ON THE ONE HAND, Missouri was thus secured to the Union fairly early and therefore was a kind of success. On the other hand, it was the scene of the worst guerrilla warfare of the war, of atrocities, and of violations of civil liberties, and therefore by another criterion it was a failure.
If you tell the Missouri Civil War story casting Lyon (the “savior of Missouri”) and Blair as the heroes, then Lincoln must be something of a hero too, because he made pivotal decisions that made their coup d’état work; he backed Lyon and Blair at every decision point through the sequence of irregularities by which they kept the state in the Union.
But if you tell the story casting them not as heroes, then Missouri is by another measure a particularly egregious failure, and then does Lincoln bear some responsibility for the failure?
Here are two summaries of the situations in the three border states, both of which conclude with a negative judgment about Missouri.
The historian William Gienapp, using criteria for success going beyond simply keeping the state in the Union, and going beyond 1861, writes: “Lincoln’s policies were fairly successful in Maryland, produced a mixed record in Kentucky, and were largely a failure in Missouri…[Missouri] left a dark blot on his otherwise generally positive record of accomplishments in the border states.”
Mark E. Neely, Jr., dealing with civil liberties, writes:
When questioned about military repression in the border states, Republican contemporaries of Abraham Lincoln pointed with pride to the role of the administration’s vigorous measure in saving Maryland for the Union. Even Democrats in the North frequently admitted the necessity of the early arrests in Maryland. Likewise, historians have long emphasized the crucial place of Kentucky on the Union map, and many of them have praised the administration for keeping that state in the Union by a shrewd mixture of tough policies and sympathetic treatment…Nobody bragged about Missouri…Civil War Missouri became a nightmare for American civil liberties.
Lincoln was implicated in the most dubious actions by a Union command, General Order No. 11, issued by General Thomas Ewing in Kansas City in August 1863. This order was issued in retaliation for the “Lawrence Massacre,” a raid by proslavery Missouri bushwhackers who rode fifty miles into Kansas, arrived at dawn, and killed most of the male population, 185 men and boys, in the antislavery town. In the excited aftermath Ewing ordered the evacuation of four Missouri counties that bordered Kansas, on the theory that these civilians had furnished support for the raiders. Lincoln’s endorsement came less than six weeks later in a letter to Ewing’s superior in St. Louis, dealing with a number of items. Lincoln wrote: “With the matters of removing the inhabitants of certain counties en masse; and of removing certain individuals from time to time, who are supposed to be mischievous, I am not now interfering, but am leaving to your discretion.”
Lincoln should have taken a moment to imagine what this “removing…en masse” meant to the human beings to be removed—civilians living their lives in a (nominally) loyal state. Instead, he went along with the generals’ contention that this order had legitimate military purposes—to forestall the Kansas vengeance and to end the insane border war in these counties.
This civilian removal was certainly not the only violation of human rights that occurred during this savage conflict in Missouri, but it was the most egregious and created long-lasting resentment. Those responsible for General Order No. 11 had the misfortune that in the affected area lived a talented American painter of realistic western scenes, a Missourian named George Caleb Bingham, who would turn his talents to attacking the order. He produced a large crowded canvas, called simply General Order No. 11, which showed devastation and misery in many forms: smoke from burning homes rising in the background, prostrate and begging and weeping figures in the foreground, loaded wagons, a swaggering General Ewing in the center.
Among the inhabitants removed en masse by General Order No. 11 was an eleven-year-old girl riding in an oxcart with her mother and five sisters away from her burning home. She would one day, in the curious circling of history, become the mother of a president of the United States.
When President Truman’s mother visited him in the White House, he played a little joke on her, which we learn about in the memoirs of their fellow Missourian Clark Clifford, who was present when it happened. “Tonight, Mother,” said the president, “we are going to give you a special treat, a chance to sleep in the most famous room in the White House, the Lincoln Room, and in the very bed in which Abraham Lincoln slept.”
There was quiet in the group for a moment, Clark Clifford reported. Then Mrs. Truman spoke not to her son but to his wife. “Bess, if you’ll get my bags packed, I’ll be going back home this evening.” The president and the others burst out laughing, and eventually his mother understood that it was a joke and joined in. But initially it had been a serious matter. She was not going to spend the night in the bedroom of the man who bore ultimate responsibility for General Order No. 11.
BY WAY OF MITIGATING the blame on Lincoln personally for this nightmare and dark blot, we may suggest these considerations about the sadly “guerrilla-ridden and war-smitten state” of Missouri, as Lincoln’s secretaries would call it:
• The five-year Kansas-Missouri border war that preceded the Civil War in Missouri, before Lincoln or the Lincoln administration had any role, created terrible patterns of conduct, brutal memories, fierce resentments, and guerrilla warriors on both sides. This conduct continued right through the war and even beyond.
• Missouri had a wider range of opinion on slavery and Union than any other state, with a concentrated and radical antislavery German population in St. Louis, fierce defenders of slavery along the river that went back to the French, and conservative Unionists in the towns and rural areas. Missouri had, for example, two different kinds of Unionists who hated each other.
• Missouri had a toxic mixture of frontier violence with slave state violence.
• Missouri was a long way from Washington. Lincoln was dependent for information and help upon the Blair family, and the Blair family was inclined to simplifications and sharp swings of opinion.
That Missouri was secured for the Union by a virtual coup d’état was more a reflection than a cause of the state’s distinct extremism in politics and war. Lincoln was faced not with a tabula rasa on which to play out graceful alternatives but with fierce realities and narrow choices. Lincoln’s overwhelming priority—a sacred trust—was the maintenance of the Union, and to that end the securing of Missouri within the Union.
And the fact that it was more or less secured in the early going meant that for an overwhelmed war president it could thereafter be not a prime focus of attention but only an intermittent “torment”—his very own word about it.
Broad historical treatments of the American Civil War often cease dealing with the impossible complexities of the border states once they were more or less securely attached to the Union. But to put it mildly, the difficulties did not stop. This broad area, and Missouri in particular, would be the scene of continuing battles and of the worst guerrilla activity throughout the war.
LINCOLN, operating at the moral as well as the geographical border, had condoned if not instituted the arrest and imprisonment of state legislators as they were about to legislate, and of police commissioners, a police chief, and a mayor; had suspended habeas corpus and declined to honor an order by the chief justice of the United States; had sent troops to occupy a state not in rebellion and to provide the presence of force as voters went to the polls; had recognized as a governor a man appointed by delegates from less than a quarter of the counties of a state; had acquiesced in the division of an existing state on the thinnest of rationalizations; had surreptitiously sent arms to sympathetic civilians in a state that was not in rebellion; had insisted that a general’s order emancipating slaves be canceled, thereby infuriating his antislavery supporters; had acquiesced in the mustering of civilians directly into the federals’ service, skipping the
state militia; had jumped a captain all the way to brigadier general, ahead of a lifetime army man; and had condoned making war on an elected governor, driving him into exile. These and like acts to come would set terrible precedents for later chief executives, but they could be defended in their own time and place not only by the necessity but by the unique necessity of civil war, in which the physical and moral essence of the nation was at risk—uniquely at risk. These actions were made necessary by a profound and original irregularity: that the rebels sought to overthrow by force of arms the government that Lincoln was sworn to defend.
He did defend it. Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri were kept in the Union, and the western counties of Virginia were added to it. After four years of the mighty scourge of war, the Union would indeed be preserved.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Moral Meaning of the Union and the War
WHEN THE FRAMERS of the Constitution in Philadelphia wrote their sentence providing that the president may convene the houses of Congress, they said that he may do so “on extraordinary occasions.” President Lincoln in the spring of 1861 dealt with the most extraordinary occasion in the history of the republic. In the proclamation that he wrote in the dramatic moment after the fall of Sumter, issued on Monday, April 15, 1861, in addition to calling out the militia, he summoned Congress to meet July 4.
The framers of the Constitution also provided that the president “shall from time to time give Congress information of the state of the Union” the custom had developed that he do so at the start of each session of Congress. And so this new president, with all that was going on around him, managed to find the time—and, harder still, to clear his brain—to compose a most extraordinary message to this extraordinary session on this extraordinary occasion of rebellion and war. He covered the business of the hour, reporting to Congress on what he had done, asking for their retroactive endorsement, and making new requests. But he went much beyond that. He used this message to address the fundamental moral meaning of the war.
He first tried out his ideas on his two young assistants. John Hay in his diary for May 7 quoted Lincoln as saying: “I consider the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us, of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government if they choose.” John Nicolay wrote, in a memorandum dated the same day: “he [Lincoln] remarked that the real question involved in [the existing contest]…was whether a free and representative government had the right and power to protect and maintain itself. Admit the right of a minority to secede at will, and the occasion for such secession would almost as likely be any other as the slavery question.” Both Hay and Nicolay made clear that the little seminar in which the president made these remarks was part of his preparation to write the message to the special session. Hay wrote: “He is engaged in constant thought upon his Message: It will be an exhaustive review of the questions of the hour & of the future.” Nicolay, in a parenthesis, had Lincoln say of the idea he floated that “he should think further about it, while writing his message.”
The July 4 Message to the special session that came out of these scribblings was Lincoln’s first big production written as president of the United States. His First Inaugural Address had been the work of a president-elect when the nation was in an unresolved, anxious time. But the July 4 Message was written and edited—somehow—in the executive mansion by the president himself, in the midst of daily crises, after war had begun.
Although Seward again made an editorial reading of the draft and persuaded Lincoln to change a word here and there, his influence was slighter than it had been on the inaugural address. From the middle of June the president concentrated on writing his message. Nicolay reported that Lincoln “has refused to receive any calls whatever, either of friendship or business, except from members of the cabinet, or high officers.”
Unlike the inaugural address, the message to the special session was never presented by Lincoln to any public audience. At that time it was not the practice of presidents to present their messages in person to Congress; their words were read to Congress by clerks. Lincoln did review it at noon on July 3 with the cabinet, but only one person ever heard Lincoln actually read the message—the new senator from Illinois, Lincoln’s old friend Orville Browning. On the evening of July 3, the night before the special session began, Browning called at the executive mansion, and in the course of the visit Lincoln read the message to him. Lincoln scholar James G. Randall regrets that the message, read in a “perfunctory manner” to Congress and upstaged by the live address by the new Speaker of the House, received “inadequate notice.” “Not the large public, not the assembled Congress, the press and galleries, but one lone Senator, heard Lincoln’s oral delivery.”
Lincoln produced, as Douglas Wilson has shown, multiple drafts of this carefully composed production. As we noted on an earlier page, in first writing the heavily fraught passage answering Chief Justice Taney about habeas corpus—about his being charged with failing to “take care” that the laws be faithfully executed—Lincoln resorted to, or burst into, the first person: “I felt it my duty,” “my verbal request,” “I should consider my official oath broken.” This first-person passage has an immediacy and a force that contrast with the sometimes awkward formality of the other passages, and of later versions in which these deeds and duties are attributed to “the present incumbent” or “the administration” or most often to “the executive.” Perhaps it was necessary, given what was deemed appropriate in a presidential message, to shield the actor behind those impersonal descriptions, but one wishes the message could have been written in the first person, as he had first drafted that sensitive part of it.
He summarized for Congress what “the executive” had done in response to the rebellion and the firing on Fort Sumter: relying on the war power, he had issued a call to states for 75,000 militia; he had proclaimed the blockade of Southern ports (that is, “proceedings in the nature of blockade”); he had made a new call for volunteers on May 3, quickly following on the earlier one of April 15, now to serve not for three months as in the first call but for three years.
He had done these things, in the necessity of the case, without congressional approval, but he fully recognized the authority of Congress. He now asked Congress for retroactive sanction for what he had already done, and he made new requests: at least 400,000 men and $400 million. Congress—in which Southern withdrawals had left large Republican majorities—not only granted these presidential requests but also raised them, to 500,000 men and $500 million.
Lincoln could have stopped after the first half of this address, having reported to Congress what had happened and what he had done, and having made his requests. But now, gathering as we may suppose all his powers, he proceeded, as James Randall would put it, to “an exalted commentary on fundamentals.”
This exalted commentary was Lincoln’s first presidential statement of what was at stake in the war.
OUR NATIONAL DESTRUCTION CONSUMMATED
TO UNDERSTAND LINCOLN in this crisis, we must understand what the attempted secession meant to him: not the mere withdrawal of some states, leaving the others undamaged and the Union intact, but the dissolution of the Union, the destruction of free government—both words that he used more than once. The choice that he faced, as he stated it in the core of this address, was to “perform this duty [of calling on the war power], or surrender…the government.” He said the issue was whether “discontented individuals” can “break up their government, and thus practically put an end to free government on earth.”
To have acquiesced would have been “our national destruction consummated.” In the references to himself (“the executive”) in the penultimate paragraph, he asserted that the alternative to his performing his duty would have been to “surrender the existence of the government.”
This interpretation of the rebellion as a mortal threat to t
he United States of America itself would reappear in Lincoln’s utterances throughout the war. Even in the Second Inaugural, as he is graciously avoiding triumphalism and vindictiveness and evenhandedly insisting—perhaps more generously than the facts would justify—that in these first days “both parties deprecated war” and “all sought to avert it,” the way he described what the insurgents sought to do would still be stark: “insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it [the Union] without war” “one of [the two parties, both deprecating war] would make war, rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.” In both clauses the effect of the success of the rebellion—whether in war or by negotiation—would be deadly.
When one looks through all of Lincoln’s presidential utterances about the effect of a successful slave state rebellion, one is impressed, first, with how many different terms he used, and second, with how stark and how dire, they are. Lincoln used the following verbs, nouns, and phrases: “surrender” “destruction” “immediate dissolution” “our national destruction consummated” “go to pieces” “broken up” “fall into ruin” “the early destruction of our national Union” “abandon” “overthrow” “not survive” “perish.” And when one asks what entity it is that would be destroyed, dissolved, broken up, and overthrown, the answer is, variously and interchangeably, the Union, the government, the nation.
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 18
