective leaves out a crucial part of the story going forward, creating the impression that matters had been settled in public opinion, that the white North had been converted to Lincoln’s shifting perspective on the future of black Americans. If we remember the narrowness of Lincoln’s reelection, however, and focus on the enduring bitterness and opposition across the North, the tortured history of the next decade is less surprising than it often appears. It was not that the white North converted for an egalitarian moment and then betrayed that conversion. The white North ended the war even more divided than it began. Throughout the war, start to finish, the language of race provided the most contested and charged words. In the two years before the war began, the papers of Franklin County talked incessantly about “negroes.” The constellation of words associated with “negro” in 1859, 1860, and early 1861 shows that the Republicans talked of slavery in the territories while the Democrats talked of John Brown and Harpers Ferry, trying to saddle their opponents with insurrection. The word “nigger” appears prominently in the Republican paper mainly because that paper quoted and taunted the Democrats for their discouragingly effective fixation on race. “Because of their continual feasting upon their colored brethren, with ‘nigger’ for breakfast, ‘darkey’ for lunch, ‘cuffy’ for dinner, ‘woolly head’ for desert, and ‘sambo’ for supper, we have arrived at the conclusion that their true name should be the Nigger Democracy,” the Republican paper charged in 1860. “Notwithstanding the nauseating character of the dish, and the frequency with which they thrust the unsavory repast under the noses of their readers, we find that they still rehash the old, mouldy collation.” The Republicans preferred to talk of white men instead of black (figure 1.4).13 Over the course of the war, the Democrats invoked “negroes” over and over again, especially at election time and especially as the end of

Presidential Election Voting 1-5% margin 6-10% margin

Figure 1.3 Margin of victory in presidential election, 1864.

Presidential Elections: Abraham Lincoln 55.0% Republican George B. McClellan 45.0% Democrat

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Figure 1.4 Words associated with the word “negro” in the newspapers of Franklin County, Pennsylvania, from January 1, 1859 to April 12, 1861.

slavery became ever clearer. The Republicans spoke positively of black soldiers, but they did not dwell on slavery or black people in general until the war had been won and Lincoln reelected. Instead, they talked of the obligations and opportunities of white people. They talked of the necessity of winning the war, of saving the Union (figure 1.5). The most frequently used words during the war years reveal the priorities of the newspapers of both sides (table 1.2). Northerners talked the most of “rebels” and Southerners talked the most of the “enemy.” Everyone dwelled on the wounds suffered by their neighbors, relatives, and friends. They carefully scrutinized the people of both sides, continually monitoring their opinion, their morale, their determination. They recognized that opinion in the North crystallized in parties and used “party” as a shorthand way of defining the tendencies they

negro appearing in all articles and articles containing the word “people” SIMILE

Northern Republican 1860

1865

1870

Timeplot

80

60

40

Timeplot c SIMILE

20

Northern Democrat 1860

1865

1870 80

60

40

20

Figure 1.5 Appearances of the word “negro” in articles that also contain the word “people” in the newspapers of Franklin County, Pennsylvania, from January 1, 1859 to December 31, 1870. Note: Solid lines: all articles. Lines with shading: articles containing the word “people.”

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Table 1.2 Most frequently used key words during war years in papers in the “Valley of the Shadow” project (ranked within each paper)

Rebel Enemy Wound People Party Rights Government Duty

Northern Republican

Northern Democrat

Southern Union

Southern Secession

1 4 3 2 7 5 6 8

1 2 3 7 6 5 4 8

9 1 2 6 4 5 7 3

10 1 9 2 3 8 4 6

Note: This table is based on a method like that described for table 1.1, but focusing on the years between April 1861 and April 1865.

celebrated or deplored. They considered their fundamental rights to be at stake, knew that rights were protected by the government, and owed a duty to protect those rights in every way they could. The language of the war, in other words, focused on war-making and the rights that white people on both sides considered their birthright. The word “slavery,” prominent on the eve of the war, fell into relative disuse by the Republicans as well as the Democrats. As Frederick Douglass complained, “Slavery, though wounded, dying and despised, is still able to bind the tongues of our republican orators,” he told an abolitionist ally. “The Negro is the deformed child, which is put out of the room when company comes.” Lincoln himself spoke only obliquely about slavery in his famous 1863 speech at Gettysburg and said little about slavery over the following year as the election loomed.14 Often portrayed as a pivotal event in the nation’s history, the Gettysburg Address in fact passed with little notice. The new national cemetery at Gettysburg lay only thirty miles from Franklin’s seat, but the Republican paper gave Lincoln’s now-famous address only a small share of the attention. Instead, the paper gushed over Edward Everett, “America’s greatest living orator,” who “for two hours held the crowd in one of the most splendid intellectual efforts of his life.” Saying only that “the dedicatory remarks were then delivered by the President, as follows,” the paper printed the brief words of Lincoln’s speech—as they did of a song by the Baltimore Glee Club—doing what Republican papers across the North did. Democrats, for their part, considered the speech a campaign maneuver from the outset and treated it with contempt. Any notion that the speech marked a turning point in white opinion is wishful thinking.15

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Destroying slavery became U.S. military policy even though many white Northerners never came to believe that the war was worth fighting to end slavery. Slavery came to an end not because white Northerners changed their minds but because white Southerners forced slavery to be destroyed. As one Republican in Franklin put it, “Slavery is now dying, not by the hands of those who long since favored a prohibitory constitutional amendment, not by the hands of abolitionists so called, not by virtue entirely of the executive proclamation, but by war, cruel war, provoked and made by its friend.”16 Many white Republicans, however, both soldiers on the field and at home, in Franklin as elsewhere, came to understand slavery more fully as they fought against slavery and as they admired black soldiers’ bravery. Channels of empathy and human understanding began to open. Some white Northerners became attuned to things they had not been attuned to before, bridges of common humanity. Men and women who came to see the humanity of black Southerners would, in coming years, give much of themselves as teachers, advocates, and allies of the former slaves. But such white Northerners did not dominate public discourse; their heroism grew by action and individual commitment, often in the face of hostility and indifference, not by default. An issue of the Republican paper in Franklin County in February 1865 shows the depth of new understanding by some whites. One article heralded the end of slavery and the beginning of a new life for black Americans. As the Thirteenth Amendment passed, the paper exulted, At last the Nation is disenthralled from its crowning crime. Slavery, the fruitful parent of all the staggering woes of the Republic—the deadly foe of the very genius of our free institutions, and the author of the bloody fraternal conf lict that has crimsoned our fair fields by the most appalling sacrifices, has, in the fullness of His time, fallen beneath the retributive stroke of Justice. Looking ahead, it spoke paternalistically but with goodwill. What may be done with the African race in the future we cannot tell. We know they have capacity, and this being the land of their birth, our duty is with the present. That they have giants among them even in their degraded condition does not admit of a doubt. In this broad land of ours, under the blessing of our Government, they can be made useful to themselves, the country and posterity. Let the effort be fairly made.

What Lincoln Was Up Against

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Such things would not have been said in a Republican newspaper four years earlier, perhaps not even two years earlier.17 But the Democrats would have nothing of it. When Lincoln was inaugurated for his second term in the spring of 1865, the Democrats’ paper in Franklin spoke of the nation’s leader with disdain. His second inaugural speech, later considered the greatest he ever delivered and the greatest inaugural speech in our history, has been looked for by the public with less interest than is usually exhibited, even in ordinary times, in regard to a public expression from the pen or lips of a President of the United States. The indifference is attributable, probably, to the fact that the people know too well how utterly his practice has been at variance with the professions he made in his first inaugural, to have any confidence in his utterances now. The editor pretended to think that Lincoln might apologize for violating the Constitution and for his “abandonment of principles which he had solemnly put forth as his rule of conduct. In lieu of any such attempt, however, he has given us the mere trash to which we refer our readers as unworthy of comment.” In sum, “He had nothing to say, and he has said it.”18 It is hard to read these words now. We know that the Democrats were profoundly wrong about the meaning of the history they were living. But we must recognize that many white Americans—the great majority, in fact, if the white South is added to the nearly half of the white North who voted against Lincoln in 1864—would have agreed with them. The aftermath of the war, with its abandoned Reconstruction, ref lected a consistent ideological, racial, and political opposition before, during, and after the Civil War. The words associated with “negro” over the five years following the war give a glimpse of what was to come. The intersection of politics, rights, and race proved to be the most volatile combination in the universe of white American men in the mid-nineteenth century. “Radicals” and “Democrats” replaced enemy and rebel as the most charged words. Democrats obsessed over any possibility of black voting, talking of suffrage, equality, vote, and supremacy whenever they mentioned the word “negro” (figure 1.6). The very things the Democrats had been fighting for—political rights for white men and all the identity as white men that went with those rights—f lowed into a toxic and volatile mix. As much as the

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Figure 1.6 Words appearing near the word “negro” in articles in the newspapers of the “Valley of the Shadow” Project, April 1865 through December 1870, shown for each paper.

Democrats had fixated on black people before and during the war, they doubled their obsession after the war ended.19 White Northerners disagreed with each other more deeply at the end of the war than at the beginning. From start to finish, Abraham Lincoln struggled with the most progressive as well as the most retrograde factions. As Frederick Douglass would write a decade later, “Viewed from

What Lincoln Was Up Against

27

genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”20 In such a context, Abraham Lincoln’s leadership lay in capturing what he could from each moment of possibility, of avoiding the worst in each moment of disaster. His leadership lay in doing less than many wanted, later than many wanted, in less dramatic ways than many wanted. He worked at the very edge of public opinion, repeatedly testing its boundaries and its strength. In the end, Lincoln led his nation through an unimaginably costly war to a redemptive outcome, ending the largest system of slavery in the modern world in a victory that many of his fellow white Americans resisted every step of the way. Notes 1. See Gabor Boritt, The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech That Nobody Knows (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), pp. 191–192. 2. See Menahem Blondheim, “ ‘Public Sentiment is Everything’: The Union’s Public Communications Strategy and the Bogus Proclamation of 1864,” Journal of American History 89:3 (December 2002), pp. 869–899. Lincoln quoted on p. 869. 3. Ibid., p. 871. 4. The evidence analyzed here is within The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War (http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu). The Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL) at the University of Richmond is creating tools to analyze the many hundreds of thousands of words in that archive and in others to follow. Robert K. Nelson of the DSL has devised those tools and I am grateful to him for his remarkable work. Readers may explore these tools and materials on their own at the website of the DSL. Pioneering work in this vein appears in John Riedl’s 2006 University of Virginia dissertation, “Language and the Making of Race in the United States, 1827–1900,” available at http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit/3225902. Also see Rogan Kersh, Dreams of a More Perfect Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). 5. These correlates appear in the text mining tools in the Digital Scholarship Lab, where the most common pairs can be seen by entering a key word. Some of the words appearing most commonly in the newspapers bear a strong resemblance to those James McPherson found in the letters of soldiers, described in For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford, 1998). The soldiers from Augusta and Franklin, like the sample in McPherson’s book, spoke of honor, duty, and courage. Looking at the homefront as well as at soldiers’ letters shows that the communities from which these men came were also absorbed in the language of military duty and honor, that the political issues of the war were thoroughly situated in partisan political struggles, and that the values of duty and honor were broad enough to embrace North and South, Democratic and Republican. These words, so charged and widely shared, clouded more concrete and contested kinds of motivations such as race, party, and military situation. It is no accident that both sides clung to the words of honor and duty in generations following the war, for those words were both true and broad enough to obfuscate other motivations. We need to study the universe of language more broadly and more rigorously to understand how all the pieces fit together.

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6. Valley Spirit, October 1, 1862. 7. Valley Spirit, October 8, 1862. 8. John C. Waugh, Reelecting Lincoln: The Battle for the 1864 Presidency (New York: Crown, 1997), pp. 11–12. 9. Valley Spirit, May 6, 1863. 10. Valley Spirit, July 20, 1864; Thurlow Weed, quoted in David E. Long, The Jewel of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln’s Re-election and the End of Slavery (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1994), p. 45. 11. For the larger context, see Adam I.P. Smith, No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North (New York: Oxford, 2006), which emphasizes the way that Lincoln used the Republican party but spoke in a patriotic language above party to avoid the limitations of partisan division. 12. See Joel H. Silbey, A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860– 1868 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), pp. 239–240. The unrelenting use of race by the Democrats is a major theme in the newest and most comprehensive account of Lincoln we have: Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). 13. Franklin Repository, April 25, 1860. 14. Michael Vorenberg, “ ‘The Deformed Child’: Slavery and the Election of 1864,” Civil War History 47 (3), pp. 240–257, quote on p. 240. During the war, the word “slavery” fell to nineteenth of the nineteen key words in both the Republican and the Democratic newspapers of Franklin County. 15. Franklin Repository, November 25, 1863. Boritt, Gettysburg Gospel, pp. 137–147. The most inf luential portrayal of the role of Lincoln’s speech, with its sweeping argument explicit in its subtitle, is Garry Wills’ Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). 16. Franklin Repository, February 22, 1865. 17. Franklin Repository, February 8, 1865. 18. Valley Spirit, March 8, 1865. A recent study by a political scientist has found that presidents’ words in general have less impact than we might imagine. See George C. Edwards III, On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). 19. “Negro” as percentage of key words in Northern newspapers:

Prewar War Postwar

Northern Republican

Northern Democrat

14.3 22.9 30.7

21.4 24.4 41.7

20. Quoted in George M. Fredrickson, Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 126.

CH A P T E R

T WO

Lincoln’s Construction of the Consent Principle and the Right of Revolution in the Secession Crisis H e rman J. B e l z

In a speech at Paris, Illinois, in 1858, during his debates with Stephen A. Douglas, Abraham Lincoln posed the question: “What does Popular Sovereignty mean?” “Strictly and literally,” Lincoln said, it meant “the Right of the People of every nation and community to govern themselves.” He further observed that the “idea of popular sovereignty was f loating around the world several ages before [Douglas] saw daylight— indeed, before Columbus set foot on the American continent.” In 1776, however, “it took tangible form” in the words of the Declaration of Independence, which stated that to secure the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness “governments were instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Lincoln proclaimed: “If that is not Popular Sovereignty, then I have no conception of the meaning of words.”1 This essay examines the meaning of government by the consent of the governed in the sectional conf lict that led to the secession crisis and the Civil War. By repudiating the Southern claim that states had a constitutional right to secede from the Union that they had voluntarily joined by ratifying the Constitution, military defeat of the Confederacy settled the long disputed question of the nature of the Union. As an exercise of consolidated state and popular sovereignty, secession represented a kind of perversion of the right of revolution and

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government by consent under social contract theory. Southern secession presents itself historically as the voluntary forming of a libertarian nation dedicated to the denial of human freedom. Even if we accept the premise that ambiguity in the meaning of American nationality justified separation, the secession movement made the wrong choice for republican America. America, the first new nation of the modern age, from its founding has been a political society based on voluntary consent. The idea of consent is “the leading doctrine of political legitimacy” in the philosophy of liberalism and modern government.2 The will of the people, expressed through formal constitutional procedures and informal social practices, is the ruling force in American government. Empirical study of critical episodes in consent-based republican government, including the corollary concepts of popular sovereignty and the right of revolution, is essential for understanding the American political tradition and national identity. In a larger sense the disruption of national Union in the nineteenth century forms part of the history of modern liberalism. Ref lection on Southern secession and Lincoln’s response to the crisis of American nationality throws light on the central problem in social contract theory. This is the difficulty, as a matter of practical reason, in distinguishing between voluntary consent, guided by reason and conceived as a binding promise, that forms the basis of political legitimacy, and voluntary consent, based on subjective will and conceived as contingent and indeterminate, that obscures the question of legitimacy. 3 In an ironic way, this perennial question has assumed historical significance in recent decades as claims of a right of secession have been asserted following the breakup of imperial systems of power in world politics. Three basic facts define the interpretive structure of the problem of government by consent in America. (1) From its revolutionary origins popular self-government was a defining feature of American nationality. (2) Although slavery was geographically confined to the South after the revolutionary era, it was an actual or potential source of political and moral controversy throughout the country as a whole. (3) Public opinion was identified with the will of the people. As the nation became increasingly divided over slavery in the nineteenth century, the question that seemed to defy resolution was whose conception of public opinion, in the pluralistic communities that constituted American society, would win assent as the constitutionally legitimate opinion of the country as a whole.

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I argue that Lincoln understood the nature and tendency of government by consent of the governed better than his political rivals for national leadership in 1860. This is not a new interpretation, but it is one that needs reaffirmation as problems of national unity and American identity emerge in the twenty-first century. Lincoln held that the will of the people was identified through constitutionally prescribed forms of electoral representation. Moreover the consent of the people, as communicated in public opinion, imposed moral and constitutional obligations on government officials. Lincoln recognized limits on the inf luence of public opinion and the sovereignty of the people. Popular sovereignty did not obviate or overrule the prudential judgments and constitutional determinations required of government officials entrusted with public authority. In the secession crisis Lincoln demonstrated his superiority as a democratic statesman and leader by making political decisions, issuing military orders to stop the process of national disintegration, and determining questions of constitutional meaning concerning the nature of the Union and the meaning of government by consent of the governed. I The Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and Constitution of 1787 were organic acts that recognized the idea of popular self-government in various forms. As foundational texts they illustrate what political philosopher Pierre Manent has identified as the distinctive feature of modernity, namely, the “rise in the political power of ‘the theory’ ” and the “emancipation of the ‘idea.’ ” The constituent power of the people was an eighteenth-century political idea that can be said to have presented itself in American state papers as something “conceived and chosen before being implemented.”4 Recurring to Lincoln’s image of something that “was f loating around the world” long before the nineteenth century, what were the essential elements of the notion of popular sovereignty on which American government by consent rested? To guide historical inquiry, it is helpful to consult the theoretical framework offered by philosopher Yves Simon in his classic work, Philosophy of Democratic Government. Simon states the problem of consent thus: “The common experience of civil societies shows that men obey other men . . . Things take place in civil relations, not exceptionally but regularly, as if some men had the power of binding the consciences of other men.” The “operation

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of an ethical motive of obedience” seems evident, suggesting that in “a direct democracy as in any other organization, the nature of society demands that man should obey man.” Simon nevertheless observes that “there is something paradoxical about one man’s having power to bind the conscience of another man.”5 Simon states that the idea of voluntary consent is ambiguous. He writes: “government by consent of the governed [is] a historic and glorious expression which will never fall out of use.” This is because the concept of consent “has several meanings, which cannot be distinguished in political speeches or even in statements of principles.” Popular self-government is a protean idea that illustrates what Simon refers to as “the paradox of political notions considered in their sociological existence.” The paradox is that, as a political idea, government by consent of the governed “is in a state of confusion.” Yet in this confused state the consent idea is “most active” and produces its “most important effects.”6 Simon’s commentary clarifies the philosophical modernity of the consent theory of government. The theory is concerned with the question of who has the right to rule, in contrast to the concern of ancient political thought with the ends and objects for which government power should be exercised.7 In modern government the people are the source of authority. Their will, rather than natural or divine right, forms the basis of obligation, obedience, and legitimacy. Political society is grounded in rational judgment and free will rather than instinct, subrational forces, or historical prescription. Government by consent conventionally takes the form of legally designated governing personnel. It may also depend on informal popular designation, as in time of public emergency when it is not practical formally to consult public opinion and political leaders declare themselves to be a de facto government. In Simon’s view, the most problematic feature of consent theory concerns the transmission of political power to government. The theory implies that the consent of the people “should be elicited anew as political life goes on” and is not given “once and for all.” Continuing consent can be obtained either through direct democracy or indirect representative democracy, in which the people control government through elections. Consent registered through elections is “the very formula of democratic government,” Simon states. He observes, however, that the formula discloses “the peculiar situation of sovereignty in democracy.” “The truth is that in every democracy, at least under modern conditions, the people retains the character of a deliberating

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assembly,” believing they have the right to participate in the government by voicing their assent or dissent in a multitude of ways.8 The problem is that government must possess sovereignty in order to discharge the trust placed in it. Yet the people are reluctant to give up their sovereignty. Simon summarizes: “Democracy never transmits the whole of the transmissible powers. Every democracy remains, in varying degree, a direct democracy.”9 This gives rise to a false conception of government by consent, namely that “the governed are never bound except by their own consent, that they never obey except inasmuch as they please to obey.” Where individuals believe they are never under an obligation to obey, Simon concludes, the theory of government by consent of the governed “expresses neither a political nor a democratic necessity but mere revolt against the laws of all community.”10 The American Revolution made it clear that government by the consent of the governed was right for America. At the same time there was continuing controversy over the nature, form, and extent of popular self-government. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that while public sentiment splintered into particularistic factions on matters of detail, the “inner feelings which control groups in America” aligned them to two fundamental opinions. These opinions were “as old as the world and all free societies display them under different names and forms,” said Tocqueville. “The first aimed to restrict popular power, the second to extend it indefinitely.”11 The two principal forms in which popular sovereignty was conceptualized in America were liberal social contract theory and republican political philosophy. Both concepts provided an account of the founding of political society centering on the idea of government by the consent of the governed. An important difference between them concerned the scope of popular self-government. Social contract theory explained how individuals in a state of nature, forming themselves into a people and political society, delegate power in trust to governing personnel to provide for their safety and happiness. In positing a right to create government, however, social contract theory logically recognized a right to alter or abolish government. Republican political philosophy, by contrast, regarded political society as natural rather than the result of a contract between isolated individuals in a state of nature. Republican philosophy acknowledged rebellion as a historical phenomenon without recognizing a moral right of revolution.12 In the United States government by the consent of the governed assumed the form of a social-contract and civic-republican hybrid. The existence of the nation depended on or signified successful

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exercise of the right to revolution in local communities shaped by republican political and cultural norms. A significant challenge facing postrevolutionary America was to prevent popular-sovereignty convictions from developing into a disposition toward political instability, rebellion, and revolutionary violence. The making of contractlike constitutions of liberty in the states and in the nation as a whole was seen as a way of sublimating the right of revolution in republican forms of electoral representation designed to express the consent of the governed. If it was clear that the people’s sovereignty was the source of the right to revolution, the problem of taming it for constructive purposes was left in a state of ambiguity. The division of sovereignty between the states and the national government compounded the ambiguity by providing a motive for rival exertions of the right to revolution. Alexander Hamilton, in The Federalist identified the people’s “original right of self-defense,” or the right of revolution, as an ultimate recourse if elected representatives betrayed their constituents.13 More pointedly, in a resolution proposing a bill of rights in the First Congress, James Madison moved that “there be prefixed to the constitution” a variation of the Declaration of Independence stating: “That all power is originally vested in, and consequently derived from the people,” and that “the people have an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform or change their government, whenever it be found adverse to the purposes of its institution.”14 Notwithstanding bitter partisan conf lict and theoretical availability of the right to revolution, in the early national period reciprocal limitations between the states and the national government inherent in the design of the Constitution evolved on the basis of which a “sustainable union” could be established.15 The fundamental purpose underlying the formation of the Union was the fundamental purpose of integrating and consolidating the people and states of America. The practical reason of the Constitution made control of the national government the paramount goal of American politics. Appeal to states’ rights in the name of popular sovereignty was the default strategy of the electoral minority. A standard of constitutional fidelity emerged holding that neither the national nor the state governments could reduce the other to itself or otherwise abolish it. This standard of fidelity was not stipulated in the text of the Constitution. It was an informal norm, the force and effect of which depended on attachment, dedication, and conviction in the belief that government by the consent of the governed was the essential principle of American nationality.

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From the beginning of constitutional politics in 1789 controversy over the nature of the Union centered on the relationship between the national and state governments. From 1820 to 1860 debate over the propriety of slavery in republican society became entwined with the politics of federalism. In the 1840s territorial expansion elevated slavery to national significance, exacerbating sectional tensions inherent in the structure of the Union. Professing fidelity to the Constitution, North and South claimed to be the true bearer of American nationality. Appealing to founding principles, each side charged the other with revolutionary intent to subvert its institutions. The nature of the conf lict was such that, in a peculiarly American way, the cause of constitutionalism and the real meaning of government by consent implicated the right of revolution. In his recent study of social contract theory, Mark Helliung writes: “Once the right of revolution had entered American thought, it was slow to take its leave.”16 Important reasons for the persistence of rightof-revolution thinking were its affinity with popular sovereignty and its paradoxical involvement in the constitutional regime. In a rhetorical and strategic sense, the logic of the “partly federal, partly national” system of dual or divided sovereignty tended to assimilate the spectrum of dissenting attitudes and actions, from protest and resistance to insurrection and rebellion, in the class of remedies or prophylactic measures for violation of constitutional rights or usurpation of government powers. Contrary to the hope or assumption that the Revolution was a unique and unrepeatable event, the political meaning of government by the consent of the governed might require continuing affirmation of the right of revolution.17 II If the right of revolution was an essential element of the constituent power of the people in social contract theory, it was pertinent to consider, as Lincoln did in the Kansas-Nebraska Act controversy, the circumstances in which popular sovereignty rightly applied. In challenging Douglas in 1854, Lincoln resumed at a deeper level of moral conviction the project of preserving popular self-government that defined his achievement as a democratic statesman. The peculiar difficulty facing Lincoln and the political leaders of his generation lay in the ambiguous relationship between government by consent and the right of revolution inherent in the nation’s founding.

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In the Springfield Lyceum speech in 1838, Lincoln proposed a political religion of reverence for the Constitution as a means of preserving American institutions of civil and religious liberty against the “mobocratic spirit” of lawless rioting. Only in a limited sense did he acknowledge a right of resistance to grievances that were “intolerable.”18 In the Temperance Address in 1842 Lincoln spoke more positively of the revolutionary origins of government by the consent of the governed. He declared: “Of our political revolution of ’76, we are all justly proud. It has given us a degree of political freedom, far exceeding that of any of the other nations of the earth.” Indeed, Lincoln said that, in the political freedom that the Revolution gave to the American people, “the world has found a solution of that long mooted problem, as to the capability of man to govern himself.”19 As a member of Congress in 1848, in a speech criticizing President Polk’s policy in the Mexican War, Lincoln expounded on the right of revolution. Texas had recently been annexed into the Union and the boundary between it and Mexico was in dispute. Lincoln said the extent of U.S. territory depended not on any treaty-fixed boundary, “but on revolution”—the revolution of the people of Texas against Mexico. Lincoln went on to define the right of revolution. He asserted: “Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off, the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.” Lincoln declared this “a most valuable—a most sacred right—a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.” The “whole people” of an existing government, or any portion of them “that can, may revolutionize and make their own, of so much of the territory as they inhabit.”20 Lincoln has been charged with hypocrisy for his later refusal to recognize Southern secession as an exercise of the right to revolution.21 Although taking possession of a territory by the people inhabiting it can be described either as revolution or secession, the relevant political question concerns the moral justification and purpose of the action in question. Lincoln’s thoughts on revolution in 1848 were inspired by the national independence movements of American colonies from Great Britain, Mexico from Spain, and Texas from Mexico, as well as the efforts of Hungarians, Irish, Germans, and French “to establish in their several governments the supremacy of the people.”22 In Lincoln’s view these revolutionary actions were justified. As slavery came to dominate American politics, however, the relationship between popular self-government and the right of revolution presented itself in a new and more problematic light. Lincoln implicitly

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acknowledged the change in discussing territorial policy toward slavery in 1845. Lincoln believed the free states, “due to the Union of the states,” had a duty not to interfere with slavery in states where it legally existed. At the same time national policy should do nothing “directly or indirectly, to prevent that slavery from dying a natural death.” He added: “Of course, I am not now considering what would be our duty, in cases of insurrections among slaves.”23 The inference can be drawn that if slaves were human beings entitled to natural rights, their claim to a right of resistance was morally justified. To understand the evolution of secession theory in the context of the antebellum slavery controversy, it is pertinent to consider the meaning of the right of revolution in social contract theory. Appeal to the right to revolution was not a claim of legal right intended to impose legal duty on another party to support or refrain from interfering with an act of resistance to authority. Rather, the assertion of revolutionary right was a moral claim that putatively conferred moral legitimacy on resistance to unjust or abusive government. Theoretically the claim placed the oppressor under a moral obligation to desist from wrongful acts and to respect the right claimed.24 Mark Helliung shows that in the nineteenth century Democrat and Whig politicians, albeit for different purposes, acknowledged the right of revolution.25 At a high level of generality, this bipartisan consensus acknowledged the historical fact of the nation’s revolutionary origin. From the standpoint of moral philosophy, however, the pertinent question concerned the essential meaning of the right of revolution in social contract theory on which the doctrine of republican consent was based. The theoretical common ground provided by the right of revolution was rejection of the doctrine of passive obedience and nonresistance. Senator John Rowan of Kentucky, in the Webster-Hayne debate of 1830, discussed the right to revolution in the context of the South Carolina nullification movement. Opponents of nullification argued that states must submit to judicial restraints on their sovereignty or incur by their resistance the guilt of rebellion. Rowan said the people knew their rights too well to accept such an argument. He asserted: “Everyone knows that rebellion consists in the resistance of lawful authority,” and that the resistance of lawless authority is not a crime, but a virtue . . . Patriotism requires such resistance. The citizens must, at their peril, distinguish between lawful and lawless power. It is a high duty and full of peril but it is the only condition on which

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liberty can be enjoyed and maintained. The alternative is slavery, to which passive obedience and non-resistance lead. Rowan concluded that it would not be rebellion for a state to refuse to submit to a Supreme Court decision affirming a “palpably unconstitutional” law that invaded the sovereignty of the state.26 Conceiving the right of revolution as an attribute of popular sovereignty, and defining it broadly on a spectrum ranging from voluntary consent to obligatory dissent and libertarian resistance, pointed the way to a new understanding of the relationship between liberty and authority. It created a standard of right that could be used to shift the political onus from the protester claiming deprivation of liberty to the political authority charged with violating the right of liberty. Traditional legal theory favored government over individual rights. There was a presumption of the legality of government acts and legislative measures, meaning that the burden was on the dissenting or resisting individual, claiming denial of a legal or constitutional right, to prove the government wrong. By conf lating the right of revolution with popular sovereignty the presumption might be reversed. A law or government act that adversely affected or implicated a claim of individual liberty could be treated as presumptively unconstitutional or illegal until proved otherwise. With respect to the reason and justice of the particular matter in dispute, the analytical focus would shift from the alleged illegality of an act of resistance to the presumed lawlessness of government policy against which the act was directed. John Rowan’s justification of resistance to a “palpably unconstitutional” law shows the potential benefit resulting from reconceptualization of the dialectic between liberty and authority. Rowan in effect asserted that the law on its face should be regarded as presumably unconstitutional because it was beyond the competence of the legislative power to enact it. Construed in this way the doctrine of state sovereignty, brigaded by the constituent power of the people, could become a shield of liberty to protect citizens whose duty it was to exercise the right of revolution by resisting lawless authority. Shifting the burden of proof to the legislative authority would relieve citizens of the political and legal peril involved in the duty of distinguishing between lawful and lawless power. The South Carolina doctrine of nullification that Rowan defended was designed to impair national legislative authority through a construction of the Constitution that would virtually establish a presumption of unconstitutionality. The doctrine inverted the constitutional

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rule requiring a three-fourths majority for state ratification of a constitutional amendment into a one-fourth minority authorizing a state to nullify or veto a national legislative act. The “vetoed” act was in effect to be treated as presumptively unconstitutional. Only by the consent of a three-fourths majority of the states could the nullified law be recognized as constitutionally legitimate. The doctrine of state veto appeared to threaten the rule of constitutional practical reason that prohibited the national and state governments from exercising their respective portions of delegated sovereignty to abolish or otherwise reduce the other to itself. Carried to its logical conclusion, nullification as a constitutional construction tended toward disintegration of the Union. Further controversy over the nature of the Union with respect to popular sovereignty and the right of revolution arose in debate over the admission of California as a free state in 1850. In an inverse sense, the situation offered a preview of the crisis in republican self-government that occurred a decade later when slaveholding states claimed a revolutionary right of secession from the Union. Southerners objected to California statehood on the ground that the inhabitants of California, not organized into a territorial government by act of Congress, were not a people in the sense required by the Constitution for admission into the Union.27 The principle of popular sovereignty had no just application, and to admit California as a free state was an unconstitutional exercise of power by the national government intended to undermine the sovereignty and rights of the Southern people. Northern free soil Democrats and Whigs supported California statehood as an exercise of the right of popular self-government under social contract theory.28 Southerners were alarmed at the prospect of a constitutional majority claiming the authority of state and national popular sovereignty under the principles of the Declaration of Independence. In response Southern politicians began serious consideration of secession, or the threat of secession, as a form of protest against unconstitutional infringement of states’ rights. Disavowing violent disunion, many viewed secession as a recurrence to the revolutionary principles of 1776. Others professed indifference as to whether secession was a right resulting from the federal compact, or “the ultima ratio of an oppressed people” based on “the principles of self-government.” Whenever a number of states resolved to perform the act of secession, said Senator John Berrien of Georgia, “whether revolution, or constitutional and peaceful retirement from the Union, the Union would be at an end.”29

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The California debate raised the question of whether the principles and forms of popular self-government for admitting a state into the Union applied to withdrawal of a state from the Union. Four years later the political explosion ignited by the Kansas-Nebraska Act reopened controversy over the constitutional meaning of government by consent as expressed in the concept of popular sovereignty. III The territorial slavery debate provoked three approaches to popular sovereignty. In Douglas’s version, territorial inhabitants were authorized to decide questions concerning slavery for themselves without interference from the national or state governments. Southerners, while prepared to accept the Nebraska Act as long as it protected slavery expansion, relied on a more comprehensive notion of popular self-government based on state sovereignty. The Southern doctrine held that all questions that implicated the constitutional right to slavery property, including those outside slave state jurisdiction, were subject to final determination by the people of the slave states acting through the agency of the federal government. Lincoln and the Republican Party defined popular sovereignty with reference to the Declaration of Independence, the prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Ordinance, and legislation under the territorial clause in Article IV of the Constitution that excluded slavery from national territories. In a constitutional sense the sectional conf lict over slavery centered on the nature of the Union as a system of federal and state power relations subject to popular authority. The passions and interests involved in the slavery controversy blurred the distinction between representative democracy in its orthodox constitutional acceptation, and the ideal of a more existentially authentic direct democracy that would better express the will of the people. The demand for true popular sovereignty that is present in every type of democracy complicated the problem of identifying public opinion in its constitutionally normative form as the rule and measure of government by the consent of the governed. One might say that in the slavery controversy belief in popular sovereignty assumed the dimensions of a kind of civil religion, the practice of which required extraordinary gifts of discernment if it was not ultimately inscrutable. In order rightly to be applied in particular circumstances, the consent of the people needed to be identified and known in a substantive

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sense. How to obtain such knowledge and the form it must assume to become binding and legitimate were subject to dispute. It was obvious to Douglas, for example, that the Kansas-Nebraska Act confirmed the decision made in the Compromise of 1850 to organize Utah and New Mexico as territories without restriction on slavery. It was equally obvious to Lincoln that the true meaning of popular sovereignty was found in the Declaration of Independence, the Northwest Ordinance, and the slavery restriction provisions of the Missouri Compromise act that he said were “canonized in the hearts of the people.”30 From the standpoint of consent theory, the Douglas Democrat conception of popular sovereignty presented Lincoln with a greater theoretical challenge than the Southern version. In Douglas’s view, popular sovereignty formed its own justification. In a practical sense it meant that the will of the people was subject to no rule or measure external to itself, the Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding insofar as the meaning of the Constitution was subordinate to the popular opinion. For Lincoln, by contrast, government by consent was limited by the text of the Constitution considered as fundamental political law understood in the light of reason and justice. Whereas Democrat popular sovereignty was strictly procedural and morally neutral, Lincoln’s conception of government by consent was substantive and morally normative. Lincoln saw in Douglas Democrat popular sovereignty a spirit of dissociation that threatened the integrity of the Union. He believed that Congress, representing the nation as a whole, had law making authority in new communities on the public domain. In the Peoria speech Lincoln asked: “[I]s not Nebraska, while a territory, a part of us? Do we not own the country? And if we surrender the control of it, do we not surrender the right of self-government?” Nebraska territory was “part of ourselves,” and hence subject to the legislative power of Congress. He reasoned: “If you say we shall not control it because it is ONLY part, the same is true of every other part; and when all the parts are gone, what has become of the whole? What is then left of us? What use for the general government, when there is nothing left for it to govern?”31 The logic of Douglas Democrat popular sovereignty pointed to the disintegration of federal republicanism as the constitutional expression of government by consent of the governed. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was designed to keep the Democracy united against Republican free soil expansionism. Douglas’s policy split the difference between claims of national and state power by treating the decision on territorial slavery as a matter of choice for autonomous

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individuals. Lincoln perceived a tendency inimical to the spirit of republican nationality. He observed: “But you say this question should be left to the people of Nebraska, because they are more particularly interested.” If this was to be the rule, “you must leave it to each individual to say for himself whether he will have slaves.” By analogy, a policy of autonomous choice on territorial slavery tended toward dissolution of the Union. Lincoln asked: “What better moral right have thirty-one citizens of Nebraska to say, that the thirty-second shall not hold slaves, than the people of the thirty-one States have to say that slavery shall not go into the thirty-second State at all?”32 In the language of contemporary rights discourse, popular sovereignty was an argument for a kind of political “right of privacy” intended to immunize the exercise of moral choice against intervention by outside authority in controversies of the deepest and most obvious public significance. The election of 1860 was a referendum on government by popular consent in the American republic. Lincoln’s election marked the beginning of an operational secession movement in the South, provoking a national debate on the meaning of popular sovereignty, slavery in republican society, and the nature of the Union. It was Lincoln’s duty and responsibility, as president-elect and then as chief magistrate in the executive branch, constitutionally to address this question. Popular sovereignty in its secessionist form presented Lincoln with a simpler theoretical, yet more difficult practical challenge to constitutional government by consent than the Douglas Democrat version. To the Southern mind, the political act of secession rested upon an absolute claim of reserved state sovereignty to withdraw from the Union. It was the logical corollary of the voluntary consent on the basis of which the people of the states formed the Union. From the Southern perspective, what legal writers and commentators had long regarded as constitutionally definitive delegation of powers to the government of the Union was in reality conditional in nature. A resumption of reserved rights, which state ordinances of secession justified on the ground of Northern states’ antislavery measures, was not a renunciation of political and legal obligation in the Union. The real meaning of secessionist theory was that citizens and officers of the states were never bound in conscience to obey the laws of the Union. They always had a moral and legal right voluntarily to decide which laws they would obey. If their actions gave the appearance of being under obligation to the laws of the Union, this was merely an accidental circumstance, a matter of expediency rather than an acknowledgment of moral obligation. In their ability to withhold consent, the people of the states in a

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moral and constitutional sense evinced the perfect freedom of independent action.33 Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, in a speech in Congress, January 10, 1861, advanced a theory of secession as an affirmative right. He declared: “Call it what name you will,” the framers of the Constitution “put the rights of the people over and above everything else; and . . . said this was the Government de facto.” Davis asserted that the people never separated themselves from those rights that the fathers declared to be inalienable. They reserved the right to live in independent communities, the right “to which all the powers of Government are subject.”34 Davis viewed the creation of the Republican Party as a “declaration of war” upon Southern institutions. Secession was therefore an exercise of American revolutionary principles in response to antislavery lawlessness. Davis conceded that secession was not a constitutional right in the sense of being conferred in the Constitution. Although the silence of the constitutional text showed that the states never agreed not to withdraw from the Union, the right of secession rested on a deeper political basis. It was an exercise of original sovereignty that was left unimpaired by the states’ ratification of the Constitution. The inference to be drawn was that the union of the states was always contingent and indeterminate, subject to the will of sovereign states and people.35 Davis viewed secession as an affirmative right that imposed duty and obligation on others not to interfere with the actions of the seceding states and people. Secession was the right of revolution in its progressive nineteenth-century form. Davis admonished: “[W]e are confusing language very much. Men speak of revolution; and when they say revolution, they mean blood. Our Fathers meant nothing of the sort. When they spoke of revolution, they spoke of an inalienable right.” The right of revolution was the power of the people to abrogate or modify their form whenever it did not answer the ends for which it was established. And the right was not to be exercised by brute force. Davis declared: “They meant that it was a right; and force could only be invoked when that right was wrongfully denied.” The British denied the right; therefore the revolution for independence was bloody. “If Great Britain had admitted the great American doctrine, there would have been no blood shed.” Davis implored: Are we, in this age of civilization and political progress, when political philosophy has advanced to the point which seemed to render it possible that the millennium should now be seen by

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prophetic eyes; are we now to roll back the whole current of human thought, and again return to the mere brute force which prevails between beasts of prey, as the only method of settling questions between men?36 To claim a right of secession—to conjugate the right of resistance to unjust government into a legal immunity to destroy government at will—was philosophically ambitious. It was also politically risky. Few political observers thought that radical secessionists, after repeated threatening, could actually get out of the Union without bloodshed. Southerners were nevertheless confident that swift exercise of the right of secession would give them the strategic advantage by placing Northern state governments in the moral wrong. Carrying consent theory to its logical conclusion, they hoped that to claim secession as a constitutional immunity would disarm and immobilize opposition. Earlier threats of disunion by Northern states gave Southerners confidence that a strategy of immediate secession would work. Citing these examples, Jefferson Davis subsequently wrote: “The only practical difference was that the North threatened and the South acted.”37 IV In repudiating Lincoln’s election the secession movement magnified the threat to government by consent far beyond that posed by Douglas Democrat popular sovereignty. The challenge facing Lincoln was to carry out the constitutionally recognized will of the people of the United States as expressed in the election of 1860. Lincoln met the crisis of disunion by drawing upon the deposit of authority grounded in the practical reason of federal republican constitutionalism from the beginning of the government. To defend the Constitution in the most exigent circumstances imaginable the Republican Party had first to establish its constitutional legitimacy against the perception that it was disunionist by nature because of its Northern constituency. In 1856 Lincoln observed that the charge of disunionism was “the most difficult objection we have to meet.”38 The way to overcome it was to win the support of the people and claim the right to govern with a constitutional majority. Discussing the possibility of a Supreme Court decision resolving the territorial slavery question, Lincoln said Republicans would submit to whatever decision the Court might make. Would Democrats do

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the same? If not, then “who are the disunionists, you or we? We, the majority, would not strive to dissolve the Union; and if any attempt is made it must be by you, who so loudly stigmatize us as disunionists.” Appealing to the practical reason of the Constitution, Lincoln declared: But the Union, in any event, won’t be dissolved. We don’t want to dissolve it, and if you attempt it, we won’t let you. With the purse and the sword, the army and navy and treasury in our hands and at our command, you couldn’t do it. This Government would be very weak, indeed, if a majority, with a disciplined army and navy, and a well-filled treasury, could not preserve itself, when attacked by an unarmed, undisciplined, and unorganized minority. Lincoln said, “All this talk about the dissolution of the Union is humbug—nothing but folly. We WON’T dissolve the Union, and you SHAN’T.”39 Lincoln’s admonition underscored the nature of the Union as a sovereign government based on the consent of the governed that was competent to defend its existence against revolutionary subversion in whatever form it might appear. Far from the indeterminate, voluntary compact of state-republics posited in secessionist theory, the Union was a national polity constituted on the principles of republican consent and divided government sovereignty. No political party ever regarded the Union, in relation to individual citizens or states, as a voluntary political association, the existence of which depended on a self-legislating and subjective standard of authority. Much as state sovereignty theorists might speculate otherwise, practical experience established the proposition that secession, if actually undertaken, would necessarily require violation of national law, presenting itself as rebellion. It was the nature of the Union, organized on the consent principle that a majority with the power to “compel obedience to the laws enacted . . . would never want to dissolve the Union.” If dissolution should come, said Lincoln, “it would be done, if done at all, by the minority—by the south.”40 He assured political associates in December 1860 that “the right of a state to secede is not an open or debatable question. It was fully discussed in Jackson’s time, and denied not only by him but also by a vote of . . . Congress.”41 Although in all but an explicit party-platform sense disunion was the main issue in the 1860 election, secession created a constitutional

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crisis for which no one was fully prepared. To deal with it required political prudence more than legal virtuosity. In Congress politicians proposed compromise plans to save the Union and recommended that states hold special elections “to enable the whole people” to vote on the proposals.42 Measures were introduced calling for a national constitutional convention to permit the people to express their will on the crisis of the Union. Lincoln was under enormous pressure to indicate the policy of his administration toward the seceding states. The premise on which he acted was his conviction that the election was an authoritative expression of the will of the people that imposed political and moral obligation on the government. It transmitted public opinion in a manner compatible with the exercise of executive authority under the Constitution. In response to the demand that he address the crisis, Lincoln adopted a rhetorical strategy of silence intended to recognize the scope of constitutionally defined public opinion and his duties and responsibility as president-elect. His constitutional duty prevented him from revising positions on the basis of which he was elected. Describing such a course as “dishonorable and treacherous,” Lincoln said: “I will suffer death before I will consent . . . to any concession or compromise which looks like buying the privilege of taking possession of the government to which we have a constitutional right.” To surrender to the demand that his enemies be appeased would “break the bond of faith between public, and public servant” and “distinctly set the minority over the majority.” This was a question not merely of personal honor but of the preservation of constitutional government.43 Nevertheless, at some point, it was necessary to discuss the constitutional nature of the Union in concrete terms in order to refute the secessionist heresy. In a speech in Indianapolis, February 11, 1861, en route to his inauguration, Lincoln for the first time since the election spoke directly to the nature of the Union and the claim of a constitutional right of secession. He chose to engage the state sovereignty question in relation to the issue of coercion and invasion of states. The South denied national authority to compel states to remain in the Union. Lincoln asked: “What, then, is coercion? What is invasion?” He conceded that marching a federal army into South Carolina would be invasion and coercion if the people did not give their consent and were forced to submit. It would not be coercion, however, for the federal government to hold or retake forts belonging to it, or to enforce the laws of the United States for the collection of duties on foreign imports. Lincoln asserted that if Southerners would resist such

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measures as invasion and coercion, then the means of preserving the Union “in their own estimation, is of a very thin and airy character.” In the opinion of such “lovers of the Union,” “the Union, as a family relation, would not be anything like a regular marriage at all, but only as a sort of free-love arrangement—to be maintained on what the sect calls passionate attraction.”44 Lincoln’s irreverent analysis of states’ rights continued in a more sober tone. Referring to a long-standing Democratic rhetorical trope, he inquired: “What is the particular sacredness of a State?” It was not the power and authority of a state as recognized in the Constitution that “all of us agree to” and “abide by.” Rather, it was the assumption “that a State can carry with it out of the Union that which it holds in sacredness by virtue of its connection with the Union.” The “sacredness” of states’ rights referred to “that assumed right of a State, as a primary principle, that the Constitution should rule all that is less than itself, and ruin all that is bigger than itself.” So to conceive the nature of the Union was absurd. If a state and a county were equal in extent of territory and population, Lincoln reasoned, wherein is that State any better than the county? Can a change of name change the right? By what principle of original right is it that one-fiftieth or one-ninetieth of a great nation, by calling themselves a State, have the right to break up and ruin that nation as a matter of original principle . . . to play tyrant over all its own citizens, and deny the authority of everything greater than itself?45 Defining a state as “a certain district of country with inhabitants,” and analogizing its relationship to the national government to that of a county in a state, scandalized advocates of states’ rights.46 That the federal-state relationship should be considered in this light ref lected the extent to which the secession crisis raised the same basic issue concerning the nature of the Union that was presented in the framing of the Constitution. Lincoln’s analogy recalled the thinking of nationalist delegates at the Federal Convention who, in contrast to those who regarded the states “as so many political societies,” viewed them “as districts of people composing one political Society.”47 The genius of the framers was to reconcile, in the practical reason of the Constitution, differing concepts of union that formed the material points in a “controversy” that delegates believed “must be endless.”48 Now, however, the state- and popular-sovereignty activism of the secession movement

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demanded an end to the controversy and a determination of constitutional meaning in the most exigent sense. In the secession crisis Lincoln clarified and confirmed the nature of the Union as a federal republican government founded on the constituent sovereignty of the people of the United States. His determination of constitutional meaning established that the federal government had legitimate authority to defend the existence of the nation. His construction confirmed the orthodox nationalist understanding of the federal principle in circumstances that threatened its extinction by the forces of state sovereignty. With prudential wisdom and moral integrity, Lincoln in the first inaugural justified the ordered liberty of republican government as a matter of constitutional practical reason. His exercise of the executive power in the secession crisis decisively moved the country toward resolution of the debate over the nature of the Union and the meaning of government by the consent of the governed. Lincoln’s task in the first inaugural was to explain why secession was wrong and preservation of national union right. Recurrence to history, political science, and jurisprudence, while relevant, was not in itself sufficient. It was necessary to establish, as a matter of fundamental political law, the reason and justice of federal republican union as the theoretical and practical alternative to minority-rule anarchy. Lincoln declared: “I hold, that in the contemplation of universal law, and the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual.” The permanence of the Union as a national government was necessarily implied in the course of its historical development. The colonies’ resistance to British rule marked the origin of the Union. It was “matured and continued” in the Declaration of Independence, and its perpetuity pledged by the states in the Articles of Confederation. The main object of the Constitution “was ‘to form a more perfect union.’ ” Abstractly considered, perfecting the Union meant fulfilling the ends of republican liberty, equality, and consent for which the nation was founded. In the immediate circumstances, the obligation to form a more perfect Union required the determination that “destruction of the Union, by one, or by a part only, of the States” was not “lawfully possible.” The nature of the Union was such, said Lincoln, “that no State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union.” State ordinances of secession were therefore legally void, and acts of violence in states against the authority of the United States, if undertaken, would be judged insurrectionary or revolutionary according to circumstances.49

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Lincoln’s position was not simply that sound political science did not authorize willful and arbitrary disintegration of government, or that the obligation to obey law in a political community cannot coexist with a right to disobey the same law. The fundamental premise of Lincoln’s policy was that the principle of republican government precluded recognition of secession as a right of the minority. With statesmanlike forbearance and intellectual precision, Lincoln ref lected on the nature of constitutional politics in the federal Union. No organic law, he observed, could be framed “with a provision specifically applicable to every question which may occur in practical administration.” The country was divided by questions, concerning such matters as the return of fugitive slaves and the extension of slavery into the territories, for which the Constitution provided no clear answer. In deciding them the people necessarily divided into majority and minority factions. As a practical matter, “If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the government must cease. There is no other alternative; for continuing the government is acquiescence on one side or the other.” Lincoln summarized the practical reason of republican constitutionalism: “Plainly, the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily, with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people.” In political life the rule of unanimity was impossible, and the rule of a minority “as a permanent arrangement . . . wholly inadmissible.” “Whoever rejects [the majority principle], does, of necessity, f ly to anarchy or to despotism.”50 The first inaugural defined the nature of the Union as a sovereign nation organized on the principle of federal republican freedom. As chief executive, Lincoln confirmed this construction in his management of the Fort Sumter crisis, his response to armed secession, and his conduct of the Civil War. Justification of national republican government by consent required demonstration that secession, far from a rightful claim, was yet another attempt—if the most dangerous and violent—to institute minority rule based on the pretension to absolute state sovereignty. In fact secession was rebellion against majority-rule republican constitutionalism, the real meaning of government by the consent of the governed. Lincoln reversed the course of national disintegration resulting from popular sovereignty in its Northern Democrat and Southern secessionist forms. With the hard-won consent of his fellow citizens, he vindicated the judgment of the people who elevated him to the presidency by treating secession as unjustified revolution.

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Jefferson Davis was correct when he observed after the Civil War that the difference between the sections was that the North threatened disunion and the South acted. The wisdom of the South’s decision continues to be controversial. On a probabilistic basis, the Confederate government had reason to believe that armed secession was justified by its present and future national interest.51 Military defeat, social dislocation, and the abolition of slavery resulting from the war suggest that the South acted unwisely. Of course the North acted on probabilistic grounds in choosing to resist secession. Nevertheless, although the North’s decision for war has been questioned as both unconstitutional and unnecessary, the decision to secede continues to present itself as the more important question for historical and political inquiry. The decision to secede fascinates because in a strange and paradoxical sense it was an affirmation both of liberty and of slavery. It is impossible now to reconcile these contradictory “values,” and it was difficult to do so in the nineteenth century. What saves the South historically from unequivocal moral obloquy in its justification of secession as a self-governing people is modern racism and race consciousness. To be sure, the South was a slave society and the North a free-labor society. The war came in substantial part because it was in the North’s interest to eliminate slavery as it was in the South’s interest to maintain it. Nevertheless, the fact that Northerners shared the assumption of white superiority and black inferiority on which slavery rested tends to equalize the sections in a moral sense. The racial attitudes that united white Americans gave victor and vanquished alike reason for evading the error and unwisdom of secession in defense of slavery. In historical writing a tendency developed to bracket the slavery question, focusing instead on the right of secession as a constitutional question. This move created a more level playing field on which the South might hold its own against the forces of national consolidation.52 Slavery may have been morally wrong, but if the South had a legal right to secede its decision was morally justified. In anticipation of the idea of the autonomous self in twentieth-century moral philosophy, moral weight and priority were accorded the right to choose over the virtue and wisdom of the choice made. A contemporary foreshadowing of the strategy of moral evasion appears in the report of an interview with General Robert E. Lee in April 1865. Lee said that before the war a legitimate casus belli existed on the issue of state sovereignty. The Constitutional Convention debated

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the relative powers of the states in their relation to the general government; unfortunately the question was left unsettled. Lee reasoned that since the question had to be resolved at some time, “the war raised on this issue cannot be considered treason.” The war was “destined to set it at rest,” and when “the South shall be wholly subdued” there would be a surrender of state rights and “its favorite doctrine of secession.” In the spirit of popular sovereignty, Lee further observed that it would be unjust to punish President Davis. Davis acted “as the agent of the whole people, and the acts of the whole people were his acts.” Lee said the fact that Davis was president “made him no more nor less a rebel than the rest.”53 A timely response to the Southern strategy of avoidance came from the author of a review in the Atlantic Monthly of Jefferson Davis’s The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. The reviewer provided a cogent summary of the confusion in Southern thinking on the right of secession and the right of revolution in social contract theory. Davis insisted that secession should be treated as a constitutional question. This was an absurd premise, however, since a constitution is intended to create and maintain, not to destroy a political system. “Secession was revolution,” the author argued, “and the one vital point was whether it was possible, not whether it was legal.” A revolution might be right or wrong, peaceable or bloody, intended to secure rights that are threatened or to erect a despotism. But revolutions could never be constitutional. “In the very nature of things,” the writer explained, “a revolution must be outside the pale of an existing constitution, and must appeal to humanity on grounds entirely foreign to constitutions, written or unwritten.” Davis’s critic observed that at the time it was adopted the Constitution was widely regarded as a compact. It was an experiment, and whether it would last, “or fall victim to a revolution, as its predecessor had done” was uncertain. However, the Constitution endured and made a nation out of a confederacy. The writer concluded: “The question in 1860 was not, Have certain States, or the people of certain States, the constitutional right to withdraw from a compact? but was just what it had always been: Have they sufficient reason and sufficient power to revolutionize the existing government, and substitute something else in its place?”54 Perhaps the most satisfying contemporary vindication of Lincoln’s position on secession, revolution, and self-government appeared in an essay by abolitionist James Freeman Clarke titled Secession, Concession or Self-Possession: Which? Clarke reasoned that if a state considered itself oppressed in the Union, it had a right to leave the Union peaceably.

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Secession was “only another name for peaceable revolution,” and hence an affirmation of the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Like Jefferson Davis, Clarke said that if the British government had agreed to American independence, “our revolution would have been peaceable secession.” With impeccable logic Clarke argued: “The greater includes the less. If a State has a right to obtain its independence by force, it certainly has a right to obtain its independence peaceably. I do not see how those who grant the right of revolution can deny the right of secession.” Clarke was realist enough, however, to consider the practical effect of the syllogism he propounded. A paradox presented itself. If the North used force to keep a state in the Union, and the state attempted to secede by force, Clarke said, “Secession has now become revolution; and what was wrong, if done peaceably, has become right when done forcibly.” There was no sense in this line of reasoning, Clarke wrote, “except perhaps this. It shows that a State is so much in earnest that it is willing to fight for it. It will not act lightly, but will count the cost of fighting for its independence.” To deny secession as a constitutional right thus served the end of stability and order. Clarke concluded: “Thus by granting the right of revolution, but denying the right of secession, we prevent a dissolution of the Union, except under the gravest circumstances. But if we admit a right of secession to a State whenever it will, by passing a vote, we make the Union a rope of sand and destroy the stability of government.”55 The philosophical construction of social contract theory did not solve the problem of authority in the western political tradition, but complicated it. The problem of authority is that while the necessity for it is obvious, its nature and origins are not. The philosopher Yves Simon observes that although in democracy obedience and obligation are required, “there is something paradoxical about one man’s having power to bind the conscience of another man.” Christian doctrine held that God alone could bind men to obey each other, and that he did so by creating human beings who are by nature social and political. In this view, the necessity of government and obedience follows from the nature of community life.56 The secular revelation of individual consent in social contract theory tended to obviate the classical paradigm of “ruling and being ruled.” Hierarchical authority was superseded by the symbiosis of voluntary leadership and voluntary followership in modern democracy, expressed in the idealist language of the people’s sovereignty. In social contract theory the right of revolution was a synthetic concept referring to an

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ascending scale of dissent and disaffection leading to the withdrawal of consent as the ultimate form of resistance to unjust and abusive government. The problem with the theory of liberal authority, however, is that in a practical sense liberty is incapable of creating its own authority. Power is necessary for the realization of liberty in the sense of establishing the authority in relation to which liberty—conceived either as personal independence against arbitrary constraint or as participation in public affairs—can be distinguished and recognized.57 James Madison wrote in 1792 that in Europe charters of liberty were granted by power. In revolutionary America and revolutionary France, by contrast, charters of power were granted by liberty. Madison viewed this change as “a revolution in the practice of the world,” rendered permanent in instruments of government “every word of which decides a question between power and liberty.” Madison believed charters of government, or constitutions, solved the problem of authority. “[P]roclaiming the will of the people and authenticated by the seal of the people,” charters of government were “superior to all others, because they give effect to all others.” As a trust, nothing was more sacred than a constitution, “bound on the conscience by the religious sanctions of an oath.” Madison declared: “As metes and bounds of government, they transcend all other landmarks, because every public usurpation is an encroachment on the private right, not of one, but of all.”58 The American experiment in government by the consent of the governed was daring in conception and ambitious in its libertarian aspirations. Madison was hopeful in the belief that the “citizens of America have peculiar motives to support the energy of their constitutional charters.”59 Events proved his confidence misplaced when proslavery voluntarism corrupted the doctrine of government by consent. In the Civil War crisis of American nationality Lincoln met the challenge of the Founding by recalling the people to the principles of republican self-government rightly understood. Notes 1. Roy P. Basler et al., eds., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–1955), III, pp. 90–91. 2. Patrick Riley, Will and Political Legitimacy: A Critical Exposition of Social Contract Theory in Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 1. 3. Ibid., pp. 10–11. 4. Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. xv.

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5. Yves R. Simon, Philosophy of Democratic Government (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1993 [orig. pub. 1951]), p. 154. 6. Ibid., pp. 190–191. Simon adds: “About all the clarity these subjects admit of will be procured if instruments of clarification are available to whoever needs or cares to use them. To work out such instruments is what political philosophers are paid for.” 7. Dennis J. Mahoney, Bertrand De Jouvenel: The Conservative Liberal and the Illusions of Modernity (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2005), pp. 177–178. 8. Simon, Philosophy of Democratic Government, pp. 186, 193–194. 9. Ibid., p. 184; italics in original. 10. Ibid., p. 194. Referring to American democracy, Simon says the U.S. Constitution, despite having been written with a higher degree of self-consciousness than the English constitution, includes “an unwritten part which gives considerable power to a third assembly, viz., the people of the United States.” That the powers of an informal assembly should not be mentioned in a formal constitutive document was understandable and normal. Nevertheless, Simon writes, “because of this informal assembly and of the unwritten character of its powers, great uncertainties inevitably ensue, and it is the shadow of these uncertainties that democratic government ceaselessly undergoes the temptation of being corrupted” into a system where the people always retain their authority and civil obedience is an appearance and an illusion (pp. 146, 186). 11. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, trans. Gerald E. Bevan (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 204. 12. Joshua Foa Dienstag, “Between History and Nature: Social Contract Theory in Locke and the Founders,” Journal of Politics 58 (1996), pp. 1000–1001. 13. The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: New American Library, 1961), p. 180. 14. Helen E. Veit, Kenneth R. Bowling, Charles Bangs Bickford, eds., Creating the Bill of Rights: The Documentary Record from the First Federal Congress (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 11–12. 15. Rogan Kersh, Dreams of a More Perfect Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 58–103. 16. Mark Helliung, The Social Contract in America From the Revolution to the Present Age (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), p. 39. 17. See Jeffrey K. Tulis, “Constitution and Revolution,” in Sotirios A. Barber and Robert P. George, eds., Constitutional Politics: Essays on Constitution Making, Maintenance, and Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 116–127. 18. CW, I, pp. 108–109. 19. Ibid., p. 278. 20. Ibid., pp. 438–439. 21. Alexander Stephens, A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, 2 vols (Philadelphia, 1868), I, p. 520; Albert Taylor Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor, or Was Secession a Constitutional Right Previous to the War of 1861? (Richmond: Heritage Press, 1907 [orig. pub. 1865]), pp. 143–144; Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Random House, 1948), p. 103. 22. CW, II, pp. 115–116; Thomas J. Pressly, “Ballots and Bullets: Lincoln and the Right of Revolution,” American Historical Review 67 (1962), pp. 649–652. 23. CW, I, p. 348. 24. A. John Simmons, On the Edge of Anarchy: Locke, Consent, and the Limits of Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 152. 25. Helliung, The Social Contract in America, pp. 69–75. 26. John Rowan, Speech on Senator Foot’s Resolution, February 29, 1830 (Washington, D.C., 1830), p. 15. 27. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi said, “there was no organized permanent body of persons, such as constitute a people.” John Berrien of Georgia described the people of California as

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29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

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“an unorganized body of persons who were incompetent to form a constitution.” Jeremiah Clements of Alabama dismissed “the new doctrine of squatter sovereignty” and the claim of “the right of a few individuals to seize upon the public domain and erect themselves into a sovereignty.” Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., 1st Sess., App. (August 12, 1850), 1534, 1525, 1535. Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan said: “Are we to be conducted through some polticometaphysical process of reasoning, and asked to prove, step by step, the right of one hundred thousand American citizens to provide for their own social existence, and to apply for admission into this Union, as you would require proof to establish the ownership of a house?” Senator William Henry Seward of New York stated: “California sprang from the head of the nation, not only complete in population and full armed, but ripe for affiliation with its members.” Ibid., 1529–1530 (August 12, 1850), 261 (March 11, 1850). On the California statehood debate, see Herman Belz, “Popular Sovereignty, The Right of Revolution, and California Statehood,” Nexus: A Journal of Opinion 6 (2001), pp. 3–22. Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., 1st Sess., App. 1527 (August 12, 1850). CW, II, p. 243. Ibid., p. 267. Ibid. The Constitution, Article VI, clause 3, which states that members of the state legislatures and all executive and judicial officers “shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution,” was generally regarded as an oath of obligation and allegiance to the United States. Philip G. Auchampaugh, in his history of the Buchanan administration, says that in dealing with the secession movement Attorney General Jeremiah S. Black proposed a novel theory of the federal principle of divided sovereignty. Black’s idea was “to erase the term ‘allegiance’ from the political science vocabulary in America, merely retaining the term ‘obedience’ to laws both State and Federal.” Philip G. Auchampaugh, James Buchanan and His Cabinet on the Eve of Secession (privately printed, 1926), p. 102. Jefferson Davis, “Remarks on the Special Message on Affairs in South Carolina. Jan. 10, 1861,” in John L. Wakelyn, ed., Southern Pamphlets on Secession November 1860–April 1861 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 130. Ibid., pp. 126–127, 137. Ibid., p. 129. An anonymous South Carolina writer expressed the progressive spirit of secessionism in dismissing the argument, advanced by President James Buchanan among others, that there was no such thing as a right of secession and that the Southern states, believing laws and policies of Northern states to be oppressive, should exercise the right of revolution. Referring to violent rebellion against authority, the writer said Northern states “may resort to the refuge from tyranny which is common to them with the subjects of King and Emperor.” The serf of Russia and an organized state among the United States stood on the same platform of violent resistance. He asserted: “This very doctrine is false on the face of it . . . New words, or words in a new acceptation, announce new ideas or modifications of ideas . . . The terms ‘secede,’ ‘secession,’ are evidences of new modes of government, and of corresponding new remedies for mis-government.” The government formed by the American states is “their ‘constitutional organ,’ their creature, with no independent existence. It has no ‘prerogatives.’ The people owe it no ‘allegiance.’ They owe obedience, as citizens, to the laws; not allegiance, as subjects, to a ruler. They owe obedience so long as they are citizens. They are citizens while their State is in the Union. They cease to be citizens when their State secedes.” Reply to Professor Hodge on the State of the Country (Charleston, 1861), pp. 10, 26. Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, 2 vols (New York: D. Appleton, 1881), I, p. 76. CW, II, p. 350. Ibid., pp. 354–355.

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40. Ibid., p. 372. 41. Memo of John G. Nicolay, December 13, 1860, quoted in Michael G. Burlingame, “ ‘I Will Suffer Death before I Will Consent to Any Concession or Compromise’: President-elect in Springfield, 1860–61” (unpublished manuscript, 2004), pp. 1–2. 42. Congressional Globe, 36th Cong., 2d Sess., February 11, 1861, p. 853. 43. CW, IV, pp. 200, 175. 44. Ibid., p. 195. 45. Ibid., pp. 195–196. 46. Albert Taylor Bledsoe, Is Davis a Traitor; or Was Secession a Constitutional Right Previous to the War of 1861? (Richmond, Va.: Hermitage Press, 1907 [orig. pub. 1865]), pp. 104–106. 47. Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison, with an introduction by Adrienne Koch (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1965), p. 211, remarks of Samuel Johnson. 48. Ibid. 49. Basler et al., Collected Works of Lincoln, IV, pp. 264–265. 50. Ibid., p. 268. 51. Probabilism ref lects the common sense belief that despite the reality of forces beyond the power of individuals to control, “human freedom dialectically weaves itself into the structure of historical causality.” It is a practical expression of belief that “all human and political choices were not inexorably determined.” Daniel J. Mahoney, The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1992), pp. 24–25. 52. This interpretive tendency can be seen in accounts ranging from Charles Francis Adams, Lee at Appomattox and Other Papers (Freeport, N.Y., 1970 [orig. pub. 1902]) to Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War (New York: Random House, 1960). 53. New York Herald, April 29, 1865, p. 5. 54. Book Review, “The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government,” Atlantic Monthly 48 (1881), pp. 405–411. 55. James Freeman Clarke, Secession, Concession or Self-Possession: Which? (Boston: Walher, Wise, and Co., 1861). 56. Simon, Philosophy of Democratic Government, p. 154. 57. Franciszek Draus, ed., History, Truth, Liberty: Selected Writings of Raymond Aron (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 168–173. 58. James Madison, “Charters,” National Gazette, January 18, 1792, http://oll.libertyfund. org, p. 3. 59. Ibid.

CH A P T E R

T H R E E

Abraham Lincoln and the Search for American Identity Je ffrey L e ig h S e dgwick

I. Placing Lincoln in the Context of American Political Thought The title of this essay may strike some as presumptuous, suggesting that Abraham Lincoln’s life (and the tragedy of his death) is fruitfully understood as an attempt to relocate and redefine American identity. But that is precisely what I mean to do. For an examination of Lincoln’s most important speeches, when placed in their appropriate context, appears to me to situate Abraham Lincoln among the great American thinkers of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, all of whom were concerned with answering the very same question: What does it mean to be an American? One must begin, of course, by addressing why Americans of that period were so concerned about matters of identity. Part of the answer is found in the remarkable coincidence of July 4, 1826: barely eighteen months into the second quarter of the nineteenth century, both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, icons both of the American Revolutionary period and identity, passed away. It was as if a page had been turned, a chapter closed. What would be written on the new page, what story told in the new chapter? Lincoln was seventeen years old.

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Equally important, Lincoln comes to political maturity in the immediate post-Jacksonian period. Majority rule, and particularly the consent of national majorities, has come to be irresistible. Hence politics becomes much less personal than it had been for the revolutionary generation; rather, it becomes like a natural force that cannot be resisted. Gone are the rule of gentlemen and the deferential politics of the founding era. Citizens have learned to “get out of the way” of majorities and harbor unto themselves their moral judgments. Politics in the second quarter of the nineteenth century takes on a new orientation. Contrary to Publius’ teaching in The Federalist, apathy comes to be thought of as the characteristic defect of republics, not faction.1 According to Martin Van Buren, most citizens are quite moderate by nature; they are not particularly passionate about public affairs. Preserving a moderate, stable politics thus requires not insulating politics from public input but rather engaging the public through energizing them with the spectacle of partisan conf lict. The spoils system is important here because it impels people to fight strenuously: if you lose, you lose everything; if you win, you win everything. This promise of material reward draws people into politics who would otherwise mind their own business. Another part of the answer to our question is that Americans were on the move, f looding across the Appalachian Mountains and streaming west in a relentless attempt to make themselves anew. Lincoln’s parents were a part of that movement to and settlement of the frontier: first to Kentucky and then to Illinois. We do well to remember Alexis de Tocqueville’s insightful characterization of life on the frontier: there, he said, a mixing up and leveling of society occurs such that natural distinctions among human beings fail to appear. Frontiersmen all appear roughly equal in ability and merit—and, most likely, lack of cleanliness. The fertility of the land and the general ease of settlement fail to call forth extraordinary talent in order to achieve success; the more mundane qualities of perseverance and hard work suffice. The result is a general sameness or loss of identity. This anxiety about identity goes well beyond politics and sociology, however; it extends as well to culture and intellect. Consider one of Lincoln’s contemporaries, Ralph Waldo Emerson. For Emerson, as for Lincoln talking at the same time, the critical question is: “What does it mean to be American?” America had, by the 1830s, become more mobile, more industrial, and better able to escape local or traditional morals and values. It was also becoming more unequal as the conditions on the frontier, though conducive to a local condition of social

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equality, differed markedly from the more advanced conditions in the original thirteen states. In Emerson’s “The American Scholar,” he addresses culture; Lincoln in the Lyceum Speech addresses himself to politics.2 Lincoln speaks to external relations; Emerson speaks to the inner life of human beings. Both think that the old ways (the natural rights teaching of the Declaration?) are no longer sufficient. The proposition that humans enter this world without obligations and without claims may well explain separateness, but it cannot satisfactorily explain community. Emerson’s attempt to understand the whole without resort to traditional religion or to rationalism (both of which are visibly weakening in his time) gives his work its distinctive character. Intuition and the poetic are the only means by which the whole can be explained as tending toward the good. Thus the mission of American scholarship is not truth, but moral living. Scholarship is to uplift and improve society but not necessarily to enlighten it. Pointing to Emerson’s attempt to define anew what it means to be an American, even if only in intellectual and cultural terms, reminds us of the significance of the Transcendental Movement to Lincoln’s project. Put succinctly, Lincoln seems to me to be struggling to reintegrate that which had been sundered since the decline of Puritan piety in New England. The rise of Transcendentalism, and the variety of new forms of religious enthusiasm that erupted in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, can be understood as attempts to preserve the experience of salvation as the New England Puritan elect felt it. As the traditional ground of New England Puritanism (what Tocqueville referred to as the dominant founding experience on the American character) became increasingly subsumed by rationalism or reason, the experience of grace was effectively squeezed out of both religion (by Unitarianism) and politics (by Jacksonianism’s materialism and instrumental rationality). Lincoln thus seems, on perhaps the deepest level, to be engaged in preserving the union among the states and between the inner experience of faith or inspiration and the outward signs or signifiers of that faith apprehensible by others. (I note in passing that these are two very different unions: one of the body politic, the other of the human identity.) Yet one should not presume that, in preserving either of these unions, Lincoln did not redefine or relocate them. To grasp the importance of that point, one needs to understand Lincoln’s critique of American materialism and idealism, the twin legacies of the Founding.

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To say that the twin legacies of America’s origins were materialism and idealism is neither particularly controversial nor very original. In his ref lections on the origins of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville made the very same point. Touring the United States in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Tocqueville observed that America had not one founding experience, but two: one in the South (the Commonwealth of Virginia); and another in the North (the Commonwealth of Massachusetts). The South, Tocqueville observed, was settled by men seeking quick riches. Their restless and turbulent spirit, he said, endangered the young colony. And, of course, their materialism led quickly to the introduction of slavery, a social institution that dishonors labor and makes a mockery of natural rights. The North, on the other hand, was settled by (to quote Tocqueville directly) men seeking the triumph of an idea, Puritanism. Of course, the idealism of the New England colony was not without its problems. Tocqueville noted that Puritan idealism included and perfected the practice of social repression. Creating a democratic republic while preserving natural rights from social, and particularly majority, oppression was, of course, the great task of those who framed the American Constitution. And it is no accident that their handiwork, an extended commercial republic, combined both the materialism and the idealism of America’s twin foundings. The earliest of Lincoln’s significant public utterances is his “Speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois (1838),” the formal title of which is “The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions.” This title hints from the start that Lincoln intends to engage our constitutional framers in debate. In The Federalist, Publius argued that proper institutional design would make the cultivation of civic virtue unnecessary; the constitutional order was a machine in the Garden of Eden that would go of itself. It was just this proposition that distinguished Publius’ modern republicanism from classical republicanism. We should pay particular attention to Lincoln’s argument about the preservation of political institutions, for it may well suggest that Publius was wrong; a certain type of civic virtue (a genius of the American people, perhaps) may be necessary for Publius’ carefully constructed institutions to work. Early in his speech, delivered when he was but twenty-nine years old, Lincoln noted that were America to fail, its defeat would not come at the hands of a foreign aggressor: “If destruction be

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our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”3 Whether attributed to American exceptionalism or to the old Puritan notion of America as a City on a Hill, Lincoln here sounds a familiar and deeply American tone. Whereas most countries have ancient and traditional neighboring enemies that they fear greatly, this country is understood as uniquely fragile and yet oddly tough; others cannot beat us, but we are constantly in danger of defeating ourselves. But what form would this suicide take? The answer lies in two examples around which Lincoln’s entire speech is constructed. The first is placed in Mississippi. Lincoln says, In the Mississippi case, they first commenced by hanging the regular gamblers: a set of men, certainly not following for a livelihood, a very useful, or very honest occupation; but one which, so far from being forbidden by the laws, was actually licensed by an act of the legislature, passed but a single year before. Next, negroes, suspected of conspiring to raise an insurrection, were caught up and hanged in all parts of the state: Then, white men, supposed to be leagued with the negroes; and finally, strangers, from neighboring states, going thither on business, were, in many instances, subjected to the same fate. Thus went on this process of hanging, from gamblers to negroes, from negroes to white citizens, and from these to strangers; till, dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every roadside; and in numbers almost sufficient to rival the native Spanish moss of the country, as a drapery of the forest.4 In a very short passage, Lincoln paints a provocative and troubling scenario. First, notice that the law has, in this case, sanctioned a useless and dishonest profession. This is deeply troubling to those who believe that the law should both forbid vice and prohibit socially unproductive activity. It also appears to concede Thoreau’s point: man-made law, conventional justice, is f lawed. We can, perhaps, sympathize with the good citizens of Mississippi who, acting from utilitarian motive, decide to do good by removing the useless from their midst. And Lincoln certainly doesn’t question their assessment of the social utility of gamblers. But Lincoln tells of a progression of hangings that produces not only a visually stunning image, but also an outcome at odds with the initial motive. For notice that what began with eliminating the useless ended with an attack on

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businessmen coming to Mississippi to enrich the lives of the inhabitants by importing goods and buying local produce. Lincoln here strikes a theme familiar to readers of Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson.5 The public just seems to get it wrong. In this case, they mean well, but they go too far. Their prudent calculations of self-interest go awry. Now consider Lincoln’s second example—the seizure in St. Louis of an apparently peaceful man, minding his business, by an enraged mob that chained him to a tree and burned him to death. Lincoln presents this second example very cleverly, for he initially says little about the mob’s motive. The reader is invited to feel outrage or horror at the treatment of the victim. Then Lincoln tells the reader that the man was guilty of an outrageous murder; he had killed a leading citizen of the community. And indeed, Lincoln notes that had the mob not killed the man, the law certainly would have sentenced him to death. But then we might wonder, what is the tragedy here? The mob got the right man; there was no mistake. And yet Lincoln believes the story to be tragic. Why? Certainly, the righteous indignation of the mob is understandable. And shouldn’t we be troubled if the public could witness a murder and not be upset or outraged? What makes these two stories important is that in each case, citizens chose to “take the law into their own hands.” In the Mississippi case, they trusted in their calculation of self- (and social) interest or utility. In Missouri, the mob followed its sense of righteous indignation (grounded in moral sensibility). Lincoln appears to be arguing that the specific form suicide will take in the United States is a disregard for the law. Overcoming this problem requires cultivating the attachment of the people to the law. But how might this be done? One way is through a rational calculation of one’s interest. Since self-interested citizens manifest that interest in the acquisition of property, obedience to law can be encouraged if all are taught that law secures and regulates property. This particular insight, however, has a troubling implication. Southern slaveholders maintained that their slaves were property in which they held legal title. Abolitionism thus struck at the very foundation of Southern attachment to the law. The ticklish business was thus how to wean slaveholders from their “property” without destroying their commitment to the regime and its laws. A second way to secure obedience to the law is through religion or patriotism (a sort of civic religion). Notice that the beginning and end of the Lyceum Speech deliberately seek to arouse patriotic sentiments. And note as well that Lincoln asserts the Founders believed in the equality of all men. Their refusal to abolish slavery immediately

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was a concession to necessity; it was neither an endorsement of slavery’s moral standing nor a mark of studied indifference. Having ref lected on the necessity of obeying the law, Lincoln turns to an ironic and quite sophisticated ref lection of human ambition. (Again, think about the way in which this topic amounts to a public questioning of Publius’ work; remember that the Federalists thought that the unleashing of self-interest in a modern commercial republic would provide stability and safety to all.) The transition is not quite as abrupt as it may appear, for Lincoln suggests that when lawlessness becomes widespread as people “take the law into their own hands,” the rest of the “good folk” (people who normally obey the law and go about their business) become frightened. In fear, they turn increasingly to men “of sufficient talent and ambition” who promise them safety in return for political power. Such “men on white horses” offer safety but at the cost of freedom. Here Lincoln touches a raw nerve, for how many times in human history have we witnessed democracies voting themselves into tyrannies? Ref lect on the commonly understood reference to “bread and circuses.” One should not miss the irony of the discussion Lincoln is about to initiate, for his friend and law partner William Herndon once remarked that Abraham Lincoln’s ambition was like a little engine that “knew no rest.” One might well wonder whether the young Lincoln of 1838 is ref lecting on that other Lincoln who, twenty-two years later, would unilaterally suspend the constitutionally guaranteed right to habeas corpus or close the post office to “treasonable correspondence.” Consider now the two-edged phenomenon of human ambition. At the time of the Revolution and Founding, ambition, the sort of selfinterest that seeks fame and glory through great deeds, is an asset to the United States. It leads men to risk their freedom, their wealth, and their very lives for a risky venture, an experiment. Leaders such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison served their country at considerable cost to their personal fortunes. But before we shed tears for them, we should realize that they may willingly have given up material wealth for the pursuit of fame, the type of fame available only to those who rule greatly, and by their deeds achieve a certain measure of immortality. But what happens to these same ambitious individuals once the experiment is over, the deeds done, the Revolution won, the Constitution written? Certainly some may be satisfied being industrial giants of the sort of Rockefeller, Carnegie, or Mellon. But some won’t. Disdaining mere wealth, such individuals will seek the opportunity to win the

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kind of fame available only to those who truly rule. Such individuals will find their ambition frustrated by the very thing that won the Founders their fame. The Founding Fathers acquired their fame by creating out of whole cloth a new nation and form of government. Yet that form of government prevents such rule to subsequent generations by such devices as separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, and the notion of natural rights that limit the scope and power of government. Of ruling ambition, Lincoln observed: It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen. Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us? And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.6 In this remarkable analysis, Lincoln lumps together the moral crusader who would free the slaves with the tyrant who would enslave freemen. Both are equal in their determination to rule. Both can be frustrated only by a people united in their commitment to stand equal before the law and to insist that their fellow citizens do likewise. Hence the necessity to cultivate the attachment of the people to the law. The very end of the Lyceum Speech is one of the most remarkable pieces of political rhetoric in the American lexicon, for it combines in one paragraph a stirring appeal to patriotic sentiment with a precisely reasoned analysis of the problem of preserving the regime. It thus attempts to reintegrate what had been split asunder with the collapse of Puritan piety: the experience of inner religious (patriotic?) fervor with the reasoned calculation of external effects. It combines Jacksonian political cunning with the soaring spirit of Transcendentalism. Speaking of the memories of the Revolution, Lincoln said, They were the pillars of the temple of liberty; and now, that they have crumbled away, that temple must fall, unless we, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason. Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating,

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unimpassioned reason must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense. Let those materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality and, in particular, a reverence for the Constitution and laws; and, that we improved to the last; that we remained free to the last; that we revered his name to the last; that, during his long sleep, we permitted no hostile foot to pass over or desecrate his resting place; shall be that which to learn the last trump shall awaken our Washington.7 Consider for a moment the feelings evoked by this passage; it stirs the blood and arouses the spirit. It appeals not to cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason—far from it! Rather it, like the speech as a whole, surrounds a tightly reasoned argument with religious and patriotic imagery. Both reason and civic religion meet at a single point—obey the law, revere the Constitution, protect your freedom. And finally, consider what this argument means in light of Publius’ new science of politics.8 Whereas Publius depended on institutional design to make the cultivation of civic virtue unnecessary, Lincoln candidly admits that institutions cannot withstand the assaults of the ambitious, those of the “family of the lion and the tribe of the eagle,” unless those institutions are backed by a particular genius of the people. That genius, which amounts to a belief in the equality of all before the law, cannot be safely assumed. Lincoln had to make the Lyceum Speech precisely because that civic genius was eroding; not being selfsustaining, it needed to be restored. III. Offering an Alternative: Civic Friendship Were Lincoln to stop here, with a simple exhortation to equality before the law—simple law-abidingness—his legacy of freedom would still be impressive. However, four years after the Lyceum Speech, in 1842, Lincoln significantly extended his reformulation of American identity beyond mere equality in law abidingness. In his “Address to the Washington Temperance Society of Springfield, Illinois,” Lincoln addressed American idealism and offered a significant modification of it. Before turning to the argument of that speech, perhaps I need to pause for a moment to defend my argument’s reliance on Lincoln’s rhetoric. After all, Marx taught that rhetoric is “mere words” and that the truly important cause of human progress is the underlying mode of production. Following his argument, I should be examining the

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clash of a Southern agrarian slave economy with a Northern industrial wage-labor economy. But one need not be a Marxist to be skeptical of rhetoric. While speech may be said to be our best window into intentionality, we also know that words can mislead or dissemble. Far from offering reasons behind actions, words can offer rationalizations. And yet taking Lincoln at his word, literally, is important, especially in the democratic republic he occupied. Consider this: the second quarter of the nineteenth century in the United States was a period of rapid expansion of the electorate. I earlier noted the role of the Jacksonian patronage (spoils) system in enticing citizens to take an interest in and actively participate in politics. This was a dramatic change from the elite, deferential political culture of the early constitutional period. As the suffrage expanded, so did the need for civic education to prepare new voters for their civic role. Now the form that civic education takes in any particular regime depends on the character of that regime. Monarchies can entrust civic education to the royal family’s tutor; aristocracies can entrust civic education to elite schools and universities that serve the sons (and daughters?) of the well-born. But democracies need something more: as they extend political participation more broadly, they must also extend the availability of civic education. I would argue that popular public rhetoric serves such a purpose. And understanding the centrality of political rhetoric to political life may be especially necessary in a regime characterized by limited government, separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, and the proliferation of civil rights, all of which served to fragment and impede rule in the classical sense. Think now about modern western democracies where life is divided into public and private spheres. The highest questions, touching on the definition of the “good life” (such as justice, morality, and religion) are assigned to the private sphere and jealously guarded from state intrusion. The public sphere, by way of contrast, is concerned with questions of “mere life” such as the security of life and property. The boundary between these two spheres is marked by private or civil rights that prevent the state from using law to cross the boundary between the public and the private. For example, consider the commonly heard remark, “you can’t legislate morality.” To the extent that Lincoln sought to change Americans’ views, especially on matters of morality, he had to do that by reaching into their private lives. Because he could not do this with the force of law, Lincoln had to use rhetoric or speech. In short, it is in Lincoln’s speeches that one finds

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him reaching out to his fellow citizens in order to reshape their understanding and their identity. That the Temperance Address is focused on American idealism is disclosed in several remarkable references to the Bible and to religion. The first comes in the celebratory second paragraph, where Lincoln is congratulating the temperance (abolition?) movement on its recent success. Lincoln observes that “The cause itself seems suddenly transformed from a cold abstract theory, to a living, breathing, active, and powerful chieftain, going forth ‘conquering and to conquer.’ ”9 The phrase “conquering and to conquer,” which Lincoln enclosed in quotation marks, comes from the Book of Revelations 6:2. Upon the breaking of the first seal by the Lamb, the first of the four horsemen of the apocalypse appears. This horseman was seated on a white horse; he wore a crown and rode out conquering and to conquer. This intimates that a temperance society is like a warrior, going forth to conquer and to rule. But this crowned warrior on a white horse comes as a herald of the impending Apocalypse; the end is drawing near. Note as well that Lincoln says the temperance movement is “just now” becoming successful. Why “just now?” Lincoln says that earlier temperance efforts were misguided. First, the messenger was wrong. Earlier advocates of temperance had been too distant from their subject. They lacked “approachability” and thus were seen as being unsympathetic or disinterested. This distance destroyed their ability to convince or persuade their audience. Lincoln ends his fourth paragraph by saying that only a reformed drinker has the requisite approachability to convince his audience; this is because he has seen both sides of the issue himself and is the only person in a position to know truly of what he speaks. Second, the message itself was wrong. Lincoln criticizes the form of earlier temperance appeals saying, When the dram-seller and drinker, were incessantly told, not in the accents of entreaty and persuasion, diffidently addressed by erring man to an erring brother; but in the thundering tones of anathema and denunciation, with which the lordly judge often groups together all the crimes of the felon’s life, and thrusts them in his face just ere he passes sentence of death upon him, that they were the manufacturers and material of all the thieves and robbers and murders that infested the earth; that their houses were the workshops of the devil; and that their persons should be

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shunned by all the good and virtuous, as moral pestilences—I say, when they were told all this, and in this way, it is not wonderful that they were slow, very slow, to acknowledge the truth of such denunciations, and to join the ranks of their denouncers, in a hue and cry against themselves.10 Lincoln suggests here that a denunciation of a sinner is counterproductive. It simply drives the sinner away. Then how might one make a successful temperance appeal? The newer and more successful message of the temperance movement has two characteristics. First, note that Lincoln takes a rather obvious slap at the ministry. He suggests that the temperance movement was formerly too dominated by ministers. Why this is significant becomes readily apparent if one thinks of the architecture of a church: the minister stands up in the pulpit, over the heads of the congregation, literally speaking down to them. Rather than passing judgment from above, Lincoln encourages the temperance advocate to go down among the congregation, if you will, and address the heart. Second, Lincoln advocates establishing a friendship, demonstrating sympathy, and like interests as the key to persuasion. This appeal to the heart, to the feelings, is crucial if the reason is ever to be affected. However, Lincoln notes, once the heart is captured, “you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause, if indeed that cause really be a just one.” He closes this section of the argument with the following admonition: “assume to dictate to his judgment, or to command his action, or to mark him as one to be shunned and despised” and the man will ever be beyond reach; he will never be persuaded. On one level of the Temperance Address, Lincoln seems to be speaking primarily of the best way to couch a reform appeal. He observes not that feelings rule or dominate the individual, but rather that feelings provide a socially useful avenue to guiding human conduct, hence the importance of friendship and like interests as ways to appeal to a fellow citizen. On another level, Lincoln’s Temperance Address speaks troublingly to the issue of whether any morally or religiously motivated reform movement can have other than disastrous consequences. Whether we speak of the temperance movement, the abolition movement, or the Progressive movement yet to come, Lincoln poses profoundly disturbing questions about American idealism and its root in religion. Lincoln deliberately likens religion to the ambitious warlord who, mounted on his white horse, brings on the apocalypse. What emerges

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from the speech is the juxtaposition of two alternatives for a community: the strife and instability of a religious crusade, on the one hand, and the relative peace and calm of friendship, on the other. Lincoln’s characterization of friendship in a political community places heavy reliance on the sharing of interests and the deliberate avoidance of overtly moral claims and judgments. His use of speech seems deliberately to conceal moral appeals within the garb of patriotic sentiment and calculated (and, hopefully, enlightened) self-interest. Thus we find that friendship is far more than a tactic for winning over one’s opponents. Indeed, for Lincoln as for Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, friendship becomes almost an end in itself, the very definition of a truly human community. Nearly twenty years later, and in a far more dangerous setting for Americans, Lincoln returned to his theme of friendship. Speaking at his first inauguration, Lincoln cautiously addressed the forces of secession, reassuring them that he had no intention of interfering with the institution of slavery in the States where it existed. Further, he noted that he, like all members of Congress, swore an oath to support the whole Constitution, including the provision to return fugitive slaves to their owners. And he carefully pointed out that the logic of secession was the essence of anarchy. But putting aside arguments of law and logic at the end, Lincoln appealed not to self-interest or to idealism, but rather to friendship, famously saying: I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.11 Earlier in his inaugural, Lincoln called attention to the difference between the United States and the domestic union of man and wife. He noted that while husband and wife may divorce and “go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other,” the parts of our political union cannot. The cumulative effect of that observation and his closing paragraph is to suggest an appeal to fraternity, for while a married couple may divorce, siblings cannot. Now a cynic may suggest that Lincoln’s closing paragraph is nothing more than soaring rhetoric, that the possibility of friendship between

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North and South was long gone, that the gulf between North and South was too wide to be bridged by patriotic memories and fraternal appeals. Before succumbing too quickly to that pessimistic view, it is well to remember that friendship depends on estrangement. After all, it makes no sense to speak of being a friend to oneself. The beginning of friendship is the recognition that the one to whom I would be a friend is not me. The completion of friendship is the willed decision to reach across the gulf between us and to be friends despite all that sets us apart. Lincoln’s appeal to friendship is thus not naïve, but rather hopeful that the obvious estrangement between the North and South had not grown into alienation. IV. An Opportunity Lost: The Tragedy of Lincoln’s Assassination By the end of the first quarter of 1865, the Civil War was in its last days. A little more than a month after Lincoln’s second inaugural address, Robert E. Lee would surrender the Army of Northern Virginia, effectively bringing the Civil War to an end. If ever there was a time for celebration and rejoicing by the victors, Lincoln’s inaugural was it. No one would be surprised if the reelected president spoke to the victorious North and sounded a triumphal note for those who had sacrificed so much. But Lincoln spoke much more brief ly. Equally significant, Lincoln treated the contestants in the Civil War as equals. Consider the following: Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conf lict might cease with or even before the conf lict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. And further: If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible

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war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?12 Lincoln’s second inaugural carefully sets both North and South on an equal plane, each facing the same God’s judgment and paying the same butcher’s bill. By so doing, he preserves the possibility of friendship, or at least restoring the old fraternal relations, between North and South. In this inaugural address, one hears the echoes of his Temperance Address some twenty-two years earlier. His appeal for malice toward none and charity for all stands in stark contrast to the increasing calls for a total reconstruction of the American South by the victorious North. In a very short time, Lincoln would be dead and his appeal for charity for all would be eclipsed by a stern radical Republican triumphalism imposed on the South. Reconstruction would last almost long enough to give way to Progressivism, a political movement deeply informed by Protestantism and the Social Gospel. Lincoln’s appeal to civic friendship as an alternative to materialism or idealism faded as an alternative formulation of the American identity. And that, perhaps, is the greatest tragedy of Lincoln’s assassination. His thoughtful attempt to define American identity anew, to push it beyond the twin alternatives of materialism and idealism, each of which he saw to be insufficient, failed to take root. Friendship is not uncharacteristic of Americans, but it has not found a foothold in our civic identity except, perhaps, in the final stanza of the first verse of America the Beautiful where God is asked to crown America’s good with brotherhood. Notes 1. For Madison on faction, see Jacob Cooke, ed., The Federalist (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), no. 10, pp. 56–65. 2. See Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar: An Oration Delivered Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, August 31, 1837,” in Joel Porte, ed., Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: The Library of America, 1983), pp. 51–71. 3. Roy P. Basler, ed., Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings (New York: De Capo Press, 2001), p. 77. 4. Ibid., p. 78. 5. Mark Twain, “Pudd’nhead Wilson,” in Guy Cardwell, ed., Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1982), pp. 913–1056. 6. See Basler, Abraham Lincoln, p. 83.

72 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Jeffrey Leigh Sedgwick Ibid., p. 84. See Cooke, ed. The Federalist, no. 9, pp. 51–52. See Basler, Abraham Lincoln, p. 131. Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p. 588. Ibid., pp. 792–793.

CH A P T E R

FOU R

The Magnanimity of Abraham Lincoln: “What I Deal with Is Too Vast for Malicious Dealing” Wi l l i am L e e M i l le r

I am pleased to be here, in this place on this day: in Richmond, on Lincoln’s 200th birthday. And I am pleased to speak in this program that examines leadership, about this greatest of American leaders. Our theme tonight is Lincoln’s magnanimity. But before I expand on that theme I have two introductory digressions. The first introductory digression has to do with two interwoven current events: the 200th birthday of the president who brought a new birth of freedom; and the beginning of a presidency that is one dramatic fruit of that newly born freedom. Because Obama’s inauguration came so near Lincoln’s 200th birthday, and because during his rise the newly inaugurated president had referred to Lincoln so often and had been linked to Lincoln so persistently—he was a tall, gangly lawyer/politician from Illinois, who had almost exactly as little and as much “experience” in office as Lincoln had, and in the same places; he had come to national attention as Lincoln had largely through the distinction of a particular speech; and in order to make sure no one missed the point, he had started his campaign on the weekend of Lincoln’s birthday two years ago in front of the Old State Capitol in Springfield where Abraham Lincoln delivered his House Divided speech—one was sure references to Lincoln would be a prominent feature of the inaugural address.

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On Election Day when he gave the victory speech in Grant Park there were Lincoln’s words: “We are not enemies, but friends . . . though passion may have strained it, it must not break our bonds of affection.”1 And the Lincoln references increased as the inauguration approached. They served apple cinnamon sponge dessert at the inaugural dinner because Lincoln was supposed to like apples; they arranged a special train trip from Philadelphia through Wilmington and Baltimore specifically retracing Lincoln’s entrance into Washington; they made conspicuous visits to the Lincoln Memorial and held a grand show on its steps; they made a point of using at the inaugural ceremony the Bible, bound in burgundy velvet, that Lincoln himself used; they referred to the Lincoln book Team of Rivals 2 so insistently as to give the author of an alternative book about President Lincoln acute heartburn; they announced as the theme of the whole inauguration the phrase from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address “A New Birth of Freedom.” Therefore, surely the new president’s inaugural on January 20 would be an orgy of Lincoln references. And so one listened wondering just which Lincoln quotations the new president would use. But wait—there was nothing about Lincoln in the early going. In the middle—strong stuff about our responsibility, but no Lincoln. And then as the new president came to the end of his address, a great figure from our past was indeed invoked—but it was George Washington, not Abraham Lincoln. Can this be? Then afterwards, when one could read through the address carefully one found what might be, after all, a quite subtle Lincoln connection. In his citation of the long, rugged path that our forbears followed so that we might have a better life, President Obama said this: “For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.” Wait a minute—“Endured the lash of the whip?” Presidents evoking the Americans’ shared immigrant past usually do not include those who came not from Europe, but from Africa, not by choice but in the horrors of the slave ship. But now we have a president who when evoking the hardships of our shared ancestors, can include those who endured the “lash of the whip.” There is only one other president who could refer to that terrible symbol, the lash—Abraham Lincoln. In the most remarkable sentences ever written by an American president in the next to last paragraph of

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his second inaugural, before he got to charity for all and malice toward none, Lincoln wrote this astounding passage: Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”3 “Every drop of blood drawn by the lash” matched by one drawn by the sword—a vision of a terrible justice. Obama the black man and Lincoln the Emancipator are the two American presidents who could refer in that trenchant way—with the dark symbol of the lash—to the original sin of the American nation. Lincoln’s final emancipation proclamation invited black men into the Union armed services, and one hundred and eighty thousand served; that had to mean their continuing presence and citizenship. That was the moment when the racial definition of the nation was defeated, when whiteness and Americanism were separated, when a biracial America at least in theory was secured, and when the election one day of Barack Obama was made possible. That is the real connection between Presidents Lincoln and Obama. *

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Speaking of President Obama, I see that he is holding fort today out in Springfield about Lincoln. One can surely imagine that—given the current economic scene—he might tell this Lincoln story. A man who was seeking presidential favors kept telling the president all that he had done to get him elected, and finally Lincoln turned to him and said “So you think you got me elected president?” and the man answered, “Yes, under Providence, I think I did.” “Well,” said Lincoln, “it’s a pretty mess you’ve got me into. But I forgive you.” *

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Now a second introductory digression: We will be privileged tonight to hear, after I subside, the University Orchestra playing Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait. Copland’s Portrait

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was composed in 1942 in the dark days of World War II. It includes, along with the music, the reading of words that Lincoln wrote in some earlier dark days in 1862. By the summer of that year it had become clear that the war was not going to be short or easy. Lincoln made the huge decision that he would issue a proclamation, freeing slaves in the rebel areas as a military measure. In September he announced that decision to the public, saying that he would issue the order on January 1, 1863, for those areas still in rebellion. Frederick Douglass and many others worried. Would he actually do it when the time came? Meanwhile, then, in that period of high anticipation, waiting for that momentous date—a date when American history might be split in half—the president delivered to Congress his annual message on the first of December 1862—just a month before the Emancipation Proclamation might be issued. Presidential annual messages then (the equivalent of today’s State of Union) were not delivered to Congress by the president himself but were sent over as a document to be read to the assembled congress by a clerk. So picture the scene on that day in December 1862. The clerk is droning through this annual survey, covering the whole range of government actions in the way such messages do, material from the census, for example, and a report on finances and on the post office. One can imagine that not all the congressmen listened attentively. As he neared the end of the message, Lincoln finally mentioned the topic of slavery and then the tone shifted, and if one were listening one might have sensed that something powerful was coming—the way citizens would sense, a long time in the future, the hair on one’s neck bristling when a Texan president was coming to the moving moment when he would say, “And we shall overcome.” Were the Congressmen snoozing, bustling around, chatting, slipping in and out of the chamber? Did a couple of alert ones, noticing what was suddenly being intoned over them from the podium, look at each other in wild surmise? They were the first to hear, if they did hear, some phrases that would ring forever thereafter in American memory. First came an appeal to think anew: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall our selves, and then we shall save our country.”4

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Then came an extraordinary appeal to face up to the needs of the time. Aaron Copland put it first: Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility.5 Aaron Copland then finishes with selections from Lincoln elsewhere—from one Lincoln-Douglas debate, from a letter, and finally, the last part of the Gettysburg Address, including the phrase “a new birth of freedom.” But Lincoln himself follows what we have just read with one surpassingly majestic nugget, in which he stated with unmatched concentration the national accomplishment of which he was to be the leader. “In giving freedom to the slaves, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”6 Lincoln’s two great purposes were thus joined: Giving freedom to the slave assured freedom to the free, the two tied together, both honorable, and joined together they will “nobly save” the best that this nation represents to all the world. *

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Now to our theme: Lincoln’s remarkable magnanimity. While he was bringing about the huge accomplishments that these two digressions indicate—bringing freedom to the slave and assuring freedom to the free and bringing a new birth of freedom that would one day bring down a racial barrier—he did so, as he would famously say, with malice toward none and charity for all. He would show magnanimity to rivals and critics, mercy to the accused, patience with insolent generals, eloquent sympathy to the bereaved, generosity to associates and subordinates, non-vindictiveness to enemies. He made reference to avoiding malice and to not seeking revenge and to not planting thorns often enough both in public speeches and

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in private letters, both in informal comment and in formal orders, to indicate sufficiently deeply for the words and ideas to come to his pen and his lips repeatedly, and to be ref lected in his deeds repeatedly. Lincoln as a younger man did not necessarily exhibit these qualities. He was ambitious; he had an intense desire to leave a scar upon the earth with his name attached; he had strong opinions; he had a considerable sense of his own powers, those powers included a talent for satire and mockery. That meant he sometimes made use of what has been called his “power to hurt”; his mockery—his “skinning” of an opponent—was reportedly so pointed as to leave one victim weeping. But as he grew older and stepped onto the national stage, that sort of thing stopped. There is a common notion that all power corrupts, and the more power you get the worse the corruption becomes. But that is not what happened with Abraham Lincoln. Power did not corrupt him, but something like the reverse. The higher he rose and the greater the power he gained, the worthier his conduct would become. It is significant what you choose to praise in somebody else. In 1850, Lincoln had the perhaps uphill work of composing a eulogy for General Zachery Taylor. He singled out as the point to praise an occasion when Taylor had strong reason to take revenge on another general who had disparaged him in Washington and he had an opportunity for payback, but didn’t do it. Lincoln said of Taylor: “he pursued no man with revenge.” So also with Lincoln, the selecting of that story tells more about the eulogist than about the eulogee. Disavowing all revenge would be a theme of his presidency. In 1855, he badly wanted to be elected senator from Illinois by the state legislature, and had by far the most votes on the first ballot, but five Democrats who agreed with him on policy refused on ballot after ballot to give him the votes he needed because he was a Whig, and he finally, in order to save the policy, had to tell his voters to vote for their man Lyman Trumbull, even though Trumbull had started way behind. Mary Todd Lincoln watching from the balcony never forgave the five Democrats or Trumbull or even Trumbull’s wife, who had been one of her oldest friends. She really knew how to hold a grudge. But her husband did not—he held no grudge and went on to work with them all. When in 1860 Lincoln was elected president, the more severe test would come: Could he still be the generous person in the highest office and in wartime? On that point I want to tell a story about a previous visit of mine to Richmond. On the turbulent day when a memorial to Abraham Lincoln was dedicated over at the Tredegar Iron works, three of us

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gave talks in the morning at the Virginia Historical Society; mine was about the magnanimous President Lincoln, as it is here tonight, and the other two speakers dealt also with the benign side of the Lincoln story. We did not know that a writer for the conservative journal The Weekly Standard, who was in town covering the furor over the monument, was present out there in the audience hearing us talk. This conservative writer would later write that evening, when Richmond’s leading Lincoln-hating neo-Confederate asked him what we all had said about Lincoln, he answered: “They said Lincoln was a wimp.” The neo-Confederate’s sneering response was: “Jesus, even I don’t think he was a wimp.” Well, I don’t think he was a wimp, either. I say he was so far from being a wimp that he did not have to do or say macho things in order to avoid being called one. When I started to write the book called President Lincoln I could not help but see the centrality of his implacable resolve.7 He did his duty as a statesman—and that certainly required the unbenign unwimpish assertion of purpose, the determined use of coercive force, and the willingness to undertake a long list of bold irregularities. And yet, Lincoln’s strength of will did not have the same shape as that of the Napoleonic strong men admired by those who sneer at so-called wimps. Lincoln’s strong purposive action did not feature the overt assertion of the proud ego, or any swaggering joy in dominating. Lincoln’s resolution and strength of will did not spring from, or lead to, mindless stubbornness or egotistical willfulness. Lincoln’s high resolve arose, rather, from the response of a rigorously dutiful intellect to a moral imperative found in the objective situation. A strong resolve was of great importance, but only as it rested on the stability of truth. That grounding in reason, duty, and truth rather than ego and will meant that Lincoln could be resolute without being ruthless, he could admit mistakes, he could change his mind; and—our main point tonight—he could combine generosity with his steadfast resolve. *

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I could make a long list of men against whom President Lincoln might have had resentments, but didn’t. He put up with a great deal of insubordination from General George McClellan—his secretaries thought more than he should have. After one instance of McClellan’s rudeness, Lincoln famously said: “Never mind. I will hold McClellan’s horse if

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he will bring us victories.” That was always the point: the objective accomplishment not any deference to himself. Salmon Chase not only gave encouragement to a movement to substitute himself for Lincoln as the nominee for president in 1864; he did so while he was still a member of Lincoln’s cabinet. Lincoln said don’t change horses in the middle of the stream, and was renominated by the Republicans. The insatiable Chase thereupon hinted that he might now be willing to accept the Democratic nomination. As historian William Zornow observed: “Chase apparently would not only swap horses but was willing to exchange streams as well.” Lincoln’s retaliation? He appointed Chase chief justice of the United States. The supreme example was Edwin Stanton. While I was writing the book Lincoln’s Virtues I discovered that Edwin Stanton—along with a team of high-powered Eastern lawyers—had treated Lincoln disdainfully in a major national trial, the McCormick Reaper trial back in 1855 in Cincinnati.8 I spread that story across the pages of a full chapter, chapter sixteen if you want to look it up in your copy of Lincoln’s Virtues. The high-powered Eastern lawyers regarded Lincoln as a hick lawyer from downstate Illinois, whom they had to add to the defense team only to satisfy the Illinois clients. But Lincoln took the case very seriously—it was the biggest case he had ever been involved in; he investigated reapers on his own, wrote out a defense, made the trip on his own to Cincinnati where the trial was held—and then found that the defense team scarcely spoke to him. The high-powered lawyers did not read Lincoln’s brief, and when the other side objected to too many lawyers on their side, dropped him from the case. There he was, stuck in Cincinnati with his blue umbrella. The defense team did have a younger lawyer whom they wanted, but it was not Lincoln: it was Edwin Stanton, who fully participated in the disdainful treatment of Lincoln. Usually Lincoln would return from a trip bubbling with entertaining stories. But not this time. His partner William Herndon remembered Lincoln telling him not only that he had been rather “roughly handled by that man Stanton,” but also that he, Lincoln, actually overheard through a slightly open door Stanton saying “Where did that long-armed creature come from, and what can he expect to do in this case?” Incredible as it must have been to the high-powered defense team, just five years after their serial snubbing, that ill-dressed, long-armed fellow from downstate Illinois turned out to be the president of the

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United States. Stanton was a Democrat who had joined the Buchanan administration in its last days; of course he did not vote for Lincoln. As one of the few in Washington who knew this new president he talked about him disdainfully; he was the source of an epithet for Lincoln that McClellan picked up: “the original gorilla.” Nine months into his administration Lincoln needed to appoint a secretary of war in place of the incompetent Simon Cameron, whom he arranged to be ambassador to Russia. But who then should he put in the enormously important position of secretary of war? Stanton was a strong supporter of the Union; he had cabinet experience and was a brusquely efficient administrator. (Frederick Douglass memorably said of him: “Politeness was not one of his weaknesses.”) So Lincoln put aside all the resentments he might have had and offered the post to Stanton. Stanton accepted, became a great secretary of war, and totally revised his opinion of Lincoln. They became great good cop/bad cop partners, and the rest is Civil War history. *

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But now a larger point: Lincoln’s magnanimity applied not just to personal interaction but also to high policy—to the giant battle for national self-definition of which he was a leader. He would fight a hard war—but without hatred. Lincoln’s magnanimity would not be so striking had it not been sustained in that embattled situation, and combined with resolute larger purposes. His resolution, his firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, and that larger purpose—that great cause for which he, too, would in the end give “the last full measure of devotion”—at once both make his magnanimity the more striking, and at the same time are reasons for it, causes of it, and motives for it. That is a very difficult combination: resolution and magnanimity. When, in pursuit of great objects, one must impose one’s will on others. One is not easily also of a mind to be generous, forgiving, magnanimous. Conversely, if one is disposed to sympathy and forgiveness one is—so at least the world thinks—less able to be a resolute leader. But Lincoln, if not uniquely among world leaders at least to an unusual extent, exhibited both qualities, a difficult combination. One can find an expression of both points—his steadfast resolution, and his generosity—in a letter Lincoln wrote to a Louisiana Unionist in the hard summer of 1862. The correspondent had

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complained about Union army action. Lincoln answered with a series of rhetorical questions: “What would you do in my position? Would you drop the war where it is? Or, would you prosecute it in future, with elder-stalk squirts, charged with rose water? Would you deal lighter blows rather than heavier ones? Would you give up the contest, leaving any available means unapplied?” A resolute Lincoln was not going to prosecute the war with elder-stalk squirts, charged with rose water; he was going to use every available means to attain the essential nation-saving victory. But then at the end of that same letter he makes the other point in words that is our text for the evening: “I shall do nothing in malice. What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.”9 That is one of the greatest of Lincoln statements and adds something even to the second inaugural. Lincoln used the word “vast” to describe the moral reach of his decisions. He referred to his presidential duty as “so vast, and so sacred a trust.” He said “The struggle of today, is not altogether for today—it is for a vast future also.” In a letter to the executive of the United States Christian Commission he praised: “Whatever shall tend to turn our thoughts from the unreasoning and uncharitable passions, prejudices, and jealousies incident to a great national trouble . . . and to fix them upon the vast and longenduring consequences, for weal, or for woe, which are to result from the struggle . . .”10 That is the disciplining constraint: an awareness of the vast and longenduring consequences, for weal, or for woe, all across this nation, out around the world, on into the vast future. It should both hold the maker of high policy to the unrelenting pursuit of the nation-saving victory, and at the same time prevent the leader from doing anything from ill-will, anything petty or personal, anything ref lecting “unreasoning, and uncharitable passions, prejudices, and jealousies . . .” A moral imagination that sees a vast panorama of far-reaching effects disciplines his action in both regards. *

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The grandest among the many illustrations of Lincoln’s magnanimity is his conduct toward the end. Although many in the North, including members of his own cabinet, thought the rebel leaders ought to be executed, Lincoln disavowed any such retribution—none of them were hanged.

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Although this was mostly an accident, his visit here to the capital of the defeated Confederacy in April of 1865 certainly had nothing triumphal about it. Lincoln’s secretaries wrote of that trip: “Never in the history of the world did the head of a mighty nation and conquerer of a great rebellion enter a captured chief city of the insurgents in such humbleness and simplicity.” The very manner of his coming to Richmond, with the progressive shrinkage in the grandeur of his entrance, was an apt symbol of the absence of triumphalism. From the “f leet of four ships carrying hundreds of soldiers, sailors, and marines his entrance had been reduced by one mishap after another to a single open boat propelled by muscle power.” And finally when he landed there was (his secretaries said) neither officer nor wagon, nor escort, to meet them. An old contraband was the first to recognize and speak to him and he then walked the remaining distance entering the city on foot. Lincoln was reminded by this comedown, as he always was, of a story. An old fellow came to him and wanted to be appointed ambassador; Lincoln had to tell him all the ambassadorships were filled; then he asked to be appointed as a postmaster, and he had to tell him all the postal positions were filled; then he said, well, could he get a job as a waiter in the White House, and Lincoln had to say that no, those positions were all filled too. So finally the old fellow said, well, do you have an old pair of trousers you could let me have? Of course the supreme expression of his absence of malice was the great speech he gave at his second inauguration. To appreciate that great address one should try to think oneself into his situation. He was the leader of one side in a terrible civil war, after four years of killing. That war still was not quite finished. These words he would speak would not be those merely of an observer, surveying it from outside or afterward, but would be the sober expression of the top combatant on one side in a bloody contest of the highest importance for a whole nation (and also, he had claimed with his particular eloquence, for the whole family of man). So suppose you had been in this president’s shoes. You, who did not like guns or shooting or killing even animals in the hunt, you a gentle civilian professional who had never personally done battle against any enemy fiercer than the mosquitoes in the Blackhawk War, who had been forced by your oath and your convictions and the persistent defiance of the rebels, to send wave after wave of young men, and for

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the first time in American history, conscripts torn away from the farm and the shop, to risk—perhaps to lose—their lives, at Shiloh, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor. You had had to do this, they had had to do this, the country had had to go through this because of the persistently defiant secessionists. Suppose you had strongly argued in your first inaugural against what your dissatisfied fellow countrymen were doing; suppose you had then said, bluntly: “In your hands . . . and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war . . . With you, and not with me, is the solemn question of ‘Shall it be peace, or a sword?’ ”11 So you, at your second inauguration, drawing near to the end of this terrible, destructive rebellion might have allowed yourself a least a glance at the warnings and pleadings of four years earlier. You might have included a straightforward condemnation of those who had endeavored to rend the Union to defend human slavery. You might have struck a note of triumph, now that it appeared that the heroic efforts of the U.S. forces would after all save a nation—so you and I might have done in this president’s place. Lincoln did none of that. The short inaugural that he wrote rose above all that. Here was a war leader rounding the corner into victory who expressed not a trace of triumphalism, not a word of moral vindication, not a hint of blame, who although he insists that slavery is “somehow” the cause of the war (wonderful somehow) he makes clear the complicity of the whole nation, the North as well as the South, in that grave offense. And as he does not pin blame for slavery on the soon to be defeated enemy, so also he does not blame those rebels for the war. Of the war he says just: “And the war came.” As to thanking God for giving his side the victory? Lincoln did not exactly do that either. What he said was this: “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”12 Certainly no one would have seen surprised if the president of the United States, nearing the end of this bloody, religion-drenched war, would in his address have claimed that the impending victory showed that God was on the side of the United States. But—astonishingly—he did not do that; he said something else: “The Almighty has his own purposes.” When at the reception after the inaugural Lincoln insisted that Frederick Douglass tell him what he thought of the address, Douglass replied, “Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.”

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Six weeks after that address Lincoln was shot, and as he died it would be Edwin Stanton, who had once disdained him, who would say: “Now he belongs to the ages.” Notes This chapter is taken from a speech delivered on February 12, 2009, the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, at the University of Richmond as part of the Jepson Leadership Forum. 1. Roy P. Basler, ed., Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings (New York: De Capo Press, 2001), p. 588. 2. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005). 3. Basler, Lincoln, p. 793. 4. Ibid., p. 688. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. See William Lee Miller, President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). 8. See William Lee Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). 9. Basler, Lincoln, p. 650. 10. John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, vol. 6 (New York: The Century Company, 1890), p. 330. 11. Basler, Lincoln, p. 588. 12. Ibid., p. 793.

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CH A P T E R

F I V E

Abraham Lincoln’s Opposition to the Mexican War Dani e l Wal ke r H owe

On December 22, 1847, an unfamiliar, lanky, somewhat awkward figure took the f loor of the U.S. House of Representatives. A freshman Congressman from Springfield, Illinois, rose to present a set of resolutions. Thirty-eight-year-old Abraham Lincoln had only been in Washington for three weeks. Nevertheless he felt impelled to speak out. The United States had been waging war against the Republic of Mexico for a year and a half. The president had defended this war in his annual message of December 7, with which he greeted the newly seated Thirtieth Congress. President James Knox Polk blamed the war on Mexico, and claimed that the United States should permanently seize vast areas of northern Mexico in compensation for the wrongs that country had inf licted.1 Lincoln believed that the United States was waging a war of aggression, provoked by the executive branch in defiance of the constitutional provision that the war-making power should rest with Congress. Furthermore, Lincoln was sure that territorial acquisitions, in the current state of politics, would provoke strife within the United States. A wise statecraft would avoid taking additional territory from Mexico, warned the leaders of the Whig Party to which Lincoln belonged. The annexation of slaveholding Texas had already stretched the limits of tolerance in many parts of the North. In August 1846, David Wilmot of Pennsylvania had introduced a proviso forbidding slavery in any land taken from Mexico, provoking a bitter sectional controversy. North

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and South had already begun to quarrel over the spoils of a war that was not even over yet. Lincoln’s resolutions responded not only to the president’s annual message but also to a resolution introduced into the House two days earlier, on December 20, by Representative William A. Richardson, Democrat of Illinois. Richardson called upon the House to affirm that the war was “just and necessary,” and that, due to Mexico’s rejection of repeated U.S. overtures, the president had had “no alternative but the most vigorous prosecution of the war.”2 Since the Democrats had lost control of the House in the midterm elections of 1846–1847, it was unlikely that Richardson’s resolution would actually be adopted. But, if the president’s address and the Richardson resolution remained unanswered, the administration would score in public relations, and the Whig opposition appear timid. The next day, December 21, two Whig Congressmen each offered a resolution of his own. John Minor Botts of Virginia proposed that the war had been brought on, not by Mexico, but by the “unauthorized actions” of the president; therefore, no territory should be annexed as a result of the war. The resolution of New Jersey Whig John Van Dyke had a more radical tone; it declared the U.S. invasion of Mexican territories an “act of injustice, cruelty, and wrong.”3 A raucous debate ensued. Whig Party control over the House was tenuous: 115 Whigs faced 108 Democrats and 4 others; at least 3 of the Southern Whigs could not be counted upon to stick by the party’s policy of No Territory from Mexico. This was the situation when Lincoln took the f loor on December 22. Lincoln was probably prompted to rise to the occasion partly by a desire that the Illinois Democrat Richardson should be answered by an Illinois Whig. That would show Richardson did not speak for all Illinois, nor all the Old Northwest. As the only Illinois Whig in the House, Lincoln would have to take on this responsibility. Despite having only two days to prepare, Lincoln had a thoughtful and comprehensive presentation ready. A lawyer, he couched his group of resolutions in legal form. He worded them carefully, as subjects for investigation rather than as conclusions. Phrasing them as questions made it harder for Democratic members to shout them down. But any actual inquiries such as he proposed would severely embarrass the administration. Polk’s rationalizations for the conquest of new lands did not stand up to scrutiny, of that Lincoln was sure. The president had repeatedly insisted that the Mexicans had invaded the United States, “shedding the blood of our citizens on our own soil.” Lincoln’s eight resolutions demanded facts “to establish whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our citizens was so shed, was,

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or was not, our own soil, at that time.” Accordingly, the resolutions asked, first, if the spot of soil had not been defined as Spanish by the AdamsOnís Treaty of 1819. Second, whether the spot had not been “wrested from Spain, by the Mexican revolution.” Third, whether the spot was not inhabited by a settlement that long antedated the Texas Revolution. Fourth, whether that settlement was not isolated by “wide uninhabited regions” around it. Fifth, whether the people of that settlement had ever voluntarily submitted to the “laws of Texas or of the United States.” Sixth, “Whether the People of the settlement, did, or did not, f lee from the approach of the United States Army, leaving unprotected their homes and their growing crops before the blood was shed . . . and whether the first blood so shed, was, or was not shed, within the inclosure of the People, or some of them who had thus f led from it.” Seventh,whether the American citizens “whose blood was shed . . . were, or were not, at that time, armed officers, and soldiers, sent into that settlement by the military order of the President.” And finally, whether those soldiers had not been ordered into that settlement even after “Genl. [Zachary] Taylor had, more than once, intimated to the War Department that, in his opinion, no such movement was necessary to the defense or protection of Texas.”4 The “Spot Resolutions,” as they were promptly labeled, illustrate the characteristic working of Lincoln’s mind. They are logical, legalistic, and carefully phrased. Although lacking the eloquence and grace of later Lincoln speeches, they address relevant facts accurately and make Lincoln’s points in an original and effective manner. Their implication is clear. Polk’s claims regarding the origin of the war will not bear examination. Therefore, Polk’s assertion that Mexico owes the United States a territorial indemnity falls to the ground. The Democrats made no response to Lincoln’s resolutions. Lincoln had wanted the last word, and he got it. The House never recurred to the Spot Resolutions because they were quickly overtaken by events. On January 3, 1848, Representative George Ashmun, Massachusetts Whig, offered an amendment to a resolution thanking General Taylor for his services. The Ashmun amendment added a statement that the war itself had been “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States.”5 The amendment passed the House on a party-line vote of 85 to 81. The Democrats controlled the Senate, so the Ashmun amendment disappeared there, but the slim Whig majority in the House had made its point. On January 12, Lincoln spoke again on the war, this time to explain why he had given his vote for the Ashmun amendment. Lincoln did not take lightly the responsibility of criticizing the commander in chief during wartime. He reminded the House that he had not campaigned

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against the war, indeed had not addressed the war issue at all publicly until he had taken his seat. Initially, he had adopted the position that those who could not in conscience approve the president’s conduct “should nevertheless, as good citizens and patriots, remain silent on that point, at least till the war should be ended.” He pointed out that this had also been the view of a number of prominent Democrats who disapproved of the war, including ex-president Van Buren.6 Lincoln was correct when he stated that the war had not been debated in his campaign for election. Neither he nor his Democratic opponent, the celebrated Methodist circuit-riding minister Peter Cartwright, had raised the issue in the fall of 1846, even though the war had already begun. Indeed, in most congressional districts throughout the country, the campaign had been fought largely on the domestic issues that usually divided the two parties of the day—banking, the tariff, and internal improvements. Gradually, however, as the war went on, opposition to it grew, and the Whig Party was increasingly emboldened to build upon it. Lincoln felt impelled to break his own silence on the war after coming to Congress and witnessing the insistent attempted justifications for the war by the president and his congressional supporters. The administration persists, he complained, in peddling misleading half-truths and interpreting silence as consent to them. The situation, Lincoln concluded, “demand[s] of all who will not submit to be misrepresented, in justice to themselves, to speak out.” Lincoln centered his speech around the concept of the “whole truth.” Thus, the administration repeats the half-truth that only fourteen House members voted against the declaration of war in May 1846. But the whole truth, Lincoln correctly pointed out, would include the fact that when the declaration of war had been addressed separately from support for the troops, sixty-seven had voted no. Polk insists that the southern boundary of Texas was the Rio Grande and that the war thus began on American soil. If he told the whole truth, Lincoln protested, he would say something like this: “I say, the soil was ours, on which the first blood was shed; there are those who say it was not.” 7 In the balance of his forty-five-minute speech, Lincoln went over the arguments offered by the president’s latest annual message on behalf of the Rio Grande boundary, treating each with meticulous specificity, adhering to his principle of “the whole truth.” In doing so, Lincoln showed himself a good historian as well as a good lawyer. The first claim made by Polk and his partisans was “that the Rio Grande was the Western boundary of Louisiana as we purchased it

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from France in 1803.” Lincoln rightly dismisses this issue as irrelevant; the boundary was redrawn by the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, in which the United States relinquished whatever claim it had to Texas. (Polk’s supporters in 1844 had called for the “re-annexation” of Texas, in the hope of conferring more legitimacy on their imperial ambitions.) Lincoln went on to dismiss the argument that Texas acquired the Rio Grande boundary by the agreement Santa Anna signed at Velasco following the Battle of San Jacinto in April 1836. Santa Anna there promised that the Mexican army would withdraw south of the Rio Grande. Lincoln, in common with most historians today, rejected the view that the document fixed a new international boundary, or that it constituted either a treaty or Mexican recognition of Texan independence. Lincoln concluded that the Republic of Texas could claim sovereignty only over the area where most of the population had in fact supported the Texan Revolution against Mexico—an area that included very little of the lands between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. Most of the people in the region southwest of the Nueces were Mexicans who wanted their homes to remain part of Mexico. At length Lincoln returned to the posture of his Spot Resolutions. He called upon Polk to furnish evidence—“facts”—to substantiate his assertions of Mexican aggression. “Let the President answer the interrogatories I proposed,” he demanded. “Let him answer, fully, fairly, and candidly”—that is, in the light of the whole truth.9 At this point Lincoln’s devotion to honesty, for which he is rightly famous, becomes the predominant theme of the speech. The half-truths in which Polk has dealt, Lincoln now decides, are the practical equivalent of deliberate lies. Polk’s justification for war, Lincoln indignantly proclaims, “is, from beginning to end, the sheerest deception.” A powerful condemnation, coming from Lincoln. Honesty was just as indispensable to the historical Lincoln as to the “Honest Abe” of popular mythology. Polk should “remember he sits where Washington sat,” and tell the truth about the origin of the war—as, of course, Washington was famous for always telling the truth. Lincoln declared: “As a nation should not, and the Almighty will not, be evaded, so let him attempt no evasion—no equivocation.” Addressing the president in tones worthy of the Prophet Nathan addressing King David, Lincoln declared that Polk must be “deeply conscious of being in the wrong”—that he must realize “the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him.” Not having been truthful about the beginnings of the war or its objectives, Polk can provide no leadership regarding its ending.

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Lincoln’s manuscript of his speech reads: It is a singular omission in this message, that it, no where intimates when the President expects the war to terminate . . . [A]t the end of twenty months during which time our arms have given us the most splendid successes . . . this same President gives us a long message, without showing us, that as to the end, he himself, has, even an immaginary [sic] conception . . . He is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man.10 Lincoln’s criticism of Polk’s failure to announce U.S. war aims was well founded. Polk had gone to war (as his diary makes clear) intending to take territory from Mexico.11 Yet he showed reluctance to announce this objective, preferring instead to repeat his assertions that Mexico had initiated hostilities. He thus laid the groundwork for the United States to claim compensating damages in the only form Mexico could pay: land. The Whigs called attention to this lack of declared war aims in order to lay the groundwork for a policy of their own: Congress should supply the objectives for which a war was fought, as a corollary of its power to declare war. The Whig-controlled House could then make sure that territorial acquisitions were forbidden or at least kept to a minimum. From the Whig point of view, the principle of No Territory had another advantage. Mexico’s peace negotiators were balking at cession of their national patrimony to the United States. As a U.S. policy, No Territory would open the door to a speedy conclusion of peace. Disturbed by the mounting national debt, sensitive to the adverse judgment of world opinion, and appalled by the death rate from disease in the armed forces, the Whigs were eager for peace.12 To understand Lincoln’s antiwar speech of January 12 in context, it helps to compare it with one by his party’s senior statesman Henry Clay, delivered two months earlier on November 13, 1847, in Lexington, Kentucky. The occasion at which Clay spoke had been organized by Lincoln’s father-in-law, Robert S. Todd, a prominent Lexington Whig. Lincoln himself, accompanied by his wife Mary, arrived in Lexington on their way to Washington for the congressional session. So it was that Lincoln, who had never before seen the celebrated “Harry of the West” in person, could hear him deliver one of his great addresses.13 Clay used the opportunity to open his fourth and final campaign for the presidency. Back in 1844 he had opposed the annexation of Texas because he predicted that it would lead to war with Mexico, as

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indeed it did. By late 1847 he had reluctantly come to acquiesce in the annexation provided Texan boundaries remained modestly defined. Otherwise, however, he wanted no more lands from Mexico—which, he warned, “might prove a fatal acquisition.” The current war he denounced forthrightly: “This is no war of defence, but one unnecessary and of offensive aggression.”14 Like Lincoln after him, Clay insisted on the importance of the truth. Clay had not been in Congress at the time the war began. Referring to the declaration of war against Mexico, which included a preamble blaming the war on Mexican aggression, Clay now insisted: “No earthly consideration would ever have tempted or provoked me to vote for a bill, with a palpable falsehood stamped on its face. Almost idolizing truth as I do, I never, never could have voted for that bill.”15 Clay’s speech criticized Polk for unconstitutionally provoking a war and confronting Congress with it as an existing situation. He called for Congress to define and announce American war aims. He deplored the possibility that the United States would become an imperialist empire like those of Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Napoleon. He expressed special outrage at the movement, then advocated by some Democrats, to annex all Mexico. Although no discussion of the slavery question was strictly necessary to his subject, Clay included one, detailing his long-standing support for gradual emancipation and the colonization of the freed people in Africa. In his famous debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln referred to Henry Clay as “my beau ideal of a statesman.”16 Lincoln wholeheartedly supported Clay’s “American System” of domestic economic development. Neither one approved of slavery but both hoped to avoid sectional conf lict. Comparison of their antiwar speeches confirms how much else their statecraft and rhetoric had in common. Both accused the president of an unconstitutional usurpation of congressional power. Both denounced Polk’s lack of candor. Neither approved of expanding an American empire by conquest. Later, Lincoln declared that, in contrast to the imperialist Democrats, the Whigs “did not believe in enlarging our field, but in keeping our fences where they are and cultivating our present possession, making it a garden, improving the morals and education of the people.” Clay could have endorsed every word of this. Indeed, it is a succinct metaphoric description of the program of the Whig Party, which opposed Indian removal as well as the Mexican War, and which fostered economic development, education, and moral reform.

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The same month that Lincoln gave his speeches against the Mexican War, Henry David Thoreau delivered for the first time the antiwar lecture that he would later publish under the title “Resistance to Civil Government.” (We know it under the less militant title “Civil Disobedience.”) To compare Lincoln’s and Thoreau’s addresses is to underscore the difference between a practical politician and a self-isolated radical critic of all things conventional. Yet both men shared a biblical sensibility, a prophetic resolve to speak truth to power, and a faith in rational ref lection. Lincoln, as a member of Congress, had the public ear in a way that Thoreau could only hope (vainly, it proved) to attain through the dramatic gesture of going to jail for his principles. Like Lincoln, Thoreau blamed the war on executive abuse of government power. For Thoreau, President Polk’s ability to provoke a war that the American people “would not have consented” to wage if they had been consulted in advance showed a defect in the institution of government itself. “A single man can bend it to his will,” he complained. Thoreau uses the occasion to provoke his audience to question the claim of government to their obedience. Lincoln provokes his audience to question the president’s account of the outbreak of war. Both demand people to think for themselves instead of getting caught up in wartime enthusiasm.17 It seems unlikely that either knew about the other’s address. Abraham Lincoln’s two speeches against the U.S.-Mexican War were sincere and heartfelt. They also fell well within the mainstream of his party’s range of opinion on the subject. Political passions ran high in that era, and the two major parties were sharply differentiated (as well as just about evenly balanced among the electorate). As he so often did, Lincoln acted from both principled and pragmatic motives when he delivered his antiwar speeches. He sincerely hated war, international aggression, and duplicity of all kinds. In 1847–1848 he hoped to avoid domestic sectional conf lict. He fervently hoped to avoid a ghastly civil war such as the one he ended up having to fight. Lincoln was also an ambitious man. He probably hoped that his speeches would bring an otherwise obscure freshman Representative to the attention of the national Whig Party leadership. Before his term was over, Lincoln would also try to solve the problem of slavery in the District of Columbia through gradual emancipation. This project too represented a conf luence of sincerity and ambition. But his plan pleased neither abolitionists nor slaveholders and went nowhere. Back home in Lincoln’s Springfield constituency, the Whig newspaper proudly reprinted his speech of January 12 in its entirety. The Illinois Democratic press raged against it and called him “Spotty”

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Lincoln. Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon wrote him to say that he thought Lincoln had hurt himself with his speeches, that public opinion in the district supported the war. Lincoln wrote Herndon back, defending his course. He insisted that Polk’s justification for the war really was “a lie,” and that he could have done nothing else but bear witness to “the truth.” The several letters he wrote to Herndon say nothing about public opinion, but do defend the patriotism of the Whigs, many of whom served with great credit in the army; Lincoln cites in particular Alexander Doniphan, who led a celebrated military expedition across northern Mexico.18 By prior arrangement among local Whig leaders, Lincoln served but one term in Congress. The plan to rotate the seat in the only reasonably safe Whig district in Illinois strikes us as weird, but it did not seem so strange in the antebellum period, when few congressmen served very long. (In fact, more than half the members of the House of Representatives in 1847–1848 were in their first term just like Lincoln.19) The Whig who ran for the Springfield congressional district to replace Lincoln in 1848, Stephen Logan, lost a tight race by 106 votes. Although not a candidate to succeed himself, Lincoln remained politically active during the campaign of 1848. He supported Zachary Taylor rather than the aging Henry Clay for the Whig presidential nomination in 1848. Within a month of his second antiwar address, Lincoln was already appearing at pro-Taylor meetings. His preference for Taylor was avowedly tactical; he thought the popular general would make a stronger candidate. The party convention agreed. Taylor got the nomination and went on to win the general election. But Lincoln’s hopes and expectations of inf luence in the Taylor administration proved unrealized. Neither his congressional speeches nor his early backing of a presidential winner gained him notice or preferment. Lincoln retired to private life until roused again by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Within a few months of Lincoln’s antiwar speeches, the U.S.-Mexican War came to an end. Modern students have sometimes dismissed the antiwar protests by Lincoln and others in the Thirtieth Congress as petty politics, on the ground that the war was almost over anyway.20 This, however, is anachronistic. People at the time had no expectation that the war would end so soon. U.S.-Mexican negotiations were deadlocked. President Polk called them off in November of 1847, intending to let a prolonged U.S. occupation of most of their country bring the Mexicans to make appropriate concessions. (The administration’s policy, avowed in Richardson’s resolutions of December 20 that provoked the

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initial debate, was to demand more and more territory the longer the war went on.21) On the other side, an intransigent Mexican faction called the puros declared themselves willing to wage guerrilla warfare against the Yankees indefinitely. Whigs therefore believed they faced a long war for undisclosed objectives. A memorandum from March 1848 shows that Lincoln then assumed that it would fall to the next president to make peace with Mexico.22 But events took an unforeseeable turn in the winter of 1847–1848. President Polk’s diplomatic emissary Nicholas Trist, ordered to break off peace negotiations and come home, defied the order. Instead he agreed on peace terms with Mexican moderates (moderados) that secured vast gains for the United States: Texas, California, and everything in between. Polk had been demanding still more; he wanted Baja, a right of transit across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and everything north of Tampico. Furious with his disobedient diplomat, Polk had him arrested and returned to the United States in custody. Nevertheless, the president realized he had no practical alternative to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and allowed the Senate to ratify it in May 1848. (At least that kept the treaty out of the hands of a possible Whig successor, he must have ref lected.) A few Whig Senators opposed it because it violated their principle of No Territory; most supported it because it brought a quick peace. A few Democratic Senators opposed it because they wanted more (or all) of Mexico; most accepted it. Nicholas Trist, never prosecuted, retired to obscurity. He received no salary for the period when, all alone, he negotiated his great treaty. The administration that finally awarded Trist his back pay was that of Abraham Lincoln. For the first half century after Lincoln’s antiwar speeches, historians and biographers treated them respectfully. Around the time of World War I, however, they fell out of scholarly favor. Two inf luential Lincoln biographies of this period, those of Senator Albert J. Beveridge and Lord Charnwood, attributed Lincoln’s antiwar speeches to trivial, unworthy partisan motives and insisted that they disgraced him politically. (Beveridge enthusiastically supported America’s insular imperialism of 1898; the Englishman Charnwood welcomed a wartime alliance with the United States.23) In subsequent decades, most historians paid little attention to the speeches except to insist that they ruined Lincoln’s political prospects. Benjamin Thomas, who published an outstanding biography in 1952, took the issues Lincoln faced seriously, but concluded the speeches hurt him politically, as did Donald W. Riddle in his 1957 book on Lincoln

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in Congress. Reinhard Luthin, who emphasized Lincoln’s loyalty to the Whig Party in his fine biography of 1960, nevertheless paid surprisingly little attention to his antiwar speeches, which he described as “courageous if partisan” but “unpopular” in his constituency.24 An explicit break with this historiography occurred in the 1970s, with the publication of articles by Gabor Boritt and Mark Neely. Boritt found little evidence that Lincoln’s speeches against the war hurt him politically. He attributed the origin of this opinion to the selfimportance of William Herndon, who liked to suppose he had mentored Lincoln in practical politics, and to the prejudices of historians, who could not imagine that a politician could “oppose the wars of one’s country with impunity.” Although the Whig who ran to succeed Lincoln lost, Boritt considered this was simply due to his being a weak candidate, not to his endorsement of Lincoln’s views on the war.25 Neely emphasized that Lincoln’s position was perfectly normal within the Whig Party, and distinguished it from that of abolitionists who accused Polk of conspiring to spread slavery. It is true that Lincoln never described Polk’s expansionism as a proslavery conspiracy; he attributed it simply to pandering to popularity. Neely also pointed out that when radical Whigs moved to call the war off unilaterally and simply bring the troops home, Lincoln, along with other moderate Whigs and Democrats, voted the proposal down, 137 to 41. Accordingly, Neely sided with Boritt in concluding that Lincoln’s speeches against the Mexican War did not represent political suicide.26 Neither Boritt nor Neely was a political radical. Still, it seems reasonable to believe that they were inf luenced by the example of the war in Vietnam in concluding that opposition to a war might not prove fatal to a politician. The only example I have found of Lincoln’s speeches against the Mexican War being invoked directly by the antiwar movement of the Vietnam era is one article in The New Republic of February 1967.27 Most of Lincoln’s biographers since the appearance of the Boritt and Neely articles do not seem to have been powerfully inf luenced by them. David Herbert Donald’s outstanding biography of 1995 supports Herndon’s view that Lincoln’s speeches were unpopular in his district; he suggests that by supporting the war hero Taylor for president, Lincoln was trying to atone for his mistake. Allen Guelzo, in 1999, although in general wonderfully sensitive to Lincoln’s moral commitment and biblical rhetoric, does not notice these qualities in the antiwar speeches and simply comments that they “backfired” on their author. The mention accorded to the antiwar speeches in Richard Cawardine’s

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noteworthy biography of 2003 brief ly encapsulates my own position, recognizing Lincoln’s sincerity and passion along with his practical political goals.28 One author who has taken Boritt’s work to heart is the literary scholar John Channing Briggs. In his fine work Lincoln’s Speeches Reconsidered, Briggs treats the two antiwar speeches with great seriousness in both their rhetoric and substance. Perhaps historians need to take a lesson from a colleague in an English Department.29 It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Lincoln’s antiwar speeches have fallen victim to that general lack of attention that has left the war with Mexico such a curious lacuna in U.S. historiography. Considering the enormous consequences of that war, it seems strange how both the historical profession and the general American public manage to avoid it. In the context of Lincoln’s later career as a famous and successful war leader, his opposition to the war with Mexico has no doubt seemed an anomaly to many, and for some, even an embarrassment. In recent years historians have come to recognize the importance of some of Lincoln’s early speeches for understanding his values, his principles, his social and political outlook. His lyceum Address of 1838, his temperance address of 1842, and his eulogy on Henry Clay in 1852 have all been profitably analyzed to this end. It seems time to put Lincoln’s speeches regarding the war against Mexico into the same category of illuminating statements, and to stop ignoring them, minimizing their significance, or regarding them as an atypical blunder. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Messages and Papers of the Presidents (Washington, 1901), IV, pp. 533–549. Congressional Globe, 30th Cong., 1st sess., December 20, 1847, 4:59. Congressional Globe, 30th Cong., 1st sess., December 21, 1847, 4:62. “Spot Resolutions,” in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–1955), I, pp. 420–422. Congressional Globe, 30th Cong., 1st sess., January 3, 1848, 6:95. “The War with Mexico,” in Collected Works, I, 431–442. Quotations from ibid., p. 433. Quotations from ibid., p. 434. Quotations from ibid., p. 439. Quotations from ibid., pp. 441–442. Diary of James K. Polk, ed. Milo Quaife, May 13, 1846 (Chicago, 1910), I, pp. 397–399. Michael Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 256. Ronald C. White, A. Lincoln, A Biography (New York: Random House, 2008), p. 140. Papers of Henry Clay, ed. Melba Porter Hay (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), X, pp. 361–377.

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15. Ibid., p. 363. 16. “First Debate with Stephen A. Douglas” (August 21, 1858), Collected Works, III, p. 29. 17. Quotations from Henry David Thoreau, Reform Papers, ed. Wendell Glick (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 63–64. 18. “To William H. Herndon,” in Collected Works, I, pp. 446–448. 19. White, A. Lincoln, p. 144. 20. For example, David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 126. 21. Congressional Globe, 30th Cong., 1st sess., December 20, 1847, 4:59. 22. “What General Taylor Ought to Say” (March 1848), in Collected Works, I, p. 454. 23. Albert J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln (Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 1928), I, pp. 422–423; Lord Charnwood. Abraham Lincoln (New York, Henry Holt, 1917), pp. 93–95. 24. Benjamin Thomas, Abraham Lincoln (New York: Knopf, 1952), pp. 881–821; Donald W. Riddle, Congressman Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957), pp. 32–55; and Reinhard Luthin, The Real Abraham Lincoln (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1960), pp. 103–107. 25. Gabor Boritt, “Lincoln’s Opposition to the Mexican War,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 67 (1974), pp. 79–100. 26. Mark Neely, “Lincoln and the Mexican War,” Civil War History 24 (1978), pp. 5–24. 27. Herbert Mitgang, “The Mexican War Dove,” The New Republic (February 11, 1967), pp. 23–24. 28. Donald, Lincoln, pp. 124–126, 129; Allen Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln, Redeemer President (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), p. 139; Richard Carwardine, Lincoln (Harlow, England: Longman, 2003), pp. 22–23. 29. John Channing Briggs, Lincoln’s Speeches Reconsidered (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), pp. 83–112.

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CH A P T E R

SI X

Wonderful Self-Reliance: Abraham Lincoln’s Leadership R ic hard Carwardine

Victorious war leaders win the plaudits of history, while the defeated struggle for reputation: Jefferson Davis’s efforts on behalf of a people mired in a moral enormity have done him few favors, while Abraham Lincoln has acquired mythic status as the savior of the American Union and the Great Emancipator. Moreover, Lincoln’s death, at the moment of his triumph, through a shot fired on Good Friday, led to the canonization of the martyr of the glorious Union. A contemporary journalist immediately understood what was at work: “It has made it impossible to speak the truth of Abraham Lincoln hereafter.”1 Let me begin with a minor episode during Lincoln’s debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858. Among those who descended on Illinois that dusty summer was a young correspondent from New York, Henry Villard. One evening, during a thunderstorm, Lincoln and the reporter took shelter and, in Villard’s words, fell to talking . . . [H]e told me that, when he was clerking in a country store, his highest ambition was to be a member of the State Legislature. “Since then, of course,” he said laughingly, “I have grown some, but my friends got me into THIS [canvass]. I did not consider myself qualified for the United States Senate . . . Now, to be sure . . . I am convinced that I am good enough for it; but, in spite of it all, I am saying to myself every day: It is too big a thing for you; you will never get it. [His wife] Mary insists, however,

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that I am going to be Senator and President of the United States, too.” These last words he followed with a roar of laughter, with his arms around his knees, and shaking all over with mirth at his wife’s ambition. “Just think,” he exclaimed, “of such a sucker as me as President!”2 Aspects of Villard’s story lack credibility. Lincoln was certainly not a diffident entrant into the contest with Douglas.3 But his memorable words—“Just think of such a sucker as me as President!”—seems only too believable. It was graphic; it played into the developing reality of his nationwide recognition; it echoed the self-deprecating substance of remarks he would continue to make over the next year or so; and, while maintaining the etiquette of modesty, it neatly planted into a newspaperman’s mind the idea that Lincoln be considered as a potential presidential candidate. The term “sucker”—in the sense of greenhorn, or simpleton—was then in common use. Lincoln certainly lacked leadership experience. Of the five most recent presidents, James Buchanan could boast service as secretary of state; Franklin Pierce, Zachary Taylor, and William Henry Harrison had held positions of military command; and James Knox Polk had won two terms as governor of Tennessee. Lincoln, by contrast, had not wielded executive power. His political experience had been confined to the legislative branch of government; his only military command had been a captaincy during the Black Hawk war (when, in his own words, his only “bloody struggles [were] with the musquetoes”). He ran a law office, of course, but only a two-man operation scarcely noted for its efficiency. Lincoln, however, was no sucker, and the last thing any of his associates would have called him was naïve. And he himself was confident that he had what it took to lead. During a discussion with Judge David Davis about possible candidates for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination, he burst out: “Why don’t you run me? I can be nominated, I can be elected, and I can run the government.”4 Nor was he blind to the dangers that faced the country. When, during a conversation about the possibility of civil war, his law partner Billy Herndon expressed his anxiety that the North would lack the great leader it needed, Lincoln replied: Go to the river bank with a . . . sieve and fill it with gravel. After a vigorous shaking, you will observe that the small pebbles and sand have . . . fallen to the ground . . . By . . . repeated shakings you will

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find that, of the pebbles still left in the sieve, the largest ones will have risen to the top. Now, if, as you say, war is inevitable and will shake the country from center to circumference, you will find that the little men will fall out of view in the shaking . . . and the big men will have climbed to the top. Of these latter, one greater than all the rest will leap forth armed and equipped—the people’s leader in the conf lict.5 In the event, of course, national fratricide produced challenges beyond the imaginings of any presidential aspirant. Recognizing his limitations and the immensity of what he faced, he told Senator Morrill of Maine, I don’t know but that God has created some one man great enough to comprehend the whole of this stupendous crisis . . . from beginning to end, and endowed him with sufficient wisdom to manage and direct it. I confess I do not fully understand and foresee it all. But I am placed here where I am obliged to the best of my poor ability to deal with it.6 Lincoln’s sense of his ultimate responsibility for the direction of the Union cause came close to overwhelming him at times. He told General Robert Schenck: “You have little idea of the terrible weight of care and sense of responsibility of this office of mine . . . [I]f to be at the head of Hell is as hard as what I have to undergo here, I could find it in my heart to pity Satan himself.”7 This was the language of a president assailed by both friend and foe. Ben Wade complained of a “blundering, cowardly, and inefficient” administration: “You could not inspire Old Abe, Seward, Chase, or Bates with courage, decision, and enterprise with a galvanic battery.”8 Had Lincoln been operating under a parliamentary system, his party would surely have ditched him during 1862. Despite the dramatic success at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863, by the following summer Lincoln’s leadership was once again being called into question, and some within his party aimed to replace him as presidential candidate. Lincoln heard these critics, and was capable of stern self-appraisal, but he was equally sure of his ability to do the job as well as any, and better than most. His celebrated political ambition bespoke not only a deep desire for recognition but a trust in his own capabilities. A salient theme among his associates’ recollections is this faith in his own strength, a self-confidence that derived from elements of self-esteem,

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self-mastery, and self-understanding, and that took the form of unusual self-reliance. Lincoln was frequently self-deprecating, and was certainly no braggart, but neither was he falsely modest. He was, after all, a self-made man, and that self-making gave him added confidence in his innate faculties.9 John Hay thought it “absurd to call him a modest man. No great man was ever modest. It was his intellectual arrogance and unconscious assumption of superiority that men like Chase and Sumner could never forgive.”10 That Lincoln kept his own counsel on all key issues made him—in the words of a fellow Illinois lawyer Lawrence Weldon, U.S. attorney for Southern Illinois—“one of the most self-reliant men of history,” an opinion encouraged by those who knew him much more intimately. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles was forcibly struck by his “wonderful self-reliance.” Leonard Swett “doubted whether he ever asked anybody’s advice about anything. He would listen to everybody . . ., but he never asked for opinions . . . As a politician and as President he arrived at all his conclusions from his own ref lections, and when his opinion was once formed he never had any doubt but what it was right.”11 Following the miserable failure of the 1862 Peninsular campaign, Orville Browning advised the president not to succumb to the “many cliques who thought they understood how public affairs should be managed better than he did,” but rather “adhere firmly to his own opinions.” Lincoln deemed the advice superf luous, telling his friend “that he had done so to a greater extent than was generally supposed,” and citing as examples his determination to resupply Fort Sumter and to forewarn the Confederates of his purpose—in both instances against the initial opposition of his cabinet.12 The wartime White House was commonly busy, but the multitude of visitors and acquaintances offered Lincoln nothing like the quality of the friendship he had once enjoyed with Joshua Speed. From his wife Mary, especially after the devastating death of Willie, he got little in the way of emotional support. He undoubtedly took pleasure in the company of John Hay, a surrogate son, but neither Hay nor his other personal secretary, John Nicolay, became routine political confidantes. Yet these circumstances did not prompt Lincoln’s self-reliance; rather, they reinforced his natural disposition toward private ref lection and analysis, and dependence on his own judgment. This confidence in the rightness of his own position toughened him against chronic wartime criticism, but stopped short of becoming an overdeveloped self-regard. Most of those who dealt with Lincoln recognized a political confidence that never spilled over into arrogance or self-glorification.

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In his penetrating study of leadership James MacGregor Burns concluded that there was no great correlation between a strong sense of self-worth and leadership.13 (After all, followers can be pretty pleased with themselves, too.) Nor, equally, is self-reliance in and of itself a key to effective leadership. Executive self-sufficiency in the service of a misconceived strategy simply accelerates the handcart’s progress to political hell. Lincoln’s self-reliance should impress us not in and of itself, but for the quality of the decisions he took, for the effectiveness of the lines of thought and courses of action that he developed while relying above all on his own intellectual and emotional resources. As the Union’s chief executive and commander in chief, Lincoln had four major responsibilities: first, to develop and sustain a vision of national purpose, and not to lose sight of this big picture; second, to identify the strategic priorities to advance it; third, to support his larger goals by effective policies and day-to-day political management; and, finally, as a democratic leader, to communicate his conception of national purpose to a wide public and maximize support. Of course, Lincoln as war leader faced a swirl of unpredictable events and contingencies, was buffeted by domestic and foreign forces beyond his immediate control, and depended ultimately on the efforts and resources of his fellow citizens. But what is truly striking is that—as he confronted each of his areas of responsibility—Lincoln made his mark above all through a reliance on, and confidence in, his own judgment. I. Vision First: Lincoln’s national vision. None of its elements was unique to him, yet the composite was distinctively his own creation. In its key features, Lincoln’s reading of the Union’s purpose remained remarkably consistent throughout his political career. His project—as much moral as it was economic—was to build an enterprising, commercially prosperous nation in which, under the equal operation of republican laws, all citizens would enjoy the right to rise. His logic dictated a social and moral order at odds with Southern slavery. Drawing especially on the doctrines of natural rights and human equality set out in the nation’s founding texts, he insisted that all men, black and white, should be free to enjoy the fruits of their own work. Free labor offered the prospect of “improvement in condition” and kept the social order f luid. Slavery stif led enterprise in both planters and slaves, and sustained a fundamental inequality: depriving human beings of the just rewards of their labor.

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Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860 did nothing to alter his hostility to slavery but—by provoking the secession of seven Southern states—did everything to change his political priorities. Yet Lincoln’s underlying vision did not change. There are a number of strands in the rope that bound Lincoln resolutely to the Union. He had a profound faith in the nation’s material potential. Far more often, however, he celebrated the political purpose of the nation and the moral magnificence of its free institutions. In a speech to New Yorkers as president-elect, Lincoln set out the vision that sustained him during his term of office: There is nothing that can ever bring me willingly to consent to the destruction of this Union, unless it were to be that thing for which the Union itself was made. I understand a ship to be made for the carrying and preservation of the cargo, and so long as the ship can be saved, with the cargo, it should never be abandoned . . . So long, then, as it is possible that the prosperity and the liberties of the people can be preserved in the Union, it shall be my purpose at all times to preserve it.14 The Union vessel was important only for its cargo of liberty, equality, and a meritocratic society. During the war, Lincoln came to see that preservation of the cargo legitimized the emancipation of the slaves. Many have judged this and his other acts relating to slavery to have been sluggish, grudging, and partial. This view—though correctly identifying Lincoln’s temperamental caution—neglects the political constraints on his freedom of action. What impresses is Lincoln’s determination, during the two years after he had issued the Proclamation, to follow through its logic: in the arming of black troops, in the refusal to renege on the promise to emancipate, in the invocation of “a new birth of freedom” at Gettysburg; in energetic efforts to secure a constitutional amendment to end slavery; and in an openness to enfranchising some classes of freedmen. Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice president, considered Lincoln’s love of the Union to be kin to religious mysticism. That rather misses the rigorous intellectualism underpinning Lincoln’s sense of national purpose. But it does prompt us to ref lect that Lincoln’s tenacious Unionism was joined to a deepening religious devotion under the pressure of wartime events, in the face of personal tragedy and battlefield carnage. Two lines of thought warrant our attention.

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First, belief in the operations of providence played a large part in Lincoln’s thinking throughout his life. Before the war, however, he regarded providence as a superintending but remote force. As president, Lincoln’s “providence” became an interventionist God of judgment, more mysterious than the ruling force it superseded. Lincoln’s search to discover God’s purposes revealed itself in his remarks at the landmark cabinet meeting on September 22, 1862, when he explained how he had vowed ahead of the battle of Antietam that he would interpret victory as “an indication of Divine will, and that it was his duty to move forward in the cause of emancipation”: not he, but “God had decided this question in favor of the slaves.”15 And this providentialism expressed itself most remarkably in the explicit Biblicism of the second inaugural. Second, Lincoln lacked the orthodox Christian’s faith in an afterlife. Instead, one’s legacy must be felt on earth. “How hard,” he exclaimed to Herndon, “oh, how more than hard—it is to die and leave one’s country no better for the life of him that lived and died her child!”16 He gave this sentiment less agonized expression when he declared, “die when I may I want it said of me by those who know me best . . . that I always plucked a thistle and planted a f lower where I thought a f lower would grow.”17 This consideration gave added tenacity to his defense of the nation’s true purpose. At the outbreak of war he ref lected to a company of guardsmen, “The last hope of peace may not have passed away, but if I have to choose between the maintenance of the union of these states, of the authority of the government, and of the liberties of this nation, on the one hand, and the shedding of fraternal blood on the other, you need not be at a loss which course I shall take.”18 Three years later, during the dark days of battlefield slaughter, Lincoln came under intense pressure from within his own party to enter peace negotiations with the Confederacy on terms that would bring reunion but not emancipation. Lincoln hesitated but—even in extremis—did not yield. II. Political and Military Strategic Priorities Lincoln’s confidence and tenacity in holding to the big picture of what the war meant for the nation helped him keep his focus on strategic priorities. For the Union there were several key strategic concerns: exerting control over the rich resources of the “border” slave states, tugged in two directions by ties of blood, economy, and culture; securing international support, notably from Great Britain, the most

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powerful nation of the day and master of the seas; adopting a military plan that would minister to one’s own strengths while exploiting the enemy’s limitations; and mobilizing to the full the human and natural resources of the country. Here, too, in respect of each of these, we can see Lincoln’s independence of judgment as he identified and pursued the Union’s strategic needs. Lincoln the Kentuckian fully understood the enormous significance of the border. Even after the opening of hostilities, at Fort Sumter, he had not forfeited the northernmost tier of slave states, on which the outcome of the war would almost certainly hang. Lose Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, and the Confederacy would expand its population to more than twelve million; Washington’s days as the Union’s capital would be numbered; the Ohio River would provide the South with a natural defense; and the domain of slavery would stand undivided in its life-and-death struggle with freedom. In the ensuing effort to cement the loyalty of these four slave states, Lincoln’s determined pursuit of the Union’s strategic interest prompted in Maryland the brilliant use of an iron fist in a gloved hand. Less well judged was his handing over of military authority in Missouri to the impulsive agent of the Radical Unionists, who hastened the state’s decline into guerrilla warfare. It was Kentucky, however, that provided the strategic crux of the whole border region. Mindful of the Kentucky legislature’s proclamation of “neutrality,” he resisted pressure to send forces into the state. His waiting game seemed humiliating, but it paid off when Confederate forces rashly occupied Columbus, and gave Grant’s troops the excuse to move in and secure control. At the same time Lincoln resolutely repudiated Frémont’s proclamation putting Missouri under martial law and threatening to free the slaves of rebels. Alert to the alarm among slaveholding Unionists in Kentucky, Lincoln responded to his greatest wartime political challenge to date by “very cheerfully” modifying Fremont’s order.19 Winning the border was no more important than securing the respectful support—or at least neutrality—of the great European powers, especially Britain. For Lincoln and his accomplished secretary of state William Henry Seward, this meant preventing European nations from intervening on the side of the South. Lincoln was inexperienced in foreign affairs, but he understood that civil wars left nations exposed to interference. Foreign powers had to recognize that the Union was involved in suppressing an internal insurrection, accept that the Confederate “government” was illegitimate, deny support to the rebels, and respect his blockade of Southern ports. Above all, war must be avoided.

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A breakdown in British-Union relations was, of course, precisely what Confederates prayed for. But British economic ties with the Union and her calculation of national interest would keep her clear of intervention—at least until it was evident that Southern independence would be, not a project in progress, but a permanent reality. This was a lesson driven home by the celebrated Trent crisis of December 1861, when the Union navy’s seizure from a British mail packet of Europebound Confederate commissioners prompted the British into a show of preparations for war. But Davis could only watch in impotence as Lincoln’s firm grasp of national interest produced an outcome of wary peace and a gradual strengthening of British-American ties. Other perils lay ahead in the Union’s international relations, but Lincoln had navigated past the greatest point of danger, determined that he would not have “two wars on his hands at a time.”20 Thereafter, calculation of the Union’s national self-interest, and the implications of Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation, made conf lict inconceivable. The Confederates’ best hope of securing foreign recognition lay not in overseas corridors of power but on the battlefields at home. Although Lincoln’s military inexperience meant that he initially lacked Davis’s selfconfidence, he applied himself as commander in chief with every bit as much diligence as his opposite number, to the point that he outran most of his generals in his strategic thought. Operating from first principles, rather than the textbooks of the interpreters of Napoleonic warfare, he came early on to see the best means of exploiting the Union’s advantage in numbers. While McClellan planned a concentration of massive force against Richmond, Lincoln was telling his western commanders that his “general idea” was that—since “we have the greater numbers, and the enemy has the greater facility of concentrating forces upon points of collision”—the best way to exploit the Union’s superiority was by menacing the enemy “with superior forces at different points, at the same time.” To this insight he added another: that the tracking and destroying of Confederate armies, not places, was the key to victory.21 But to destroy armies one had to deny them food, ammunition, and other supplies. Under Lincoln, and with his encouragement, the North’s military policy developed into a “hard war” against white civilians. From the summer of 1862 onward, Union troops destroyed railroads, seized crops, burnt buildings, plundered homes, killed livestock, and freed slaves. Behind Lincoln’s military aggression stood statistical ruthlessness. After the grievous defeat at Fredericksburg Lincoln remarked “that if the same battle were to be fought over again, every day, through a week of days, with the same relative results, the army under Lee would

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be wiped out to its last man, the Army of the Potomac would still be a mighty host, [and] the war would be over.”22 The advantage Lincoln identified would have remained merely theoretical, however, without an effective means of organization. Human resources, and the other material of war, had to be mobilized—and in this lies the fourth strategic consideration pressing on him. Lincoln’s circumstances gave him opportunities for broadening presidential authority in ways of which his predecessors would never have dreamed. All understood his authority to be a key lever to the wartime mobilization of resources, in the arena of black enlistments, conscription measures, and taxation. Most controversial of all, of course, was Lincoln’s readiness to adopt emancipation as a means of harnessing a resource that earlier in the war he had not seen in those terms: namely, the slaves of rebels—whether the runaways within Union lines, or the bondsmen whose labor continued to provide the Confederacy with an essential support, but whose tenuous loyalty was shown to be just that as the federal armies approached. III. Management Strategic vision was a necessary but insufficient ingredient of successful wartime leadership. Equally required was a capacity for the deft handling of the levers of the political and military machinery. Lincoln was no natural or efficient administrator, and was not particularly good at delegating tasks, though he was shrewd enough at sifting out the trivial from the important. In contrast to his Confederate counterpart, he avoided suffocation from an avalanche of paper, and knew how to ration his cabinet meetings and prevent them from meandering unprofitably for hours. But his work habits alarmed those who feared he was wearing himself out. He became an increasingly poor sleeper as the war progressed (though he tried to make a virtue of it, asserting that “Night is the only time I have to think”). When a visiting Springfield acquaintance urged him to use his evenings for rest, Lincoln replied: “I can put off the war governors, and secretaries and senators and all that, but there’s the women. What would you do about the women?” He told how the distraught mother of an eighteen-year-old boy, due to be shot on the morrow, had called at night to see him, and refused to leave until she had. Over his wife’s protests, the president got up and went downstairs. “Would you have gone down, Rollie,” Lincoln inquired, “would you?”23

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Lincoln’s burdens were, however, eased by having talented departmental secretaries to lean on. In making his cabinet appointments Lincoln sought to surround himself with the most able men, including his chief rivals for the presidential nomination in 1860. If not every choice was well judged, Lincoln mostly gathered an outstanding team, with superb ministers in the key departments of state, war, navy, and the treasury. Of these, Salmon Chase provides the most instructive example of Lincoln’s subordinating difficult personal relations to the administration’s need for the best talent. As Chase maneuvered for the 1864 presidential nomination, Lincoln told John Hay: “I am entirely indifferent as to his success or failure in [his] . . . schemes, so long as he does his duty as the head of the Treasury Department.”24 The record of Lincoln’s judgment was notoriously more complicated in the arena of military appointments. Here he made some poor choices under political pressure, and—given the limits of talent and experience—promoted some who would not make the grade. Lincoln showed an early confidence in his handling of relations with other centers of authority. He ensured that he was the early master by calling Congress to meet in special session not at once, but some three months after the first shots were fired. He left Congress to its own devices in some policy areas, notably its economic program, but he kept firm control over emancipation, reconstruction, and management of the war. He drew political strength from his relations with the UnionRepublican governors who dominated the Northern states, a ref lection of his control within his party. He gave his cabinet secretaries room for maneuver in their own departments but he remained their master. When given a present of whistle made from a pig’s tail, Lincoln joked that he could use it to summon up his cabinet.25 His overall command, one congressional radical judged, made him “the virtual dictator of the country.”26 This was an exaggeration, of course: as he explained to a young woman toward the end of the war, “he was but one horse in the team, and if the others pulled in a different direction, it would be a hard matter for him to out-pull them.”27 The personal qualities Lincoln revealed in his political management merit more attention than we have time for here, but certain aspects of his temperament and personality served him especially well in the loneliness of office and in his political dealings. His strong sense of selfworth, allied to a keen appreciation of priorities, meant that he rarely, if ever, stood on his dignity: McClellan’s notorious personal slights prompted no retaliation. The same assuredness gave him the strength for magnanimity and for admitting mistakes. At the same time, his

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mental fortitude—forged through his dark passages of depression— gave him more resilience in extremity than some of those around him. He recalled how “in critical times” he had had “to sustain the sinking courage” of Montgomery Meigs, Henry Halleck, and other professional fighters. Lincoln was not immune to periods of despair or to bouts of anger. But what is far more striking is Lincoln’s self-restraint: his ability to control his anger and his disappointments. Of the “feeling of personal resentment,” he acknowledged that he perhaps had “too little of it, but I never thought it paid. A man has not time to spend half his life in quarrels. If any man ceases to attack me, I never remember the past against him.”28 He wrote but did not send letters prompted by despair or anger; and he worked to patch up potentially destructive controversies between and among his commanding officers and the political authorities. Lincoln’s famous fondness for stories, jokes, and jests suggests their importance as personal therapy. “If it were not for [them]” Lincoln remarked, “I should die; they . . . are the vents . . . of my moods and gloom.”29 He agreed with the English clergyman and fellow depressive Sydney Smith about the value of humor as an antidote.30 But it served an additional purpose, for the president made his mirth and gift for story-telling key weapons in his personal and political relations, a means of lubricating and turning conversation. For a depressive, Lincoln could be excellent company. However, he told his stories not for their own sake, but rather to illustrate his point with color and economy. Jefferson Davis’s austerity in manner and lack of a sense of humor—no doubt related to his dyspepsia, neuralgia, and recurrent malarial symptoms— provide a jarring contrast with Lincoln’s often mirthful informality. Lincoln’s temperamental caution, his preference for deep thought, and for privileging reason and logic over passion often inclined him to greater deliberation than suited the mood of the times. When, during early 1862, Herndon ref lected a growing public concern over the administration’s timidity, and urged the president to act with the boldness of his predecessor Andrew Jackson, Lincoln replied: “I can’t do it . . . I do not know whom to trust and must move slowly and cautiously. I think I have my foot on the rebellion, nevertheless.”31 He admired Jackson’s staunch Unionism, but not his impetuosity. There were times when this caution might have ill-served his judgments: in delaying his departure for Washington as president-elect, or in tolerating McClellan’s battlefield procrastination, or in his slow embrace of the arming of black troops. In the main, however, what impresses is Lincoln’s well-developed sense of political timing, his shrewd judgment

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of when precisely it was the moment to act. “Many of my strongest supporters urged Emancipation before I thought it indispensable, and . . . before I thought the country ready for it,” he told the portrait painter Francis Carpenter. “It is my conviction that, had the proclamation been issued even six months earlier than it was, public sentiment would not have sustained it.”32 Once Lincoln had determined to act, he did so decisively and undeviatingly. He thought so long and carefully before taking any new position, Charles Sumner explained, that “it is hard to move him . . . once he has taken it.” This intellectual ratchet meant that the decision for emancipation, once taken, would not be retracted; and in November, two months after issuing the preliminary order, he said privately that “he would rather die than take back a word.”33 As this suggests, Lincoln would not be bullied, but his favored technique in handling those who tried was commonly to outwit them, rather than engage in an open trial of strength. Facing a governor angered by the demands of the draft, Lincoln managed him as did the farmer who boasted he had “got rid of ” a big, knotty log in the middle of his field by plowing around it. “Now,” Lincoln chuckled, “don’t tell anybody, but that’s the way I got rid of [the] Governor . . . I ploughed around him, but it took me three mortal hours to do it, and I was afraid every minute he’d see what I was at.”34 It was easy to underestimate Lincoln—though from that he derived advantage. In the prewar courtroom, in Swett’s memorable metaphor, anyone “who took Lincoln for a simple-minded man would very soon wake up with his back in a ditch.”35 He outwitted Horace Greeley during the summer of 1864, when the Tribune’s editor, fearing “new rivers of human blood,” urged the president to negotiate with Confederate diplomats apparently on a peace mission. Lincoln cunningly appointed the reluctant Greeley as his envoy to meet them at Niagara Falls, “to crack that nut for himself ” (as he put it to James Harlan), correctly believing that nothing would come of an encounter with men who, it unsurprisingly transpired, had been given no power to negotiate.36 Lincoln’s veto of the Wade-Davis Bill, laying out a radical plan of Southern reconstruction, was similarly deft. A lesser figure would have been ground between the upper and nether millstones of Republican radicals and conservative Unionists. Lincoln shrewdly played these forces, each essential to the war coalition. Throughout the crisis of the Union Lincoln never lost sight of the need to nourish that coalition: “I must act for all sections of the Union in trying to maintain the supremacy of the government.”37 Although initially he used his power of patronage to sweep out hundreds of Buchanan

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Democrats, he cast aside conventional partisanship once hostilities erupted. When Josiah Grinnell presented a complaint against a Democrat employed as a departmental clerk, Lincoln demurred: “Don’t ask me to strike so low; I have to do with those whom I despise, for we are at war. Democratic aid we must have if possible, and I conciliate to avoid all friction.”38 Elements in the Democratic Party could be dangerous, powerful, and extreme, but they also provided a political focus for hostility, helped identify dissent, and gave Lincoln a target he could work on. By appointing loyal Democrats to political and military posts, he pursued a kind of “recognition” politics that brought non-Republicans on board. Indeed, the rebranding of Republicans as the “Union” party appealed to a widespread antiparty sentiment in Lincoln’s nationalist efforts to delegitimize the opposition. IV. Communication That Lincoln headed a powerful political party would be of great consequence for his role as a communicator of his administration’s purposes. Military force and an organized economy would not alone secure victory. Essential to the Union’s success was the mobilizing of popular patriotism in the face of the ravages of war. The coercive means that Lincoln sanctioned to combat disloyalty—the suspension of habeas corpus, military arrests, enforcement of the draft—were far less significant to the Union’s operations than unforced popular rallying to the cause. Lincoln’s achievement, in touching the nerve of ordinary folk, was striking and consequential. And it was an aspect of his leadership that not only revealed his self-reliance but indeed encouraged his confidence in his own judgment. The starting point for any discussion of Lincoln as communicator must be his remarkable faith in the people. This was no affectation. If it was the pragmatic reality of a democratic republic that public sentiment was, as he put it, “everything,”39 it was also best basis for government. Herndon quoted him as saying “that the intelligence of the mass of our people was the light and life of the republic.”40 This, of course, put a premium on universal education, to accompany the universal ballot (an argument, incidentally, that made Lincoln believe women’s political rights would come in time). At the outset of the war, he declared: “Our people are easily inf luenced by reason.” Their political representatives had a political and moral duty to be scrupulously honest with people in argument, “not to be led from the region of reason

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into that of hot blood.” The political leader must be a teacher, not a demagogue. Traveling to Washington as president-elect he was confident the people would sustain him: “They have never yet forsaken any true man.”42 It was an observation he repeated throughout the war, and it adds another layer of explanation for his concern over public sentiment at the lowest points (“What will the country say, what will the country say?” he groaned after Chancellorsville).43 “The people are for this war. They want the rebellion crushed and as quick as may be, too,” he remarked in fall 1863, and the following spring told Joseph Gillespie that “the People were greatly ahead of the poloticians [sic] in their effort for and confidence in putting down the rebellion.” He continued: “the People in our emergency was next thing to the voice of God”; they “were behaving so nobly that all doubt had been removed from his mind as to our ultimate success.”44 During the grim summer of 1864, as Copperheadism burgeoned, he reiterated his confidence: the people “will not consent to disunion. The danger is, they are misled. Let them know the truth, and the country is safe.”45 Lincoln’s confidence in the people was sustained by what he called his “public-opinion baths”: twice-weekly meetings where every applicant for audience took his turn “as if waiting to be shaved in a barber’s shop.” “Men moving only in an official circle are apt to become merely official—not to say arbitrary—in their ideas,” Lincoln ref lected, “and are apter and apter . . . to forget that they only hold power in a representative capacity.” Thus, “no hours of my day are better employed than those which . . . bring me again within the direct contact and atmosphere of the average of our whole people.”46 Regular and frequent conversations with ordinary folk kept Lincoln both grounded and informed, and further encouraged his natural faith in his own judgment. Lincoln saw his task as “talking the country up” to the administration’s measures and new directions in policy.47 But the pressure of wartime business gave him few opportunities for the set-piece oration, and—unlike modern presidents—he had no team of speechwriters. He did, however, supplement his few memorable set-pieces (his inaugurals, the Gettysburg Address, and some of his messages to Congress) with a clutch of skillfully crafted public letters, each addressing a burning issue: emancipation, the arming of black troops, conscription, treason, military arrests, and the suspension of habeas corpus. In these he combined force of argument with language rich in color and energy. “Don’t shoot too high,” he told Herndon, “and the common people will understand you.” He used the house-divided metaphor, he said, because it was a

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“universally known figure, expressed in simple language.”48 Ref lecting on the Southern idea of state sovereignty, he vividly remarked that “the advocates of that theory always reminded him of the fellow who contended that the proper place for the big kettle was inside of the little one.”49 Harriet Beecher Stowe complimented Lincoln for language that had “the relish and smack of the soil.”50 Lincoln aimed to be accessible in other ways. The mass-produced lithograph carried his image into thousands of homes, as did the new, mass-produced photograph. He sat dozens of times for photographers, and many of the seventy or so wartime likenesses of him were reproduced in huge numbers as pocket-size photographs. This was not vanity. He enjoyed telling stories against his looks. He told of meeting a stranger in a railroad car, who said, “Excuse me, sir, but I have an article in my possession which belongs to you.” Taking a jackknife from his pocket, the man explained: “This . . . was placed in my hands some years ago, with the injunction that I was to keep it until I found a man uglier than myself . . . Allow me now to say, sir, that I think you are fairly entitled to the property.”51 A photographer getting Lincoln to pose asked that he “just look natural,” to which the president shot back: “That is what I would like to avoid.”52 But Lincoln also understood the value of photographs in creating a virtual presence and giving those who had never seen him in the f lesh a sense of personal encounter. By these means Lincoln tapped the Union’s deep well of patriotic and religious sentiment. In seeking out the most potent agencies to mobilize that opinion, Lincoln looked beyond the official institutions of government to the most powerful of the nation’s voluntary networks: the political party, the churches, and the citizen army. He harnessed their loyalty to a providential vision of the nation, seeking to keep it steadfast in even the darkest days of war. Time is short so let me brief ly consider the least commonly noted of these, Lincoln’s relationship with the churches and their ancillary organizations. They offered him a potent instrument. Recruiting church leaders as active advocates of the Union cause would harness the forces of evangelical Protestantism—the millions of Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and others, who together formed the most formidable religious grouping in the country. Lincoln recognized the loyalty of the churches to the cause of Union. Northern clergy, divided before the war over slavery, now united in defense of the nation, as radical antislavery men found common cause with “law and order” conservatives. Protestants prized the Union as the vehicle for God’s unique role for America within human history. The majority of them accepted the

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government’s initial definition of the war as a struggle to reestablish the Constitution and laws, but during 1862 even cautious evangelicals warmed to emancipation and the use of black troops as divinely proffered means of restoring the Union. American history, as the culmination of world history, would resolve the battle between Antichrist and the Christian order; between Southern slavery on one side, and freedom on the other. When it came, the Emancipation Proclamation purified the nation, opening the way to victory. Lincoln worked hard to keep open two-way channels with religious leaders, and met the full gamut at the White House: the editors of mass-circulation papers, and delegations from particular churches and charitable causes. Some saw only an oppressed president bombarded by pressure groups, but Lincoln turned these meetings to his advantage, responding to his visitors’ addresses with his own carefully crafted words. He used a language that recognized the administration’s dependence on Divine favor. In proclamations calling for days of fasting and thanksgiving; and in speeches that summoned a deep moral understanding of America’s meaning Lincoln prompted observers to perceive in him a “deep religious feeling.” Jonathan Turner shrewdly commented that both president and people “seem . . . to imagine that he is a sort of half way clergyman.” Thus Lincoln went a long way toward satisfying those who cast him as an instrument of the divine will. A Chicago Methodist believed he had located “the true theory & solution of this ‘terrible war’ ” in the vivid remark of one of the city’s lawyers: “You may depend upon it, the Lord runs Lincoln.”53 Lincoln’s efforts achieved their reward. Mainstream Protestants put their full-blooded Unionism at the service of patriotic politics and the Republican Party. Church meetings fused the sacred and the secular. Congregations sang “America” and the “Star-Spangled Banner.” A network of potent clerical speakers took to the rostrum and pulpit. The combined religious engines of the Union did as much as any other single force to mobilize support for the war. Lincoln rejoiced in what he described in 1864 as “the effective and almost unanimous [sic] support which the Christian communities are so zealously giving to the country.”54 *

* *

From this it should be clear that—whatever the undoubted force of Lincoln’s self-reliance—his achievement as president relied even more on what he knew to be the surging force of American nationalism: a

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shared belief in the republic’s special place in the dispensation of providence. For African Americans and a broad swathe of white Union opinion, this was a nationalism only enhanced and invigorated by Lincoln’s proclamation of freedom in January 1863. This leads me to a final, counterfactual ref lection that has particular relevance here in Richmond: namely, the historian David Potter’s idea “that if the Union and the Confederacy had exchanged presidents with one another, the Confederacy might have won its independence.”55 Few today would grant to each president so powerful an inf luence over events that the quality of leadership becomes the definitive element in the war’s outcome. Leadership mattered, but so too did political systems, human and material resources, economic organization, military capabilities, and the interests of foreign powers. Beyond this, however, Potter’s proposition rather misses the point that Lincoln did not offer the kind of leadership that, arguably, would have best served the Confederacy: charismatic authority. Lincoln was well suited to the role of serving as “routine” leader of an established polity. He possessed considerable personal authority, but his mobilization of popular support depended little on loyalty to him as an individual, and certainly not on charismatic power, strictly defined. Charismatic authority is founded on the perceived greatness and mission in the proclaimed leader during a time of instability and governmental breakdown. Although the events of 1861–1865 represented the greatest crisis in the republic’s history, Lincoln’s power came, not from subverting the routine political system, but from acting as the defender of the constitutional status quo, as Unionists defined it. He emphasized and represented legal continuity, not radical disjunction. Had McClellan, for example, supplanted Lincoln as an unelected military ruler and overturned constitutional forms, then a charismatic form of domination—heroic, romantic, Napoleonic, and driven by a sense of mission—would have been essential. But what is significant is the resilience of the system of republican constitutionalism in the Civil War Union, not its fragility. Lincoln well understood this. Responding to rumors of plots to kidnap or assassinate him, he remarked: “I do not see what the Rebels would gain by killing or getting possession of me. I am but a single individual, and it would not make the least difference in the progress of the war. Everything would go right on just the same.” But what the CSA arguably needed, as a new entity, was charismatic power. Gary Gallagher has identified the army of Northern Virginia as the prime driver of wartime Southern nationalism. In Lee, the Confederacy had a leader who contributed a romantic, heroic,

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audacious, even f lamboyant element to the Confederates’ cause (“I should like to see him as King or Dictator,” a young gunner ref lected).56 This was scarcely Lincoln’s quality. Moreover, what Lincoln carried out superbly well were tasks that required a robust infrastructure. His strengths would have been poorly served in the South, lacking as it did a vigorous party system and providing means of communication that were attenuated and disrupted. Lincoln, however, rose remarkably to meet his particular challenge: his was the achievement of a political master whose capacities bordered on genius. They included a capacity for strategic thought; a fixed moral compass; a steady determination to hold to policy positions, once adopted; an aptitude for day-to-day party political management; a remarkable sensitivity toward shifts in public opinion; a faith in “the power of the right word” to educate the public through rational argument and appeals to conscience; a shrewd understanding of human psychology; physical and mental strength; and—running through them as a thread—“wonderful self-reliance.” Notes 1. Quoted in Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 21. 2. Henry Villard, Memoirs of Henry Villard, Journalist and Financier, 1835–1900, 2 vols (Boston, New York: Houghton, Miff lin and Company, 1904), 1, p. 96. 3. Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher, comps. and eds., Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln [hereafter RWAL] (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 455. 4. Ibid., p. 131. 5. Ibid., pp. 251–252. 6. Michael Burlingame, ed., An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln: John G. Nicolay’s Interviews and Essays (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), pp. 54–55. 7. Allen Thorndike Rice, ed., Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (New York: North American Publishing Company, 1886), p. xxix. 8. Allan Nevins, The War for the Union: vol. 2: War Becomes Revolution (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960), pp. 385, 402. 9. “Lincoln was as nearly master of himself as it is possible for a man clothed with great authority and engaged in the affairs of public life to become.” James B. Fry, in Rice, Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, p. 390; “the sense of superiority possessed President Lincoln at all times. Unobtruding and even unassuming as he was, he was not modest in his assertion . . .” Don Piatt in ibid., p. 493. 10. Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants: Letters Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), p. 332. 11. Rice, Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, pp. 209–210; Gideon Welles, Lincoln and Seward: Remarks Upon the Memorial Address of Chas. Francis Adams, on the late William H. Seward, With Incidents and Comments Illustrative of the Measures and Policy of the Administration of Abraham

120 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

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Lincoln (New York: Sheldon & Company, 1874), p. 32; Wilson and Davis, Herndon’s Informants, p. 167. Theodore Calvin Pease and James G. Randall, eds., The Diary of Orville H. Browning, 2 vols. (Springfield, Ill.: Illinois State Historical Library, 1925), 1, pp. 562–563. James MacGregor Burns, Leadership (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 94–104. Roy P. Basler et al., eds., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln [hereafter CW], 9 vols (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953-55), 4, pp. 232–233. Diary of Gideon Welles: Secretary of the Navy under Lincoln and Johnson, 3 vols (Boston: Houghton Miff lin Company, 1911), 1, p. 143. RWAL, p. 241. Wilson and Davis, Herndon’s Informants, pp. 157–158. RWAL, p. 8. Cf. CW, 4, p. 345. CW, 4, p. 518. J.G. Randall and Richard N. Current, Lincoln the President, 4 vols (New York: Dodds, Mead, 1955), 2, p. 41. CW, 5, p. 98; 6, p. 257. William O. Stoddard, Inside the White House in War Times: Memoirs and Reports of Lincoln’s Secretary, ed. Michael Burlingame (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), p. 101. RWAL, p. 142. Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), p. 93. RWAL, p. 270. George W. Julian, quoted in William C. Harris, With Charity for All: Lincoln and the Restoration of the Union (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1997), p. 241. RWAL, pp. 16, 33. Burlingame and Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House, pp. 191, 245. RWAL, p. 252. F.B. Carpenter, The Inner Life of Abraham Lincoln: Six Months at the White House (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995 [orig. pub. New York, 1866]), pp. 149–152. RWAL, p. 254. Carpenter, Inner Life of Abraham Lincoln, p. 77. CW, 5, p. 503. Rice, Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, p. 400. William H. Herndon and Jesse William Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life (The History and Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln) (Chicago: Belford, Clarke, c1889), p. 334. Ida M. Tarbell, The Life of Abraham Lincoln: Drawn from Original Sources, 4 vols (New York: Lincoln History Society, 1907), 3, p. 198. Ibid., p. 175. Josiah Bus[h]nell Grinnell, Men and Events of Forty Years: Autobiographical Reminiscences of an Active Career from 1850 to 1890 (Boston: D. Lothrop Company, 1891), p. 174. CW, 3, p. 424. RWAL, p. 244. Burlingame and Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House, pp. 4, 254. RWAL, p. 254. David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), p. 436. Wilson and Davis, Herndon’s Informants, p. 182. RWAL, p. 278. Carpenter, Inner Life of Abraham Lincoln, p. 281. RWAL, p. 144.

Abraham Lincoln’s Leadership 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

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Ibid., pp. 251–252. Wilson and Davis, Herndon’s Informants, p. 187. Chicago Tribune, January 16, 1864. Carpenter, Inner Life of Abraham Lincoln, pp. 148–149. RWAL, p. 126. Victor B. Howard, Religion and the Radical Republican Movement 1860–1870 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990), p. 71; D.H. Wheeler to D.P. Kidder, December 14, 1863, Daniel Kidder Papers, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, Illinois. 54. CW, 7, p. 368. 55. David M. Potter, “Jefferson Davis and the Political Factors in Confederate Defeat,” in David Herbert Donald, ed., Why the North Won the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960), pp. 102, 112. 56. Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 85–89.

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CH A P T E R

SE V E N

Lincoln and the Copperheads Je nni fe r L . We be r

From almost the moment the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, Abraham Lincoln started hearing from friends, supporters, and Republican governors about strong opposition to the war, especially in the lower Midwest. Antiwar Democrats, who were strict constructionists on the Constitution, objected to nearly everything Abraham Lincoln did to wage war: raising troops, suspending habeas corpus, ordering a blockade of Southern ports, and virtually declaring war on the South—all before Congress had even had a chance to meet. By the time Congress convened on July 4, 1861, for a special session, anxious conservative Democrats were convinced that Lincoln was out to usurp American liberties and was well on his way to becoming a tyrant. Caught up in war fever and far from the places where dissent was most apparent, the Eastern press paid no attention. Lincoln did. In his message to Congress, Lincoln explained himself. He had “no choice but to call out the war power of the Government.” When fired upon, the Union had to resort to force for its own protection. He defended his call for troops by reminding members of Congress that Northerners had demanded it and by saying he assumed they would ratify it—as they quickly did. Without specifically mentioning Roger Taney, he argued against the chief justice’s ruling in ex parte Merryman, which held that Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus was unconstitutional. Lincoln pointed out to Congress that the laws were not being executed in a third of the states and said he had to impose federal authority. “Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go

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to pieces, lest that one be violated? . . . Would not the official oath be broken, if the government should be overthrown, when it was believed that disregarding the single law, would tend to preserve it?” Lincoln later said that had he not taken these steps, he was sure the government would have been overthrown.1 This message established Lincoln’s pattern for dealing with Peace Democrats, his most virulent critics. Leaders need followers, and during the Civil War, no one was less likely to follow Lincoln’s lead than the antiwar Democrats. In his message to Congress, as in many other instances, Lincoln addressed their complaints, but he never mentioned them by name, either as individuals or as a movement. His response to Northern dissidents illustrates many of the traits that made him a superb president, including vision, determination, and discretion. But had the Union armies failed to reverse their fortunes in the fall of 1864, these same qualities likely would be interpreted otherwise—deaf to the people, stubborn, and secretive. Historians would dismiss Lincoln as a failed president instead of ranking him as one of the greats, and they would have blamed many of the same characteristics they cite to extol him. That Lincoln was a great president is too pat to square with the historical reality. While Lincoln was often a master of timing, he was, to a great degree, also its servant, reacting to events as they unfolded. Historical contingency is as important a factor in Lincoln’s enduring legacy as are his own immense gifts as a politician and leader. Lincoln almost never spoke to or even alluded to the Peace Democrats. A search of the Collected Works shows no record of his using the word “Copperhead”—the popular term for the peace wing of the Democratic Party—until 1864, when he used it three times. Indeed, he rarely even used the word “Democrat.” The scarcity of these terms is reminiscent of Lincoln’s determination never to use the word “Confederate”—only “rebel”—but no evidence exists that Lincoln’s semantic handling of the Peace Democrats was a conscious decision. Not alluding to the source did not mean he did not address Copperheads’ issues. At times he would refer to their charges and try to refute them, but not often. In not confronting his political enemies, Lincoln played a dangerous game. On the one hand, he did not add weight to their arguments by dignifying them. On the other, by offering little in the way of rebuttal and less in the way of direct engagement, he seemed often to cede the field to the conservative Democrats. At times when the Union armies were not performing well, especially the summers of 1862 and 1864, Lincoln’s silence gave Democrats, in particular, the excuse to switch their allegiance from

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War Democrat to Peace Democrat. His laconism is all the more striking given the no-holds-barred politics of the day.2 Adam I.P. Smith has argued that the Republican Party tried to make itself synonymous with Unionism and patriotism during the war. A moderate by nature, Lincoln may have maintained as politically neutral a pose as possible in hopes of keeping the support of War Democrats. He named Democrats to his cabinet, and later agreed to have a Southern Democrat, Andrew Johnson, as his running mate. Prominent Democrats, including John Logan, who represented a butternut district in Illinois, and Lincoln’s old foe Stephen A. Douglas rallied to his side at the beginning of the war, leading some to believe that nonpartisanship was possible during wartime. But nonpartisanship really was a one-way street for Republicans. For them, “nonpartisan” meant “Republican.” They made little effort to accommodate Democratic interests in public policy and were quick to paint anyone who did not agree with them— especially Copperheads—as a traitor. A master of the shrewd political appointment, Lincoln was not above partisanship either.3 Credible claims of nonpartisanship really began to fray in the fall of 1862, after the dismal military losses of the summer and Lincoln’s announcing the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Democrats, and especially the Copperheads, made notable gains in the November election. By January 1863, loud rumblings of secession were coming from the Old Northwest. Lincoln told a senator that he worried more about “the fire in the rear” than the enemy to the front. Resistance would only grow stronger after Congress passed a draft act in March. Despite his fears, Lincoln appears to have had few conversations about the Peace Democrats with his confidantes or advisers. An old Springfield friend mentioned discussions about Copperheads, but none of his cabinet members did. Perhaps not surprisingly, Lincoln’s most apparent interest in conservative Democrats was as the butt of jokes, especially David Ross Locke’s Nasby Papers. This was a satire about the misadventures and dubious deeds of Petroleum V. Nasby, a barely literate Ohio peace man. The president would sometimes read passages to visitors and roar with laughter.4 Lincoln may have been reluctant to say much serious about the opposition, but he was far less hesitant to act against them. When the governor of Lincoln’s home state, Illinois, asked for four regiments to be posted in the state to keep an eye on the legislature, he got them. The governor of Indiana received a quarter of a million dollars to keep the state running while he kept the Democratic legislature from meeting. The president sent troops to New York City for the 1864 election to

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make sure another riot did not break out there. He did not hesitate to suspend habeas corpus, first in limited areas and then across the country. When he thought two New York newspapers had gone too far and committed treasonous acts, he ordered their editors and publishers to be arrested immediately. While he may not have been personally responsible for the most egregious violations of civil liberties, Lincoln endorsed many of the actions taken on behalf of his administration, claiming that they were in the best interests of public safety during a rebellion. As historian Richard Carwardine writes, the president “was angered less by the knowledge that there could be innocent victims of military arrests than by learning about obstruction to military mobilization.”5 His concern about interference with the military is what finally prompted Lincoln to communicate with his critics. These two occasions were the only times he directly engaged with them. Both took place in the summer of 1863 and were in response to the arrest of former Congressman Clement Vallandigham, the nation’s most notorious Copperhead. Vallandigham’s detention was not something Lincoln knew about in advance—he learned about it from the newspapers—or condoned. When General Ambrose Burnside had Vallandigham seized, tried in military court, and convicted for making disloyal comments, a bipartisan furor broke out. Vallandigham was not, as Mark Neely, Jr. observes, the kind of man usually targeted for arrest; draft-dodgers, bridge-burners, and Confederate sympathizers were. He may have been, as one Republican reporter called him, “the disorganizer, the mischief-maker, the ally of Jeff Davis and the devil,” but he was also a congressman freshly turned out of office. Democrats and Republicans were outraged at what appeared to be a naked violation of free-speech rights. Burnside offered his resignation, but Lincoln refused to accept it. He did not want to undermine his general. Instead, he banished Vallandigham to the Confederacy. From there, the congressman sailed to Canada and ran for governor of Ohio. (Vallandigham sneaked back into the Union in the summer of 1864, hoping to be captured and to embarrass the government again. Lincoln had men keep an eye on Vallandigham but instructed them not to arrest him.6) The correspondence with the Copperheads began when two groups of conservative Democrats, one from Albany, New York, and the other from Ohio, sent Lincoln resolutions objecting to the arrest and demanding the congressman’s return. The president seized the opportunity to discuss Vallandigham’s case as well as Copperhead fears about civil liberties and Lincoln’s claims to expanded powers as a commander in chief. Lincoln’s carefully worded response, which at times featured

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the reasoning of a legal brief, can be read two ways: either as an example of his trying to reason with and reach out to the opposition, or as Lincoln subtly undermining the peace men’s cause and raising questions about their loyalties. His language is ambiguous enough to support either case.7 Polite throughout his letter to the Albany group, Lincoln began by congratulating the petitioners on their patriotism. Like them, he sought to maintain the government—even though, as he admitted, he only inferred that this was one of their goals. He defended the military arrests of civilians, pointing out that the Constitution allowed the suspension of habeas corpus “in cases of rebellion or invasion [when] the public Safety may require it.” He reminded the petitioners that Andrew Jackson maintained martial law in New Orleans even after the War of 1812 was over. This argument was a particularly relevant one, given the hallowed status that Jackson enjoyed among conservative Democrats.8 As a young man, Lincoln had a reputation as someone who could seriously wound a political foe with his wit. Historians generally agree that Lincoln gave up his “undisciplined sense of humor” when a series of anonymous letters led an opponent to challenge Lincoln to a duel. The letters to the Copperheads demonstrate that Lincoln could still throw reputations into question, though far more subtly than he had as a young man. By even debating military arrests, Lincoln wrote the Albany group, they had fallen into a clever Confederate trap. At the time of secession, the Rebels calculated that they could rely on guarantees of free speech and habeas corpus to protect “a most efficient corps of spies, informers, suppliers, and aiders and abetters of their cause in a thousand ways.” Raising constitutional issues confused Northerners enough to buy time for the Confederates, a critical element in a war of attrition. Lincoln subtly impugned the Peace Democrats’ loyalties by suggesting they were aiding the Rebel cause, whether intentionally or by accident.9 As for his own actions, he assured the New Yorkers that he had adopted stronger measures only gradually and when they were “indispensable to the public Safety.” Here he was referring especially to suspending habeas corpus. Civil courts were not equipped to handle the number of crimes committed in wartime, he said. (In parts of the country where resistance ran high, the government had had a serious problem finding impartial juries or judges to conduct fair trials involving the draft or desertion.) Military courts were better set up to recognize and deal with crimes of this nature, which weakened the Union cause “as much as he who kills a Union soldier in battle.”10

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Vallandigham was arrested not because of what he said—that would be unconstitutional, the president agreed—but because he was trying to prevent troops from being raised and encourage desertion. That left the nation underprotected. “He was warring upon the military; and this gave the military constitutional jurisdiction to lay hands upon him,” Lincoln asserted. Had Vallandigham not been “damaging the military power of the country,” Lincoln said he would be happy to “correct” the arrest. The crux of the problem was this, he said famously: “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert? . . . I think that in such a case, to silence the agitator, and save the boy, is not only constitutional, but, withal, a great mercy.”11 At the end of his letter, Lincoln became rather more pointed. He could not help but notice, he wrote, that the signers identified themselves as “Democrats,” not as “American citizens.” This was disappointing; he would have hoped that they had risen above party politics, “because I am sure that from such more elevated position, we could do better battle for the country we all love.” He was relieved, he said, that not all Democrats put their party first the way this group had. He ended on a reassuring note, saying that he expected that as the confusion around the war waned, the government would have to use force against Northerners less often and that arrests like Vallandigham’s would no longer be necessary. Lincoln’s allusion to party—indeed, the very fact of the letter itself—marked a dramatic change for the president. Under intense fire from the increasingly inf luential Copperheads and still reeling from Joseph Hooker’s humiliating loss at Chancellorsville, Lincoln abandoned any pretense at nonpartisanship and bipartisan unity that he had maintained publicly to this point. He was becoming more assertive in dealing with the opposition.12 The Albany men responded with a pamphlet. “Reply to President Lincoln’s Letter of 12th June, 1863” argued that arrests and imprisonment could not legally be carried out, even with the suspension of habeas corpus. They worried that the suspension was merely a way to “invent new crimes unknown to law and new ways of suppressing them,” according to Neely. The result, the pamphlet predicted, would be “indiscriminate arrests, midnight seizures, military commissions, unheard-of-modes of trial and punishment, and all the machinery of terror and despotism.” The pamphlet earned no response from the president.13 The restraint Lincoln had mostly shown the New Yorkers was gone a couple of weeks later in his letter to the Ohio Democratic State

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Convention, when his tone became vexed and damning. Lincoln reiterated much of what he had said to the New Yorkers, but added that unlike their Eastern brethren, the Buckeyes did not specifically support military force as a constitutional response to the rebellion. Nor did they admit “that you are conscious of an existing rebellion being in progress with the avowed object of destroying” the Union. That, combined with nominating Vallandigham for governor, made the Ohio men complicit in encouraging draft dodging and desertion. He did not know if the Ohio contingent realized this, Lincoln said, “but I assure you that both friends and enemies of the Union look upon it in this light.” This offered hope to the enemy, Lincoln said. Then he made them an offer. If they would agree to a set of resolutions and sign them, he would allow Vallandigham to return. Lincoln assumed this would keep Vallandigham quiet since Vallandigham would not want to disagree publicly with his friends. The resolutions, as Lincoln laid them out, acknowledged that rebellion existed in the United States and that using the army and navy was a constitutional response to the threat; that none of the signers would do anything to undermine the army’s or navy’s efficiency; and that each would do everything he could to support Union troops.14 The offer was a trap. If the Buckeyes signed, Lincoln had a promise of cooperation. If they did not, they looked less than loyal. The snare was obvious, and the Ohioans tried to sidestep it. They wrote him back, strongly disagreeing with his reading of the Constitution and accusing him of splitting legal hairs. “Our government was designed to be a government of law; settled and defined, and not of the arbitrary will of a single man,” they reminded him. Hardly able to contain their wrath, they wrote: “Surely it is not necessary to subvert free government in this Country, in order to put down the rebellion; and it cannot be done under the pretence of putting down the rebellion. Indeed, it is plain that your administration has been weakened, greatly weakened by the assumption of power not delegated in the constitution.” Its own policies, they charged, had encouraged desertion and draft dodging. They finished by saying they had no authority to bargain with the president over Vallandigham’s freedom. That concluded Lincoln’s correspondence with them.15 The letters to the New York and Ohio Democrats marked a turning point for Lincoln. After this, Lincoln’s allusions to the Copperheads were far less conciliatory. He may have realized he could not change their minds, or perhaps he lost all patience with them after the bloody draft riots that plagued the summer of 1863. His fatalistic streak could

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also explain his hardening stance. Lincoln never spent much energy on things out of his control. Leonard Swett, who rode the legal circuit with Lincoln and became a political adviser, described Lincoln’s entire life as “a calculation of the law of forces . . . The world to him was a question of cause and effect. He believed the results to which certain causes tended, would surely follow; he did not believe that those results could be materially hastened, or impeded.” In any case, his changing attitude was certainly an early harbinger of what David Donald has called an increasingly “ruthless determination” to prosecute the war. From here on, Lincoln seemed more inclined to needle the Peace Democrats than try to reach an accord with them.16 The president’s letter to James Conkling, which Conkling read at a mass meeting in Springfield, Illinois, in September 1863, is a prime example of Lincoln’s new attitude toward the opposition. In this letter, he reverted to his old habit of not specifically referring to the Peace Democrats, but no one could misunderstand whom the letter targeted or his disdain for them. He began by addressing the Copperheads’ persistent calls for an end to the war. Peace, by his reckoning, could be had only in one of three ways: Northerners could win the war militarily, give up the Union, or compromise with the Rebels. If Democrats wanted to give up the Union, they should just say so, he said. A peace deal was a fantasy. That left only a military solution. However, Lincoln did not think the war was the real issue for the Copperheads; race was. The Emancipation Proclamation had infuriated Peace Democrats not just because they thought Lincoln overstepped his constitutional limits, but also because they were intensely, savagely racist, even by the standards of their own day. Lincoln’s words on slavery almost mock the opposition. “I certainly wish that all men could be free, while I suppose you do not,” he wrote. He set out a series of propositions: If a man could own people, were they not by definition property? And had not property always been a fair target in war? If one endorsed the notion of human property, and confiscating property was legitimate in wartime, then the Emancipation Proclamation made perfect sense as a war measure. Lincoln saved his most cutting remarks for a discussion of military service, all but accusing stay-at-home dissidents of cowardice. (In fact, in an early draft Lincoln directly challenged the manhood of opponents of the draft and tried to humiliate them. The final version remains insulting, but in a far more subtle way.) “You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you,” he observed dryly. Having more black men in uniform meant that fewer whites would have to serve, he said, but blacks, like whites, “act upon

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motives”—in this case, the promise of freedom. “The promise being made, must be kept.” As for Copperhead assertions that they were loyal Unionists, Lincoln suggested they fight for the Union now and worry about emancipation later, once the nation was saved. This was another wily challenge, given that Peace Democrats rarely volunteered for military service despite their claims of patriotism. Lincoln concluded his letter with a withering indictment of the Copperhead movement, one that again alluded to race. When the Union won the war, he said, “there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.” This was strong language for Lincoln and the closest he ever came to accusing the opposition of treason, which many of his Republican brethren did regularly.17 Lincoln had come to believe that the fundamental problem between him and conservative Democrats was not a question of the burgeoning power of the federal government or the draft or the cost of the war. Like the Copperheads, the president saw the difference between them was over questions of liberty, but he saw the crux as being a very particular kind of liberty: freedom for African Americans. “We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing, . . .” he said. The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails to-day among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty.18 Lincoln’s commitment to emancipation was unqualified, and it illustrates several important characteristics as a leader. First, Lincoln did not act quickly on anything. He “refrained from doing what was not essential; and often—generally indeed—refrained even from explaining or defending his non-action,” his secretaries said. His inclination was to listen to numerous points of view from politicians, Cabinet members, and editors, and in his meetings with common people in his office, encounters he called “public opinion baths.” By the time he came to a decision, he was fully aware of his options.19

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Those public opinion baths gave Lincoln a strong feeling for what the mood of the country was and where it was going. Using his intuition—this was an era before polling, after all—he could position himself just ahead of the national sentiment and guide it. He strongly believed in Americans’ ability to be educated and in their common sense. “Mr Lincoln had more respect for & confidence in the masses than any statesman this Country has ever produced,” wrote Joseph Gillespie, a friend of Lincoln’s from the Black Hawk War days and a fellow lawyer. This confidence, along with his measured approach to making a decision, his knowledge of the possibilities, and his understanding of the American frame of mind were all on display when he decided to issue an emancipation proclamation. Lincoln deplored slavery all his life, but when he came into office his object was not to free the slaves. He did not think the Constitution gave him that power. Emancipation was an action he considered only after a year of war, when he came to believe that there were not as many Unionists in the South as he had thought, that they would not attempt to overthrow the Confederate government, and that he needed to do something powerful to undermine the Rebel war effort. He also needed to keep the European powers from recognizing the Confederacy. Action had become essential. Slaves were the moral and military weak point of the South. Their presence allowed white families to send thousands of men to the battlefield, men who otherwise would have to stay home and tend the crops. Yet even after he wrote the preliminary proclamation, Lincoln waited nearly two months—until the Union army could claim a victory—to issue it.20 Silence and secrecy were characteristics familiar to those who had known Lincoln for years, and his friends did not necessarily find them appealing. David Davis, a judge who rode the circuit with Lincoln in Illinois and whom Lincoln appointed to the Supreme Court, called him “the most reticent—Secretive man I Ever Saw—or Expect to See.” William Herndon, Lincoln’s longtime law partner famously and simply described him as “the most shut-mouthed man” who ever lived. His habit of nondisclosure could rankle observers, but it gave Lincoln great f lexibility as president. Until he publicly announced a decision, he could keep his options open. As a result, events generally did not overtake his decisions. And as John Hay pointed out, Lincoln’s comments always carried the potential to “divide and fiercely fight those who were now most strongly united in the defense of the Union.” Silence meant that critics such as the Copperheads would have less to attack.21

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And so Lincoln kept quiet, even after deciding on emancipation in July. He told only his cabinet. After that, he kept the proclamation in his desk, waiting for the right moment to make it public. The fact that he had not yet acted allowed Lincoln to write New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley in August that he had no idea what he would do about the slave question. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” This was somewhat disingenuous but defensible as long as the proclamation remained in his drawer. He needed a little time for public opinion to catch up and, more importantly, for a victory to come to the Union.22 Once his mind was made up, Lincoln was often immoveable, especially on what he saw as critical issues such as emancipation. Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862 to a public and an army that were deeply divided as to its wisdom, not to mention its constitutionality. Needless to say, conservative Democrats were apoplectic, although this did give them occasion to brag that they were right all along about the real motive for bringing on the war: to save the black man. Lincoln refused to reconsider the proclamation, even after the Democrats, including a number Copperheads, made a good showing in the fall elections. When his old Illinois friend Orville Hickman Browning advised Lincoln to drop the measure, the president peevishly denied that the proclamation had anything to do with the election returns. He told Browning that “if he should refuse to issue a proclamation there would be a rebellion in the north, and that a dictator would be placed over his head within the week.” Publicly, the president insisted that emancipation was the only way to win the war: “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free— honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail.” The disheartened Browning remained unconvinced, confiding to his diary that the president was “fatally bent upon his course.”23 Emancipation was still a dodgy subject for Lincoln a year and a half later. In the summer of 1864, many Northerners blamed the seemingly endless war on their president’s mulish insistence on emancipation as a condition for peace. Copperheads were calling for an armistice, which Lincoln rejected as “the end of the struggle.” His arguments went unheeded. By August, war weariness had grown to the point that Lincoln’s political prospects appeared to be nil. War

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Democrats and even Republicans were defecting. Hay reported to Nicolay that “the copperheads are exultant and our own people either growling & despondent or sneakingly apologetic.” Jittery party leaders urged Lincoln to back off his support for emancipation. Lincoln considered their advice overnight and then refused, saying he would be “damned in time & in eternity” if he broke his word to the freedmen. Lincoln had long since come to see the moral dimension of emancipation, but in this instance it could hardly be more clear. Moreover, he believed he would be putting the military effort in jeopardy because black soldiers would desert immediately if there were any threat of re-enslavement. Convinced he would be turned out of office for his commitment to freeing the slaves, Lincoln told a senator: “We will go down with our principles. I will not modify, qualify nor retract my proclimation.”24 Lincoln may have been f lexible in coming toward a decision, but he stood fast once it was made, even when the pressure for him to change his mind was enormous. Resoluteness led him to insist on emancipation and unconditional surrender, even when Northerners were howling for peace. His certainty was such that he was “willing to risk war rather than let the nation perish,” as James McPherson writes. Lincoln continued to back Ulysses S. Grant as the general in charge of all the Union armies after the public had soured on the man they had come to call “Grant the Butcher.” Again, this proved to be a wise choice, but in the summer of despair that was hardly apparent. Good or bad, though, Lincoln was never one to shift blame. He took full responsibility for his decisions. Newspaperman Noah Brooks said that Lincoln did not care what the political costs of his most important decisions were; for him “the question was not, ‘Is it convenient? Is it expedient?’ but ‘Is it right?”25 Lincoln’s stubbornness on key issues, along with his frontier background, made him the target of intense criticism—from Copperheads, members of his own party, abolitionists, and even some of his own generals. The attacks were often personal, as in General George B. McClellan’s privately calling him an “idiot” or a Wisconsin editor’s publicly referring to him as both “the widow maker” and “the orphan maker.” Lincoln was aware of the criticisms directed at him, but he made a point of not reading the attacks. Insulating himself from the worst of the assaults saved him from getting angry and allowed him to focus his energy on the war. When one of his secretaries once alerted him to a particularly vituperative letter, he dropped the writer a note saying, “As I am trying to preserve my own temper, by avoiding further

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irritants, so far as practicable, I have declined to read the cross letter.” Then he apologized for any pain he may inadvertently have caused the writer. Even when he did hear the assaults on him, Lincoln was able to shrug them off. He took little personally and never launched recriminations.26 Lincoln has become famous for his forgiving nature, and with good reason; it repeatedly trumped the anger that he experienced. Again and again, he wrote sharply worded letters to incompetent generals, only to stick them in his desk and never send them. The fact that others did not share his compassion seems to have surprised him, even though he was a keen observer of human nature. “Often bitterly assailed and abused, he never appeared to recognize the fact that he had political enemies,” journalist Noah Brooks wonderingly remarked. If anyone brought an insult to Lincoln’s attention, the president tended to wave it away, saying, “I guess we won’t talk about that now.” At other times, Lincoln seemed puzzled by the intensity of feeling he generated. The day of the 1864 election, he confided to Hay: “It is a little singular that I, who am not a vindictive man, should have always been before the people for election in canvasses marked for their bitterness. Always but once: When I came to Congress it was a quiet time; but always besides that the contests in which I have been prominent have been marked with great rancor.”27 *

* *

Had the Union armies not enjoyed a reversal of fortunes in the fall of 1864, Lincoln surely would have lost. Even he thought so. Toward the end of August, with Grant mired at Petersburg and William T. Sherman stuck at the gates of Atlanta, he wrote a memo to his Cabinet stating his plan to save the Union between Election Day and the inauguration. This was important, he said, because his successor would have won “on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.” Instead, September saw the Confederates pull out of Atlanta and General Phil Sheridan ransack the Shenandoah Valley. Northern morale underwent a complete turnaround, with many Unionists believing that victory was just around the corner. Had those victories not taken place—or any others between August and Election Day—Lincoln would not have been reelected. George B. McClellan, his Democratic opponent, would have dismantled the Emancipation Proclamation immediately. He had always opposed it. McClellan may well have been under such pressure from the peace wing of his party that he would have agreed to negotiate a peace settlement that granted the South its independence.

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Under these circumstances, historians would regard Lincoln and his presidency as a failure. They would mourn for emancipation as a good idea whose time had not yet come. And they would have blamed Lincoln’s leadership style, as surely as they blame Jefferson Davis’s for Confederate defeat, for the Union’s loss. Lincoln was too secretive, they would say. Too stubborn. Too inf lexible. Too willing to stick with poor generals for too long, too unwilling to change course, even when the country demanded it. In short, many of the leadership characteristics that we credit him for, that we argue made him great, could equally have been blamed for his downfall, had military victories not come at a critical juncture.28 The turnaround did happen, though. Unionists were once again sure of their cause and of their man. Lincoln won the election handily, taking more than 80 percent of the soldier vote in the process. Discredited, most Copperheads all but went into hiding. The North won the war the following spring, and Lincoln was assassinated just a week after Robert E. Lee surrendered. In the minds of many Americans, certainly many in the North, Lincoln became the martyr president, someone nearly on par with Jesus, making his tenure rather more challenging for historians to assess fairly. Lincoln was, in fact, a man of vision. He was a remarkably gifted politician. He had a capacity, in an age before polling, to sense the public mood and stay just ahead of it. He led his people, not they him, and his faith in them and their wisdom was unshakeable. His determination to protect his promise of emancipation was an act of real political courage. But his greatness was not obvious to many of his contemporaries as late as August 1864. Americans today are quick to label him as one of the two greatest presidents, Washington being the other, as almost a ref lexive response. The real history is not so tidy. Lincoln was very much the beneficiary of timing. A great deal of the regard in which he is now held was in fact contingent on military successes over which he had little control. 29 Where he could control things, he was a master of timing. But in many ways, he was also its servant. His death, coming just days after Robert E. Lee’s surrender, sealed his legacy. Lincoln did not have to confront the whole of Reconstruction. He unquestionably would have done a better job than his successor, but he still would have had to deal with Radical Republicans on the one side and balky Southern elites on the other. Instead, he was shot on Good Friday. He died in the moment of his great glory, frozen in time, leaving us to contemplate him amid a constellation of persistent “what ifs.”

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Notes The author would like to thank Herman Belz, Joseph Glatthaar, Al Goethals, Daniel Walker Howe, Brian Holden Reid, Jeffrey L. Sedgwick, Richard Carwardine, James M. McPherson, and the members of the Seminar on Peace, War, and Global Change at the University of Kansas’s Hall Center for the Humanities for their comments. 1. Roy P. Basler, ed., Collected Works (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953– 1955), vol. IV, pp. 426–430, and vol. V, p. 242. 2. The Collected Works is available online at http://quod lib.umich.edu:80/l/lincoln/, accessed July 3, 2008. 3. Historians are engaged in a lively debate about the importance of parties and partisan behavior, especially in the North, and how this affected the outcome of the Civil War. See Adam I.P. Smith, No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Union Divided: Party Conflict in the Civil War North (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). Both books are a response to Eric McKitrick’s seminal article, “Party Politics and the Union and Confederate War Efforts,” in William Nisbet Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham, eds., The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 117–151. 4. Edward L. Pierce, ed., Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893), vol. 4, p. 114; David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995). The Nasby Papers is available online at http://repo lib.virginia.edu:18080/fedora/get/uva-lib:443976/ uva-lib-bdef:100/getFullView/. 5. Richard Carwardine, Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), p. 257. 6. Douglas L. Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), p. 167; Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 67; P.J. Staudenraus, ed., Mr. Lincoln’s Washington (South Brunswick, N.J.: T. Yoseloff, 1967), p. 106; Basler, Collected Works, vol. VI, p. 237, and vol. VII, p. 402. For a full account of the Vallandigham affair, see Frank Klement, The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), pp. 149–189. 7. This brings to mind Charles Ramsdell’s argument about the slippery nature of Lincoln’s writing. Charles W. Ramsdell, “Lincoln and Fort Sumter,” Journal of Southern History 3 (August 1937), p. 265. 8. U.S. Constitution, Art. I, Sect. 9; Basler, ed., Collected Works, vol. VI, pp. 260–266. 9. Donald, Lincoln, pp. 92–93; Basler, ed., Collected Works, vol. VI, pp. 263–264. 10. Basler, ed., Collected Works, vol. VI, pp. 264–266. The Supreme Court ruled after the war in ex parte Milligan that civilians could not be tried in military courts if civil courts were open. 11. Ibid., pp. 266–269. 12. Ibid. For a more extended discussion of this letter, see Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword, pp. 167–177. 13. Neely, The Fate of Liberty, pp. 196–199. 14. Ibid., pp. 305–306. 15. Matthew Birchard et al., to Lincoln, July 1, 1863, the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress, http://memory loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/mal:@field (DOCID+@ lit(d2442700)), accessed May 26, 2008. 16. Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), p. 162; Donald, Lincoln, p. 489. 17. Basler, ed., Collected Works, vol. VI, pp. 406–410; Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword, pp. 184–185. See also Ronald C. White, Jr., The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words (New York: Random House, 2005), chapter 8.

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18. Basler, ed., Collected Works, vol. VII, pp. 301–302. 19. John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, abridged and ed. by Paul M. Angle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 78. 20. Wilson and Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants, p. 182. For a thorough treatment of Lincoln’s metamorphosis on emancipation, see Mark Grimsley, Jr., The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chapters 1–6. 21. Wilson and Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants, p. 348; William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln, introduction and notes by Paul M. Angle (New York: A. & C. Boni, 1930), p. xxxix; Richard N. Current, Lincoln and the First Shot (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963), p. 119. For a more complete discussion of Lincoln’s silences, see Richard N. Current, The Lincoln Nobody Knows, American Century Series (New York: Hill and Wang, 1958), chapter 1. 22. Basler, ed., Collected Works, vol. V, p. 388. 23. Ibid., pp. 493–495, 509–510, and 537; Theodore Calvin Pease, ed., Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, vol. 1 (Springfield, Ill.: Trustees of the State Historical Library, 1925), pp. 607, 616. 24. Basler, ed., Collected Works, vol. V; vol. VIII, p. 1; vol. VII, pp. 507, 499–500; Michael Burlingame, ed., At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), p. 91; Jennifer L. Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 163–164; Wilson and Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants, p. 562. 25. James M. McPherson, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 65; Michael Burlingame, ed., Lincoln Observed: Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 209. 26. Stephen W. Sears, ed., The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan: Selected Correspondence, 1860–1865 (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989), p. 85; LaCrosse Democrat, August 29 and September 5, 1864; Basler, ed., Collected Works, vol. VI, p. 344. 27. Basler, ed., Collected Works, vol. VI, p. 344; Burlingame, ed., Lincoln Observed, p. 208; Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), p. 243. 28. Basler, ed., Collected Works, vol. VII, p. 514. 29. Lincoln’s inf luence on the military outcome is another debate. T. Harry Williams’s claim that Lincoln was a brilliant military strategist, for instance, has recently drawn fire from Joseph Glatthaar, who believes Lincoln at times hurt the Union cause as an armchair strategist. T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1952); Joseph Glatthaar, “Genius or Talented Amateur: Lincoln as Military Strategist” (paper presented at Jepson Colloquium 2008: Lincoln’s Legacy of Leadership, Richmond, VA, September 2008). In a more fundamental question, psychologist James R. Meindl cast doubt on how inf luential any leader is in determining outcome. James R. Meindl et al., “The Romance of Leadership,” Administrative Science Quarterly 30 (1985), pp. 78–102.

CH A P T E R

EIGH T

Abraham Lincoln and the Shaping of Public Opinion Doug las L . Wi l s on

December 1862 marked a low point in the administration of Abraham Lincoln. Not only had his party lost ground in the elections the month before, and his army been humiliated on the battlefield at Fredericksburg, but the president was also beset by leaders of his own party, who believed the desperate situation indicated that high-level changes were needed in the cabinet. In the Senate, the Republican caucus sent a deputation to the White House to demand the resignation of the secretary of state William H. Seward, but Lincoln so arranged things that Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, who had been secretly promoting Seward’s ouster with the Republican Senators, was forced to admit to the Senatorial deputation that matters in the cabinet were not as he had represented them. When Chase subsequently offered to submit his own resignation, Lincoln fairly snatched it out of his hand. Not, as it turned out, for the purpose of getting rid of him, but as a way of resolving the crisis. In spite of the president’s pleas, Seward had insisted on resigning, but now with Chase’s resignation in hand, Lincoln saw a way out of his difficulty. By refusing both resignations, he could defuse the explosive situation and at the same time emphasize that the attention of all sides should be focused on the primary task of putting down the insurrection. This, as we can see clearly in retrospect, was leadership of a high order, but Lincoln’s contemporaries had trouble seeing it this way, and he received little credit for his deft management of this crisis. In truth,

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Lincoln had what modern pundits would call an “image problem,” being widely perceived as a genial but hapless rube who was simply in over his head. And Lincoln himself did little to dispel this impression. His canny maneuvering in the cabinet crisis was worthy of a seasoned diplomat, but it was characteristic of the president to explain the way the resignations of Seward and Chase canceled each other out by a metaphor from his rural past. “I can ride on now,” he told a visitor. “I’ve got a pumpkin in each end of my bag!”1 It was just this kind of folksy expression that gave his visitors their strongest impression of the prairie president, something of which he was doubtless fully aware. There was nothing inauthentic about this kind of behavior, for the colorful colloquialisms and stories were a residue of his hoosier upbringing, something he had never relinquished and, in fact, had systematically used to his advantage. It seems clear from the experience of many observers that, when in the presence of stylish visitors who had come to size him up, Lincoln regularly resorted to homespun language and stories. To give the f lavor of the president’s talk, the Wall Street lawyer and diarist George Templeton Strong recorded in his diary a story Lincoln had recently told in his presence. “Wa-al,” says Abe Lincoln, “that reminds me of a party of Methodist parsons that was travelling in Illinois when I was a boy thar, and had a branch to cross that was pretty bad—ugly to cross, ye know, because of the waters was up. And they got considerin’ and discussin’ how they should git across it, and they talked about it for two hours, and one on ’ed thought they had ought to cross one way when they got there, and another another way, and they got quarrellin’ about it, till at last an old brother put in, and he says, says he, ‘Brethren, this here talk ain’t no use. I never cross a river until I come to it.’ ”2 Such performances persuaded sophisticated visitors like Strong that their president was “a barbarian.” And Strong liked him. The impression of Lincoln as an incorrigible yokel in manner and expression was so widely publicized and became so thoroughly ingrained with the public that recognition of his extraordinary abilities as a writer was slow in arriving. Undeniably apt passages in his state papers were often assumed to be the work of his advisers, such as Seward, Stanton, or Chase. Lincoln’s writing, while frequently given credit for its clarity, did not rate high by the prevailing standards of eloquence, which,

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like the architecture of the day, valued artifice and ornament. Like his contemporaries Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson, Lincoln was effectively forging a new, distinctively American style. Less selfconsciously than some of these, perhaps, but no less diligently, Lincoln was in his own way perfecting a prose that was a uniquely American mode of expression. His all-consuming purpose was, of course, not literary, but political—to find a way to reach a large and diverse American audience, and to persuade them to support the government in its efforts to put down the rebellion. *

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As an experienced politician and one who had spent his career in minority parties, Lincoln was acutely aware of the importance of public opinion. “Public opinion in this country,” he had once said expansively, “is everything.”3 That was in 1859, when he was trying to persuade his party to lay the necessary groundwork for a successful presidential campaign. Three years earlier, he had given this idea a more focused treatment, telling a gathering of Illinois Republicans: “Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much.”4 If public opinion was thus malleable, then politicians with the power of office and the gift of persuasion could potentially do as much harm as good, especially if they could effect a change in basic American ideals and values. All of this, he maintained, had a practical application for the new Republican Party in the political turmoil of the 1850s. In the senatorial campaign of 1858, which featured the famous series of debates with Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln made the inf luencing of public opinion a primary issue. If the public had been led to believe by the actions of the founders and subsequent developments that slavery had been placed on a course of ultimate extinction, then Douglas and his Democratic cohorts, Lincoln argued, had been deliberately trying to undermine that sentiment. In the first debate, at Ottawa, Lincoln punctuated his claim with a memorable example of antithesis, which we know from his manuscripts he had carefully composed in advance: With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.

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This must be borne in mind, as also the additional fact that Judge Douglas is a man of vast inf luence, so great that it is enough for many men to profess to believe anything, when they once find out that Judge Douglas professes to believe it.5 Later, in the fifth debate, at Galesburg, Lincoln stressed this charge, arguing that Douglas was “in every possible way preparing the public mind, by his vast inf luence, for making the institution of slavery perpetual and national.”6 The following year, he energized his language, urging in several speeches that Douglas’s arguments and actions were aimed at a “gradual and steady debauching of public opinion.” 7 Lincoln used this same harsh term in his Message to Congress of July 4, 1861, to characterize the efforts of Southern extremists. Their attempts to “sugar-coat” secession so that it would be swallowed by otherwise loyal citizens he there labeled “an insidious debauching of the public mind.”8 So what, then, could or should be done legitimately to inf luence or change public opinion? One thing that Lincoln apparently would not consider doing was what people like the New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley often did, which was to attempt to bully others into submission under the pretense of speaking, like a Roman tribune, for the general public. As early as 1842, Lincoln had laid it down as a principle in his Temperance Address that to assume to dictate to [someone’s] judgment, or to command his action, or to mark him as one to be shunned and despised” is counterproductive, for the person so admonished “will retreat within himself, close all the avenues to his head and his heart; and tho’ your cause be naked truth itself, transformed to the heaviest lance, harder than steel, and sharper than steel can be made, and tho’ you throw it with more than Herculean force and precision, you shall no more be able to pierce him, than to penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw.9 Although he had reformed his oratorical diction since that time, his views on persuasion had remained essentially the same. A prime consideration was still what it had been in 1842: “If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.”10 Very much in the forefront of Lincoln’s calculations was the obverse of what he regarded as “debauchery,” namely the gradual education of public opinion. “No one had greater responsibility for defining and

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directing democracy than the president,” wrote a leading historian of Lincoln’s presidency, Phillip S. Paludan, “and Abraham Lincoln may have been the most qualified man in the nation for the job. For over a quarter century, as both lawyer and politician, Lincoln had been in the persuading business in the most democratic society in the world.”11 As we have just seen, even in his early speeches there are glimpses of a theory of persuasion that he operated by. Except for the passages on rhetoric in the textbooks he read as a young man, it is doubtful that Lincoln ever studied the art of persuasion as a formal discipline or read Aristotle’s Rhetoric. But as Ronald C. White Jr. has suggested, Lincoln’s practice in many respects embodies the principles of Aristotle.12 For example, Lincoln’s endorsement in his 1842 Temperance speech of the sympathetic reform efforts of the Washingtonians over the harsh denunciations of the clergy accords perfectly with Aristotle’s precept that “our judgements when we are pleased and friendly are not the same as when we are pained and hostile.”13 In the same way, Aristotle’s formulations shed light on Lincoln’s various ways and means of bringing his audience around. George Templeton Strong concluded on the basis of his first meeting with Abraham Lincoln that he was a “yahoo, or gorilla, in respect of outside polish . . . but a most sensible, straightforward, honest old codger.”14 Strong was a well-educated Wall Street lawyer, whose public-spirited work for the Sanitary Commission brought him several times into meetings with Lincoln. The detailed entries in his diary show him to have been a discerning observer, but he seems never to have grasped that the president’s “yahoo” persona might have been, at least in part, a means to an end—a means, for example, of convincing sophisticated strangers like Strong that he was sensible, straightforward, and honest. “Persuasion,” says Aristotle, “is achieved by the speaker’s personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. We believe good men more fully and more readily than others; this is true generally whatever the question is, and absolutely true where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided.”15 Lincoln seems to have understood this instinctively, and from a very early period. An account of a speech he gave in Quincy, Illinois, in 1841 reports: “As a speaker, he is characterized by a sincerity, frankness and evident honesty calculated to win attention and gain the confidence of the hearer.”16 When he became president, Lincoln seems to have behaved accordingly. Rather than trying to convince strangers to alter their preconceptions, he understood that he would be better served by simply

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giving them reason to believe that, whatever his faults, he was essentially honest and trustworthy. *

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In August of 1862, this was about all Lincoln had going for him. This particularly anguished period in Lincoln’s administration has to rate, in hindsight, as one of the lowest points in his presidency. The public, as Strong reported in his diary, was generally disheartened and disillusioned with its honest but ineffective commander in chief: “Most honest and true, thoroughly sensible, but without the decision and energy the country wants.”17 But when the president’s determination to meet this situation dramatically with a proclamation of emancipation had to be postponed until the deteriorating military situation improved, he looked for other ways to make his presence felt. Characteristically, he took up his pen. Horace Greeley was a notorious gadf ly. As the editor of the New York Tribune, he had long occupied a prominent pulpit from which he issued his opinions forcefully and at high volume. At every turn of events, in spite of constantly changing his mind, Greeley could be counted on for emphatic pronouncements about what was needed and what must be done. Now he was seemingly incensed that the president had not acted promptly on the provisions of the second Confiscation Act, and on August 20 published a long, nine-part indictment in the form of a public letter to the president with the eye-catching title “The Prayer of Twenty Millions.” Presuming, in characteristic fashion, to speak for all those loyal to the Union, Greeley intoned: We require of you, as the first servant of the Republic, charged especially and preeminently with this duty, that you EXECUTE THE LAWS. Most emphatically do we demand that such laws as have been recently enacted, which therefore may fairly be presumed to embody the present will and to be dictated by the present needs of the Republic, and which after due consideration have received your personal sanction, shall by you be carried into full effect, and that you publicly and decisively instruct your subordinates that such laws exist, that they are binding on all functionaries and citizens, and that they are to be obeyed to the letter.18 Since the second Confiscation Act had been passed scarcely a month earlier, Greeley’s indignation about delay in its execution was arguably

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overdrawn, but there may well have been more to it. News of Lincoln’s decision in July to proclaim some form of emancipation was no secret to insiders in Washington, and the chances are good that Greeley knew what was coming. In this light, “The Prayer of Twenty Millions” may well have been the egotistic Greeley’s attempt, as one writer has suggested, “to beat Lincoln to the draw on emancipation and thus win for himself a portion of the ref lected glory.”19 But Greeley, as it turned out, had misjudged his man. He had known the president since they served together in Congress in the 1840s, and he was persuaded that “the power of Mr. Lincoln is not in his presence or in his speech, but in the honesty and gloriously refreshing sincerity of the man.”20 If Greeley’s “Prayer” was intended as a preemptive strike, it had the misfortune of being aimed at one who was not only a superior writer, but one who, at that very moment, was casting about for an occasion to publish something he had already written. Lincoln’s reply to Greeley appeared promptly on August 23, and the next day the New York Times reported: “Several days ago the President read to a friend a rough draft of what appears this morning as a letter to Horace Greeley. He said that he had thought of getting some such statement of his position on the Slavery question before the public in some manner, and asked the opinion of his friend as to the propriety of such a course, and the best way of accomplishing it.”21 Here Lincoln had merely been doing what he often did in times of difficulty—putting his thoughts down on paper. That he had tried the result out on a friend was typical and perhaps an indication that he regarded his brief statement as a finished product; that he was taking soundings on the propriety of publication suggests remarkable confidence, if not downright audacity. Greeley’s ostensible objective was to smoke the president out on the question of emancipation, but he could hardly have anticipated a public reply, much less one printed in another newspaper. It is important to recognize that Lincoln’s public response to Greeley was unprecedented. Presidents in the past may have been sorely tempted to defend or explain their views directly to the people through the medium of the newspapers, but it was considered undignified for a chief executive to do so and had, so far as contemporary commentators were aware, never been done. Thomas Jefferson, the only president whose writing ability rivaled Lincoln’s, had, in fact, composed at least one such letter, but he had done it entirely in secret and under the fictitious guise of a concerned citizen.22 Predictably, Lincoln’s precedent-breaking letter caused a stir. Whitelaw Reid, the brilliant young reporter for the Cincinnati Gazette, told his

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readers: “So novel a thing as a newspaper correspondence between the President and an editor excites great attention. Mr. Lincoln does so many original things that everybody had ceased to be surprised at him, and hence the violation of precedent in this matter did not provoke so much comment as might be expected.”23 Going public with his response to Greeley was clearly a risk. It is possible to argue, of course, that Lincoln had little to lose and that his taking such an unprecedented step was a measure of his desperation. But this would obscure the fact that he made a shrewd calculation, especially after seeing Greeley’s wordy and illtempered letter, that his brief but pithy message would carry the day. Lincoln’s public letter to Greeley came at a time when the president had already made up his mind to invoke a desperate remedy— emancipating rebel slaves and using them as troops in the Union army. This measure seems so logical and inevitable to modern readers that historians find it endlessly necessary to assure their audiences that such an action was, at the time, a very risky venture. Emancipation was not generally popular in the North, and no one could be sure how the loyal Democrats, or the loyalists in the border states, or the officer corps, or the soldiery, or the Northern public at large would react to it. Strong resistance from any of these quarters would present serious difficulties for prosecuting the war; broad opposition would be ruinous. Nonetheless, Lincoln determined to risk it. The public letter to Greeley, coming just one month after Lincoln revealed his intention to his cabinet, was the first of its kind and played a key part in his calculated efforts to prepare the country for a change in direction. Hoping to catch the president at a vulnerable moment, Greeley found himself instead almost immediately on the receiving end of a presidential salvo whose prose was so lean and crisp and memorable that it could almost be recited after a first reading: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”24 While not universally approved, there is little doubt that the letter, and thus the president’s initial gambit, succeeded. “Those who insist on precedent, and Presidential dignity, are horrified at this novel idea of Mr. Lincoln’s,” the sympathetic New York Times admitted, “but there is unanimous admiration of the skill and force with which he has defined his policy.”25 Even Greeley got the message. “I have no doubt,” he wrote years later, “that Mr. Lincoln’s letter had been prepared before he

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ever saw my ‘Prayer,’ and that this was merely used by him as an opportunity, an occasion, an excuse, for setting his own altered position— changed not by his volition, but by circumstances—fairly before the country.”26 While it is ironic in the extreme that Greeley, who changed his mind about the war repeatedly, should treat Lincoln’s “altered position” as an implicit criticism, the charge was essentially true. A week after its publication, Lincoln reportedly told Isaac N. Arnold “that the meaning of his letter to Mr. Greeley was this: that he was ready to declare emancipation when he was convinced that it could be made effective and that the people were with him.”27 What he did not say, but what is clear in hindsight, is that the public letter to Greeley was part of a conscious effort to bring these things about. *

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Thomas Jefferson had considerable experience at shaping public opinion, but he knew that the public was often unresponsive or actively resisted measures that he believed were necessary. He wrote to a friend that he had come to see “the wisdom of Solon’s remark, that no more good must be attempted than the nation can bear.”28 Lincoln was probably as little acquainted with Solon as he was with Aristotle, but he had read Jefferson’s own works with care. That he was familiar with the substance of Solon’s remark and that he acted accordingly as president is evident in a number of instances. In the case of the reply to Greeley, the first of his unprecedented public letters, he was trying to prepare the way for the acceptance of a highly controversial measure. Unable to be certain that he had properly gauged the situation, Lincoln himself was unsure, when he issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation a month later in September 1862, that the public was ready for it. He confessed as much to his cabinet at the time, but he followed his instincts and took a chance. When it proved successful, he characteristically admitted to a visitor, “When I issued that proclamation, I was in great doubt about it myself. I did not think the people had been quite educated up to it.”29 But there could be little doubt that the Greeley letter had helped enormously in the process of educating the public up to the point of accepting emancipation. A public letter from a president, even if considered an undignified gesture, cannot be ignored. Especially if its arguments are pithy and provocative, they will be noticed, repeated, and will generate widespread public discussion. Indeed, what this episode suggests is that one of the things Lincoln was most criticized for by

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members of his own party—his slowness to act—was in reality a superior sense of timing. But the publication of the Greeley letter was the unveiling of what would prove to be an even greater asset, his ability to shape public opinion with his pen. *

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Lincoln’s ability as a writer was considerable, and it had much to do with his becoming president, but when he was elected, it was a distinctly hidden asset. He had no reputation as a writer, not even among his friends, who thought of him, instead, as a first-rate thinker and speaker and debater. But behind all the successful arguing and speechifying that brought him to prominence in the 1850s was a facility for, and a commitment to, writing. He had developed the habit of putting his ideas down in written form in order to try them out, to shape and reshape them, to see and especially to hear how they sounded. As his presidency proceeded, he would make the same kind of use of his writing that he had in the past, and eventually the effects of his extraordinary literary ability began to be felt. Strange as it seems to us, Lincoln’s contemporaries, friend and foe alike, had great difficulty in recognizing this. It simply did not fit with the picture they had of him—honest, friendly, colorful of speech, but uneducated and thoroughly unrefined. Through this maze, much of it thrown up by Lincoln himself, most detected no sign of a gifted writer. A skeptical newspaper editor spoke the misgivings of many after the election when he asked “Who will write this ignorant man’s state papers?” This was the state of things when Lincoln came into office, and it persisted for much of his presidency. It can be argued that this lack of recognition served Lincoln well, especially in the case of his public letters, whose appearance was at first widely seen as yet another indication that Lincoln lacked the requisite sense of presidential decorum. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal: You cannot refine Mr. Lincoln’s taste, or extend his horizon; he will not walk dignifiedly through the traditional part of the President of America, but will pop out his head at each railroad station and make a little speech, and get into an argument with Squire A. and Judge B. He will write letters to Horace Greeley, and any editor or reporter or saucy party committee that writes to him, and cheapen himself.30

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But just as a solid punch is more effective against someone who has underestimated his opponent, so Lincoln’s public letters hit their target audience with maximum force. He happened on to them, it would seem, by accident, but it was probably inevitable that he would eventually find a way to communicate directly with the public. Lincoln’s unprecedented series of presidential letters was nominally addressed to an individual or group, but actually aimed, usually with unerring precision, at an anxious public. In 1863, he would send a forthright letter to a mass meeting of bipartisan Union loyalists in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, many of whom were disaffected with the president’s efforts, concentrating on a defense of his decision, taken at the same time as his Emancipation Proclamation, to employ former slaves and free blacks in the U.S. armed forces. He would write, in 1864, one of his most memorable and most quoted letters to a Kentucky newspaper editor, defending his official course as president and distinguishing between his own personal inclinations and his constitutional duty. I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling. It was in the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. I could not take the office without taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath using the power. I understood, too, that in ordinary civil administration this oath even forbade me to practically indulge my primary abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery. I had publicly declared this many times, and in many ways. And I aver that, to this day, I have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment and feeling on slavery.31 It was the appearance of this potent and persuasive letter in April 1864 that prompted the irascible Horace Greeley to appeal to his fellow critics of the president to change course, conceding that to continue belittling the presidential powers of expression was to “sin against the clearest light.”32 One of the topics on which it became crucial for Lincoln to explain himself was his understanding and use of his war powers, and this was the subject of one the most effective of his public letters, the reply to Erastus Corning and his fellow Albany petitioners, dated June 12, 1863.

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A shrewd sense of timing is something that Lincoln is nowadays given credit for, and the timing of the Corning letter was a classic case in point. After the publication of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, the substantial wing of the Democratic party that opposed the war—the Peace Democrats—became more vocal and more vehement. A majority of Northerners supported the government, but one issue that raised widespread concern, and that the Peace Democrats were able to use to attract sympathetic attention, was the Lincoln administration’s curtailment of civil liberties. From the earliest days of the war, Lincoln had not hesitated to support the arrest and detention of civilians considered dangerous by the military and to authorize the temporary suspension of the writ of habeas corpus when and where he thought it was needed. Many pro-Union loyalists, Republican and Democrat, were concerned about the line being drawn by the military authorities between patriotism and protest. Especially troublesome was the distinction between political speech that was merely critical of the government and speech that constituted disloyalty, giving aid and comfort to the insurgents. When the military commander of the District of the Ohio General Ambrose Burnside issued Order No. 38 in April 1863 forbidding the expression of sympathy with the enemy, the firebrand former Congressman Clement Vallandigham promised defiance and, after making a particularly incendiary speech in Mount Vernon, Ohio, was arrested by Burnside’s soldiers and jailed. Vallandigham insisted that he was very much committed to the Constitution and the Union, both of which, he argued, were being destroyed by the war and could only be preserved by making peace with the rebellious Southern states. Because there were many who shared his doubts about the war, and more who believed in the citizen’s right to express them, his case became what the great Lincoln scholar J.G. Randall called the “cause célèbre of the Lincoln administration.”33 Part of the trouble was that the appearance of the Emancipation Proclamation had seemed to prove what Vallandigham and the Peace Democrats had been claiming all along—that a Republican administration had provoked a sectional war for the express purpose of abolishing slavery. As always, the situation on the battlefield had much to do with the mood of the country, and things were not going well. In the West, Grant had been trying for months, without success, to capture Vicksburg and reestablish control of the Mississippi River. At the very time Vallandigham was being arrested, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia had outmaneuvered the substantially larger invading

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Union army at Chancellorsville, and caused its cocky new commander, Fighting Joe Hooker, to retreat back across the Rappahannock River. For Union loyalists, it was a profoundly discouraging time. “Northern morale,” notes James M. McPherson, “descended into the slough of despond in the spring of 1863.”34 It was at the depth of this despondency that the news of Vallandigham’s arrest became known. From the public’s perspective, the military that could not stand up to the Confederate Army had broken down the door of a prominent politician in the middle of the night and hauled him off to jail. And for what? For criticizing the administration and its war policies. Censure of what seemed like a blatant denial of civil liberties was immediate and widespread. Lincoln’s secretaries noted in their biography, “No act of the Government has been so strongly criticized, and none having relation to the rights of an individual created a feeling so deep and so widespread.”35 Public meetings were quick to convene. One such meeting in Albany, New York, was composed of loyal or War Democrats and chaired by prominent businessman and former Congressman Erastus Corning. The tone of the meeting was set by a message from New York’s Democratic governor Horatio Seymour, who wrote: “If this proceeding [that is, Vallandigham’s prosecution] is approved by the Government, and sanctioned by the people, it is not merely a step toward revolution—it is revolution; it will not only lead to military despotism—it establishes military despotism.”36 The aroused Albany Democrats sent the president a bristling petition of protest on May 19. It was the receipt of this petition that Lincoln used as the occasion for offering, in the form of a public letter to Corning and others, his defense of the government’s actions. While it is understandable to think of Lincoln’s performance with respect to his public letters as evidence of his superior ability to react to criticism, close study of Lincoln’s manuscripts and his practices as a writer indicates that this is a misunderstanding. One of the secrets of Abraham Lincoln’s success was that he tended to do his reacting in advance. He was what his law partner William H. Herndon called “long-headed,” that is, he was constantly thinking about the direction in which things were going. It says a lot about Lincoln that he was the kind of lawyer who said he began a case by first studying the opposing side in great detail. To judge by his practice as president, he raised anticipation to a fine art. In the case of his public letters, there is evidence that most of them were substantially written or prepared for in advance. As we have already seen, this is dramatically illustrated in the case of his first public letter,

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the one directed at Horace Greeley in August of 1862. What Lincoln had done in this case is an instance of the way he had been working for years, namely, making notes and drafting responses to important questions in advance, so as to be fully prepared when an appropriate opportunity arose in which to present them. His son Robert remembered that his father, before he was president, was “accustomed to make many scraps of notes and memoranda.”37 His partner Herndon described the way he composed his famous “House Divided” speech. “He wrote that fine effort . . . in slips—put those slips in his hat, numbering them, and when he was done with the ideas, he gathered up the scraps—put them in the right order, and wrote out his speech.”38 All of this helps to explain his activity in the spring of 1863 that resulted in the reply to Corning and the Albany petitioners. An Iowa Congressman James F. Wilson recalled that once, while visiting the president in his office, he had complimented him on his letter to Corning and was rewarded with a description of how it came about. “He then explained,” Wilson wrote, “how the paper had been prepared. Turning to a drawer in the desk at which he was sitting and pulling it partly out, he said: ‘When it became necessary for me to write that letter, I had it nearly all in there,’ pointing to the drawer, ‘but it was in disconnected thoughts, which I had jotted down from time to time on separate scraps of paper.’ ”39 Here, as Wilson discovered, was the long-headed Lincoln in action. The president continued: “Often an idea about it [his power to restrict civil liberties] would occur to me which seemed to have force and make perfect answer to some of the things that were said and written about my actions.” “I never let one of those ideas escape me, but wrote it on a scrap of paper and put it in that drawer.” Wilson’s recollection of what Lincoln said next may be somewhat harder to credit at such a distance in time, but it is nonetheless provocative: “In that way I saved my best thoughts on the subject, and you know, such things often come in a kind of intuitive way more clearly than if one were to sit down and deliberately reason them out.”40 This may be Wilson’s own gloss on the process Lincoln had described, but its authenticity is an intriguing possibility. It would suggest a lesson that a thoughtful and experienced writer had learned over time—that it is easier to capture illuminating insights and aphorisms on the f ly—when and as they occur—than to sit down at your desk and attempt to generate them on demand. All but possibly one of the scraps of paper that Lincoln saved up in his desk drawer have disappeared, but his handwritten drafts for

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this letter survive, which affords us considerable insight into how the resulting letter developed. If one were to conjecture which of the incidents and anecdotes treated in the letter were conceived ahead of time, the most obvious would be one that he positioned near the end, an anecdote about Andrew Jackson. That Lincoln had made a careful study of Jackson’s career is clear from many references in his political speeches over the years in reply to Democrats, speeches that are replete with examples of Jackson saying and doing much the same thing for which the Democrats were then denouncing Lincoln and his party. In the Corning letter, he treats his readers to a choice narration of Gen. Jackson’s handling of the issue of habeas corpus while maintaining martial law in New Orleans after the great victory over the British in January 1815. To quell a public outcry against the continuance of martial law, which Jackson thought necessary until the departure of the British army could be confirmed, he was obliged to make a series of military arrests, which become the highlight of Lincoln’s narrative: Among other things a Mr. Louiallier, published a denunciatory newspaper article. Gen. Jackson arrested him. A lawyer by the name of Morel, procured the U. S. Judge Hall to order a writ of Habeas Corpus to release Mr Louaillier. Gen. Jackson arrested both the lawyer and the judge. A Mr. Hollander ventured to say of some part of the matter that “it was a dirty trick.” Gen. Jackson arrested him. When the officer undertook to serve the writ of Habeas Corpus, Gen. Jackson took it from him, and sent him away with a copy.41 Lincoln then concluded the story so that it drew its own moral. When confirmation arrived that the danger was past, Jackson withdrew martial law and permitted himself to be fined one thousand dollars by the same judge, a fine that Jackson had duly paid, but that the American Congress many years later, at the instigation of Democrats, voted to repay. “The permanent right of the people to public discussion,” Lincoln wrote, “the liberty of speech and the press, the trial by jury, the law of evidence, and the Habeas Corpus suffered no detriment whatever by that conduct of Gen. Jackson, or its subsequent approval by the American Congress.”42 There was a further message in this anecdote that was so obvious to his readers, especially Democrats, that Lincoln did not even have to utter it. But Edward Everett, to

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whom Lincoln sent a copy of the letter, could not resist pointing it out: that Vallandigham “would not have got off so cheaply under General Jackson.”43 Another part of the letter was almost certainly conceived in advance, and this was its most famous and most memorable line. Lincoln’s writing shows a notable penchant for putting statements in the form of provocative questions. In his Message to Congress of July 4, 1861, in explaining the actions he had taken in response to the outbreak of hostilities, he famously asked: “Is there, in all republics, this inherent, and fatal weakness?” “Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”44 This last question, designed to lay bare the dilemma of unattractive alternatives, is echoed by the most resonant line of the Corning letter. It tells us much about Lincoln’s instincts as a writer that this memorable sentence was originally much longer. It read: Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert by getting his father, or brother, or friend, into a public meeting, and there working upon his feelings, till he is persuaded to write the soldier boy, that he is fighting in a bad cause, for a wicked administration of a contemptable government, too weak to arrest and punish him if he shall desert.45 In this form, the potential force of the idea is effectively dissipated because the momentum of the sentence carries the reader past the arresting sentiment too quickly. The solution, which Lincoln applied in revision, is elegantly simple—a full stop in the form of a question mark: “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert?”46 The sentence is thus rescued from wordiness and brought sharply into focus by the simple expedient of separating it from its much longer original and giving the remaining part a new beginning. By means of a touchingly sympathetic image, an appealing argument is packed into a single sentence and becomes the nineteenth-century equivalent of a sound bite. Lincoln’s letter to Corning made an enormous impact upon the public, not only quieting the doubts and fears of the public generally, but giving new confidence to his administration and its own stalwarts, many of whom were shaken by the Vallandigham imprisonment. An irony

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that is always pointed out in this regard—which is itself a testament to the president’s persuasive skills in arguing a case—is that Lincoln himself was not personally in sympathy with the arrest of Vallandigham, which had been solely the ill-advised work of General Burnside. As the leading student of this aspect of Lincoln’s administration, Mark E. Neely, Jr. observed, “Burnside’s unfortunate act caused Lincoln to fight on ground not of his own choosing, but he fought exceedingly well.”47 Like most of his other public letters, the Corning letter offers a telling example not only of the way Lincoln’s ability as a writer contributed to his effectiveness as president, but also of how his distinctive mode of writing in anticipation—what I call “prewriting”—was an essential part of the unique array of talents responsible for the success of his presidential leadership. Notes This essay is drawn, in part, from material in the speaker’s book, Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), and is used here by permission. 1. Quoted in David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 405. 2. George Templeton Strong, Diary of the Civil War 1860–1865, ed. Allan Nevins (New York: Macmillan, 1962), January 29, 1862, pp. 204–205; hereafter, Strong Diary. 3. Speech at Columbus, Ohio, September 16, 1859, Roy P. Basler et al., eds., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953), III, p. 424; hereafter Collected Works. In fact, he had said essentially the same thing in his first debate with Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois, in 1858. See The Lincoln-Douglas Debates: The Lincoln Studies Center Edition, ed. Rodney O. Davis and Douglas L. Wilson (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), p. 32. 4. “Portion of Speech at Republican Banquet in Chicago, Illinois,” December 10, 1856, Speeches and Writings 1832–1858 (New York: Library of America, 1989), pp. 385–386. 5. Reply to Douglas at Ottawa, Lincoln-Douglas Debates, 32. For AL’s notes using the antithesis in the first sentence, see “Fragment: Notes for Speeches,” Collected Works, 2, pp. 552–553. 6. Lincoln-Douglas Debates, p. 201. 7. Speech at Columbus, Ohio, September 16, 1859, Collected Works, 3, p. 423. AL used this term in speeches at Indianapolis, Indiana, and Janesville, Wisconsin. 8. Collected Works, 4, p. 433. 9. “Temperance Address,” February 22, 1842, Collected Works, 1, p. 273. 10. Ibid. 11. Phillip Shaw Paludan, “The Better Angels of Our Nature”: Lincoln, Propaganda and Public Opinion in the North During the Civil War (Fort Wayne: Lincoln Museum, 1992), pp. 9–10. 12. Ronald C. White Jr., The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words (New York: Random House, 2005), p. xxi. 13. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translations, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 2155. 14. Strong Diary, January 29, 1862, p. 204. 15. Rhetoric, p. 2155.

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16. From the Quincy Whig, January 1, 1841, quoted in Paul Simon, Lincoln’s Preparation for Greatness: The Illinois Legislative Years (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), p. 231. 17. Strong Diary, August 4, 1862, p. 244. 18. The entire “Prayer of Twenty Millions” is printed in Harlan Hoyt Horner, Lincoln and Greeley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1953), pp. 263–267; for the passage cited, see pp. 263–264. 19. Richard S. Harper, Lincoln and the Press (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1951), p. 176. Lincoln got wind of Greeley’s agitation and tried, by sending him word of the forthcoming proclamation, to placate him, but his message arrived too late. See Allen C. Guelzo’s account in Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), pp. 132–137. 20. Quoted in White, The Eloquent President, p. 48, citing the New York Tribune, February 17 or 18, 1861. 21. On “the best way of accomplishing it” see “News from Washington,” New York Times, August 24, 1862, 1. This was also reported in similar language by Whitelaw Reid on the same day in the Cincinnati Gazette. See Whitelaw Reid, A Radical View: The “Agate” Dispatches of Whitelaw Reid 1861–1865, ed. James G. Smart (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1976), p. 215. 22. See Henry Adams, History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Library of America, 1986), p. 357. 23. Reid, A Radical View, p. 215. 24. AL to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862, Collected Works, 5, p. 388. 25. “News from Washington,” New York Times, August 24, 1862, 1. 26. Horace Greeley, “Greeley’s Estimate of Lincoln: An Unpublished Address by Horace Greeley,” Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 42:3 ( July 1891), p. 380. 27. Reported in a letter from New York Tribune correspondent Adam S. Hill to Sydney Howard Gay, September 1, 1862, Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Don E. and Virginia Fehrenbacher (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 18. 28. Thomas Jefferson to Walter Jones, March 31, 1801, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. H. A. Washington, 9 vols (Washington, D.C.: Taylor & Maury, 1853–1854), 4, p. 393. 29. As told to John McClintock, in Fehrenbacher, Recollected Words, p. 314. 30. Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Miff lin Company, 1960), pp. 396–397. 31. AL to Albert G. Hodges, April 4, 1864, Collected Works, 7, p. 281. 32. “Lincoln to Hodges,” New York Tribune, April 29, 1864. 33. J.G. Randall, Lincoln the President: Midstream (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1952), p. 212. 34. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 645. 35. John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols (New York: The Century Co., 1890), 7, p. 349. 36. Quoted in ibid., pp. 341–342. 37. Robert Todd Lincoln to Isaac Markens, June 18, 1918, in Paul M. Angle, ed., A Portrait of Abraham Lincoln in Letters by his Oldest Son (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1968), p. 62. 38. William H. Herndon, “Lincoln Individually” [August 1887], Herndon-Weik Collection, Library of Congress, Microfilm edition, Group 4, Roll 11, Exp. 3410. 39. James F. Wilson, “Some Memories of Lincoln,” North American Review, 163 (December 1896), p. 670. 40. Ibid. 41. AL to Erastus Corning et al., June 12, 1863, Collected Works, 6, p. 268. 42. Ibid., p. 269.

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43. Edward Everett to AL, June 16, 1863, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress website; hereafter ALP. 44. “Message to Congress in Special Session,” July 4, 1861, Collected Works, 4, p. 426. 45. AL to Erastus Corning and Others, June 1863, Draft, ALP. 46. Collected Works, 6, p. 266. 47. Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 68.

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CH A P T E R

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Genius or Talented Amateur: Lincoln as Military Strategist Jo se ph T. G latthaar

Over the last three-quarters of a century, scholars have made little progress in understanding the relationships between President Abraham Lincoln and his generals-in-chief. They have viewed the Great Emancipator as an individual who possessed an uncanny feel for military events and strategy and have presented his subordinates as inept bunglers, until Ulysses S. Grant assumed the reins. Finally, so the saga goes, Lincoln had someone who could execute the kind of war the president knew would be best and decisive. This approach began in its incipient stage with an Englishman, Colin Ballard. In 1926, Ballard published his little-known book The Military Genius of Abraham Lincoln.1 Ballard attributed Union strategy exclusively to Abraham Lincoln, a natural-born military strategist and operational expert who uncannily knew how to defeat the Confederacy. T. Harry Williams built on Ballard’s thesis in his classic Lincoln and His Generals.2 Clearly, the United States’ conduct and command structure in World War II inf luenced Williams in his depiction of Lincoln as a wartime leader who grasped strategy and operations better than his subordinates. With George C. Marshall as chief of staff and Dwight D. Eisenhower as supreme allied commander, Europe, the United States employed overwhelming resources and applied pressure simultaneously on a broad front to defeat the hard-pressed Germans. The same was true with American strategy in the Pacific Theater against Japan, as the

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U.S. forces advanced along the Southwest Pacific and Central Pacific routes to converge on the Japanese Islands. Like Ballard’s portrait, Williams’s Lincoln was a natural military genius, but he could neither find the right general nor the right command structure to translate that strategic vision into successful campaigns. Lincoln eventually assumed the role of commander in chief and general in chief because of repeated failures of professional soldiers. After numerous attempts to find someone to ease the presidential burden, the frustrated president turned to Grant, who implemented Lincoln’s strategic concepts and worked with the president to establish a modern command structure. Grant employed superior Union forces simultaneously, with a goal of defeating the enemy armies before them. Grant also set up a system with a chief of staff who handled affairs in Washington D.C. while he traveled with the principal field command in the East, the Army of the Potomac. As commanding general, Grant monitored various campaigns and sent recommendations, but he left much of the day-to-day communications to Chief of Staff Henry W. Halleck. Williams created a paradigm that has dominated assessments of Lincoln as a wartime president to this very day. Many, such as David Donald in his 1995 book entitled Lincoln, accept Williams’s interpretation completely.3 While Donald presents Lincoln as a president who reacted, rather than initiated, he embraces Williams’s version of Lincoln as commander in chief: a directed individual who had a better sense of how to fight the war than any of his subordinate generals. Others, such as James McPherson in his new book Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln As Commander in Chief (2008) ref lect the long reach of Williams. Although McPherson is unwilling to label Lincoln a military genius, and he possesses a much clearer understanding of the distinction among national strategy, military strategy, and operations, his depiction is very much in line with Williams’s portrayal. Lincoln’s genius rested in politics, but he emerges as a military thinker with better understanding and judgment than his officers. And while McPherson offers some insights and analyses that are wonderful and enlightening, his vision of Lincoln is not much different from the one in Williams’s pages. No doubt, Lincoln possessed extraordinary talents that enabled him to emerge from the war as the greatest commander in chief in U.S. history. He set his sights on the goal of a restored Union and never wavered, even in the face of extraordinary frustrations, horrible failures, and seemingly monumental obstacles. Lincoln communicated his goals more artfully than any president in the nation’s history. He rallied

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millions upon millions to the cause, and convinced them that the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and the sacrifices and heartaches the war wrought were worth that goal. For those people who could not or would not serve, he burdened them with unavoidable high taxes, revolutionary policies like conscription, nearly 100 percent inf lation, and civil rights restrictions, along with the hardships of life without family and friends. He sold to soldiers and the public a policy of emancipation that united some Northerners but divided others, and he refused to yield on that guarantee of freedom when a compromise would have been convenient. Through his vision and his ability to communicate that vision to the public, he preserved enough support to sustain this mammoth war effort and to rally and even coerce politicians to ratify those policies or run the risk of alienating the majority of that voting public. He used diplomacy well to keep foreign nations from giving extensive assistance to the Confederacy, even when it would be in their interest to have a permanently divided United States. And he employed a variety of other weapons, such as an economic blockade of Confederate ports, to squeeze the Confederacy tighter and tighter, preventing the Rebels from importing vital war materiel. Thus, Lincoln’s national strategy was absolutely sound.4 By and large, these are all qualities of a great politician, an art Lincoln honed largely in the Illinois legislature and in pitching arguments in court cases to Illinois jurors. But do great politicians necessarily make great wartime commanders in chief? What kind of national military strategy would emerge from the administration? The job of commander in chief in wartime extends far beyond the more traditional role of politics. If strategy equals ends plus ways plus means, then a great commander in chief must ensure that all components are established and fulfilled. To do that, a president must set them, monitor them, and place individuals in positions of authority who can implement those designs. Lincoln clearly articulated his ends: the restoration of the Union and, later, the destruction of slavery. He and his administration carefully developed the means. They mobilized 2.25 million men to serve in the armed forces. They got industry to manufacture the machines of war in tremendous quantities for an army and a navy and farmers to produce enough foodstuffs to feed the people at home, all of those in uniform, and still have enough left over to export to Europe and alleviate hardships and strengthen bonds there. Yet when it came to means, how a nation goes about defeating the enemy militarily, Lincoln and his administration struggled. Although his formal schooling was certainly limited to several years, he embarked

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on a prodigious quest to educate himself and did so to a truly extraordinary degree. He possessed a brilliant, piercing mind, superb writing skills, a quick wit, and a capacity for growth. Still, he had virtually no military background. Lincoln had served two brief stints in the militia, one as a captain and the other as a private. As he liked to joke, they encountered no Indians but had some bloody bouts with mosquitoes. Without extensive military experience or intellectual training, Lincoln would have to rely on key officers to coach him on military operations and personnel and help train him to think through military strategy. Even before the shelling at Fort Sumter, Lincoln had begun to lose faith in professional soldiers, and he came to believe that he could formulate more sound military strategy and oversee operations better than those with professional training and extensive campaign experience. In certain instances, Lincoln’s judgment was superior, but other times he failed to grasp proposals by proven combat leaders that probably would have shortened the war and reduced the bloodshed. He directed operations that even if successful would not have brought the war to a close any sooner, and they deprived vital resources from more pressing campaigns. In short, I argue that Lincoln was a brilliant amateur but still an amateur. He was by no means a military genius, nor was he a superior military strategist to all of his military subordinates. To explore Lincoln’s formulation of military strategy and operations—defined as a campaign or series of campaigns that seeks to achieve strategic objectives in a theater of war—I want to examine it through his relationship with his various generals-in-chief. When Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4, 1861, he inherited Bvt. Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott. By August 1861, Scott retired and Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan took over the job. Prior to the beginning of McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign, Lincoln relieved the little Pennsylvanian of that duty and left it vacant. He and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton assumed those duties until the failure of the Peninsula Campaign convinced Lincoln to bring Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck from the Western Theater to oversee the war in July 1862. Finally, after Grant’s series of victories, Congress created the rank of lieutenant general and Lincoln appointed Grant to it in March 1864. Winfield Scott was the great soldier of the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. He entered the Virginia militia in 1807, and by 1814 held the rank of brigadier general and had won an impressive victory over British Regulars at the Battle of Chippewa. After the peace, Scott remained in the Regular Army and assumed the position of commanding general in 1841. His brilliant campaign in the Mexican

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War, from an extraordinary amphibious operation to the capture of Mexico City, marked the summit of his military career. Insufferably pompous and keenly intellectual, Scott regularly battled his political leaders but earned enormous respect among officers and enlisted men in the Regular Army. No one had a greater inf luence on the officer corps than Scott.5 By the time of the secession crisis, rumors circulated that Scott’s mind and body had become decrepit. In truth, Scott’s body was breaking down, but his mind was still crisp. He suffered from gout, rheumatism, and was grossly obese, tipping the scales at well over three hundred pounds. His body limited the duration of his concentration—he needed frequent naps during the day—but when he was awake he possessed the most knowledgeable military mind in the country. Unfortunately, Scott ran afoul of Lincoln in the early days of the new administration, when he made it clear that militarily the Union could not maintain its hold on Fort Sumter, particularly once the garrison commander informed the administration that its supplies were dwindling and it could not hold out much longer. Months before, Scott had urged President James Buchanan to reinforce various coastal forts with troops and supplies. He also conveyed that message to Lincoln after the election. Buchanan took no action, and by March 1861, Scott believed it was too late. As Scott correctly pointed out, even if the ship arrived with humanitarian aid, the Union would have to continue to resupply to sustain that garrison, thereby bringing renewed crises. Lincoln seemed to acquiesce, until Postmaster General Montgomery Blair and his father, the prominent Missouri politico Francis P. Blair, met with the president. They implored Lincoln not to yield federal territory and reminded him what people then as well as generations to come would conclude—that the abandonment of Fort Sumter would be perceived as an act of treason and cowardice. The president had to try to save the fort and garrison. Lincoln was now convinced he could not evacuate federal property without an attempt to resupply it, and he adopted a brilliant scheme. He would send a resupply ship and inform the Rebels that it contained only food and medical supplies, no additional troops or ammunition. This humanitarian gesture would force the Confederates to allow the ship to pass and resupply a garrison on what secessionists claimed was their property, or it would compel them to fire on it and provoke violence. Lincoln maneuvered the Confederates into an awkward position, and President Jefferson Davis ordered his commander to fire on the garrison, rather than let the supplies land. The Confederates had fired the first shots on Federal troops.6

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From a military perspective, Scott’s advice was sound. The Union could not preserve the garrison there until it seized and occupied Charleston. But military concerns were only a part of the factors that Lincoln had to weigh. Not only was Lincoln battling a secession movement, but there was also a power grab in the administration, with various politicians seeking to wield a disproportionate amount of authority. Until Lincoln asserted himself over them, which he did in the Sumter crisis, there was an unusual degree of manipulation and backdoor politicking. Although Scott did not play a role in the game, he nonetheless lost credibility with Lincoln and many other politicians over the Fort Sumter affair.7 With Scott’s standing wounded, Lincoln and others were far too quick to dismiss or challenge his military strategy and operational plans. More than an ailing body, Scott suffered from amateurs who thought they knew warfare better than a professional of five decades. Scott operated under two major assumptions. Like so many other Union supporters, including Lincoln, he thought a majority of the people in the seceding states actually were pro-Union, that extremists had kicked up a fury and hijacked those states into secession. Scott also believed that if the Union tried to send large invading forces into the Confederacy, it would require several years of fighting and vast quantities of lives and treasure to subdue the Confederates. Moreover, it might take years more of occupation before peace truly returned to the seceding states. Most amateurs anticipated a swift war with a decisive blow or two, consummating in a Union victory; others believed that unionists needed a quick battlefield triumph to rally them, but once they rose up against the agitators, it would be a short conf lict. In a letter in response to an absurd strategic proposal from Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, Scott laid out a plan that would employ a heavy blockade, build up and train large forces, and then advance them down the Mississippi River, severing a big chunk of the Confederacy and resolving a complicated logistical problem by drawing supplies by water. Critics have derided Scott’s Anaconda Plan as woefully lacking in reality. They completely missed the point. When Scott offered this proposal, it was just one phase of a multi-year series of operations. Scott well knew the Confederacy’s incapacity for manufacturing and dependence on imports to sustain the war effort. The blockade would halt those supplies from arriving. A successful campaign to control the Mississippi River would offer exactly what Grant and his key subordinate William Tecumseh Sherman achieved almost eighteen months later. They would excise from much of the war the Trans-Mississippi

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West, and they would also possess the ability to project power anywhere along the river, to launch with impunity internal raids that would seize slaves, destroy property of military value, and frighten the citizenry.8 Scott’s problem in history is that he did not write out the entire series of campaigns. But much like the Mexican War, he could not predict with certainty the necessary campaigns until the war progressed. In Mexico, it only became evident that Scott would have to lead an overland campaign on Mexico City when the Mexican government failed to negotiate after initial defeats of its army and the conquest of vast chunks of its territory. Thus, he wrote to McClellan about the first stage of operations, and politicians, the media, and the public vilified him for it.9 Amateurs chanted “on to Richmond,” but an experienced soldier like Scott knew that would necessitate a better trained army. An overland campaign to Richmond would require six river crossings and a huge logistical strain that this raw field command could not have accomplished. At the time, the Union lacked vessels to execute an amphibious campaign along the Virginia coastline and march inward toward Richmond, and with Confederate control of interior lines, the Rebels could have blocked the Union invaders along any one of the peninsula routes they would have to utilize. Individuals like Blair had the president’s ear and thought the Confederates could only muster a ragtag opposition. Others demanded immediate action. Lincoln again overruled Scott’s recommendation and ordered an advance on Confederate forces at Manassas Junction led by Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell. The president believed national strategy demanded unity among the Northern populace, and their cries for an advance trumped the military concerns of an untrained army. “You are green, it is true,” Lincoln conceded, “but they are green, also; you are all green alike.”10 As Scott well knew, it was much more difficult to fight on the offensive than on the defensive, and for untrained troops, this was a particularly glaring distinction. On July 21, 1861, at Bull Run, McDowell’s soldiers executed a turning movement well and began rolling up the Confederate f lanks. But when the defenders stiffened and reinforcements arrived, morale and discipline among the raw Federals collapsed, as soldiers f led back to Washington, discarding impedimenta along the roadside to lighten their load. The defeat certainly jolted the Northern public, but it also fixated attention on the war in the East, and Scott’s days as a military planner were over. In a strange way, the fiasco at Bull Run may have strengthened Lincoln’s rapport with Scott. The president brought in Maj. Gen. George

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B. McClellan, the victor of a minor fight in Western Virginia, to replace McDowell as head of the Army of the Potomac. It did not take long before McClellan began howling that the defenses of Washington were woefully inadequate, that his troops’ strength was far less than the Confederates and insufficient to protect the nation’s capital. The assertions were certainly directed at Scott, the general-in-chief, but they were also a slap at the commander in chief, who held ultimate responsibility. Scott’s calm reassurances fortified Lincoln’s suspicions that McClellan grossly inf lated enemy numbers and badly overstated the threat. On October 31, 1861, Scott resigned from the Union Army. His ailing body, the assaults from McClellan, and the disregard if not contempt with which politicians held him proved too much for the old general to endure. He sought refuge at West Point and lived out his remaining years there. Lincoln surely could have used him nearby over the next three and a half years as a military adviser and sounding board. In fact, the following summer, when McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign suffered a huge setback, Lincoln rode the long train ride up to West Point just to consult Scott. Despite some irritations and loss of faith in Scott’s judgment, the president had come full circle. In a crisis, he still had enough confidence to turn to Scott. McClellan had coveted and lobbied for the position of general-inchief since he arrived in Washington. Barrel-chested, five feet, eight inches tall, and imposing on horseback, McClellan fit the image of a commanding general, especially compared to the decaying Scott. He also possessed superb credentials. McClellan had graduated second in his U.S. Military Academy class at nineteen years of age and joined the Corps of Engineers. In the Mexican War, he served on Scott’s staff, and several years later the army sent him as part of a team to observe the Crimean War. Eventually, slow advancement in the Regular Army and enticing prospects in the private sector lured McClellan to accept a position as chief engineer for a railroad. By the time of the war, McClellan had risen to railroad president.11 An individual with McClellan’s talents and experience was in great demand, and the governor of Ohio offered him a major generalship and command of the Ohio volunteers. The federal government brought him into service as major general. In his first action, McClellan defeated Confederate forces when he mishandled his command, but the Rebels bungled it even worse, and Federals defeated them at the Battle of Rich Mountain. McClellan pronounced it a great victory, and the Northern newspapers and public proclaimed it so. After the crushing defeat at

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Bull Run, it was a surprise to no one that Lincoln would tap McClellan to take over the Army of the Potomac. McClellan possessed considerable talents, but he also had severe drawbacks. Psychologically, he exhibited signs of paranoia and narcissism. Without justification, McClellan questioned the loyalty of others, assigning to them the worst possible motives. Excessively suspicious, he was easily slighted and bore grudges deeply. He hesitated to confide in others—he simply did not trust others—and seldom if ever delegated responsibility, overseeing the minutest details personally. He needed to dominate, to be in the position of authority, and he could not handle working under others. Throughout his career, he struggled in roles of inferiority, often alienating or aggravating superiors in an effort to dictate the f low of the relationship. For all his intelligence and administrative ability, McClellan had a tendency to embellish difficulties and overreact to them. Magnifying obstacles well beyond their true merit or strength, he took excessive precautions against perceived threats and clung rigidly to his views, even in the face of contrary evidence. He could not cope with failure and avoided blame at all costs. Even though he was highly critical of others, he reacted harshly to criticism. He was certainly ambitious, which in itself was not a fault, but the way he went about undercutting Scott in quest of the general in chief position was despicable. He stroked Scott with words like “Next to maintaining the honor of my country, general, the first aim of my life is to justify the good opinion you have expressed concerning me, and to prove that the great soldier of our country can not only command armies himself, but teach others to do so,” yet at the same time he corresponded without Scott’s knowledge to his political leaders, complaining about Scott’s decisions. Within a few weeks of his arrival in Washington, McClellan wrote to his wife about Scott, “I do not know whether he is a dotard or a traitor! I can’t tell which.” Scott, he asserted, “is a perfect imbecile. He understands nothing, appreciates nothing & is ever in my way.” McClellan began lobbying politicians, claiming that Scott was an impediment to him taking the offensive, that he jeopardized the capital with slipshod defenses and that his incompetent meddling retarded the war effort. The pressure mounted until Scott could take no more and resigned. When Lincoln appointed McClellan as general in chief as well as commander of the Army of the Potomac, McClellan responded, “I can do it all.”12 Once in charge, McClellan found new targets for blame. Magnifying the obstacles against him, the Rebel army in Virginia increased by leaps

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and bounds. On August 16, the Confederates opposed him with “3 to 4 times my force”; three days later, they had 150,000; by mid-September, “The enemy probably have 170,000!” Why the Confederates did not attack Washington, a mystified McClellan could not explain. The nation was fortunate indeed.13 Still unwilling to adopt McClellan’s evaluation of the military situation, Scott suffered indignities from McClellan, and when others concurred with Scott, they too came in for ridicule. “The Presdt is an idiot,” he informed his wife. Two months later, Lincoln was “nothing more than a well meaning baboon,” Secretary of State William H. Seward a “meddling, officious, incompetent puppy,” and Secretary of Navy Gideon Welles “weaker than the most garrulous woman you were ever annoyed by.” Another time, he labeled Lincoln a coward, Seward a vile fellow, Secretary of War Simeon Cameron a rascal, Welles “an old woman,” and Attorney General Edward Bates “an old fool.” Anyone in the administration who crossed McClellan’s path and did not yield wholeheartedly to his program came in for such epithets.14 On the day Scott retired, McClellan submitted a strategic plan for the Union Armies. As he had done previously, his army was the critical component, the centerpiece, upon which the fate of the nation rested. He wanted all Federal forces to work in unity, but then argued that all of them should go on the defensive except the Department of Kentucky and all superf luous troops should be sent to the Army of the Potomac immediately for offensive operations. McClellan hoped to use military forces to win great victories without massive bloodshed and destruction and without wringing tremendous changes on the South and its landscape. He believed that the capture of Richmond would break the back of Confederate morale and force President Jefferson Davis and his people to the negotiation table. Although we will never know, at that point in the war McClellan probably underestimated Confederate resolve. Later in the war, as hardships compounded and railroads decayed from overuse, the significance of Richmond as an industrial center and as a symbol of the fighting prowess of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia became more and more important to the Confederate cause. Its capture in 1864 or 1865 would have signaled the abandonment of nearly all of Virginia and the inability to provide additional ammunition for the defending armies in the region. It would have been, as it was in April 1865, a disaster from which the Confederacy could not recover. But in 1861 and 1862, that was probably not the case.15 McClellan wanted the advance to begin by November 25. But as November came and went, politicians and the public, even friends of

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McClellan, grew restive. Soon, winter settled in, and the best season for active campaigning had passed with no movement. The president tried to get McClellan to reveal his plans. He visited the general often, checking up on matters, hoping to learn them. McClellan was not forthcoming, and in private he resented “all enemies in shape of ‘browsing’ Presdt etc.” In early December, an increasingly frustrated Lincoln decided to force McClellan’s hand. The president offered his own scheme to outf lank the Confederates from their fortified position in Northern Virginia. McClellan replied that intelligence sources indicated the Rebels could match his strength in such an expedition, but “I now have my mind actively turned toward another plan of campaign that I do not think at all anticipated by the enemy nor by many of our own people.” No details, he just gave a cryptic reference to an unexpected approach to his commander in chief.16 As Congressional pressure mounted for action, McClellan took ill with typhoid fever. A disconsolate Lincoln unburdened his problems to the quartermaster general, who suggested that the president confer with senior generals in the Army of the Potomac for advice. On January 10, Lincoln brought together several cabinet members and two generals and asked the generals to recommend offensives. One proposed a direct advance on the Confederates around Manassas, and the other general suggested a f lanking movement by water, similar to McClellan’s secret plan. The next day, Lincoln held a second conference, and this time the military men agreed on the overland march against Manassas. Lincoln ordered them to develop a plan. McClellan caught a whiff of the meetings and he grew furious. Suspicious by nature, he perceived this as an overt attempt to usurp his authority or remove him from command. Two days later, when the group gathered for the third time, McClellan “miraculously” recovered enough to attend. Amid a tense atmosphere, Lincoln explained why he had summoned the officers originally. When one of the generals spoke, McClellan silenced him icily. The quartermaster general Montgomery Meigs privately urged McClellan to discuss his plans. McClellan announced insolently that Lincoln could not keep a secret; he even told his young son Tad about future campaigns. Then, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase intervened. He called on McClellan to divulge his plan. McClellan again refused. Before the Army of the Potomac took to the field, Buell’s troops in Kentucky had to undertake operations. He had already begun to arrange it. “If the President had confidence in me it was not right or necessary to entrust my designs to the judgment of others,” he pronounced. “Some were incompetent to

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form a valuable opinion, and others incapable of keeping a secret.” He would not detail his intentions unless Lincoln specifically ordered him to do so. Lincoln refused to force the matter. He asked if McClellan had settled on a date for the campaign, and the commanding general responded affirmatively. “Well,” Lincoln decided, “on the assurance of the General that he will press the advance in Kentucky, I will be satisfied, and will adjourn this council.”17 In fact, Lincoln was not satisfied. His faith in McClellan was shaken. In late January, the commander in chief set a timetable for action, ordering all land and naval forces to move against the enemy on February 22. Not long before, Lincoln had replaced his secretary of war with Edwin M. Stanton, a friend of McClellan’s who, in time, the general would brand “without exception the vilest man I ever knew or heard of.” Stanton urged the general to submit his secret plan to Lincoln. After a briefing, Lincoln concluded that the proposal to move by water to Urbanna and then overland toward Richmond merely altered the site of confrontation and delayed the date of advance. In its place Lincoln specified Confederate troops at Manassas as the target for the Army of the Potomac. McClellan insisted his plan had merits the president did not understand. Ultimately, Lincoln posed five fundamental questions about the two plans that addressed the cost in time and money, the likelihood of success, the benefits of decisive victory, and the consequences of disaster. If McClellan resolved these issues to Lincoln’s satisfaction, he could undertake the Urbanna campaign.18 In fact, the Urbanna campaign had merits, but Lincoln’s confidence in McClellan had largely dissolved. McClellan responded with a thirty-five-hundred-word essay of exoneration, excessive detail, and speculation, the plan’s strengths drowned beneath the f lood of detail. Lincoln withdrew his objection, but he monitored matters carefully. What he witnessed did not please him. First, the army botched an attempt to clear the upper Potomac River of Confederates. Then, the Confederates abandoned their works at the Manassas-Centerville axis and fell back closer to Richmond, which made the move on Urbanna no longer viable. An examination of Confederate works there, too, indicated a far smaller military force than McClellan claimed. Finally, when McClellan chose the new site for invasion, the peninsula between the York and James Rivers, the Confederate ironclad Virginia emerged to terrorize the Union blockade f leet. The Navy had long pleaded with McClellan to occupy the naval yards at Norfolk, where the Virginia was raised from the river bottom, reconstructed, and given iron protection, but McClellan declined to cooperate.

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Fed up with McClellan’s temporizing, just days before McClellan boarded ship for Fort Monroe and the peninsula, Lincoln relieved him as general in chief. The demands of field command, Lincoln explained, would prevent him from dealing with military affairs in other theaters. Lincoln delegated greater authority to Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck and Maj. Gen. John C. Fremont, his two other military division commanders, and he and Stanton would assume responsibility for overall direction of the war.19 Lincoln’s decision to have Stanton and him handle the duties of general in chief demonstrated the frustration he felt with McClellan, but it also indicated how little confidence he had in military professionals. To assume that two utter amateurs could handle oversight of military operations was at the very least very naïve. At the same time, though, Lincoln created the War Board, composed of the various bureau chiefs, such as the commissary general, quartermaster general, and adjutant general, and headed by a retired forty-year veteran named Ethan Allan Hitchcock. The rationale was that the Board could give advice and information and Lincoln and Stanton would make the decisions. During Lincoln’s stint as “general in chief,” a f lurry of negative events shook the president. He learned that McClellan had denuded the defenses of Washington in violation of Lincoln’s directive. That became apparent when Confederate Maj. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson routed Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks and drove the Union troops in the Shenandoah Valley north of the Potomac River. Jackson then beat two separate Union commands that tried to trap his command. To top off the string of disasters, McClellan was knocked back from the outskirts of Richmond to twenty miles away, protected by Yankee gunboats and howling almost irrationally that he needed more troops. Lincoln and Stanton realized they were in over their heads, and at that time Lincoln traveled by train up to West Point to consult with Scott. Upon his return, the president ordered Halleck to come east and assume the duties of general in chief. Halleck, nicknamed “Old Brains,” had graduated third in his West Point class and had earned a great reputation as an army intellectual. A soft-looking fellow with bulging eyes and a thick double chin, Halleck impressed no one physically. He had taught at West Point, where he wrote an important book entitled Elements of Military Art and Science and translated Antoine Henri, Baron de Jomini’s Political and Military Life of Napoleon.20 In 1854 he left the Regular Army and literally became a millionaire by 1860 as a mining lawyer. Lincoln appointed him major general and he headed the Department of Missouri.

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A disciple of Jomini, in truth Halleck had very little actual campaign experience and was more suited to being a staff officer than a commanding general. His knowledge derived primarily from scholarship, and though deep, it was conventional. Grant had won the victories at Forts Henry and Donelson; Halleck had played a logistical and administrative role. Yet because Halleck was the ranking officer, he received the promotion to command the forces in the West at the same time that McClellan was relieved as general in chief. When Lincoln called on him to serve as general in chief, the decision made sense. Halleck was widely respected and his department had won the great successes. While Union army under Grant did suffer heavy losses at Shiloh, military forces in Halleck’s department had driven the Rebel forces all the way back to Northern Mississippi and he had even personally directed the capture of Corinth.21 Lincoln desperately needed Halleck because he could not decide what to do about McClellan. When Gen. Robert E. Lee’s inferior forces attacked McClellan in what has been called the Seven Days’ Campaign, McClellan’s messages to authorities in Washington, initially confident and composed, soon degenerated to near hysteria. After the first day, he blustered, “If I had another good Division I could laugh at Jackson.” Two days later, as Confederate attacks compelled his army to abandon the field, McClellan pined, “Had I (20,000) twenty thousand fresh & good troops we would be sure of a splendid victory tomorrow.” He was not responsible for the retreat, he charged the next day to the secretary of war, and if the government wanted victory, “you must send me very large reinforcements & send them at once.” His concluding remark, which was so outrageous that the telegraph operator in Washington deleted it intentionally, shifted the entire burden of defeat on Lincoln and Stanton: “If I save this Army now I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or any other persons in Washington—you have done your best to sacrifice this Army.” By July 1, his requests had reached absurd proportions: “I need fifty thousand (50,000 ) more men, and with them I will retrieve our fortunes. More would be well, but that number sent at once, will, I think enable me to assume the offensive”; within three days, his needs exceeded 100,000. Confronted with failure, and so desirous to shift blame onto others, his demands had lost all semblance of reality, and Lincoln could not assess the situation and determine what to do. The president visited McClellan first, and when Halleck arrived, he ordered the new general in chief to travel down to McClellan’s headquarters, speak to officers there, size up the situation, and decide on a course of action.

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He authorized Halleck to promise McClellan no more than 20,000 reinforcements.22 When the two men met, McClellan tried to secure more troops than Halleck was authorized to offer. “Old Brains” refused to budge, and McClellan vowed to “try” to resume his offensive with only twenty thousand more men. Within a week, McClellan began calling for more men, and Halleck realized that an offensive there was not possible. He ordered McClellan to return his army to Northern Virginia as rapidly as possible. It was one of the few firm decisions that Halleck made. Halleck then joined the lengthening list of McClellan’s enemies.23 It did not take long for the weight of responsibility to crush Halleck. McClellan shifted his forces northward slowly, and Lee exploited the opportunity to attack Maj. Gen. John Pope’s army while most of McClellan’s troops were in transit. Lee crushed Pope at the Battle of Second Manassas, Halleck failed to get reinforcements to Pope in time, and McClellan deliberately withheld soldiers from Pope when the Union general desperately needed help.24 By the time the battle was over and Pope’s forces were safely within the fortifications around Washington, political infighting and the stress of the job as general in chief had worn Halleck to a frazzle. As Lincoln explained to his private secretary, he had served the president well until the defeat at Second Manassas, “when he broke down— nerve and pluck all gone—and he has ever since evaded all responsibility.” Lincoln’s disappointment clearly in evidence, he overstated the case when he described Halleck’s role as “little more since that than a first-rate clerk.” Yet Lincoln held on to Halleck until he was convinced someone else could do better. The general-in-chief failed to take charge, but he offered intelligent information and explanations to Lincoln and kept on top of operations in all the theaters. In effect, he served as a good staff officer.25 To be sure, Lincoln could spot problems and solutions better than most men, even in areas where he was untrained. He scolded Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell and others when they delayed campaigning to await more supplies, pointing out that more supplies and equipment reduced the number of front-line troops, and while the army waited, it consumed its supplies on hand. After the battle of Antietam, when McClellan hesitated to undertake a new campaign, it was Lincoln who pointed out that in their present positions McClellan was closer to Richmond than Lee. Lincoln wondered, “Why can not you reach there before him, unless you admit that he is more than your equal on a march.” As the master of geometry, Lincoln noted that “His route

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is the arc of the circle, while yours is the chord,” and “The roads are as good on yours as his.” If McClellan drove into Virginia east of the Blue Ridge, he would threaten Lee’s communications. If Lee advanced north, the Federals could follow behind him, blocking his communications and coercing Lee to fight on McClellan’s terms. If Lee shifted to protect his communications, McClellan could race him to Richmond, gain the “inside track,” and engage Lee on ground of McClellan’s choosing. All along that chord McClellan had ready access to supplies by roads, railroads, and waterways from Washington, as “spokes of a wheel extending from the hub towards the rim.” With Lee’s army in the Shenandoah Valley, which angled from northeast near Washington to the southwest away from Richmond, McClellan could hug the eastern face of the Blue Ridge as he marched, block the gaps or slip through them to surprise Lee, and force the Confederates to assume an even farther course to reach Richmond. “It is all easy,” Lincoln concluded, “if our troops march as well as the enemy; and it is unmanly to say they can not do it.”26 Lincoln most certainly possessed a searing mind, but when it came to military affairs it was still the intellect of a talented novice. Where Halleck truly failed Lincoln as general in chief was in his unwillingness to challenge the president when Lincoln proposed or endorsed poor ideas. Once Grant’s reputation and authority rose, Lincoln never could grasp his strategic proposals, and Halleck either failed to fight for them because he did not want the struggles and headaches or he failed to grasp their merits because he thought too conventionally and had too little field experience. In February 1862, Grant had earned the first major Union victory at Forts Henry and Donelson. Not only had he captured a Confederate field force, but he shattered the Rebel cordon and compelled a major retreat back to the Tennessee-Mississippi border. His star slipped somewhat after the bloody victory at Shiloh in April 1862, but his brilliant campaign against Vicksburg in the spring and early summer 1863 was probably the most masterful of the entire war. Grant boldly slipped south of Vicksburg along the west side of the Mississippi River, shuttled across the waterway, and then fought several victorious battles, maneuvering his various commands with consummate skill throughout the operation. Eventually, he besieged the Confederates in the city of Vicksburg, and on July 4, 1863, he compelled the entire Confederate army to surrender. Since the fall of Vicksburg, Grant had lobbied authorities in Washington for a landing at Pascagoula, Mississippi, and an overland

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march on Mobile, Alabama, the major port city on the Gulf of Mexico. The experiment of cutting loose completely from a supply base and drawing essentials from the land had proven so successful that Grant felt sure he and Sherman could employ their raiding strategy on lengthy campaigns. Rather than exploit the momentum and close the largest open port on the Gulf of Mexico, the Lincoln administration preferred an invasion of Texas, to discourage any French incursions in territory that Lincoln claimed as U.S. domain. This peripheral operation could in no way contribute significantly toward crushing the rebellion and was, therefore, a waste of valuable resources and effort. The campaign failed miserably.27 After the defeat of Confederate forces in the Chattanooga Campaign in November 1863, Grant again eyed the fall of Mobile and an advance through Alabama and Georgia. This time, Grant sent newspaperman and confidant of the president and secretary of war Charles A. Dana to present his views to the administration, while he forwarded a direct communication to Halleck. Since the roads in that part of Tennessee and Northern Georgia had become so muddy and would not dry out till the spring, major land campaigns could not be conducted there. Rather than keep troops idle, Grant sought to exploit the momentum by proposing to transfer part of the army back to New Orleans and have it strike for Mobile. The other troops could protect Lincoln’s beloved East Tennessee, a geographical region that dominated the president’s thinking far more than it warranted. If the Confederates refused to surrender Mobile, Grant proposed to leave a portion to hold the garrison tightly, and with the bulk of his command launch a massive raid into Alabama and Georgia, marching directly through one of the richest agricultural regions of the Confederacy, foraging on the land and drawing any other necessary supplies and ammunition by way of the Alabama or Chattahoochee Rivers. Meanwhile, during the late winter or early spring the army near Chattanooga would drive toward Atlanta. The pincer columns would slice off a chunk of the Confederacy stretching from Chattanooga to Mobile, with Atlanta and Montgomery, Alabama, as vital intermediate points, severing the last east-west transportation connection in the Confederacy. Unless Lee evacuated Virginia and transported the Army of Northern Virginia south to oppose him, Grant predicted, “the enemy have not got army enough to resist the army I can take.”28 After conversations in Washington, Lincoln, Stanton, and Halleck responded faintheartedly. Before undertaking the bold venture against Mobile, the trio preferred Grant remove Confederates from

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East Tennessee, stif le some guerrilla unrest in Mississippi and West Tennessee, drive the Rebel army in Northern Georgia deeper into the interior, and assist Banks in expanding his control of Louisiana. The administration seemed bent on a trivial employment of manpower and resources, rather than a bold effort to follow up the success around Chattanooga. For the second time in less than six months, the campaign for Mobile never got off the planning table. Again, it was Grant, not Lincoln, who formulated sound military strategy and operations.29 As an alternative, Lincoln and his cabinet directed a patently useless campaign, an invasion of Texas with Banks as commander. The president and the cabinet worried about Napoleon III’s occupation of Mexico, and Lincoln sought a Union presence in Texas to prevent French penetration there. The problem was that an expedition into Texas would not diminish Rebel power materially, which should have been the paramount concern. By contrast, a raid that disrupted parts of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, captured Mobile, one of the Confederacy’s most prized ports, and created a pincer movement on Atlanta would have inf licted much more serious damage to the Confederate war effort. Halleck refused to explain to the president the wrongheadedness of the idea, which was exactly why Lincoln had brought a man of Halleck’s expertise to Washington originally. “The President so ordered, for reasons satisfactory to himself and his cabinet,” the general in chief explained unconvincingly to Grant, “and it was, therefore, unnecessary for us to inquire whether or not the troops could have been employed elsewhere with greater military advantage.” As subordinate officer with no direct access to the commander in chief, Grant dutifully accepted the poor decision of his superiors. Moreover, the War Department had recently elevated Grant to commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi, which subordinated military department commanders to him. The rationale was to give Grant “general military control and at the same time to relieve you from the burden of official correspondence.” Yet by imposing this unwanted campaign on Grant, Lincoln and the War Department undercut the very purpose of both restructuring command arrangements out west and elevating Grant to oversee all operations there.30 As the winter cold thawed into spring, Grant had achieved limited results. Sherman directed a march on Meridian, Mississippi, which demonstrated the efficacy of the raiding strategy on a smaller scale; otherwise, Grant and the Federals did not conduct a major expedition that winter.

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At Halleck’s request, Grant submitted another plan in mid-January, this one focusing on the Eastern Theater. As an alternative to the bloodbath of Virginia, Grant suggested a massive raid, some sixty thousand troops, from Suffolk, Virginia, into North Carolina. The army would destroy the Weldon Railroad, one of Lee’s principal means of supply, and drive on to Raleigh, wrecking anything of military value, consuming foodstuffs and forage, confiscating slaves, and wholly disrupting life in the region. From Raleigh, the army had a viable escape route and supply base at New Bern, or it could attack Wilmington, which proved to be the last open Confederate port, from the rear. 31 Supply problems had almost always rankled Lee and his army, but that winter and spring they became acute. At one point he had only one day’s meat ration of one-quarter pound of beef on hand per soldier, and horses lived on anywhere from two to five pounds of food per day, when they needed twenty-three to twenty-six pounds. By April 1864, Lee proposed to Davis that the Confederacy alter its consumption habits and save meat and other items for the armies. He also suggested the depopulation of Richmond, removing all nonessential personnel. As the spring campaign of 1864 approached, supply problems remained so terrible that he had to keep James Longstreet’s troops at a railroad junction ten miles away just to feed them and their animals. The campaign that Grant proposed would most likely have compelled Lee to evacuate Virginia due to supply problems, and the chaos in North Carolina would have led to massive defections and desertions in that state and also Virginia.32 Halleck dismissed the scheme before he even presented it to the president, knowing that Lincoln would turn it down. In a clouded response that was uncharacteristic of the scholarly general-in-chief, Halleck insisted that he had not designated Richmond the primary target for the Army of the Potomac; rather, “that point is Lee’s army. I have never supposed Richmond could be taken till Lee’s army was defeated or driven away.” Citing Napoleon Bonaparte as his authority, the bookish Halleck argued that the direct, overland route from Washington toward Richmond and targeting the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia offered the best prospects for success. Presently, he doubted that the Union could generate a force of sixty thousand, which might not be strong enough to accomplish the mission. “Our main efforts in the next campaign should unquestionably be made against the armies of Lee and Johnston,” he persisted.33 Lincoln’s rejection of Grant’s plans in favor of his own indicates that he may have possessed a penetrating mind, but when it came to military

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strategy and operations, he was a conventional, not a brilliant, thinker. Neither he nor Stanton nor Halleck could comprehend the merits of Grant’s proposals. Both the North Carolina and Mobile plans were so contrary to the traditional notions of warfare that emerged from the Napoleonic era, so rooted in actual experiences in the Mississippi River Valley, that the leadership in Washington had no basis from which to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. Other than the idea of fighting all year long, they found little redeeming value in the concept of a raiding strategy. They were so wedded to a direct approach, which inevitably would result in a conventional bloodbath, that they could not comprehend how the raiding strategy would weaken Lee’s army, shorten the war, and save lives. They could not conceive that the campaign through North Carolina, for example, would so disrupt Lee’s logistics that his army could not sustain itself in most of Virginia. Once Lee abandoned Richmond, it could no longer supply itself with ammunition. Most of the Army of Northern Virginia’s ammunition was manufactured in Richmond, and the remainder came from Georgia and South Carolina. Not only would the raid have forced Lee out of Richmond due to a lack of supplies, it would also have wrecked the railroads connecting Lee’s army to its ammunition sources in the Deep South. Thus, Lee and his army would have been incapable of fighting a large-scale battle, let alone feeding those troops and animals. On March 10, 1864, Lincoln appointed Grant to the rank of lieutenant general and general in chief of all Union armies. By then, Grant realized that he must adopt the conventional strategy that Lincoln, Stanton, and Halleck had directed. He would employ all military forces simultaneously, certainly a good utilization of manpower and resource superiority, with his principal field commands confronting the main Confederate armies directly. The best Grant could hope for was that once Sherman broke up the Confederate Army of Tennessee in Georgia, he could launch a massive raid into the interior, destroying Confederate war resources. The command structure that Grant forged with Lincoln and Halleck was nothing resembling a World War II General Staff. In World War II, Gen. George C. Marshall as chief of staff was the ranking officer of the U.S. Army and he remained in Washington, D.C., to oversee strategy, mobilization, training, logistics, and political aspects of military leadership. In the Civil War, Grant sought to escape the politics and ensure that the Army of the Potomac fought effectively, so he traveled in the field, with his headquarter tent pitched near Maj. Gen. George G. Meade, commanding general of the Army of the Potomac. He left

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his subordinate, Halleck, whose title now became chief of staff, to handle coordination and minor problems. Lincoln thoroughly approved Grant’s command structure and strategic approach, and the two maintained an excellent relationship. Grant kept Lincoln informed and tried to work with the resources available, assuming that if the president had more he would give them. Lincoln appreciated that Grant utilized the available manpower and resources wisely and took full responsibility for the campaigns that he oversaw. As casualties piled up, Lincoln stood firmly behind Grant. He had dictated to a great extend the kind of operations that Grant and his subordinates were fighting, and it was vital that he backed up his commanding general. Yet Lincoln had experienced a string of problems with professional soldiers, and he kept a watchful eye on Grant. When he challenged Grant, he received brief, clear explanations of Grant’s decisions. At the same time, Lincoln warned Grant when individuals or the bureaucracy were undercutting Grant’s policies.34 The major f law in the Lincoln-Grant command structure emerged when Confederate Lt. Gen. Jubal Early launched a raid down the Shenandoah Valley, into Maryland, and exchanged gunfire with Union soldiers in fortifications defending Washington, D.C. Grant initially misread Early’s movements, and because he was down at City Point, Virginia, he responded slowly to protect the capital. The president remained calm and saw opportunity, not danger, but he could not get an aggressive leader to take charge of all the troops and exploit the opportunity. When Grant suggested various persons as overall commander, Lincoln and Stanton rejected them. Finally, Grant sent back his aggressive cavalry commander Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan with sufficient troops to defeat Early’s columns, but by this time Stanton and Halleck were so annoyed with Grant’s handling that they obstructed Sheridan’s efforts. Ultimately, Lincoln had to intervene and warn Grant that just because he ordered something did not mean that others executed it. If Grant wanted a specific plan implemented by a particular officer, he must push it and watch it all the time until it was done. In order to give Sheridan the authority that he needed, Grant had to return to Washington and oversee the directives personally. With overwhelming numbers and firepower, Sheridan went on the offensive, and in September and October 1864, his army crushed Early’s forces.35 Strangely enough, Grant’s handling of Early’s Campaign may have affected the president’s initial negative reaction to Sherman’s proposed March to the Sea, but Sheridan’s ultimate success may have opened

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the door to Lincoln’s eventual acquiescence of it. After Sherman and his army captured Atlanta, Confederate commander John Bell Hood and his command struck at Sherman’s supply line, the railroad between Chattanooga and Atlanta. Sherman’s army shooed it away, but Hood’s field force was too small and too agile for Sherman to trap it. Rather than keeping up a bootless pursuit, Grant’s key subordinate suggested the drive through Georgia, leaving Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas in Tennessee to tend to Hood’s army. Halleck promptly voiced objections, and Grant, too, questioned the wisdom of the campaign with Hood’s army intact. But Sherman, drawing on his intimate knowledge of the commanding general and his new-found prestige after the capture of Atlanta, persuaded his friend with carefully chosen words about offensive and initiative. Lincoln, who again pored over the messages, did not like the plan. Fixed as he was on the destruction of the enemy army through battle, he could not comprehend the value of such a march, especially when he weighed it against the negative consequences, perhaps the loss of an entire army and Hood’s advance northward. “The President feels much solicitude in respect to General Sherman’s proposed movement and hopes that it will be maturely considered,” Stanton alerted Grant. A “misstep by General Sherman might be fatal to his army,” Lincoln feared. Grant, “on mature ref lection,” endorsed Sherman’s operation, and Lincoln refused to overrule the plan of his two best generals. Yet several days later Stanton paid Grant a visit at City Point, no doubt at Lincoln’s urging, to explain the president’s reservations and receive assurance that Sherman could fulfill all his intentions without incurring excessive risk. Grant refused to countermand Sherman’s designs, and Lincoln and Stanton reluctantly accepted the decision. Only after Sherman reached Savannah safely did Lincoln grasp the essence of the raiding strategy. Piecing together Confederate newspaper reports and snippets from Sherman, it finally dawned on Lincoln how disruptive to Confederates and productive to Federals these raiding campaigns could be. In a congratulatory letter, the president confessed, “When you were about leaving Atlanta for the Atlantic coast, I was anxious, if not fearful; but feeling that you were the better judge, and remembering that ‘nothing risked, nothing gained,’ I did not interfere. Now, the undertaking being a success, the honor is all yours; for I believe none of us went further than to acquiesce.”36 Grant continued to oversee matters carefully, as did Lincoln. In December 1864, when Grant and some others thought Thomas was hesitant to attack, Grant traveled to Washington and had boarded a

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train for Nashville, before learning that Thomas had struck and defeated Hood’s army. From the Early Raid, Grant knew Lincoln expected him to oversee matters like this personally. In late February 1865, as Sheridan commenced a campaign to capture Lynchburg, an important railroad junction for Lee’s army, Lincoln snatched at a telegram that implied only a token force would protect the northern Shenandoah Valley. “General Sheridan’s dispatch to you of to-day, in which he says he ‘Will be off on Monday,’ and that he ‘will leave behind about 2,000 men,’ causes the Secretary of War and myself considerable anxiety,” he notified Grant. “Have you well considered whether you do not again leave open the Shenandoah Valley entrance to Maryland and Pennsylvania, or at least to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad?” Grant explained to Lincoln’s complete satisfaction that Sheridan had designated his entire infantry and 3,000 cavalrymen as the protecting force, and his route of advance would also shield these vital areas. Sheridan’s telegram merely informed Grant that an additional 2,000 horsemen would remain. As late as April 1865, Lincoln continued to monitor and prod, even though by that time he had full faith in Grant. After Federal troops compelled Lee to abandon his works around Richmond and Petersburg and f lee westward, Grant sent a substantial force under Sheridan to prevent the escape. At Burke’s Station, those Federals carved out a sizeable chunk of Lee’s army. To Grant, Sheridan observed, “If the thing is pressed I think Lee will surrender.” Lincoln, still scanning the message traffic, pointedly injected to Grant, “Let the thing be pressed.” It was. On April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox Court House.37 In Lincoln and His Generals, Williams concluded the Lincoln was “a great war president, probably the greatest in our history.” To that statement I will go even further. Lincoln was the greatest American wartime president. But Williams also claimed that Lincoln was a “great natural strategist, a better one than any of his generals.” Here, I disagree.38 Lincoln was a brilliant man, with a piercing intellect camouf laged by jocularity and a simple image. He learned very rapidly, and at times exhibited some remarkable insights. But he was an amateur, and his lack of knowledge handicapped him as well. Despite claims that Lincoln tried to convince his generals that their primary target was the enemy army, he himself was just as culpable for seeking geographic targets for personal reasons. While he chided general after general over their interest in seizing Richmond, he himself was guilty of a similar problem with East Tennessee. In 1861, he began what bordered on a mania to secure East Tennessee. He sidetracked Buell from cooperation with Grant; he insisted that East Tennessee was more valuable then

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Nashville. When McClellan needed reinforcements, Halleck informed the secretary of war and president that he could provide them, but it would mean cancelling an expedition into East Tennessee. Lincoln replied no. “To take and hold the Rail-road at, or East of, Cleveland in East Tennessee, I think fully as important as the taking and holding of Richmond.” The quest to secure this region continued to dominate Lincoln’s thought, and once he held it, his fear of losing it drove him to nix a very sensible campaign on Grant’s part.39 Lincoln’s second geographic fixation was the Red River and Texas. The president wanted the area conquered and insisted on a campaign there, even though the victory would not bring the Union one inch closer to ultimate victory. Why did he insist on the two campaigns? Lincoln intended to send a message to the French in Mexico to be wary of Union military power and to gather valuable cotton. When he directed those campaigns, however, Lincoln lost sight of priorities. The French presence in Mexico would have mattered little if the Union lost the war. Nor could the Federal armies have brought out enough cotton to have made a dent in the demand. Yet he went ahead with the two campaigns with costly consequences. One prevented Grant from striking at Mobile and then through Alabama and Georgia. The other campaign, under command of an incompetent general, tied up two hardened divisions that were critical to Sherman’s operational plan against Johnston in the Atlanta Campaign, and nearly cost the Union a sizeable chunk of its Mississippi Squadron and its best naval officer. Had the campaigns of Grant and Sherman been successful, they would have shortened the war considerably. Had Lincoln’s two campaigns been successful, it would not have affected the progress of the war in any appreciable way. Williams and others tout Lincoln’s demand that Confederate armies, not geographical locations, be the targets. He did not understand that with the advent of industrialization, geographical targets could have a dramatic inf luence on the ability of an army to fight because factories and railroads are fixed. Although strategic bombing failed to live up to the grandest assertions of its advocates, there is no doubt that it reduced German and Japanese productivity in World War II, which in turn significantly aided U.S. and Allied ground forces. So, too, did the raiding strategy. It targeted logistics and morale on the home front, and the devastation of those raids created shortages at home and in the army, instigated grave concern among soldiers for loved ones at home, dissolved support for the war effort, and accelerated desertion. Those raids placed the Confederacy on a downward spiral from which they

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could not recover. And it did those things with a minimal loss of life, compared to direct battles. As an amateur, Lincoln lacked the basic knowledge to comprehend the merits of the raiding strategy. He opposed several proposals by Grant to undertake them, and had very serious qualms about Sherman’s Campaign to Savannah. Only when it was completed did he begin to grasp its merits. No one will ever know what would have happened had Lincoln not blocked Grant’s campaigns in place of mopping up in East Tennessee or two campaigns into Texas. It is certainly possible, though, that had Lincoln allowed Grant to undertake his raids, it may very well have shortened the war and saved lives on both sides. Was Lincoln a brilliant politician whose penetrating logic pointed out the fallacies in officers’ plans and decisions? Absolutely. Was he a natural military strategist, better than any of his officers? Absolutely not. It is time to discard the Williams’ paradigm of Lincoln as a military genius. Notes 1. Colin R. Ballard, The Genius of Abraham Lincoln: An Essay (London: Oxford University Press, 1926). 2. T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York: Random House, 1952). 3. See David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). 4. Some scholars have made the claim that he should have closed the ports instead of declaring a blockade, which gave the Confederacy belligerent status by international law. 5. For a very good biography of Scott, see Timothy D. Johnson, Winfield Scott: The Quest for Military Glory (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998). Also see Allan Peskin, Winfield Scott and the Profession of Arms (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2003). 6. Memorandum of John G. Nicolay, November 10 and December 22, 1860. Michael Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860–1865 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), pp. 9 and 21. 7. See Gideon Welles, “The Beginning of the War,” in Gideon Welles, ed., Diary of Gideon Welles, I (Boston: Houghton Miff lin Company, 1911), pp. 3–39. 8. McClellan to Scott, April 27, 1861. Scott to McClellan, May 3, 1861. War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901), series I, vol. 51, Part 1, pp. 338–339 and 369. 9. See Daniel Canfield, “Opportunity Lost: The Development of Union Military Strategy: January 1861 to July 1862” (Master’s thesis, North Carolina State University, 2007), pp. 56–69; Scott to Seward, March 3, 1861. Winfield Scott, Memoirs of Lieut.-General Winfield Scott, LL.D., Written By Himself, II (New York: Sheldon & Company, 1864), pp. 625–628. 10. See James McPherson, Tried By War: Abraham Lincoln As Commander in Chief (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), pp. 29–33; Johnson, Winfield Scott, p. 227. 11. For a smart book on some of McClellan’s strengths, see Ethan S. Rafuse, McClellan’s War: The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).

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12. McClellan to Wife, August 8 and 10, 1861. Stephen Sears, ed., The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan: Selected Correspondence, 1860–1865 (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989), p. 81; John Hay diary, undated. Tyler Dennett, ed., Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries and Letters of John Hay (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1939), p. 33. 13. McClellan to Wife, August 16, 1861; August 19, 1861. McClellan to Cameron, September 13, 1861. Sears, ed., Papers of McClellan, pp. 85, 87, and 100. 14. McClellan to Wife, August 16, 1861; August 19, 1861. McClellan to Cameron, September 13, 1861. McClellan to Wife, [October 11?, 1861]; [October 31, 1861]. Sears, ed., Papers of McClellan, pp. 85, 87, 100, 107, and 114. 15. McClellan to Cameron, undated [October 31, 1861]. OR 5, pp. 9–11. 16. McClellan to Wife, [October 31, 1861]. Sears, ed., Papers of McClellan, p. 113; McClellan to Lincoln, December 10, 1861, with Inclosure. OR 11, pp. 6–7. 17. McClellan, McClellan’s Own Story, p. 158; quoted in Williams, Lincoln and His Generals, p. 57. 18. McClellan to Wife, May 18, [1862]. Sears, ed., Papers of McClellan, p. 269. 19. Presidential General War Orders, No. 3. March 8, 1862. OR 5, p. 50. Also see President War Order, No. 3, March 11, 1862; and Stanton to McClellan, March 13, 1862. OR 5, pp. 54 and 56. 20. See H. Wager Halleck, Elements of Military Art and Science (New York: D Appleton & Company, 1846); see also Baron Jomini, Life of Napoleon, trans. H. W. Halleck (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1864). 21. See John F. Marszalek, Commander of All Lincoln’s Armies: A Life of Henry W. Halleck (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), for the best biography, and pp. 113–120. 22. McClellan to Stanton, June 25, 1862, and June 27, 1862. OR 11 (3), pp. 254 and 266; McClellan to Stanton, July 28, 1862. OR 11 (1), p. 61; McClellan to Lorenzo Thomas, July 1, 1862. Lincoln to McClellan, July 2, 1862. McClellan to Stanton, July 3, 1862. Halleck Memorandum to the Secretary of War, July 27, 1862. OR 11 (3), pp. 281, 286, 291–92, and 337–338; McClellan to Wife, [ July 7, 1862]; McClellan to Marcy, July 4, 1862; McClellan to Wife, July 8 and [ July] 10, 1862. Sears, ed., Papers of McClellan, pp. 341, 334, 346, and 348; McClellan to Lincoln, July 4, 1862. OR 11 (1), p. 72. 23. McClellan to Wife, August 8 and 10, [1862]. Sears, ed., Papers of McClellan, pp. 388–390. 24. McClellan to Lincoln, August 10, 1862. OR 11 (1), p. 98; John Hay diary, September [1] and 5, 1862. Dennett, ed., Lincoln and the Civil War, pp. 45 and 47. 25. John Hay diary, April 28, 1864. Dennett, ed. Lincoln and the Civil War, p. 176. 26. Lincoln to McClellan, October 13, 1862. OR 19 (1), pp. 13–14. 27. See Grant to Halleck, July 18, 1863. Lincoln to Grant, August 9, 1863. OR 24 (3), pp. 529– 530 and 585. 28 .Grant to Halleck, December 7, 1863. OR 31 (3), pp. 349–350. 29 .Halleck to Grant, December 17 and 21, 1863. Dana to Grant, December 21, 1863. OR 31 (3), pp. 454 and 457–458; Grant to Halleck, January 15, 1864. OR 32 (2), pp. 100–101. 30 .Halleck to Grant, January 8, 1864. OR 32 (2), p. 41. The campaign up the Red River turned out disastrously and deprived the Army of the Tennessee of 10,000 veterans at a critical moment in the Atlanta Campaign. If McPherson had 10,000 more men with his army during its turning movement at Resaca, he may have been more willing to assail the defenders, seize the Western & Atlantic Railroad, Johnston’s supply line, and trap the Confederate Army of Tennessee between his and Sherman’s main command. Of course, Lincoln had no way of predicting the repercussions, but his scheme was still a poor one. 31. Grant to Halleck, January 19, 1864. OR 33, pp. 394–395. 32. Davis to Northrop, January 4, 1864. B.P. Noland to Northrop, November 14, 1863. CSA. Commissary Department, NYPL; Lee to Northrop, January 13, 1864. Confidential Letters Sent, ANV. RG 109, NA; Lee to Letcher, October 31, 1863. Lee to Northrop, November 23, 1863. L&TS, ANV. RG 109, NA; Lee to Kemper, January 29, 1864. Lee to Seddon,

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35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

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April 12, 1864. Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin, eds., The Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee (Boston: Little Brown, 1961), pp. 663 and 696–697. Halleck to Grant, February 17, 1864. OR 32 (2), pp. 411–413. Grant to Sherman, July 16, 1864. OR I, 38 (5), p. 149; Lincoln to Grant, July 17, 1864. OR I, 40 (3), p. 289. Also see Joseph T. Glatthaar, Partners in Command: Relationships Between Leaders in the Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1994), pp. 191–223, for the Lincoln-Grant relationship. For a more detailed discussion of the command structure problem, see Joseph T. Glatthaar, “U.S. Grant and the Union High Command during the 1864 Valley Campaign.” Gary W. Gallagher, ed., The Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 34–55. Stanton to Grant, October 12, 1864. Grant to Stanton, October 13, 1864. OR 39 (3), pp. 222 and 239; Lincoln to Sherman, December 26, 1864. OR 44, p. 809. Also see Sherman to Grant, October 1 and 11, 1864. Halleck to Grant, October 2, 1864. Grant to Sherman, October 11 and 12, 1864. Grant to Stanton, October 14, 1864. OR 39 (3), pp. 3, 25–26, 202, 222, and 266. Lincoln to Grant, February 25 and 27, 1865. Grant to Lincoln, February 26, 1865. OR 46 (2), pp. 685, 704, and 717; Sheridan to Grant, April 6, 1865. OR 46 (3), p. 610. Lincoln to Grant, April 7, 1865. Roy P. Basler et al., ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953–1955), VII, p. 392. Williams, Lincoln and His Generals, p. vii. Lincoln to Halleck, June 30, 1862. Basler, ed., Collected Works, V, p. 295.

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Abraham Lincoln as War Leader, 1861–1865 B rian H ol de n R e id

The literature on Abraham Lincoln’s war leadership is surprisingly sparse. The term is usually applied to denote his policies and strategy as commander in chief, as if directorship of military activities and leadership are synonymous. T. Harry Williams’s Lincoln and His Generals remains unassailable as a survey of military operations.1 Military historians are also inclined to construe “leadership in war” to mean the leadership of troops in battle or as an aspect of command, and a gap has opened up as to how the president as commander in chief deploys and sustains his forces in the field. Leadership deployed beyond the battlefield is just as important as that evinced on it; perhaps it is more important. The sources of Lincoln’s leadership have been delineated by recent scholars, notably Richard Carwardine, and military historians can profit by his approach. It is the sources of Lincoln’s style of war leadership that is the subject of this essay, especially the qualities and the attitudes that Lincoln brought to his presidency during a period of unprecedented trial and crisis in American history. The whole argument of this essay opposes the approach of some of Lincoln’s biographers that depict him as a “passive” creature. Lincoln waited upon events undoubtedly, but only so that he could take the action that he deemed necessary; the events did not shape the program. When elected in 1860 the prestige of the presidency had been so battered by the secession crisis that the new president could have been forced into assuming the role of a “chairman of the board.” In short, a faltering performance might have ended the presidency as we know it.

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The president might still be the titular head of state but reduced to a figurehead as in Ireland and India, not a significant force in American governance. Abraham Lincoln not only revived the office but enlarged its authority. It is therefore important to understand how Lincoln managed this process and established himself as a leader; consequently, the essay tends to focus on the years 1861–1863.2 Historians have usually stressed Lincoln’s inexperience on arriving in Washington D.C. in February 1861. He had never managed anything before assuming the presidency, but given the immensity and novelty of the challenge he faced, such callowness was a positive advantage. His discredited predecessor James Buchanan ranked among the most experienced and prepared chief executives when he stepped forward at his inaugural in 1857. Alas, he was experienced in the wrong things and had persisted in policies and attitudes that had worsened the secession crisis. Then he compounded the error by feuding with members of his own party who doubted the wisdom of his course. As a leader, the elderly, captious, complaining, partial, anxious but stubborn Buchanan had been a disaster: resolute in secondary matters but irresolute when facing major challenges. In his last months Buchanan veered dangerously close to violating his oath to “preserve and defend the Constitution.”3 He offered a case study in what not to do. Lincoln assumed office with the benefit of not carrying any of the baggage from these unhappy events. He labored, however, under a quite different disadvantage that arose from this absence from the Washington scene in the 1850s. He had to endure the commonplace view that he was a mediocrity who would have to be “guided” in his duties by his superiors; he would be another Franklin Pierce: the “available man” with undoubted attractions as a candidate but wholly deficient in the qualities necessary to lead a great nation on the brink of dissolution. This universal tendency to deprecate his talents could not have boosted Lincoln’s morale as he set out on his journey from Springfield to Washington, “to assume a task more difficult than that which devolved upon General Washington.”4 Nor were there a shortage of candidates who preened themselves in the conceit that their judgment was superior to the president-elect’s and that they would be the “real” president. In particular, the titular head of the Republican Party Senator William H. Seward, whom Lincoln had beaten to secure the nomination, arrogantly assumed that the weak-headed Lincoln would not only require his judicious guidance, but that he would willingly delegate his presidential responsibilities to the man who had agreed to be his secretary of

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state, and thus could assume the title of “premier.” By the time Lincoln reached Washington there seems to have been an expectation that this would indeed happen. In the very early days of the administration a good deal of jostling for position occurred among the members of the cabinet in an attempt to contain Seward’s inf luence, as Lincoln receded into the background as a figurehead.5 Yet if many of these presumptuous observers had the wit to notice it Lincoln had already revealed some of the key attitudes that would determine the character of his presidency. In traveling to Washington he might have shown too casual a manner, certainly more humor than it was fashionable for a “statesman” to display at this stage, and failed to break the habit of campaigning for office rather than assuming it, but he could not know or even predict the maelstrom that would engulf his first term so soon after his inauguration. Actually, his reassuring manner was well suited to the tenor of the times and was preferable to spreading alarm and despondency. He had already indicated a disinclination to accept Southern special pleading on “states rights,” denying “that the law should rule all that is less than itself, and ruin all that is bigger than itself [laughter].” He also emphasized that he would not be browbeaten by bluster; on the contrary, he realized to a greater extent than many later chief executives that he would be “tested” and would show resolve whatever the threat. He showed a quiet confidence that cloaked this core of iron: “when the time comes I shall then take the ground that I think is right . . . and I feel called upon to insist upon deciding the question myself [Enthusiastic cheers].” This last sentiment could hardly be more emphatic.6 Lincoln might still adhere to the notion that the crisis blowing up over the status of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor could only be “artificial”: for if tempers cooled then the controversy would fade away, as earlier troubles “have been adjusted.” Yet once Lincoln was inaugurated he resolutely and successfully stuck to the guiding themes of his policy, namely, “The Government will not use force unless force is used against it.” Early in the crisis, when its sheer enormity and intractability bore in on him, the strain made its mark. On March 29 on one of the few occasions during the Civil War, Lincoln lost his temper after receiving a pusillanimous memorandum from the general in chief Brevet Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott, suggesting that the “erring sisters” should be allowed to depart. He berated all in the room and hurled a glass into the fireplace while the cabinet stood meekly by, exposing Seward’s pretensions to be “Premier” as a sham. The latter still persisted, however, in a course of frantic, misdirected action that would have proved disastrous

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for Lincoln’s administration if he weakly embraced it, too. It simultaneously threatened foreign war as an effort to regain unity while giving up Sumter just as it came to symbolize Northern resolve and the prestige of the administration. On the afternoon of April 1 Seward planned to take over the running of the administration for the president. That day Lincoln had already begun to exert the war powers of the presidency as commander in chief and instructed Scott to send him daily summaries of troop movements, “including movements by himself and under his orders” and intelligence reports. In the afternoon he quickly disposed of Seward’s efforts to usurp his job—probably in an interview. Lincoln repeated that he had a clear policy if people cared to read his inaugural address. Sumter would be held; and in its implementation “I remark that if this must be done, I must do it.” 7 It would be typical of Lincoln’s skill in handling his subordinates that he managed to put Seward in his place with authority but without humiliating him, and that their personal relations would become intimate. Seward, furthermore, soon became an admirer. “Executive force and vigour,” he informed his wife, “are rare qualities. The President is the best of us.” Lincoln would reward this belated loyalty by saving Seward’s political career during the Cabinet Crisis of December 1862.8 Lincoln had thus given hard evidence of what kind of leader he would be even before his inauguration. In his classic work Leadership James MacGregor Burns postulates two forms of leadership, the transactional, which involves the daily bargaining or maneuvering to secure the desires of those who follow, and the transformational, moral leadership, which in Burns’s opinion “is elevating. It is moral but not moralistic.” This last creates major and enduring change in the leader’s environment. All forms of leadership, Burns argues, demand an understanding of the nature of power; the true leader must not only grasp the purpose of any struggle but be able to articulate it in appealing language, and stand by his or her interpretation. Consequently, the question of motives lies at the heart of the question of leadership. Should transformational leadership be displayed, then the leader must switch from simply meeting needs and wants to addressing the aspirations and expectations of both leaders at lower levels and followers. The use of power as a means of display or self-indulgence, such as the demagogue and antiwar critic Clement L. Vallandigham felt on arousing huge crowds, should be avoided.9 As a war leader Lincoln displayed the highest skill in both forms of leadership; despite his essential humanity, war suited Lincoln’s

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peculiar talents. Lincoln impresses because he never indulged in cheap demagoguery—though he was not above distorting his opponent’s views. He showed keen psychological insight in detecting the path to take and then once selected pursued it with energy—he was after all one of the youngest American presidents to date. His prime duty was, as Burns puts it, “to mobilize, in competition with others, institutional, political, psychological, and other resources so as to arouse, engage and satisfy the motives of followers.” Lincoln understood that leadership is what Burns calls a “collective enterprise.” It is certainly one of the strengths of Burns’s study that he links leadership and followership together as inseparable; he argues that leaders and followers are sometimes interchangeable; indeed one state follows from the other. In the American political system an understanding of this condition was vital because of the system of constitutional checks and balances. Moreover, the federal system promoted conf lict and the importance of local power bases, such as those benefiting the state governors. Lincoln, though the outsider, grasped the significance of the various constituencies and the multiple relationships these engendered. He did not become frustrated with, though he hardly welcomed the quarreling that occurred over resources, place, and prestige that such a system generated in wartime.10 James MacGregor Burns may be right in claiming that the U.S. Constitution, with its checks and balances, had erected “probably the most elaborate and well calculated barriers” to ruling; such precautions rendered the conduct, direction, and management of a great war difficult. In 1861 Lincoln could rely on little in the way of administrative structure to help him. The federal government could call upon thirty thousand employees, though most of them were district postmasters. The choice of subordinates was crucial largely because the sinews of the Republican Party were more resilient and highly developed than those of the federal administration. It could assist in the management of the war in the absence of anything else. Hence the attention that Lincoln devoted to the patronage, ensuring that friends of the administration were in place at the war’s beginning; he earned criticism, especially during the Sumter Crisis for spending so much time on interviewing office seekers, but given the spoils system, it is difficult to see how he could avoid this important duty. An earlier war president, James K. Polk, had neglected patronage and came to regret it.11 At a much higher level, an even more important consideration lay in Lincoln’s choice of who would assist him in the running of the administration. Despite the initial turbulence, Lincoln ensured unity among

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the various factions in the Republican Party by taking his rivals for the nomination and putting them in his cabinet. He then persuaded them to work together. Lincoln overcame Seward’s efforts to exclude Salmon P. Chase of Ohio. Interestingly, all of Lincoln’s rivals expected him to fail his first test of leadership, the creation of a cabinet; but thanks to his calculation, guile, and audacity by calling their various bluffs, they all found themselves laboring in it. Lincoln’s was not only the most unusual cabinet in American history, it was also one of the most able. “We needed to hold our people together,” Lincoln confided to Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune. “I had looked the party over and concluded that these were the very strongest men. Then I had no right to deprive the country of their services.” There would be no “kitchen cabinets” or cliques of cronies from Illinois—indeed the men most responsible for winning him the Republican nomination, David Davis and Leonard Swett, were left behind in Springfield. Lincoln started off with no real political friends in his cabinet. His cabinet making also ref lected a buoyant self-confidence; he never felt in awe of the talents of others, no matter how better educated they may be; he would lead them. His technique was striking and unusual. Lincoln sought to disarm rivals and opponents by persuasion and self-deprecating humor, winning over many and neutralizing those that could not be reconciled, such as Salmon P. Chase. He almost persuaded his rivals to underrate him.12 The other important, co-equal agency that Lincoln had to deal with was Congress. The decade 1850–1860 had been a period of Congressional dominance in the face of weak presidents whose policies were either stymied or overtaken by Congressional initiatives. Lincoln reversed this dramatically in May–July 1861 when in almost Cromwellian style, he ruled without Congress and ignored the constitutional barriers to executive action. He called Congress into emergency session to meet on July 4 and asked it to retrospectively legalize his acts. This most imperial of presidential courses could only be justified by the unprecedented emergency that Lincoln faced. He had vastly increased the size of the army and the navy, spent millions of dollars without congressional authorization, and as early as April 1861 authorized General Scott to suspend habeas corpus and declare martial law “where resistance occurs.” Lincoln pleaded that he had followed “what he has deemed his duty.” He relied upon the war power as the basis of his energetic and masterful action. “He [the Chief Executive] felt that he had no moral right to shrink not even to count the chances of his own life in what might follow.” Although excoriated by some Democrats for creating “a military despotism,” not least by the Chief

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Justice of the United States Roger B. Taney, Lincoln’s action received applause from the Republican majority and their Democrat allies.13 However, it was by no means agreed that the executive branch enjoyed a monopoly of the war powers; indeed those of Congress are just as pronounced a feature of the Constitution. The president enjoys many advantages vis-à-vis Congress in any battle for public opinion, and Lincoln had certainly carried this with him during the summer months; what he needed above all else to keep it was dramatic and consistent success. But as Norman Graebner has pointed out, a united Congress can be a much more powerful opponent, and this is what Lincoln encountered in 1861–1862. Even under these conditions Congress has shown itself reluctant to impose its will on the executive in wartime, especially if the president has shown resolve in meeting a crisis, as Lincoln had. He had decided unilaterally what federal resources were used and deployed, and took those decisions himself with little consultation, throwing aside any personal preference he might have had for a “limited” Whig presidency. Yet all the same, Lincoln had to tread warily.14 We should also accord attention to Burns’s view that the sources of political conf lict that test any leader tend to stem from disputes between leaders in government and leaders who head political organizations, and happen to be members of the same party. Again, such a tendency is marked in the United States and accentuated in 1861–1865 by a reliance on party political institutions. The first rumblings that the division of the powers had been abused and that congressional authority over the war effort should be reasserted were heard in the autumn of 1861 after the humiliating defeat at Ball’s Bluff that had resulted in the death of Lincoln’s friend Colonel Edward D. Baker, a serving senator. Lincoln’s ability to dominate both his administration and events depended on military success, especially in the Eastern theater; but successive defeats led to criticism and the emergence of groups prepared to challenge the president’s direction of affairs. In the following December the congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War received a mandate to ensure that military men “will not make mistakes, and that we shall not be easy with their errors.” It was chaired by Senator Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, though two of its members were War Democrats—Senator Andrew Johnson and Representative Moses F. Odell.15 Lincoln always demonstrated great care in treating senators, however self-important or irritating they might be, with courtesy and consideration; he befriended Charles Sumner. Most senators had been taught

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by the previous decade’s activity that they were not inferior to the president, if anything they took the opposite view. Lincoln’s relations with the Committee were amicable, and he succeeded in def lecting any temptation it might have to trespass on his prerogatives. It shared with Lincoln the advantage or disadvantage of lacking the slightest acquaintance with military affairs; no matter how complex the problem it invariably came up with a solution after no more than ten minutes study of it. The Committee soon came to the conclusion that most Union commanders were pro-slavery Democrats who sympathized with the South and that they should be purged at the earliest opportunity. Such opinions were ref lective of Wade’s deeply partisan attitudes—although his Democratic colleagues tended to agree with him. They also sought the urgent removal of the new general in chief, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan. The committee had no powers to appoint or remove any officer, but it had inf luence, especially in the War Department. The subject of Lincoln’s relations with his generals will be considered shortly. But it is well to recall Joseph G. Dawson III’s cautionary warning that all presidents are politicians first and commanders in chief second.16 McClellan would give evidence over the next six months that he would try the patience of any politician, but he had been seriously ill in December, and Lincoln still remained inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. “I hear the doings of an Investigative Committee, give you some uneasiness,” he wrote to McClellan. “You may be entirely relieved on this point . . . they are rapidly coming to think of the whole case as all sensible men would.” Though meant sincerely, this prediction did not turn out to be the case at all. Baker’s superior Brig. Gen. Charles P. Stone found himself arrested without charge; gossip had it that the real target was McClellan. Lincoln wholly agreed with its necessity, and revealed that a streak of ruthlessness lay just underneath the surface of his affability. In April he candidly admitted that Stone had been “arrested and imprisoned on my authority and with my sanction”; his court martial had been postponed by the Peninsular Campaign. Stone would not be released until August 16. Lincoln hoped that this draconian move would spur McClellan into activity—in this desire he wholly concurred with the Committee, even though he did not embrace their prejudices and personal motives with anything like their fervor. But throughout the early months of 1862 he felt that he had been imposed on.17 The Joint Committee developed as a competing agency and forum for advocacy about how the war should be run. It zealously set about

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deprecating the motives and loyalties of all those who disagreed with it while advancing the careers of those who pandered to its prejudices. Lincoln had to treat this body carefully. Power in Washington can be measured just as much by progress in debate as by legislation or even appointments. Therefore the Committee could yield great inf luence rather than authority, especially in advancing an agenda of issues that neither the president nor the senior generals could ignore; in some respects this suited Lincoln. It undoubtedly added another element of strain to the exercise of higher command that many Union generals had already found difficult to bear. Here Lincoln’s patience and good humor were an inestimable advantage in dealing with the Committee’s garrulous, self-righteous, and overbearing members; he did not take their sweeping condemnations of him and thinly veiled contempt personally. He teased its pompous members who failed to notice that he had fun at their expense. When it came to policy and action he reserved the decisions for himself. In January 1862 the Congress had passed Joint Rule 22 that allowed the two houses of Congress to move into secret, executive session should the president desire it. This would permit the Congress to take executive action and rival the presidency with the Joint Committee as its cabinet. But Lincoln did not desire it; rather than making a fuss and attempting to take action to defend his position he did nothing—a characteristic expedient—and this threat to his authority withered away unused. But despite disagreements, even in 1864 when members of the Committee were running John C. Frémont for the Republican nomination and denouncing his incompetence, Lincoln did not allow an outright breach to occur.18 This capacity to make alliances and nurture them was especially important in dealing with the War Democrats. One, Edwin M. Stanton, ran the War Department after January 1862, another, Joseph Holt, was judge advocate general; both were zealous proponents of a “vigorous” war and extirpation of traitors, and Stanton allied himself with Wade and the Joint Committee. Disaffected Republicans believed that 80 of the 110 brigadier generals were Democrats, and 80 percent of major generals’ commissions were held by Democrats. Lincoln took a risk in these appointments and endured much criticism after Republican defeats in the 1862 midterm elections. Carl Schurz accused him of placing the administration “into the hands of its enemies.” Lincoln’s audacity would eventually pay a dividend because Lincoln made new political friends for the administration like Stanton. He faced up to the tough political reality that the war could not be won without the aid

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of the War Democrats. Men like John A. McClernand had to be persuaded to be constant in their support for a Republican president and his goals.19 The vexed issue of military appointments leads to a consideration of how Lincoln ran the war. The focus here should be on the means by which Lincoln sought to persuade, cajole, hector, but above all, mobilize opinion and resources for the war effort, and thus sustain the launch of decisive military operations that he instinctively felt would be necessary to attain a Northern victory. War is first and foremost a matter of instinct. In Lincoln’s case his instincts were pronounced and sensitive to the military environment around him.20 The impression is sometimes given that Lincoln appeared near to being overwhelmed by the summer of 1861. Nonetheless, although he was criticized for vacillation and inconstancy, he acted with great force and energy.21 He labored with little institutional underpinning, and enjoyed the services of only two secretaries. As he admitted to John A. McClernand, “Much, very much, goes undone: but it is because we have not the power to do it faster than we do.” A lot of the initiative passed to the state governors, notably in the raising of moneys and loans, and of course troops; the governors rarely met as a group but by the early months of 1862 they were f lexing their muscles and threatening to abridge executive authority because the federal government appeared swamped by the challenges facing it in fielding an army of sufficient size at so many threatened points and on such a wide front. Lincoln was required to make urgent, simultaneous decisions because they all demanded priority. Yet he did not lose contact with the bigger picture. “As to Kentucky,” he reproved Governor Oliver P. Morton of Indiana, “you do not estimate this state as more important than I do; but I am compelled to watch all points.” The chief executive would claw this authority back by 1864, but in 1861–1862 the governors were indispensable allies, and Lincoln worked constructively with them despite some mutual recrimination. Mistakes were made, of course, but on close inspection Lincoln seems very dominant by comparison with any of his predecessors. He became involved in every aspect of his administration.22 How did he do it? The root of his success lay in sensible delegation. He concentrated important decisions in his own hands, but the execution of tasks he entrusted to others, members of his cabinet and his generals. He did not try and do their jobs for them. To interfere is all too tempting in times of great crisis but ref lects insecurity rather than the opposite. Lincoln set the tone from the earliest days of his

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administration. “You know the circumstances, which I do not; I cannot take the lead,” he admitted to Gideon Welles. He would not be drawn into minor details. Specific cases were, of course, submitted for his urgent attention; but he rarely took action until he had received a full written briefing from the responsible cabinet member, and these were studied carefully. His correspondence is littered with requests for information or comment. If he did not do their jobs, he certainly would not delegate to the extent that he would allow them to do his; cabinet members frequently received injunctions not to take action until he had taken a decision.23 The second reason can be summed up simply: trust. Lincoln inspired trust despite his imperious acts. The residue of enduring trust lay more deeply outside Washington D.C., among Northern voters and soldiers in the ranks, than it did among their elected representatives. Lincoln’s natural, unaffected, and wholly sincere modesty, although it cost him dear in being so accessible, became a tremendous wartime asset. He decided in January 1862 that he did not want an “entourage” or to be accompanied wherever he went by the adjutant general. The previous year he had declared in Cleveland that “it is with you the people, to advance the great cause of the Union and the Constitution, and not with any one man. It rests with you alone. This fact is strongly impressed on my mind at present.” In his July 4 message to Congress, he appealed particularly to the understanding of “the plain people” and dubbed the outbreak of hostilities “a People’s Contest.” He held that the war was designed to sustain a society that sought “to elevate the condition of man,” to offer all “a fair chance in the race of life.” In an earlier exploration of this theme, Lincoln expressed his faith in “the enthusiastic uprising of the people in our cause,” as “our great reliance, and we can not safely give it any check, even though it overf lows, and runs in channels not laid down in any chart.” Lincoln’s profound grasp of the popular dimensions of the conf lict allowed him to adapt his outlook as his own opinions and public opinion shifted. It equipped him to articulate in powerful and timeless eloquence what the war was actually about, culminating in the Gettysburg and second inaugural addresses. Such an undertaking seems easy, but is fiendishly difficult in practice. Lincoln discharged this task with triumphant success.24 In articulating war aims and the nature of the war, Lincoln used two main methods, the sparing use of public speeches and the letter drafted for publication. Richard Carwardine has analyzed these methods skillfully. His approach can be employed to dissect Lincoln’s relations with soldiers in the ranks. Lincoln had spent years campaigning on the

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stump on the frontier, and in any case, his upbringing had lent him a special affinity with the “plain folks.” It is therefore not surprising that he employed great skill in speaking to soldiers. His modesty shone through and made an effective impact. “I trust you will not censure me for . . . assuming such a prominent position,” he humbly observed when reviewing New York regiments passing through Washington D.C. on July 4, 1861. He was sure that the soldiers wished to hear General Scott. “I have made a great many poor speeches in my life . . . [Much laughter and applause].” Even William T. Sherman admired his technique. On July 23 he and Seward suddenly appeared after the repulse at First Bull Run, in an attempt to revive Union soldiers’ bruised morale. Apart from humorous asides, Lincoln implored the sixty-ninth New York in Sherman’s brigade to re-enlist. His remarks were “received with cheers” a reporter observed, “and the soldiers responded by declaring their readiness ‘to go in for the war and stand by the government and the old f lag forever.’ ” Lincoln encouraged the soldiers to appeal to him personally if they had a grievance. Even this did not annoy Sherman who thought his speeches “the neatest, best, and most feeling addresses I ever listened to.”25 Lincoln did not speak to soldiers frequently. His visits were only confined to the Army of the Potomac and he never traveled further west, unlike Jefferson Davis, who spoke in public more frequently. The press of duties was Lincoln’s usual excuse for declining invitations to speak, but reducing the number of speeches increased their impact when he did speak, and he also (unlike Davis) avoided tactless errors. Lincoln never spoke for its own sake, but only “unless I hope to produce some good by it.” He did not speak either because he thought he was important and should be heard—a rare trait in a politician. One of Lincoln’s most potent themes concerned himself: “I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has.” It is sentiments such as these that led many soldiers to think of him, in Carwardine’s apt phrase, “more as a neighbour to be dropped in upon than as a remote head of state.” This feeling would sustain him politically; though buffeted, soldiers’ faith in him would prompt most to vote for his reelection in 1864.26 It is appropriate at this point to comment on Lincoln’s use of humor. Humor is an essential means of communication, on the American frontier especially, but for any leader. It is perhaps not surprising that its use by Lincoln was frequently deprecated by two of his cabinet members, Salmon P. Chase and Edwin M. Stanton. For all their executive drive and administrative ability neither of these men were leaders. On

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September 21 both deplored Lincoln’s reading of Artemus Ward’s “A High Handed Outrage at Utica” before he submitted his final version of the Emancipation Proclamation for the cabinet’s information. Here Lincoln used humor to divert tension and strain. Stanton revealed similar impatience and perplexity when Lincoln on election night in November 1864 regaled all in earshot with amusing anecdotes about himself and life on the frontier, and read aloud from the adventures of Petroleum V. Nasby in an effort to reduce the strain waiting for the results. Humor also def lected annoyance or parried arrogance; Lincoln thus remained cool and imperturbable despite provocation. A good listener, even Lincoln found Charles Sumner’s endless sermons on emancipation tedious—especially as he had already made up his mind on the matter and agreed with his arguments. On spotting Sumner and two allies advancing on the White House in determined fashion, Lincoln told the story of a boy at Sunday school who embarrassingly mangled the pronunciation of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego while reading the biblical story out loud in front of the class. In alarm he looked down the page and exclaimed: “Look! Look there! Here come them same three damn fellows again!”27 In public speaking—especially to soldiers, humor is more than a def lection—it is a vital means of communication. It reveals the imperturbability of the leader and displays his human strengths and desire to empathize with others while distracted and under pressure. Lincoln revealed that whatever his trials, he was willing to reveal a concern for the welfare of others. He never neglected their commitment to the great cause they all fought for together. Neither Chase nor Stanton was capable of carrying out such a charge.28 Lincoln could mobilize public opinion because he revealed an uncanny skill at reading it. His use of letters for publication—first revealed while president-elect—formed an important way of testing its conf licting currents and changing moods. His famous letter to Horace Greeley discussing whether the object of the war should be the maintenance of the Union or the freeing of the slaves is an example of his masterly skill at marshaling the arguments and presenting the choices before him in a subtle fashion. It ends with the marvelous but sensibly prudent observation, “and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.”29 Lincoln had always revealed a reluctance to commit himself irrevocably whether prematurely or in support of the wrong cause. To undo such damage could destroy not just his credibility but the policy he advanced. His letters helped mold opinion. He declined, for instance, to

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advance the case for emancipation faster than he calculated that public opinion would tolerate. Such pragmatism undoubtedly contributed to Lincoln’s wasted effort in advancing impracticable schemes, such as the colonization of the former slaves, or those overtaken by events, such as compensated emancipation.30 John C. Frémont, one of Lincoln’s commanders, sought to take the decision out of his hands entirely. In August 1861 he issued a proclamation declaring martial law, confiscation of property and the emancipation of slaves. His style was the opposite of the president’s: Frémont “isolates himself, [and] allows nobody to see him”; he was so highhanded that he refused to withdraw the proclamation voluntarily until Lincoln ordered it directly. Lincoln took a risk confronting Frémont directly. His proclamation had been received with applause, even in conservative circles. To George Templeton Strong, after the defeat at Bull Run, Frémont’s act “looks like war in earnest, at last . . . A most significant step and in the right direction, though it may weaken the national cause in Kentucky.”31 Lincoln would not tolerate such a blatant trespass on his executive prerogatives. He explained his action in ordering the rescinding of the proclamation to Orville Hickman Browning: “I cannot assume this reckless position, nor others to assume it on my responsibility.” He feared its effect on the Border States, as Strong anticipated, but guessed that it “would be more popular with some thoughtless people”—but some thoughtful ones too, including the conservative Blairs. Such support would be significant in underpinning in 1862 the calculations that determined his emerging emancipation policy. Lincoln’s streak of ruthlessness also revealed itself in the Byzantine intrigue culminating in Frémont’s removal later that autumn. Lincoln’s affability could serve as a mask behind which tough action could be taken. He sent the quartermaster general Montgomery C. Meigs and the postmaster general Montgomery Blair to report on affairs in Missouri. Lincoln enlisted also the professional military advice of Samuel R. Curtis. He protested that Blair had been sent “as a friend,” when he had turned against Frémont, and Lincoln denied “any hostility towards him”; but while taking his time to deliver the fatal blow to this over-mighty pro-consul, he did not scruple to leak details of the corrupt dealings in Frémont’s command. He thus enlisted a lot of support by the time the order for Frémont’s relief was issued on November 1. Despite his protestations, Lincoln had been “greatly perplexed” by Frémont, and very annoyed by an importunate visit to the White House by his formidable wife Jesse Benton Frémont that had greatly taxed his

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self-control. Mrs. Frémont later recorded that when the president received her “he smiled with an expression that was not agreeable”— another indication of the menace concealed within. Throughout he completely outmaneuvered Frémont.32 In general terms, Lincoln’s dealings with his generals were determined by the reality that, as in the Roman Republic, military affairs and politics were conjoined. Senior officers were either senior politicians, such as Nathaniel P. Banks and Benjamin F. Butler and John C. Frémont, or graduates of the U.S. Military Academy with political ambitions, like McClellan; those like George G. Meade, whose protestations that they were “innocent” of politics were actually true, were in a small beleaguered minority. Lincoln, true to his style, was ready to delegate a good deal to his commanders as he was to his political colleagues. In October 1861 he told David Hunter that he “intended . . . to leave a considerable margin for the exercise of your judgment and discretion.” He was at pains, even in 1861–1863 when he had to intervene directly in military affairs frequently, to stress that he did not offer opinions “as orders; for while I am glad to have them respectfully considered,” he told Don Carlos Buell, “I would blame you to follow them contrary to your own clear judgment—unless I should put them in the form of orders.” It was only when Lincoln grasped the inability of his commanders to seize their opportunities that cost his administration so dear that he would monitor matters more closely. He urged Henry W. Halleck, “Please do not lose time in this matter”; and again, “Delay is ruining us, and it is indispensable for me to have something definite.” He needed both audacity and energy in the conduct of military operations. “Our success or failure at Fort Donelson is vastly important; and I beg you to put your soul in the effort.” The resulting successes in Tennessee for which Halleck gained the credit, convinced Lincoln that he had found the dynamic commander he needed, but for once he had been deceived.33 For months though he had endured McClellan’s unhelpful procrastination, and at times his gratuitous arrogance. He had initially pleaded that the general in chief should be granted the “cordial support” without which he could not carry out his wide-ranging duties. He had always been skeptical of McClellan’s overconfident claim that “I can do it all,” that is, combine the position of commanding general with command of the Army of the Potomac simultaneously. This position was structurally unsound, and McClellan was overborn by its responsibilities. He failed to reassure the president, placate his many critics not just in the Congress but in the cabinet, too, and army command obscured the

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many successes achieved while he was general in chief for which he was not accorded any credit. In many ways, Lincoln agreed with these critics, and he had never been convinced by the peninsular concept, which involved turning Confederate defenses in Northern Virginia by an amphibious landing between the York and James Rivers, advancing on Richmond from the east. Yet he strove, despite McClellan’s selfdefeating petulance, to support him. He had no choice, in many ways, for he had no other general to turn to. Yet McClellan gave no reason why he should trust him. Lincoln’s cabinet colleagues and staff seem to have been more annoyed than he was by McClellan’s insolent behavior. In one of his more insulting private references, he called Lincoln a “gorilla.” This remark is usually interpreted as an unf lattering description of the president’s appearance. “Gorilla” as a term of abuse became popular in the 1860s and imputes the threat of physical force in the absence of intelligence. Its use prompts the speculation that for all his arrogance, McClellan might have been rather frightened of Lincoln. Needless to say, he was peeved when Lincoln took away the position of commanding general from him as he set out for the peninsula.34 Lincoln’s patience with McClellan may be connected with his scheme to make as much use of War Democrats as he could in running the war. He tried not to interfere, but his imposition of a corps structure on the Army of the Potomac that McClellan had resisted seemed to indicate the contrary. Yet Lincoln did not give in to congressional pressure in May 1862 to reinstate Charles S. Hamilton when McClellan relieved him after the siege of Yorktown, although he served creditably later in the West. But on operational matters Lincoln began to intervene for the simple reason that he could not allow troops to stand idly by. His patience was almost exhausted. He enjoined McClellan to remember that the Confederates “will probably use time, as advantageously as you can.” Hence the removal in March 1862 of Blenker’s division to reinforce Frémont’s Mountain Department and the withdrawal the following May of Irvin McDowell’s First Corps from Fredericksburg to try and entrap Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley, all actions that caused Lincoln “great pain.” He still hoped “not to control. That I now leave to General Halleck,” he observed of the new commanding general in August 1862, “aided by your counsels.” But Lincoln could not leave it to Halleck, though he reintroduced the same idea, and it worked more effectively after Ulysses S. Grant succeeded him in March 1864.35 McClellan invariably committed the sin that Lincoln invariably avoided. He could not refrain, especially when under strain, from

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personalizing disputes. As the Peninsular Campaign unfolded, Lincoln wrote, “I beg to reassure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as in my most anxious judgment, I consistently can. But you must act.” McClellan seemed incapable of taking a hint, and would blame everybody but himself. Lincoln would respond to his sweeping accusations with a rational, cool, even forensic tone. “If in your frequent mention of responsibility,” he admonished McClellan, “you have the impression that I blame you for not doing more than you can, please be relieved of such impression. I only beg that in like manner you will not ask impossibilities of me.” These letters deliberately conceal Lincoln’s ambivalence toward McClellan, but they are responses of a shrewd commander in chief, if more conditional than they appear at first sight.36 McClellan opposed emancipation and his Harrison Landing letter stressed a commitment to a policy of conciliation and restraint. Lincoln had no wish to provoke McClellan into outright intervention in the political debate, and he did not reply to his letter. By the summer of 1862 Lincoln realized that Southern obduracy and the failure of Union generals to bring the war to a successful end with slavery intact had rendered recourse to more punitive measures almost inevitable. He told Cuthbert Bullitt firmly that “it is for them [Southerners] to consider whether it is probable that I will surrender the government to save them from losing all.” In July he made up his mind to issue a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Typically, he presented it to the cabinet for its information, not views on his wisdom, but he took Seward’s advice to postpone it until after a military success that would maximize its impact. The care he took in drafting it was emphasized in a short speech he made after he had issued it, “after very full deliberation and under a very heavy and solemn sense of responsibility.” His style of decision-making involved a protracted and cautious period of gestation and trying out various arguments from different angles, including playing the devil’s advocate, followed by a switch at the most propitious moment to decisive action, followed by consistent defense of the measure decided upon.37 The Emancipation Proclamation had been founded on the war power and had been made possible by McClellan’s faltering but strategic success at Antietam. McClellan was such a divisive personality that his appointment to command all the troops in the Washington area after the defeat at Second Bull Run had been made by Lincoln over the unanimous opposition of the cabinet and congressional Republicans.

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Lincoln appeared “very distressed” by the former but ignored its views, supported only by Seward. The issue of McClellan thus disrupted cabinet unity and permitted Chase to infuriate his congressional allies with tales of Seward’s “dominance” and mischievous hold over Lincoln. Hence after the defeat at Fredericksburg a Cabinet Crisis erupted. Seward resigned, but in a bravura performance Lincoln invited the entire cabinet to his final meeting with Seward’s Congressional critics, so that Chase could not admit his support for them openly; humiliated he offered his resignation, too, leaving Lincoln free to decline both and maintain the cabinet’s balance. Lincoln not only emerged unscathed but strengthened to survive the vicissitudes of 1863–1864.38 But McClellan’s petulant responses to his evolving policy were by no means unique; far from it. Many of Lincoln’s commanders found it difficult to cope with levels of command and responsibility for which they had not been trained and were ill-equipped to carry. Even a political ally, Hunter, provoked the president’s impatience, as he found it difficult to reply to a whingeing letter “in good temper . . . I would say you are adopting the best possible way to ruin yourself.” Curiously, despite this sort of provocation, Lincoln was one of the kindest and most patient of American chief executives. He was especially solicitous toward members of an outgoing generation of commanders like Scott and John A. Wool; naturally those who wielded political power were treated gently. He congratulated John A. McClernand on his earliest forays in the Mississippi Basin. “You are now doing well . . . much better than you could possibly be if engaged in open war with Gen. Halleck.” In the projected replacement of Banks by Butler as commander of the Department of the South in February 1863 that never happened, Lincoln was very concerned that it should be managed in such a way “as not to wrong, or wound the feelings of Gen. Banks.” But even those without such inf luence, like Curtis (whom Lincoln owed a favor) or Hunter, were treated in such a manner as to convey the impression that removal from Departmental command was not a ref lection on the esteem in which they were held.39 Of course, he could sometimes lose patience. “I am ready to come to a fair settlement of accounts with you on the fulfilment of understandings,” he wrote menacingly to Frémont, though he could still be inclined to offer him another command after his performance in the Shenandoah Valley. Possibly he desired to placate a potential opponent for the Republican nomination in 1864, although he did not persist once Halleck opposed him. He once apologized to Franz Sigel for his irritation. “If I do get up a little temper I have no sufficient time to

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keep it up.” But in his correspondence with William S. Rosecrans— one that taxed him as much as McClellan’s—he remained equable. Perhaps Lincoln sensed, too, that Rosecrans might become a political rival. He did warn Rosecrans against attributing personal motives to the administration when his requests for particular things were denied. His forbearance might be explained because he felt a debt of gratitude to Rosecrans for lifting the gloom that covered the White House in the New Year of 1863 with his success at the Battle of Murfreesboro (Stone’s River)—a success that appeared greater then, after the disaster at Fredericksburg, than it was in reality. But Rosecrans was a very taxing subordinate, irritable, skittish, defensive, and quick to take offence. “In no case have I intended to censure you,” Lincoln had to write again two months later, “or to question your ability . . . ”40 Even the swaggering Joseph Hooker revealed himself similarly insecure and contentious. The long catalogue of disappointments in the East had tutored Lincoln to anticipate failure, as he did (rightly as it turned out) with Stoneman’s cavalry raid during the Chancellorsville Campaign. After that devastating defeat, he wanted nothing rash or desperate, but wanted Hooker to take the offensive; if he had a plan he must “prosecute it without interference from me.” But most of Hooker’s responses were disappointingly defensive. Lincoln also warned Hooker “that some of your Corps and Division Commanders are not giving you their entire confidence.” Lincoln never encouraged disaffection and disloyalty, as it ref lected on the wisdom of his own choices, and he urged Hooker to ascertain its full extent. Hooker fell foul of the president though because of his incessant complaining about interference from Halleck. Lincoln had given Hooker the privilege of writing directly to the president, and though he replied with courtesy, he was firm in demanding more frankness and fewer recriminations. He wanted the benefit of both their professional skill. When Hooker seemed reluctant to acknowledge Halleck’s seniority and demanded to be relieved when placed directly under Halleck’s command, Lincoln quickly acceded to his request. It is a striking feature of Lincoln’s correspondence after March 1864 that these sort of disputes among the most senior commanders tend to disappear. Grant had a record that inspired confidence and Lincoln could trust him; he trusted Sherman rather less, but something more akin to his preferred system of direction prevailed.41 Yet the campaign of 1864 proved disappointing, at least until the autumn with the fall of Atlanta. Lincoln came under intense pressure to revoke the Emancipation Proclamation. He repeated an initial line

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of defense, “I can not retract . . . And it being made, it must stand.” The weakness of Lincoln’s position in seeking the nomination might have been rectified if he had made an address about the war—his reluctance to speak in public might be deemed a miscalculation in this respect, because he could have made the boosting of Northern morale his main object. But in seeking reelection when the times were inauspicious, on more occasions than not, he proved justified in his choice of when not to take action. Grant’s greater freedom of action had been purchased at the expense of leaving politically inf luential officers, such as Banks, Butler, and Sigel, in place in important commands. Butler even thought he had a chance of gaining the Republican nomination, supported by his allies on the Joint Committee. He needed very adroit handling. In June 1864 Butler clashed over jurisdiction with Francis H. Pierpont, governor of the Restored Government of Virginia. Pierpont appealed to Lincoln who asked Butler for a report, and received forty pages in reply. Pierpont offered his views at similar length. Lincoln did not reply to either. Butler took advantage of his silence as tacit approval and organized a plebiscite asking whether the civil government should continue. Edward Bates, the attorney general, supported Pierpont, and on July 19 his quarrel with Butler spilled over into a cabinet meeting. Lincoln still refrained from intervening as the Republican nomination beckoned. Once reelected, he took decisive action, thanks to Butler’s ill-fated efforts at Fort Fisher on January 7, 1865. Lincoln had him relieved of command and safely disposed of, despite efforts by his Congressional allies to get him another appointment.42 To conclude, as a leader Lincoln could carry off dramatic, imperious, and sometimes arbitrary acts without seeming to change his political style or allow his character to be affected by them. He still contrived to give a slightly bumbling if well-meaning impression, and was usually underestimated. Yet in truth he remained a modest, self- deprecating, humble man who could be trusted with great power, not least because he wished to relinquish it. Although his reputation for “vacillation” damaged his reputation over the short-term, over the long run it became a potent political weapon. It camouf laged his political maneuvers and he displayed that he got things right and carried people with him. A consistent record helped to instill loyalty and inspire further trust. Lincoln was a very self-aware person, but he was not a very self-ref lective one; his motives and thought-processes remain enigmatic. His outward humility could be used as a cloak behind which to take masterful action involving unprecedented measures. Was he an insincere man, a

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leader of superficial sentiment? The answer must be no. He could certainly be ambivalent, but believed that those he had appointed should be given their chance; McClellan had more than one chance. He was certainly sincere in regarding himself as “an humble instrument” of the cause. “In this great struggle,” he reminded the 164th Ohio Regiment, “this form of government and every form of human right is endangered if our enemies succeed. There is more involved in this contest than is realized by every one.” Was he too meek, as claimed at the time? James MacGregor Burns believes that leaders should not shun conf lict but “embody it.” This is a dangerous nostrum. Lincoln did not avoid conf lict, yet he was not bossy and belligerent but subtle and crafty; he avoided unnecessary conf lict, and usually got his way. His affable, humorous exterior concealed a very tough political operator capable of manipulation and cold ruthlessness.43 A leader requires a “heart devoted to the work,” but also resilience. Sometimes it has been claimed that Lincoln suffered from depression. He became melancholy, and had a terrible burden to carry in 1862 with the loss of a son; he was weighed down by military defeats; but at the heart of affairs—like Winston Churchill—he would quickly revive under the stimulus of power and direction, and also because of his devotion to the cause. Others in Washington, not just in his administration, looked to him to sustain them. He could not have done this crippled by prolonged depression. His health—especially when compared with Jefferson Davis’s—appears excellent.44 Besides, Lincoln was inspired by the challenge and the renown that his ambition had always craved when young, though he concealed it when more mature. He proved to be a leader of real institutional significance, for he destroyed slavery; but he also preserved: by his dynamic action he saved the presidency from ruin. He communicated so effectively not only his own appreciation of the momentous importance of the events and measures that he had steered or carried out, but also the part of all in seeing them through. “We of this Congress, and this Administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honour or dishonour, to the latest generation.”45 Such a dedicated leader, who would not give up leaving any “card unplayed,” helped sustain northern opinion through its turbulent moments.46 The astute management of the Union war effort that is such a signal advantage throughout the Civil War was rendered possible by the skills exhibited during the successful war leadership of Abraham Lincoln.

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1. See T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952). 2. See notably, David Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995); Sir Denis Brogan makes the “chairman” point in his Abraham Lincoln (1935; London: Duckworth, 1974), p. 94. 3. Jean H. Baker, James Buchanan (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), pp. 140–143 (esp. p. 142). 4. Farewell Address at Springfield, Illinois, February 11, 1861 [C Version], in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), IV, p. 191, hereafter cited as Collected Works. 5. Brian Holden Reid, The Origins of the American Civil War (London: Addison, Wesley, Longman, 1996), pp. 248, 254, 256–257, 343. 6. Speech from the Balcony of the Bates House at Indianapolis, Indiana, February 11, 1861; Speech at the Astor House, New York, February 19, 1861, in Collected Works, IV, pp. 198 and 230. 7. Speech at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, February 15, 1861; Speech in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in Lincoln, February 22, 1861, in Lincoln, Collected Works, IV, pp. 211, 241; Lincoln to Seward, April 1, 1861, in Collected Works, IV, p. 316; Holden Reid, Origins of the American Civil War, pp. 346–348. 8. Quoted in Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1952), p. 165. 9. James MacGregor Burns, Leadership (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), pp. 4, 11, 12–13, 14, 15, 18–19, 425; see Frank L. Klement, The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970), p. 138: “applause was central to his ego.” Also see pp. 195 and 197. 10. Burns, Leadership, pp. 9, 16–17, 18–19, 134, 237, 425, 429; William B. Hesseltine, Lincoln and the War Governors (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), pp. 137–138, 166–167. 11. Peter J. Parish, “A Talent for Survival: Federalism in the Era of the Civil War,” Historical Research 62 ( June 1989), pp. 178–192; Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 222–224. 12. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), pp. 318–319; I have taken the point about Lincoln’s skill at disarming his rivals from James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York: Norton, 2007), p. 90. 13. Lincoln to Scott, April 27, 1861, in Collected Works, IV, p. 347; Message to Congress in Special Session, July 4, 1861, in Collected Works, IV, p. 438; Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr, The Imperial Presidency (London: Andre Deutsch, 1974), pp. 58–59. 14. See the editor’s Introduction and Norman A. Graebner, “The President as Commander in Chief: A Study in Power,” in Joseph G. Dawson III, ed., Commander in Chief: Presidential Leadership in Modern Wars (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), pp. 6, 32–33, 38; the case for Congressional war power is made in Louis Fisher, Presidential War Power (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), pp. 202–206. On the way Lincoln attached the war powers to the executive branch; see Schlesinger, Imperial Presidency, pp. 60–63. 15. Burns, Leadership, p. 315; T. Harry Williams, “The Committee on the Conduct of the War: An Experiment in Civilian Control,” Journal of the American Military Institute, III (Fall 1939), pp. 139–141; Hans L. Trefousse, “The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War: A Reassessment,” Civil War History, 10 ( January 1964), pp. 6–7. 16. Dawson, “Introduction,” in Commanders in Chief, p. 2. 17. Richard B. Irwin, “Ball’s Bluff and the Arrest of General Stone,” in Robert U. Johnson and Clarence C. Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York: Century, 1884–1888),

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18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

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II, p. 134; Lincoln to Hannibal Hamlin, April 28, 1862, in Collected Works, IV, p. 201; Stone did not return to duty in the Department of the Gulf until May 23, 1863. See Ezra J. Warner, Generals in Blue (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), p. 480. Brian Holden Reid, “Historians and the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, 1861– 1865,” Civil War History 38 (December 1992), pp. 329–341; on Rule 22, see Allan G. Bogue, The Congressman’s Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 101–102. T. Harry Williams, “Voters in Blue: The Citizen Soldiers of the Civil War,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review XXI (September 1944), p. 189; Lincoln and the Radicals (Madison; University of Wisconsin Press, 1941), pp. 188–89; Carl Schurz to Lincoln, November 8, 1861, in Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, ed. Frederic Bancroft (New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 1913), I, pp. 209–211; Lincoln to Schurz, November 10, 1862, in Collected Works, V, pp. 493–495. This is an important theme of Roger J. Spiller, An Instinct for War (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2005). For his insensitivity to accusations of vacillation, see Lincoln to Francis P. Blair Jr., May 18, 1861, in Collected Works, IV, p. 375. Lincoln to John A. McClernand, November 10, 1861; Lincoln to Heads of Bureaus, June 22, 1861; Lincoln to Morton, September 29, 1861, in Collected Works, IV, p. 415; V, pp. 20, 541; Hesseltine, Lincoln and the War Governors, pp. 148–154, 157–165, 167–168, 196–200. Lincoln to Welles, May 7, 1861, in Collected Works, IV, p. 361. Lincoln to Stanton, January 22, 1862; Speech at Cleveland, Ohio, February 15, 1861; Message to Congress in Special Session, July 4, 1861; Lincoln to Edwin D. Morgan, May 20, 1861; Address Delivered at the Dedication of the Cemetery at Gettysburg, November 19, 1863, in Collected Works, V, p. 108; IV, pp. 215, 438, 375, VII, p. 23; Ronald C. White Jr., Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002). Richard Carwardine, “Abraham Lincoln, the Presidency, and the Mobilization of Union Sentiment,” in Susan-Mary Grant and Brian Holden Reid, eds., The American Civil War: Explorations and Reconsiderations (London: Longman, 2000), pp. 76–78; Waldo W. Braden, Abraham Lincoln, Public Speaker (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); Remarks at a Review of New York Regiments, July 4, 1861; Remarks to the sixty-ninth New York Regiment, July 23, 1861, in Lincoln, Collected Works, IV, pp. 441 and 451; William T. Sherman, Memoirs, 1st ed. (London: Henry S. King, 1875), I, pp. 189–190. Quoted in Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), p. 92; Address to Union Meeting at Washington, D.C., August 6, 1862, in Lincoln, Collected Works, V, p. 358; Carwardine, “Lincoln and the Mobilization of Union Sentiment,” pp. 75, 76–77. Thomas, Lincoln, p. 224; on Lincoln’s prewar use of humor, see Oakes, Radical and Republican, p. 48. See Lincoln’s dry remarks to a Delegation of Progressive Friends, June 20, 1862, in Collected Works, V, p. 278. Lincoln to Greeley, ibid., V, p. 389. Idem., March 24, 1862; Lincoln, Collected Works, V, p. 169. Lincoln to Hunter, 9 September 1861, Ibid, IV, p. 513; Allan Nevins and Milton H. Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong (New York: Macmillan, 1952), III, p. 178. Lincoln to Browning, September 22; Lincoln to Mrs. John C. Frémont, September 12; Lincoln to Curtis, October 7, December 12, 1861, in Collected Works, IV, pp. 532, 529, 549; V, p. 65; Allan Nevins, Fremont: Pathmarker of the West (1939; New York: Longmans Green, 1955), pp. 513–520 (quotation p. 518); Lincoln took similar action when Hunter tried to emancipate slaves in the Department of the South. See Hesseltine, Lincoln and the War Governors, p. 196. Lincoln to Hunter, October 14, 1861; Lincoln to Buell, January 13; Lincoln to Halleck, January1, 7, February 16, 1862, in Collected Works, V, pp. 1, 87, 92, 135.

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34. Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1861, in Collected Works, V, p. 51; Michael Burlingame, ed., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), p. 30 (entry for November 1, 1861); Goodwin, Team of Rivals, p. 383; Rupert Wilkinson, American Tough: The Tough-Guy Tradition and American Character (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1984), p. 12. 35. President’s General War Order No. 2, March 8, 1862; Lincoln to McClellan, March 31, April 6, May 21, August 29, 1862, in Collected Works, V, pp. 149–150, 175, 182, 227, 399; Gary Gallagher, “Abraham Lincoln and the Shenandoah Valley Campaign,” in Gary Gallagher, ed., The Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), p. 10; Brooks D. Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph Over Adversity, 1822–1865 (New York: Houghton Miff lin, 2000), pp. 272–274. 36. Lincoln to McClellan, April 9, July 1, 1862, in Collected Works, V, pp. 185, 301. 37. Ethan S. Rafuse, McClellan’s War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), p. 233; Lincoln to Cuthbert Bullitt, July 28; Reply to the Serenade in Honour of the Emancipation Proclamation, September 24, 1862, in Lincoln, Collected Works, V, pp. 346, 438; Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), pp. 120–123, 152–156. 38. Allan Nevins, The War for the Union (New York: Scribner’s, 1964), II, pp. 352–362; Goodwin, Team of Rivals, 490–495. 39. Lincoln to Hunter, December 31, 1861; Lincoln to McClernand, January 22; Lincoln to Stanton, March 18, 1862, January 23, June 8, June 30, 1863; Lincoln to McClellan, June 15, 1862, in Collected Works, V, pp. 84–85, 164, 272; VI, pp. 70, 73, 76. 40. Lincoln to Fremont, June 16, 1862; Lincoln to Stanton, March 7, 1863; Lincoln to Sigel, February 5, 1863; Lincoln to Rosecrans, March 17, May 2, 1863; Lincoln to Sumner, June 1, 1863, in Collected Works, V, p. 273; VI, pp. 93, 127, 139, 224, 242–243. 41. Lincoln to Hooker, April 15, May 14, June 16, 1863, in Collected Works, VI, pp. 175, 217, 280, 281, 282. 42. Lincoln to McClernand, January 8, 1863, in Lincoln, Collected Works, VI, pp. 48–49; Hans L. Trefousse, Ben Butler: The South Called Him Beast (New York: Twayne, 1957), pp. 167–174. 43. Burns, Leadership, p. 39. 44. I have followed Goodwin, Team of Rivals, p. xvii. 45. Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862, in Collected Works, V, p. 537. 46. Lincoln to Reverdy Johnson, July 26, 1862, in Collected Works, V, p. 343.

Epilogue G e org e R . Goethal s

The foregoing chapters create a compelling composite of Lincoln’s legacy of leadership. Together they make clear both the nature of Lincoln’s political views, some of his important personal qualities, including his values and his abilities, and the shape of the political and military challenges that faced him from the very beginning of his administration. They provide an exceptionally useful foundation for considering some of the essentials of Lincoln’s leadership. This concluding essay considers how Lincoln undertook to lead the nation when he took office, recognizing, as he did, that exercising political leadership in the face of national dissolution or war, or both, is much more complicated than winning the presidency. Campaign rhetoric and articulation of personal values and policy aspirations might succeed in elections, but much more subtle exercises of judgment and power are needed to govern, especially in light of what Lincoln faced. In this regard, we must consider two complex facets of that which he faced. First, the Constitution, especially Article II, creating “the office of President of the United States,” defined both resources facilitating and constraints complicating Lincoln’s leadership. Second, the realities of public opinion, political action, and military success and failure at different times widened or narrowed Lincoln’s room for maneuver. Lincoln needed to consider both enduring constitutional principles and rapidly evolving external events in navigating the shoals of war leadership. In trying to understand what Lincoln faced and how he acted, attention must focus on the crucial issue of slavery, and the way Lincoln’s policies regarding slaves and slavery evolved as he encountered the realities of governing. His evolving policies can be traced in a fairly

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straightforward way. They are set out in his public statements and actions, particularly in his addresses and letters. Likewise, his stated thinking about slavery and emancipation, before and during his presidency, can also be traced. In comparing his policies and his thinking, one can note both where, early in his administration, the two seemed divergent, or dissonant, and also where, at a later point, they converged. This comparison of policy and thought, as best Lincoln’s thoughts can be inferred from his reports of those thoughts, brings to light some of the concessions Lincoln had to make to both political reality and constitutional constraint. But pointing to these seeming concessions raises other questions about the relationships between policy-making and thinking, or between actions and attitudes. Research growing out of the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance can help us here. The theory basically explores the human need to perceive that our beliefs, values, ideas, and behaviors are consistent. When we see that they are not, we experience the discomfort of “cognitive dissonance” and strive to reduce that discomfort. One consequence is that people often change their beliefs or opinions to make them consistent with their behavior, thereby justifying their behavior. In this sense, behavior controls attitudes, rather than the other way around. This tendency invites us to consider whether Lincoln’s policy concessions affected his beliefs. After bowing to political contingencies, did he come to view what he was doing as not only necessary, but right? Or was Lincoln able to remain unwavering in his convictions, even if they were dissonant with his actions? A second finding from the theory shows that when people do change their beliefs they often maintain the perception that they have been consistent over time by simply misremembering their former beliefs. Then they can feel that what they think now is what they have thought all along. This finding invites us to consider whether Lincoln’s reports about the consistency of his beliefs are completely accurate, or perhaps affected by wishful thinking. Unfortunately, these questions really cannot be answered. There is no way of getting inside Lincoln’s head. But they suggest paying close attention not only to what Lincoln did, but how he described his beliefs, publicly and privately. By doing so insight can be obtained into how he dealt with cognitive dissonance. A brief preview of what is argued: Lincoln consistently expressed his belief that slavery was a moral wrong, that the nation’s founders had regarded it as such, and that they believed it was moving toward gradual but inevitable extinction. He also believed that events no longer

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pointed toward that happy consummation, and that in fact the country might become all slave rather than all free. Whatever his beliefs, when he became president he was constrained by both political reality and constitutional principle simply to contain rather than to act for or against slavery. It did not appear then that the nation was moving toward either becoming all slave or all free, as Lincoln predicted it would in his 1858 “House Divided” speech.1 But events then altered Lincoln’s policies, and the course of history. It is useful to preface the examination of Lincoln’s changing policies regarding slavery with an oft-quoted excerpt from a letter written in the spring of 1864, at a time when optimism for a decisive Union military victory was relatively high. On April 4 the president wrote the Kentucky newspaper editor Albert Hodges explaining why he had decided he would, or really must, both emancipate slaves and arm them to fight for the Union. He argued that doing so was an “indispensable necessity” for winning the war. He further noted that his policy seemed to have worked out well, but then added that in saying so “I attempt no compliment to my own sagacity. I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”2 While causation between persons and events generally f lows both ways, Lincoln was being only slightly too modest in focusing on how events had determined his actions. The following discussion aims to make clearer the relation between events and Lincoln’s agency as it considers the evolution in what Lincoln actually did about slaves and slavery during the course of his presidency, and how his actions at least responded to, even if they were not controlled by, events. A good place to start is Lincoln’s first inaugural address, delivered on March 4, 1861. As Lincoln suggested later, context and events are important. The context: Lincoln was elected with no support from the South. He won only because the Democratic Party split into Northern and Southern tickets, thereby dividing the pro-slavery electorate. Lincoln won less than 40 percent of the total popular vote. Shortly after the election, but well before Lincoln’s inauguration, seven “deep south” states seceded from the Union. Their leader was South Carolina, followed shortly by Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. But four “upper south” states, Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, had not yet seceded, nor had four slave-holding “border” states: Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Lincoln knew that the more of these states that seceded, the more difficult it would be to save the Union. He wrote “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, we can

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not hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us.”3 Thus Lincoln had not only to forestall further secession, he also still hoped to reverse the tide and restore the union, hopefully without civil war. Thus as he made his first public speech as president, he had to walk a very fine line. He needed to say he would not disturb slavery in the states where it existed, that in fact he understood that he had no authority under the Constitution to do so, but not backtrack on his own and his party’s moral opposition to slavery and its extension. In this context what Lincoln said about not freeing slaves is more understandable, though it does not jibe with the image of Lincoln as the great emancipator: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” In his choice of specific words, Lincoln nodded South even further. The very beginning of his address claimed that Southerners need have no apprehension that “their property, and their peace, and personal security, are to be endangered.” Of course, Southerners regarded slaves as a “species of property” and in using the word “property” Lincoln seemed implicitly to endorse slaveholders’ view of black men and black women. He repeated the word a few sentences later: “the property, peace, and security of no section are to be in any wise endangered by the now incoming Administration.” Lincoln went on to make a large point of reading the clause in the Constitution stating that fugitive slaves (actually, the Constitution referred to persons “held to service or labor”) “shall be delivered up” to their owners. He emphasized that he would enforce the laws relevant to that clause. Most startling perhaps is that Lincoln went so far as to indicate, later in the speech, that he would support an amendment to the Constitution “to the effect that the federal government, shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service.”4 What about Lincoln’s belief that slavery was a moral wrong? He did implicitly repeat that view in saying “One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended.” But the emphasis of the entire speech is that he will not move against slavery where it exists, and that war is therefore both unnecessary and unwise. One wonders whether in stating that he had “no inclination” to “endanger” slavery in the South, Lincoln actually came to adopt the view that slaves were property that should not be freed. Three years later, in the letter stating “events have controlled me,” Lincoln wrote that he could

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“not remember when I did not” think and feel that slavery was wrong. But as noted earlier, actions often control attitudes, and attitudes often control memory. It is possible that Lincoln’s policy declarations in his first inaugural, largely controlled by context and consequence, crept into his own thinking. It’s hard to know. His later statements suggest that he never wavered. While people’s memory of their own attitudes and behavior cannot be trusted, perhaps in this case Lincoln’s memory is accurate. Again, it is not possible to know. Of course, the war came, the four upper south states seceded, but the four border states did not. And the war created exigencies with respect to slavery that none had anticipated prior to its outbreak. When escaped slaves f led to Union armies, some kind of policy for dealing with that contingency had to be devised. And that policy had to recognize the reality that it would almost surely be impossible actually to force the return of escaped slaves to their owners. Gradually an approach adopted by Gen. Benjamin Butler in the second month of the war led to a policy to which Lincoln “after some hesitation, approved.”5 Butler, Union commander at Fortress Monroe near Norfolk, Virginia, essentially laughed at a Confederate slave owner’s demand that he return three fugitive slaves, under existing U.S. laws. How, asked Butler, can you secede from the Union and then ask us to enforce laws on your behalf that will aid the rebellion? In line with this logic, the Congress enacted Confiscation Acts in August 1861 and July 1862, allowing Union armies to free escaped slaves being used by the Confederate military. It was unclear whether these escaped slaves were then free, but events on the ground move faster than official policy. Union commanders began to use the labor of these escaped slaves to aid in the fighting. Lincoln understood the value to the Union effort of using slaves in its cause, and developed the idea, as an extension of what was already being done, of freeing slaves in areas that were in armed rebellion against the federal government. This thinking led, of course, to the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. Lincoln’s evolving views about what he could and would do about slaves is expressed subtly in his well-known August 22, 1862, letter to Horace Greeley.6 Here again, Lincoln can be read as neutral with respect to slavery and emancipation. But the letter is better understood as laying the groundwork for his emancipation policy. Lincoln wrote that he wished for no ambiguity as to the purpose of his war policy. It was “to save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution.” And then he famously went on “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by

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freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would do that.” This apparent indifference to slavery was contradicted by Lincoln’s seldom quoted closing sentence. “I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.” The latter statement suggests that Lincoln was very much alive to the difference between what constitutional duty required and what he personally valued. Still, Lincoln was criticized then and now for saying he was willing to save the Union without freeing any slaves. Of course when Lincoln wrote the letter to Greeley, a preliminary emancipation proclamation was in his desk drawer. He had discussed it with his cabinet and decided to announce it when the time seemed right, specifically after a Union military victory. Then it would seem to be issued from a position of strength, rather than one of desperation. Less than a month after writing the letter to Greeley, following almost immediately after the Union success at the battle of Antietam, Lincoln did in fact issue the preliminary emancipation proclamation, stating that unless the States still in rebellion returned to the Union in one hundred days, the slaves in those states would “be thenceforth, and forever free . . .” Again Lincoln’s letter can be read as preparing the nation for an emancipation policy, specifically the Proclamation of January 1863. The letter was sweeping in its implied assertion that Lincoln could (he had said he “would”) free slaves (“all” or “some”) in order to save the Union. This position was miles beyond what he had said in his first inaugural, which was categorical in stating he had no intention to disturb slavery where it existed. Of course the Emancipation Proclamation has been criticized for falling short of any meaningful abolition of slavery. It said that slaves were free in States or areas of States still in rebellion. But the government had no power in those areas. In contrast, slaves were not freed in slave-holding areas that were under federal control, such as in the border states of Kentucky and Maryland. Lincoln adopted this approach so as to keep the border states in the Union (he is reputed to have quipped: “I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky”) and because he planned to use means other than force to free slaves in those areas. But those plans themselves were and are often criticized for being both misguided and unrealistic. Lincoln’s approach to the border states was compensated emancipation, and colonization of freed slaves in Africa, the Caribbean, or possibly the western United States. He made the case for this plan in his

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December 1862 message to Congress, a message that is famous for its soaring eloquence if not for the f lawed idea it proposed: in giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free— honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.7 In discussions both with white border state leaders and AfricanAmerican leaders such as Frederick Douglass, Lincoln learned that this plan had no support, and it was largely abandoned. Eventually slavery would be ended in the border states by changes to their own state constitutions (Maryland) or by the thirteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution (Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri). Lincoln’s limited and seemingly cautious approach to emancipation must be understood in terms of the distinction he made in his letter to Greeley between his official duty and his personal wishes, and the distinction made here between constitutional constraint and political contingency versus personal belief. This is a distinction Lincoln chose not to express directly in his first inaugural, when his rhetoric seemed to tilt so far South. In general, Lincoln believed that he must follow the Constitution in all matters. And in 1861 he believed that he had no authority to interfere with slavery where it existed. He only embraced emancipation when he had convinced himself that it was not only militarily convenient but actually indispensible to saving the Union and preserving the Constitution. This view is clearly expressed in the aforementioned letter Lincoln wrote to Albert Hodges in the spring of 1864. He repeated his personal belief about slavery: “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” But, reiterating the distinction between official duty and personal wish in the letter to Greeley, Lincoln continued that he did not believe that he had “an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling.” It was only, he wrote, when he came to believe that emancipation was an indispensable necessity to saving the Union that he embraced it. It is of interest that Lincoln used the specific phrase “indispensable necessity” repeatedly in that letter. And it is important to understand exactly what he meant in contrasting his “judgment and feeling” with his view of “indispensable necessity.” As Lincoln wrote later in the letter, he was always conscious of being largely controlled by events, both

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political and military. He even expressed this view in his second inaugural, when he stated that the “the progress of our arms” is that “upon which all else chief ly depends.” Back in late 1862 he had come to believe that the military situation, and to some extent the political situation, required that he free and arm slaves in order to win the war. Militarily, he needed the service of black soldiers, and, politically, he judged that an emancipation policy would gain more support than it would lose. In these two senses, emancipation was an indispensable necessity. Lincoln further felt that it was a constitutional requirement that he use all legal means to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Because emancipation was necessary to that end, Lincoln argued that it was legal. In short, politically, militarily, and constitutionally, emancipation was an indispensable necessity. In signing the Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln was able to meld his personal “judgment and feeling” with his official policy. The personal and political were not only melded, but firmly welded. When Lincoln signed the proclamation, he emphatically stated “my whole soul is in it.” The proclamation is sometimes criticized as being overly dry and legalistic, given that it represented such a momentous change in policy, with such far-reaching implications, and given Lincoln’s strong conviction that it was morally right. However, Lincoln does let his personal views, in nearly eloquent language, slip into the final proclamation. After much wordage of “whereas” and “Now, therefore,” and “I further declare and make known,” Lincoln declares that the proclamation is “sincerely believed to be an act of justice” and adds “I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.”8 That is, his personal commitments seep through the legalisms. Even though Lincoln later came under great pressure to rescind his policy to satisfy Northern Democrats, he never wavered, though he was tempted to. Even though he was lobbied intensely to abandon emancipation in order to bring the South back into the government, he was steadfast in his commitment. Perhaps the firmness of Lincoln’s commitments is understood merely in terms of a quotation from an August 1863 letter he wrote to James Conklin, a friend in Springfield, Illinois. In that letter, defending his emancipation policy, Lincoln wrote of the proclamation, “the promise being made, must be kept.” Yet other parts of the letter reveal more than a wish to stand by public commitments. It shows unusual empathy and appreciation for the emancipated slaves and free blacks who were contributing so much to the war effort. Lincoln noted that a number of highly successful army commanders “believe the emancipation policy,

Epilogue

219

and the use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion.” He went on to argue “You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you” and “Why should they do any thing for us, if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom.” Finally, he stated that in the end, “there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind” achieve a peace “worth the keeping in all future time.”9 Here Lincoln finally expresses passion for the project of emancipation. That passion can perhaps be understood as being fueled by Lincoln’s growing belief, articulated at the very end of the letter to Hodges, that slavery was a great wrong and that “If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.” This line of thought is, of course, developed further in the second inaugural’s reference to “offenses” that God “now wills to remove.” In conclusion, while Lincoln was greatly inf luenced by events and his view of constitutional prerogative and constraint, he was too modest in saying that “events have controlled me.” He had strong beliefs about the morality of slavery. But he would make concessions to it in an effort to save the Union. When he came to believe that emancipation would further rather than retard that goal, and that his constitutional duty required that he use every available means to achieve it, his policies and his beliefs came into alignment, and he worked to advance them with all the energy and creativity that he possessed. Although one cannot be sure, what Lincoln conceded in word and policy seem not to have diverted his principles. While events may have largely controlled his actions, they did not control his beliefs. And when events allowed and even demanded that policy and principle be joined, Lincoln took control of events and took the fateful step of emancipation. Notes 1. Don E. Fehrenbacher, ed., Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1832–1858 (New York: The Library of America, 1989), p. 426. 2. Don E. Fehrenbacher, ed., Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1859–1865 [hereafter LSW] (New York: The Library of America, 1989), pp. 585–586.

220 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

George R. Goethals

Ibid., p. 269 Ibid., pp. 215–223. James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 355. LSW, pp. 357–358. Ibid., p. 415. Ibid., pp. 424–425. Ibid., pp. 495–499.

CON T R I BU TOR S

The Editors George R. (Al) Goethals holds the E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Professorship in Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond. He was on the faculty of Williams College for thirty-six years where he served as chair of the department of psychology, founding chair of the program in leadership studies, and provost. He has also held academic and administrative appointments at the University of Virginia and Princeton University. In addition to his collegiate appointments, he has served as an editor, or on the editorial board of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and The Leadership Quarterly. He is coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Leadership, The Quest for a General Theory of Leadership, and Leadership and Psychology. He also has published numerous textbooks, chapters, and refereed articles in scholarly journals. His recent scholarship explores rooting for the underdog, image-making in presidential debates, peer interaction and performance, and the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant. He has received four research grants from the National Institute of Mental Health for his work on the studies of attribution theory and responses to social support and the role of similarity in social inf luence processes. After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard he obtained his doctorate in psychology from Duke University. Gary L. McDowell holds the Tyler Haynes Interdisciplinary Chair in Leadership Studies, Political Science, and Law at the University of Richmond. Prior to joining the Jepson School of Leadership Studies in 2003, he directed the Institute of United States Studies and taught American studies at the University of London. He has served as director of the Office of the Bicentennial of the Constitution at the

222

Contributors

National Endowment for the Humanities, as chief speechwriter for Attorney General Edwin Meese III, and has held various positions at Tulane, Harvard, Harvard Law School, and Dickinson. He was a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian Institution and Bradley Resident Scholar at the Center for Judicial Studies in Washington, D.C. He is the author or editor of ten books on subjects ranging from privacy to juvenile delinquency, politics, judicial power, and the Constitution. His most recent book is America and Enlightenment Constitutionalism, which he coedited with Johnathan O’Neill. The Language of Law and the Foundations of American Constitutionalism is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. After receiving an undergraduate degree from the University of South Florida he earned master’s degrees in political science from Memphis State University and the University of Chicago and a doctorate in government and public affairs from the University of Virginia. The Contributors Edward L. Ayers is president of the University of Richmond. An historian of the American South, in 2003 he was named national professor of the year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He has written and edited ten books. The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In the Presence of Mine Enemies: Civil War in the Heart of America won the Bancroft Prize for distinguished writing in American history and the Beveridge Prize for the best book in English on the history of the Americas since 1492. A pioneer in digital history, he created The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War, a website that has attracted millions of users and won major prizes in the teaching of history. He has received a presidential appointment to the National Council on the Humanities, served as a Fulbright professor in the Netherlands, and been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received a B.A. in American Studies from the University of Tennessee and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University in the field of American Studies. Herman J. Belz is professor of U.S. and constitutional history at the University of Maryland in College Park and academic director of the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation, Washington, D.C. He received a B.A. from Princeton University and his M.A. and Ph.D.

Contributors

223

in history from the University of Washington. His articles and reviews have appeared in a variety of scholarly publications. His many books include Abraham Lincoln, Constitutionalism, and Equal Rights in the Civil War Era, A Living Constitution or Fundamental Law: American Constitutionalism in Historical Perspective, and Emancipation and Equal Rights: Politics and Constitutionalism in the Civil War Era. He was awarded the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association for his first book Reconstructing the Union: Theory and Policy during the Civil War. He has been a council member of the National Council on the Humanities of the NEH since 2004. Richard Carwardine was born in Wales and received degrees from Oxford University and the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University, where he is also a fellow of St. Catherine’s College. He took up this post in 2002, after thirty years at the University of Sheffield. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2006. He is also a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His analytical political biography of Abraham Lincoln won the Lincoln Prize in 2004 and was recently published in an American edition: Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power. He has the distinction of being the only British scholar to receive the prestigious Lincoln Prize. He specializes in American politics and religion in the nineteenth century, particularly during the era of the Civil War. His other publications include Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America 1790–1865 and Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America. Joseph T. Glatthaar is the Stephenson Distinguished Professor of History and chair of the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received a B.A. from Ohio Wesleyan University, an M.A. in history from Rice University, and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He teaches courses in the American Civil War and American military history. He has taught at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Military Academy, and the University of Houston. His numerous books include General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse, The Civil War in the West, 1863–1865, Partners in Command: Relationships Between Civil War Leaders, Black Soldiers in the Civil War, and Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers. He is coeditor of Leaders of the Lost Cause: Confederate High Command in the Civil War and the Encyclopedia of American Military History.

224

Contributors

Daniel Walker Howe is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author who grew up in Denver, Colorado. His father, a newspaper reporter, died when he was eight years old, but not before getting his son interested in history. He received his A.B. from Harvard, his M.A. from Oxford, and his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. His first academic job was at Yale, where he taught from 1966 to 1973. He taught at UCLA from 1973 to 1992 and chaired the history department there from 1983 to 1987. In 1992 he accepted the Rhodes Professorship of American History at Oxford University and became the first American to hold that position. He also helped found the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford. In 2008 he was named American Historian Laureate by the New York Historical Society. His books include The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805–1861, The Political Culture of the American Whigs; Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, and What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848, which won the Pulitzer Prize in history in 2008. William Lee Miller is Scholar in Ethics and Institutions at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. He retired from the faculty of the University of Virginia in 1999 as Commonwealth Professor, and the Thomas C. Sorensen Professor of Political and Social Thought. He also taught at Yale, Smith College, and Indiana University, where he was founding director of The Poynter Center on American Institutions. He was a staff writer, editor, and regular contributor to The Reporter Magazine, where he wrote political pieces in relation to ethics and religion from 1953 to 1965. His many books include Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography, The Business of May Next: James Madison and the Founding, The First Liberty: Religion and the American Republic, and The Protestant and Politics. His most recent book is Arguing About Slavery: John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle in the American Congress, which won the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the best book on Congress in 1996. He received his AB from the University of Nebraska, and his B.D. and PhD in religious social ethics from Yale. Brian Holden Reid is Professor of American History and Military Institutions at King’s College, London. He is a graduate of the Universities of Hull, Sussex, and London. A former head of the department of war studies from 2001 to 2007, in 2007 he was awarded the Fellowship of King’s College London (FKC), the highest honor the College can award its alumni and staff. He is a trustee of the Society of Military History, honorary vice president of the Society of Army Historical Research, and a member of the Council of the National

Contributors

225

Army Museum, London. In 2004–2005 he was the first non-American to serve as a member of the Lincoln Prize Jury Panel for the award of the most important literary prize in Civil War history. His books include America’s Civil War: The Operational Battlefield, 1861–1863, Robert E. Lee: Icon for a Nation, The American Civil War and the Wars of the Industrial Revolution, 1854–1871, and The Origins of the American Civil War. He is coeditor of The American Civil War: Explorations and Reconsiderations, which was nominated for the Lincoln Prize. Jeffrey Leigh Sedgwick is an associate professor in the department of political science at the University of Massachusetts. He earned his A.B. from Kenyon College and his M.A.P.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He has taught and written on a variety of aspects of American government including public finance, policy analysis and evaluation, criminal justice policy, and executive leadership. In the public service arena he was nominated by President George W. Bush to be the assistant attorney general for the Office of Justice Programs on April 23, 2008. Prior to that, he served as director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. He previously served as deputy director of the Bureau in the Reagan administration. He is working on two forthcoming books: The Character of the Presidency: Ambition, Expectation and Opportunity and The Character of the Presidency: Readings and Cases. He is the author of Law Enforcement Planning: the Limits of an Economic Approach and Deterring Criminals: Policymaking and the American Political Tradition. Jennifer L. Weber is an assistant professor of history at the University of Kansas where she specializes in Civil War studies. She received a B.S. from Northwestern, M.A. from California State University/ Sacramento, and Ph.D. from Princeton. She started her professional life as a journalist and later worked as a political aide in the California State Legislature. A lifelong interest in the Civil War eventually spurred her to pursue academics as a career. Her first book, Copperheads, about antiwar Democrats in the Civil War North, was published in 2006. She is currently researching a book about conscription in the North and South during the Civil War, working on a children’s book about the battle of Gettysburg that will be published by National Geographic, and on a collection of essays. She also serves on the advisory panel for the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. Douglas L. Wilson is the George A. Lawrence Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at Knox College, where he is codirector of the Lincoln Studies Center. He is the author of Lincoln Before Washington: New Perspectives on Lincoln’s Illinois Years, Herndon’s Informants: Letters,

226

Contributors

and Interviews about Abraham Lincoln, Herndon’s Lincoln, and Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln. His book Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words won the Lincoln Prize in 2007. He has served as a consultant for National Park Service’s Lincoln Home, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, and currently serves on advisory committees at the U.S. Bicentennial Commission, the Illinois State Bicentennial Commission and the Library of Congress’s Bicentennial Exhibit. He is also part of the National Trust’s joint projects to restore the Lincoln Cottage at the Soldier’s Home and to create on the same site a multipurpose institute on Lincoln’s presidency. He is a graduate of Doane College and earned master’s and doctoral degrees in English at the University of Pennsylvania.

I N DE X

abolitionism, 9, 14, 17, 23–4, 50–2, 62, 68, 94, 97, 216 Adams, John, 57 Adams-Onís Treaty, 89, 91 American Revolution, 29–30, 33, 36–7, 39, 43, 53, 57–8, 63–5 Antietam, battle of, 84, 107, 173, 203, 216 Aristotle, 143, 147 Arnold, Isaac N., 147 Articles of Confederation, 31, 48 Ashmun, George, 89 Atlanta Campaign, 182, 184n30 Ayers, Edward, 2–3 Baker, Edward D., 193–4 Ballard, Colin, 159–60 Banks, Nathaniel P., 171, 176, 201, 204, 206 Bates, Edward, 168, 206 Belz, Herman, 3 Berrien, John, 39, 54–5n27 Beveridge, Albert J., 96 Black Hawk War, 102, 132 Blair, Francis P., 163, 200 Blair, Montgomery, 163, 165, 200 Booth, John Wilkes, 2 Boritt, Gabor, 97–8 Botts, John Minor, 88 Briggs, John Channing, 98 Brooks, Noah, 134–5 Brown, John, 19

Browning, Orville Hickman, 104, 133, 200 Buchanan, James, 13, 55n36, 81, 102, 163, 188 Buell, Don Carlos, 169, 173, 181, 201 Bull Run, First Battle of, 165–7, 198, 200 Bull Run, Second Battle of, 203 Bullitt, Cuthbert, 203 Burns, James MacGregor, 105, 190–1, 193, 207 Burnside, Ambrose, 126, 150, 155 Butler, Benjamin F., 201, 204, 206, 215 Cameron, Simon, 81, 168 Carnegie, Andrew, 63 Carpenter, Francis, 113 Cartwright, Peter, 90 Carwardine, Richard, 5, 126, 187, 197–8 Chancellorsville Campaign, 115, 128, 151, 205 Charnwood, Lord, 96 Chase, Salmon P., 80, 103–4, 111, 139–40, 169, 192, 198–9, 204 Chattanooga Campaign, 175–6 Churchill, Winston, 207 civic friendship, 65–71 Clarke, James Freeman, 51–2 Clay, Henry, 92–5 Confiscation Acts, 144–5, 215 Conkling, James, 130, 218–19

228

Index

consent theory of government, 32–3, 41, 44 Constitutional Convention, 46, 50–1 Constitutional Union, 14 Cooperheads (Peace Democrats), 5, 115, 123–36, 150 Copland, Aaron, 75–7 Corning, Erastus, 149–55 Curtis, Samuel R., 200, 204 Dana, Charles A., 175 Davis, David, 132, 192 Davis, Jefferson, 14, 43–4, 50–2, 101–2, 109, 112–13, 126, 136, 163, 168, 177, 198, 207 Dawson, Joseph G., III, 194 Declaration of Independence, 2–3, 7, 29, 34, 39–1, 48, 52, 59 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 33 Dickinson, Emily, 141 Donald, David Herbert, 97, 130, 160 Doniphan, Alexander, 95 Douglas, Stephen A.: allied with Lincoln at beginning of the war, 125 Lincoln debates with, 1, 35, 40–2, 44, 77, 93, 101–2, 141–2 popular sovereignty of, 3, 29, 35, 40–2, 44 on slavery, 2–3 Douglass, Frederick, 23, 26–7, 76, 81, 84, 217 Early, Jubal, 179, 181 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 159 Electoral College, 17 Elements of Military Art and Science (Halleck), 171 Emancipation Proclamation, 17, 76, 117, 130, 135, 149, 150, 199, 203, 205–6, 215–18 Emancipation Proclamation, preliminary, 14, 125, 133, 147, 203 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 58–9, 148 Everett, Edward, 23, 153–4

Federalist, The, 34, 58, 60, 63, 65 Fort Sumter, Battle of, 49, 123, 162–4, 189–91 Founding Fathers, 63–4. See also Adams, John; Hamilton, Alexander; Jefferson, Thomas; Madison, James; Washington, George Fredericksburg, Battle of, 84, 109, 139, 204–5 Frémont, Jesse Benton, 200–1 Frémont, John C., 108, 171, 195, 200–4 Gallagher, Gary, 118 Gillespie, Joseph, 115, 132 Glatthaar, Joseph, 6 Graebner, Norman, 193 Grant, Ulysses S., 2, 108, 134–5, 150, 159–60, 162, 164, 172, 174–83, 202, 205–6 Great Britain, 36, 43, 48, 52, 107–9, 153, 162 Greeley, Horace, 113, 133, 142–8, 152, 156n19, 199, 215–17 Grinnell, Josiah, 114 Guelzo, Allen C., 97 Halleck, Henry W., 112, 160, 162, 171–80, 182, 201–5 Hamilton, Alexander, 34 Hamilton, Charles S., 202 Harlan, James, 113 Harpers Ferry, 19 Harrison, William Henry, 102 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 141 Hay, John, 104, 111, 132, 134–5 Helliung, Mark, 35, 37 Herndon, William “Billy,” 63, 80, 95–7, 102, 112, 114–15, 132, 151–2 Hitchcock, Ethan Allan, 171 Hodges, Albert, 213, 217, 219 Holden Reid, Brian, 6–7 Holt, Joseph, 195 Homestead Act, 17 Hood, John Bell, 180–1 Hooker, Joseph, 128, 151, 205

Index Howe, Daniel Walker, 4–5 Hunter, David, 201, 204, 209n32 idealism, 59–60, 65, 67–71 identity, America’s, 3, 30–1, 57–71 Jackson, Andrew, 45, 58–9, 64, 66, 112, 127, 153–4 Jackson, Thomas J. “Stonewall,” 171–2, 202 Jefferson, Thomas, 3, 57, 63, 145, 147 Johnson, Andrew, 17, 125, 193 Johnston, 177, 182, 184n30 Jomini, Antoine Henri, Baron de, 171–2 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 35, 40–2, 95 leadership: Burns on, 105, 190, 193, 207 charismatic authority and, 118 as collective enterprise, 191 humor and, 198–9 inexperience, 102–3, 188 moral, 190–1 motive and, 190 power and, 190 public opinion and, 5–6, 131–2 resilience and, 207 social contract theory and, 52–3 teaching and, 115 transactional, 190–1 war, 84, 98, 105, 110, 187–207 Leadership (Burns), 190 Lee, Robert E., 2, 50–1, 70, 109–10, 118–19, 136, 167–8, 172–8, 181 Lincoln (Donald), 97, 160 Lincoln, Abraham: on ambition, 64 ambition of, 1, 4–5, 63, 78, 94, 101, 103, 207 belief in providence of, 70, 107 biographers of, 19, 96–8, 187 cabinet of, 82, 104, 107, 110–11, 125, 131, 133, 135, 146–7, 176, 189–92, 196–204

229 cabinet crisis of, 139–40, 190, 204 charismatic authority of, 118 on Clay, 93 on colonization of freed slaves, 216–17 communication style of, 114–17, 140–5, 198–9 Congress and, 192–5 as congressman, 1, 5, 87–98 on the Constitution, 36, 41, 44–8, 65, 69, 127, 132, 149, 197, 214–15, 217 decision-making style of, 5, 76, 131–4, 141, 193, 195–7, 203 depression of, 112, 207 health of, 207 honesty of, 91, 143–5, 148 humor of, 112, 127, 189, 192, 198–9, 207 in Indianapolis, 46–7 on Kansas-Nebraska Act, 41–2 leadership inexperience of, 102, 188 leadership questioned, 103 letter to Corning by, 149–54 letter to Greeley by, 144–9, 199, 215–16 magnanimity of, 4–5, 73, 77–85, 111 management style of, 110–14 on the Mexican War, 87–98 military strategy of, 159–83 moral growth of, 10 national vision of, 105–7 as passive, 187 photographs of, 116 on Polk’s Mexican War policy, 36, 92, 95 on popular sovereignty, 29 priorities of, 107–10 on public opinion, 10–11, 141–2 public opinion of, 139–55 “public-opinion baths of,” 115 resolve of, 81–2 satire of, 78 self-confidence of, 5, 104 as self-made man, 5, 104 self-reliance of, 5, 104–19

230

Index

Lincoln, Abraham—Continued on slavery, 2, 16, 23, 37–8, 42, 70–1, 76, 84, 105–6, 130–2, 145–50, 211–19 Spot Resolutions of, 87–95 stubbornness of, 134, 136 support for Taylor, 95, 97 trust inspired by, 197 on the Union, 106 vacillation of, 196, 206 War Board created by, 171 war leadership of, 84, 98, 105, 110, 187–207 writing skills of, 140–55 Lincoln, Abraham, speeches of: antiwar (Mexican War), 92–8 at Cooper Institute (1860), 2 eulogy for Henry Clay, 98 eulogy for Zachary Taylor, 78 first inaugural, 25, 48–9, 69, 84, 213–17 Gettysburg Address, 6–7, 10, 17, 23, 74, 77, 106, 115, 197 House Divided speech, 73, 115–16, 152, 213 in Peoria, 41 second inaugural address, 2, 7, 10, 25, 70–1, 74–5, 82–4, 107, 197, 218–19 to Springfield, Young Men’s Lyceum (1838), 3–4, 36, 58–65, 98 Temperance Society Address, 36, 65, 67–71, 98, 142–3 Lincoln, Mary Todd, 78, 92, 101–2, 104 Lincoln, Thomas “Tad,” 169 Lincoln, William “Willie,” 104 Lincoln and His Generals (Williams), 159–60, 181, 187 Lincoln Portrait (Copland), 75–7 Lincoln’s Speeches Reconsidered (Briggs), 98 Lincoln’s Virtues (Miller), 80 Locke, David Ross, 125 Logan, John, 125 Logan, Stephen, 95 Longstreet, James, 177 Luthin, Reinhard, 97

Madison, James, 34, 53, 63 Manent, Pierre, 31 Marshall, George C., 159, 178 Marx, Karl, 65–6 materialism, 59–60, 71 McClellan, George, 118, 182, 194 cabinet crisis and, 204 description and personal traits of, 79–80, 166–9, 171, 202–3 election of 1864 and, 18, 20 emancipation opposed by, 135, 203 insubordination of, 79–80, 134, 171 on Lincoln, 81, 134, 202 Lincoln’s magnanimity toward, 79–80, 202, 207 military strategy of, 109, 164–5, 168–74, 202 Peninsula Campaign of, 166 procrastination of, 112, 169–71, 173, 201 relieved by Lincoln, 171–2 replaces McDowell, 165–7 replaces Scott, 162 on Scott, 167 McClernand, John A., 196, 204 McCormick Reaper trial, 80 McDowell, Irvin, 165–6, 202 McPherson, James M., 27n5, 134, 151, 160, 184n30 Meade, George G., 178, 201 Medill, Joseph, 192 Meigs, Montgomery C., 112, 169, 200 Mellon, Thomas, 63 Melville, Herman, 141 Mexican War, 4, 36, 87–98, 162–3, 165–6 Military Genius of Abraham Lincoln, The (Ballard), 159 Miller, William Lee, 4–5 Missouri Compromise, 41 Morrill, Lot M., 103 Morton, Oliver P., 196 Murfreesboro (Stone’s River), Battle of, 205

Index Napoleon III, 176 Napoleon Bonaparte, 93, 109, 177–8 Neely, Mark E., Jr., 97, 126, 128, 155 “negro,” use of the word, 10, 19–23, 25–6 newspapers, civil war era, 11–16, 19–27 Nicolay, John, 104, 134 No Territory policy, 88, 92, 96 Northwest Ordinance, 40–1 nullification, doctrine of, 37–9 Obama, Barack, 73–5 Odell, Moses F., 193 Paludan, Phillip S., 143 Peace Democrats (Copperheads), 5, 115, 123–36, 150 Peninsula Campaign, 104, 162, 165–6, 170–1, 194, 202–3 Philosophy of Democratic Government (Simon), 31 Pierce, Franklin, 102, 188 Pierpont, Francis H., 206 Political and Military Life of Napoleon ( Jomini), 171 Polk, James K., 4, 36, 87–98, 102, 191 Pope, John, 173 popular sovereignty, 3, 29–35, 38–44, 47–51 Potter, David, 118 President Lincoln (Miller), 78 Progressive Movement, 43, 68, 71 Protestantism, 71, 116–17 Pudd’nhead Wilson (Twain), 62, 69 Puritanism, 59–61, 64 Randall, J. G., 150 Reconstruction, Southern, 10, 25, 71, 111, 113, 136 Reid, Whitelaw, 145–6 “Resistance to Civil Government” (Thoreau), 94 revolution, right of, 3, 29–39, 43, 51–3 Rich Mountain, Battle of, 166 Richardson, William A., 88, 96 Riddle, Donald W., 97

231

Rockefeller, John D., 63 Rosecrans, William S., 205 Rowan, John, 37–8 Schenck, Robert, 103 Schurz, Carl, 195 Scott, Winfield, 162–8, 171, 189–90, 192, 198, 204 secessionist theory, 37–45 Second Manassas, Battle of, 173 Sedgwick, Jeffrey, 3–4 Seven Days’ Campaign, 172 Seward, William Henry, 55n28, 103, 108, 139–40, 168, 188–90, 192, 198, 203–4 Seymour, Horatio, 151 Sheridan, Philip, 135, 179–81 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 135, 164, 175–83, 184n30, 198, 205 Shiloh, Battle of, 84, 172, 174 Sigel, Franz, 204–6 Simon, Yves, 31–3, 52, 54n6,n10 slavery, Lincoln on, 2, 16, 23, 37–8, 42, 70–1, 76, 84, 105–6, 130–2, 145–50, 211–19 Smith, Adam I. P., 125 Smith, Sydney, 112 social contract theory, 30, 33, 35, 37, 39, 51–3 Solon, 147 Speed, Joshua, 104 Spot Resolutions, 87–95 Stanton, Edwin M., 80–1, 85, 140, 162, 170–2, 175, 178–80, 195, 198–9 state, definition of, 47 state veto, doctrine of, 38–9 Stephens, Alexander, 106 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 116 Strong, George Templeton, 140, 143–4, 200 Sumner, Charles, 104, 113, 193–4, 199 Swett, Leonard, 104, 113, 130, 192 Taney, Roger B., 123–4, 193 Taylor, Zachery, 78, 89, 95, 97, 102

232

Index

Texan Revolution, 36, 89, 91–3 Texas, annexation of, 36, 87–92 Texas, invasion of, 176, 182–3 Thomas, Benjamin, 96–7 Thomas, George H., 180–1 Thoreau, Henry David, 61, 94, 141 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 33, 58–60 Todd, Robert S., 92 Transcendentalism, 59, 64–5 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 96 Trent crisis, 109 Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln As Commander in Chief (McPherson), 160 Trist, Nicholas, 96 Trumbull, Lyman, 78 Turner, Jonathan, 117 Twain, Mark, 62, 69 Union Party, 17 United States Constitution: Antiwar Democrats and, 14, 123 Article II, 211 Article IV, 40 Article VI, 55n33 barriers to ruling in, 191 checks and balances in, 191 fidelity to, 34–5 Lincoln on, 36, 41, 44–8, 65, 69, 127, 132, 149, 197, 214–15, 217 states’ rights to leave the union and, 3 territorial clause in Article IV, 40 Thirteenth Amendment to, 24, 217

unwritten powers in, 54n10 war powers and, 4, 192–3 Urbanna campaign, 170 Vallandigham, Clement L., 126–9, 150–1, 154–5, 190 Van Buren, Martin, 58, 90 Van Dyke, John, 88 Vicksburg, Battle of, 103, 174 Vietnam War, 97 Villard, Henry, 101–2 Wade, Benjamin F., 103, 193–5 Wade-Davis Bill, 113 Ward, Artemus, 199 Washington, George, 63, 74, 91, 112, 136, 188 Weber, Jennifer, 5–6 Webster-Hayne debate, 37 Welles, Gideon, 104, 168, 197 White, Ronald C., Jr., 143 Whitman, Walt, 141 Williams, T. Harry, 138n29, 159–60, 181–3, 187 Wilmot, David, 87 Wilson, Douglas, 5–6 Wilson, James F., 152 Wool, John A., 204 World War I, 96 World War II, 76, 159, 178, 182 Zornow, William, 80