President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman

by William Lee Miller

  But there are two deep errors in this view. In the first place, vindicating the Union was for Lincoln no mere power-political struggle but an undertaking with vast and universal moral significance—showing that free, popular, constitutional government could maintain itself, a project that, as Lincoln on one occasion said, goes down about as deep as anything.*26

  In the second place, the moral principles that Lincoln understood to define that Union placed slavery under condemnation from the start.

  As to the first point, Lincoln certainly did not regard the war, in 1861, as simply a realistic contest between two power units. And it was not slavery alone that made the Civil War for Lincoln a giant moral struggle; nor was it only after the Emancipation Proclamation that it became so for him. Nor did he present it as such only in the later great short utterance at the dedication of the cemetery in Gettysburg. A primary moral meaning of the war, for Lincoln, had been there from the start, as he set forth in his two important compositions of 1861, the First Inaugural Address and the July 4 Message to the special session.

  Lincoln’s first statement of the meaning of the war, in the July 4 Message, anticipated the famous formulation at Gettysburg:

  It [the war] presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes.

  His later statement, toward the end of the message, had an economic and social dimension:

  This is essentially a People’s contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.

  Douglas Wilson has noted, in Lincoln’s Sword, that Lincoln originally wrote “an even start” and then changed it (the one editorial change he made) to “an unfettered start”—surely a deliberate choice of a word in order “subtly to enhance the anti-slavery resonance.” One can scarcely say that a “contest” so understood is lacking in moral reach.

  This socially egalitarian understanding of the United States and of the stakes in the war would mark President Lincoln’s statements all the way through the war. Speaking to an Ohio regiment in the dark days of mid-August 1864, for example, he would say:

  I wish it might be more generally and universally understood what the country is now engaged in. We have, as all will agree, a free Government, where every man has a right to be equal with every other man. In this great struggle, 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. There is involved in this struggle the question whether your children and my children shall enjoy the privileges we have enjoyed.

  Four days later, to another Ohio regiment, he used himself as an example:

  I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has. It is in order that each of you may have through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence; that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations. It is for this the struggle should be maintained, that we may not lose our birthright—not only for one, but for two or three years. The nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel.

  As to the second point, Lincoln had an understanding of the Union’s moral essence that excluded slavery.

  President Lincoln understood it to be his oath-bound duty to preserve, protect, and defend the United States, whatever that might mean immediately about slavery. But it did not mean that slavery would be accepted as permanent and right. Lincoln had a six-year track record, after all, making clear his own position about slavery. Lincoln himself not only believed it to be wrong—if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong—and a monstrous injustice, but a wrong and an injustice as measured specifically by the moral foundation of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, with its affirmation that all men are created equal.

  Much of the Northern public, and English and other opinion abroad, did not yet perceive that Lincoln’s war purpose from the start included an implicit moral condemnation of slavery. But one audience did perceive it: the firebrands of South Carolina and the defenders of slavery across the Deep South. When he was elected—they revolted.

  Lincoln had made almost no mention of slavery in his inaugural, but the one mention he did make said everything. He used a formula that he had used before, one that avoided moralizing by simply describing the disagreement—but that still put down the marker: “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. This is the only substantial dispute.” It was a substantial dispute in which his own position was made clear—slavery was wrong.

  Lincoln had made the egalitarian premise of the Declaration of Independence, specifically including black persons, the centerpiece of his six-year argument with Stephen Douglas, and that premise was for him part of the core meaning of the constitutional union. When he made large statements of inclusive national ideals, like the one quoted above about lifting weights from all shoulders, he was implicitly including black persons. Those shoulders from which weights would be lifted—all shoulders—would for Lincoln include, though he would not make it explicit perhaps even to himself and certainly not to his listeners, the shoulders of black men.

  The next sentences in this paragraph in the message to the special session indicate again, in a backhanded way, that the eventual end of slavery was part of the meaning of Lincoln’s concept of the Union. “Yielding to partial, and temporary departures, from necessity,” wrote President Lincoln to Congress, “this [the unfettered fair start for all] is the leading object of the government for whose existence we contend.” What can he have meant by that preliminary concession about temporary partial yieldings to necessity except slavery? He meant that we must accept slavery in the states where it exists, but only by necessity and only temporarily, and not on principle and not forever.

  The moral purpose of Lincoln’s war at the beginning was not yet explicitly to generate “a new birth of freedom” it was rather to preserve, maintain, defend, and prevent the destruction of the old—but the old in Lincoln’s terms. The “old” government that the Union fought to maintain had for Lincoln an ideal and an aspirational content from which a new birth of freedom would one day spring.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Bull Run and Other Defeats

  Lincoln’s Resolve

  THE BITTERNESS OF DEFEAT

  ON THE EVENING of July 21, 1861, President Lincoln for the first time confronted the grim news of battlefield defeat. Nicolay would write, many years later, that the defeat was “inexpressibly bitter” because it was not only the first experience of defeat but the first “recognition of even the possibility of defeat.” Moreover, the defeat represented an excruciatingly painful reversal of expectations.

  A dispatch in the New York World by “Our Own Correspondent”(almost certainly young John Hay himself, writing anonymously, perhaps in the executive mansion itself) had described the electric anticipation when on July 16 General Irvin McDowell’s 34,000 Union troops tromped across the Potomac bridges and headed out toward Beauregard’s Confederate army of 24,000, encamped twenty-five miles to the west at Manassas Junction:

  The solemn midnight March of the grand army across the Potomac roused an intensity of feeling and expectancy…The marching regiments…were cheered on their departure with a lusty enthusiasm and hopefulness unprecedented in the annals. It was believed that the federal forces had started on a march to be crowned with brilliant victories; that the enemy w
ould be routed…their cannon captured, and intrenchments demolished. Under the bold leadership of our officers, the thunder of our batteries, and the heroic courage of our infantry columns, we were to march victoriously to Richmond. This was to break the bone of the Rebellion, to end the war, to restore again our nationality.

  None of this happened. “Our nationality” was not restored; to the contrary, the rebels were emboldened and almost had their own nationality created in the eyes of the world. The war was not ended but would stretch on through the weeks and months and years to a “magnitude” and a “duration” that neither side anticipated. The “grand army” would not march victoriously into Richmond; it would not make its way even to Manassas Junction. The “marching regiments” with “heroic courage” who had set forth across the bridges to the “lusty enthusiasm” of the populace on July 16 would come tumbling and scrambling and fleeing back into Washington, to the city’s dismay, on the evening of July 21. By the description not only of journalistic observers but also of their own commander, they had become “a confused mob, entirely demoralized.”

  Messages from the front coming into the telegraph office first aroused, then punctured, expectations of victory; during that one day they executed a complete and abrupt turnaround, from apparent triumph to undeniable defeat.

  When President Lincoln returned from church that Sunday morning, he went promptly over to the telegraph office to read the dispatches on the fighting that was going on some thirty miles to the west. A wire from “near Fairfax” at 1:10 p.m. made its positive point by indirection: “Firing more in the distance and greatly slackened. No guns at Centreville since last dispatch. 10 mins interval still fainter and less guns. You can draw your own inference.” The inference to be drawn was that the Union forces were about to achieve a great victory. Lincoln was reading these wires as they came in every fifteen minutes or so and talking to visitors who returned early from the front. At 3:00 p.m. the succinct dispatch said simply: “Firing ceased 10 minutes since.” Lincoln ate a late lunch at 3:30 p.m., and when he returned, a wire sent at 5:20 p.m. had good news: “I am en route to Washington with details of great battle. We have carried the day—Rebels accepted battle in their strength but are totally routed.”

  Lincoln went out for a Sunday drive, thinking the battle was won, but while he was gone the reports reversed themselves. Indeed, a dispatch from General McDowell, who was in charge of the attack, sent at 5:45 p.m. from Centreville, rather turned around within the one message:

  We passed Bull Run. Engaged the enemy, who, it seems, had just been reenforced by General Johnston. We drove them for several hours, and finally routed them.

  They rallied and repulsed us, but only to give us again the victory, which seemed complete.

  If Lincoln stopped reading at that point, he might have felt that, although it would be hard-won and fragile, the Union was winning a victory. But McDowell’s dispatch went on:

  But our men, exhausted with fatigue and thirst and confused by firing into each other, were attacked by the enemy’s reserves, and driven from the position we had gained, overlooking Manassas. After this the men could not be rallied, but slowly left the field.

  McDowell’s next wire, from Fairfax Court House rather than Centreville (that is, five miles back toward Washington), must have been still more dismaying to the readers in the telegraph office:

  The men having thrown away their haversacks in the battle and left them behind, they are without food; have eaten nothing since breakfast. We are without artillery ammunition. The larger part of the men are a confused mob, entirely demoralized. It was the opinion of all the commanders that no stand could be made this side of the Potomac. We will, however, make the attempt at Fairfax Court-House. From a prisoner we learn that 20,000 from Johnston joined last night, and they march on us to-night.

  The Johnston in this and the earlier message was the Confederate general Joseph Johnston, whose ten thousand troops in the Shenandoah Valley were supposed to have been kept out of the fight by a Union force under sixty-nine-year-old Robert Patterson. But Johnston feinted Patterson out of the battle altogether, and Johnston’s troops, showing up late in the day, spooked the exhausted Union soldiers. The failure of Patterson to tie down Johnston’s force would be one of the explanations, Patterson one of the culprits, when the time came for explaining the Union defeat at Bull Run.

  A distraught Seward brought the miserable story to the White House at six o’clock, while Lincoln was still on his drive. When at 6:30 p.m. Lincoln returned, it was his secretaries (they tell us) who broke the bad news to their president. “He listened in silence, without the slightest change of…expression, and walked away to army headquarters.” The telegram that made the point plain came from a captain of engineers:

  General McDowell’s army in full retreat through Centreville. The day is lost. Save Washington and the remnants of this army. All available troops ought to be thrown forward in one body. General McDowell is doing all he can to cover the retreat…The routed troops will not reform.

  General in Chief Winfield Scott, who did not quite believe “the bad news from McDowell’s army,” nevertheless sent wires to the commanders in Baltimore and Alexandria to be alert against uprisings.

  THE NIGHT THAT FOLLOWED was bad, and the day after was worse—Black Monday, soaked in rain. “There was never such a day here before,” wrote “our special correspondent” to the New York World from a rain-drenched Washington, and

  it is to be hoped there never will be another. With the ushering in of daylight there came pouring into the city crowds of soldiers, some with muskets, some without muskets, some with knapsacks, some without knapsack, or canteen, or belt, or anything but their soiled and dirty uniform, burned faces and eyes, that looked as [if] they had had not sleep for days, to indicate that they were soldiers.

  The report represents an immediate and on-the-spot description of Lincoln’s first encounter with modern warfare in the large:

  One by one came wagons filled with the dead and wounded. Most horrible were the sights presented to view, and never to be forgotten by those who witnessed them. The bodies of the dead were piled on top of one another; the pallid faces and blood-stained garments telling a fearfully mute but sad story of the horrors of war. And the appearance of the wounded, bereft of arms, of legs, eyes put out, flesh wounds in the face and body, and uniforms crimsoned with blood, proclaimed with equal force the savage horrors of human battling with weapons of war.

  ALL GREEN ALIKE

  THE NOVICE in the executive mansion bore the ultimate responsibility for this debacle. It was his decision, or his endorsement of the collective decision, to make the attack at Bull Run in the first place, at least to make it as soon as it was made. One can surely argue that on this occasion he should have taken General in Chief Winfield Scott’s advice, reinforced by McDowell. Scott had originally proposed as the Union’s overarching military strategy the squeezing envelope around the South that would be derided as the “Anaconda” plan. But Northern impatience seemed to mock and reject anything as slow and long-term—and tender on the South—as that. The militias that had been pouring into Washington now made an army bigger than any American army had ever been, 34,000 troops encamped in Alexandria. And there was General Beauregard from Fort Sumter, now with 24,000 Confederate troops, sitting out there at a key railroad junction just twenty-five miles from Washington. They were a threat to the nation’s capital. Moreover, capturing Manassas would open the road to the new Confederate capital, Richmond. Lincoln had asked General McDowell for a plan of attack, and on June 29 at the executive mansion his cabinet and military advisers considered the plan that the general proposed. McDowell wanted to postpone its commencement because his troops were green, and because he did not want to fight the war “piecemeal.” As to the greenness, Lincoln is reported to have told McDowell, “You are green, it is true, but they are green also; you are all green alike.”

  The president and the general who would command on the Union s
ide were also green. Historian James Rawley describes the situation: “A Commander-in-Chief, innocent of military affairs, a General-in-Chief, archaic in knowledge of his staff, and a field commander, inexperienced in handling large bodies of troops, launched a great offensive to end the war in one mighty swoop.”

  As to the widespread and reciprocal greenness, the two sets of troops had this significant difference: Captain of Engineers D.P. Woodbury noted that the green Confederates were fighting on the defensive while the green Yankees had to mount an offensive attack. In his July 30 report Woodbury gave this diagnosis of the Union army’s disintegration:

  An old soldier feels safe in the ranks, unsafe out of the ranks, and the greater the danger the more pertinaciously he clings to his place. The volunteer of three months never attains this instinct of discipline. Under danger, and even under mere excitement, he flies away from his ranks, and looks for safety in dispersion. At 4 o’clock in the afternoon of the 21st there were more than twelve thousand volunteers on the battle-field of Bull Run who had entirely lost their regimental organizations. They could no longer be handled as troops, for the officers and men were not together. Men and officers mingled together promiscuously…We cannot suppose that the troops of the enemy had attained a higher degree of discipline than our own, but they acted on the defensive, and were not equally exposed to disorganization.