President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman

by William Lee Miller

  Lincoln was in foreign affairs what admirers would one day praise him for in military affairs: one who without experience and without technical knowledge nevertheless “grasped the main facts and gave them their proper value.” He not only listened to and learned from but also managed Seward, Sumner, and even Adams.

  He was also the key agent making strong currents that moved much deeper than the episodes on the surface: bringing the rulers and peoples of the world to see who would win the war and what the war was about. The victories he was constantly pushing for finally demonstrated that the U.S. government would prevail in the end, so realistic power-balancing governments of the world would begin to tilt accordingly.

  Meanwhile, he had generated another force that went beyond all that; in the Emancipation Proclamation and steps he took after it, he redefined for the world the moral meaning of the one war in which he was engaged.

  THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR had an enormous presence in British public opinion. Aristocrats, Tories, the British upper classes, and the thundering Times tended to favor those gentlemen in the South who wanted to separate from the vulgar democracy and crass Yankee materialism in the North. A distinguished modern American historian would write: “[I]t remains one of the unsolved mysteries of nineteenth century history that the most anti-slavery nation on earth, Great Britain, harbored so much sentimental identification with the Confederacy.”

  That identification was, however, far from universal; radical and liberal opinion in the middle and working classes of England included a considerable support for the Union. Lincoln saw that this support could be encouraged by American action—which he vigorously set out to provide.

  Lincoln had a realistic awareness of the economic context of slavery that not every opponent of slavery, distant from the institution, would display. In one potent argument indicating the spread of general complicity in it, he observed “how unhesitatingly we all use cotton and sugar, and share the profits in dealing in them.”

  As the war, and the blockade, moved into late 1862, that unhesitating use of cotton, and sharing in profits, had international consequences. King Cotton, American slavery’s biggest crop, was made into clothing in Lancashire in England. When the American Civil War broke out and Lincoln ordered the blockade of Southern ports, it shut off the supply of raw cotton to the English mills. They had sufficient goods to last the duration of the short war that was then generally expected, but by October 1861 the mills began to cut back or close, and workers were put on short hours or thrown out of work. Soup kitchens sprang up. “Outdoor relief.” The dole. Pawnshops. Unemployed young men roamed the streets. “The American Civil War was becoming a matter of dire concern,” Bruce Catton writes, “to hundreds of thousands of men and women who had barely heard of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis and did not know Alabama from Michigan.”

  At the time the cotton famine was at its worst, in September and October 1862, the political leaders of Great Britain would have their severest temptation to intervene in the American war. McClellan’s huge and well-drilled Army of the Potomac had accomplished nothing. The Union armies had managed to be defeated twice now at Bull Run. Robert E. Lee was poised to take the offensive, striking north. The great British liberal W. E. Gladstone, chancellor of the exchequer, in a speech in Newcastle October 7 said:

  Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either—they have made a nation…We may anticipate with certainty the success of the Southern States so far as regards their separation from the North.

  The British cabinet considered making a formal proposal to mediate the American war, an intervention that would have ripped the Union and implicitly granted the rebels all that they wanted.

  But in these same months came a tremendous contending influence on British opinion: the preliminary emancipation proclamation on September 22 and the final Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day of 1863. The London Times would sneer that Lincoln had freed the slaves where he had no power but kept slaves in bondage where he did have power; but for broad segments of English opinion the proclamation clinched the identification of the South with slavery, the North with freedom, and the American war with the universal struggle for justice.

  A series of “remarkable meetings” were held in “York, Bolton, Halifax, Sheffield, Birmingham, Leicester, Preston, Coventry, Manchester, and at the Great Exeter Hall in London.” James Randall calls them “spontaneous gatherings” David Herbert Donald writes that “Lincoln himself began a campaign to win popular support in Great Britain, where, with some hidden subvention from American funds, numerous public meetings were held.”

  In Manchester and in London great meetings were held on the evening of December 31, 1862, in anticipation of Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation the next day. The meetings affirmed central Lincolnian points: the unique place of the United States in the history of liberty and equality (“a singular, happy abode for the working millions”); the one huge wrong, human slavery, that alone marred that distinct place (“the slavery and degradation of men guilty only of a colored skin or an African parentage”); and the significance of the Union effort, and Lincoln’s deeds, in overcoming that one huge wrong (“we have discerned…that the victory of the free North…will strike off the fetters of the slave.”)

  These British meetings addressed him; Lincoln could then write a response.

  I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the workingmen at Manchester and in all Europe are called to endure in this crisis.

  It has been often…represented that the attempt to overthrow this government, which was built upon the foundation of human rights, and to substitute for it one which should rest exclusively on the basis of human slavery, was likely to obtain the favor of Europe.

  Through the actions of our disloyal citizens the workingmen of Europe have been subjected to a severe trial, for the purpose of forcing their sanction to that attempt…

  Under these circumstances, I cannot but regard your decisive utterance…as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country.

  To tell the truth, the great meetings in Manchester and the other cities were more the doing of middle-class reformers than of actual textile mill workers (“workingmen and others,” the Manchester statement said significantly). And the opinions of actual working-class families about the American war were varied. And to be sure, the Confederacy did not deliberately cause the cotton famine in order to bring Europe to its side. Nevertheless, many textile mill working-class families in the English Midlands, offered the chance to blame their economic distress on the Union’s refusal to let the cotton South go, would, to their own perceived disadvantage, support Lincoln in a war against human slavery.

  Lincoln said this was a “reinspiring assurance of…the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity, and freedom.”

  To “the workingmen of London,” Lincoln anticipated Gettysburg: “It seems to have devolved [upon the American people] to test whether a government, established on the principles of human freedom, can be maintained against an effort to build one upon the exclusive foundation of human bondage.”

  Rebel intellectuals and English sympathizers liked to compare the Confederacy to Greece and Rome. Lincoln cut that connection: the Confederacy alone was uniquely, exclusively, originally founded on slavery, promoting slavery.

  Lincoln did not often use the word “Christian” as a moral modifier, but it came to his pen in the winter and spring of 1863 when he addressed Englishmen. Apparently he felt that when he was addressing Europe, he should invoke her ancient religious identity as a moral norm. The previous summer when a disgruntled McClellan had insisted that the war be conducted “upon the highest principles known to Christian civilization,” he had meant a gentlemanly limited war that protected property (including slavery). When Lincoln used the word “Christian” in his praise for the workingmen’s “s
ublime Christian heroism,” he meant self-sacrifice for righteous principle—against the evil of slavery. When he wrote of “the family of Christian and civilized nations” and “all Christian and civilized men everywhere,” he meant nations, and human beings, who treat all men with charity as children of God—rejecting the monstrous injustice of slavery.

  These last two phrases appear in a curious little document that Lincoln wrote in the spring of 1863. One day in April Lincoln sent for Senator Sumner and showed him a proposed resolution, written in his own hand on the back of a page of executive mansion stationery, which he said might be adopted by public meetings in England. There is no record of this actually happening—an English public gathering adopting this resolution ghostwritten for them by an American president—but it is interesting to see what he tried to get them to say.*39 Lincoln would be particularly intent to plant firmly in British opinion the understanding of the Confederacy as a uniquely obnoxious government in the “Christian” West. Whereas some nations in the past had tolerated slavery, the Confederacy proposed now to construct a new nation “upon the basis of, and with the primary, and fundamental object to maintain, enlarge, and perpetuate human slavery.” The proposal Lincoln drafted resolved then that no such state “should ever be recognized by, or admitted into, the family of Christian and civilized nations and that all Christian and civilized men everywhere should…resist to the utmost such recognition or admission.”

  The English friend to whom Sumner sent this proposal—sent the actual paper itself with Lincoln’s signature—was the great liberal parliamentary leader John Bright, who was a strong supporter of the American Union. At the time of the Trent affair Bright had given a speech in Rochdale that helped to dampen the fire of British outrage. During the cotton famine in December 1862 Bright gave an address in Birmingham about American politics that included a quotation from a source that Lincoln knew well, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” The quatrain from which Bright borrowed, assuming his hearers would recognize it, deals with vicious acts that, along with glorious accomplishments, the poor folk in this cemetery were prevented from achieving by “chill penury.” By being born poor they missed their chance to “wade through slaughter to a throne, and shut the gates of mercy on mankind.” Bright changed the word “slaughter” to the word “slavery” and applied the lines to the project of the Confederacy. Abraham Lincoln found it to be something he wanted to preserve and wrote it out in his own hand: “I can not believe that civilization, in its journey with the sun, will sink into endless night, to gratify the ambition of the leaders of this revolt, who seek to wade through slavery to a throne, and shut the gate of mercy on mankind.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Too Vast for Malicious Dealing

  NOT MANY HEADS OF STATE with Lincoln’s power of appointment would maintain in the two most eminent positions in their nation’s military, as Lincoln did throughout most of 1862, two men who were capable of calling him a “gorilla.” General McClellan had already, in letters to his wife back in 1861 when he first arrived in town, called the president an “idiot” (August 16) and a “well-meaning baboon” (October 11); then in a letter on November 17 he referred to Lincoln as “the original gorilla” and again as “the gorilla,” putting these terms in quotation marks to indicate he was borrowing them from his new friend, the attorney general left over from the Buchanan administration, Edwin Stanton. For a brief time in late 1861 these two Democrats collaborated, and part of their collaboration was their shared disdain for the Republican president. When McClellan wrote to his wife, on October 31, 1861, that he was “concealed” in order to dodge all enemies in the shape of browsing presidents, it was in Stanton’s house that he was hiding.

  If Lincoln had been a holder of grudges, Edwin Stanton would have been a prime candidate for a Lincoln grudge. Back in 1855 Lincoln the provincial lawyer had been royally snubbed in a national law case about reapers in Cincinnati, and Stanton had been a full participant in the snubbing.

  Stanton’s anti-Lincoln sins were then compounded when Lincoln, unlikely as it would have seemed to anyone in the Cincinnati courtroom in 1855, had been nominated by the new Republican Party and elected president of the United States in 1860, and Stanton, as one of the few in Buchanan’s Washington who had ever met this westerner, had made no secret that he thought him a “low, cunning clown.” In the first months of the Lincoln administration Stanton, writing to fellow Democrats, applied to the new president a term of abuse widely used in nineteenth-century American politics: “imbecility.” And then he met fellow Democrat George McClellan and joined him in comparing the president to primates.

  Nevertheless, when in mid-January 1862 Lincoln was able to move the feckless Simon Cameron out of the War Department and appoint him minister to Russia, he reached out and appointed the able, experienced, and strongly Union-supporting Democrat Edwin Stanton to the centrally important position of secretary of war, which turned out to be a superb appointment.

  Stanton’s opinion of Lincoln soon changed radically, and his opinion of McClellan changed radically too. And Stanton was soon at the top of McClellan’s enemies list. Stanton took the telegraph office away from McClellan’s headquarters and located it in the War Department, and on examining the files he gave voice to an opinion about McClellan’s dilatory parading around in Washington that was destined to be repeated often in histories of the war: “While men are striving nobly in the West, the champagne and oysters on the Potomac must be stopped.”

  Stanton’s biographers would say about Lincoln and Stanton: “[B]ecause Lincoln was a great man, Stanton reached in his service a plane far higher than his more prosaic spirit could have touched.” McClellan’s biographers would say nothing of the kind.

  In his valedictory outburst in late October 1862, McClellan would revert to his prime epithet, and he would significantly include “socially” in the list of his superiorities: “[T]he good of the country requires me to submit to all this [‘mean and dirty’ dispatches, ‘wretched innuendo’] from men whom I know to be greatly my inferiors socially, intellectually, and morally! There never was a truer epithet applied to a certain individual than that of the ‘Gorilla.’”

  Stanton’s contrasting valedictory to Lincoln would come on April 14, 1865: “Now he belongs to the ages.”

  LINCOLN TAKES DEFINITIVE STEPS

  IF YOU HAD KNOWN LINCOLN in Illinois before he became president, you would not have been surprised that in the presidency he would be capable of overlooking slights to himself and would be forbearing and generous. What you could not have known—what Lincoln himself did not know—was whether he could, at the same time, command armies and make the demanding decisions of a nation at war. He had been an active politician, a writer of excellent speeches, and a political organizer, and in those roles he had been an unusually kind and forgiving person. But did he have, to use the phrase of a future secretary of state, Dean Acheson, “the stuff of command”?

  The stuff of command, especially in a giant deadly conflict, would not seem ordinarily to combine very well with the stuff of forbearance and generosity. Executive skill and vigor, like a surgeon’s skill, would appear to require a certain withdrawal of empathy. The resolution necessary to great statesmanship would appear to invite, if not even to require, a certain ruthlessness with those whose wills and whose complex humanity complicate, impede, and even defy one’s vigorously pursued purpose.

  A moral agent who has as his gigantic central duty the preservation of a nation (as Lincoln suddenly would) would have to use the ultimate resort, violent coercion—physical force, armies, navies, artillery, bombardment, killing an opposing force. This nation-state, like all others, would have a “monopoly of legitimate violence” and would use that means to defend itself at the decision of a political leader, with all the moral hazards that entails. Would the amiable politician from the plains be able to do that well?

  Lincoln showed that he could make shrewd decisions about the use of force ri
ght away in the first days of his presidency, but the necessity of making more decisions kept coming.

  Every day of Lincoln’s presidency was fraught with wartime decision, but some moments were even heavier than others: April 1861, and the aftermath of Bull Run in July, as we have seen. In July 1862 President Lincoln would face another particularly heavy moment. He had to make huge decisions that altered the character of the war.

  When General McClellan did not go “on to Richmond” and Union hopes slumped, Lincoln had to confront the fact that this rebellion against the United States was not going to be suppressed by the limited means with which the Union at first had conducted the war.

  On July 7–10, 1862, Lincoln visited McClellan at his peninsula headquarters and, as we have seen, did not respond to this general’s presumptuous letter proposing a limited war that did not touch slavery. On July 12, in a famous carriage ride, Lincoln revealed to two cabinet members his intention to issue a proclamation that would free slaves in territory still in rebellion. At a cabinet meeting on July 21 the president, according to Secretary Chase’s diary, revealed that he “had been profoundly concerned at the present state of affairs, and had determined to take some definitive steps in respect to military action and slavery.” It is significant that the first whisper of the Emancipation Proclamation and the military steps to a wider war were decided upon together. The “definitive steps” about slavery would come to include the preliminary emancipation proclamation, a draft of which he would read to the cabinet on the next day, July 22.