President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman

by William Lee Miller

  When Sherman made his famous remark that “war is hell,” extemporaneously, to a group of veterans fifteen years after the war, he apparently had in mind a repudiation not of all restraint but of all romanticizing of war. (“Its glory is all moonshine,” one report has him saying.) But in another context, during the war itself, another oft-quoted line of his did indeed mean what the world has taken him to have meant. As he stood before Atlanta, Sherman had a remarkable exchange both with the young Confederate general John B. Hood and with the mayor and city councilmen of Atlanta. His demand that Atlanta be evacuated became an occasion for a discussion of morality in warfare. Sherman approximated his signature statement, this one also to be often quoted in the years to come: “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty and you cannot refine it, and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.” Lincoln did not say anything like that. Sherman went on:

  You might as well appeal against the thunderstorm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable, and the only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace and quiet at home is to stop the war…The South began war by seizing forts, arsenals, mints, custom-houses, &c., long before Mr. Lincoln was installed and before the South had one jot or tittle of provocation.

  Sherman’s commander in chief in Washington might have said those things, but he did not; he did not continually emphasize the blame on the South for starting the war, in order then to provide the justification for the destruction that his armies wreaked. And moralist though he was, he did not indulge in the continual self-justification that Sherman did.

  Although as much as anyone he saw giant moral issues in the war, Lincoln did not see evil concentrated exclusively on the other side or see his own side as altogether in the right; he recognized throughout his career the complicity of the North in the sin of slavery.

  It requires a distinct moral and intellectual discipline to achieve the combination that Lincoln achieved as war leader: the ability to prosecute the war with persistent energy to subdue the will of the enemy, without indulging in the passionate simplifications that war engenders.

  Lincoln’s attitude toward the treatment of Confederate leaders will serve as a symbol of his larger outlook. A member of Lincoln’s own cabinet, the comparatively moderate secretary of the navy Gideon Welles, certainly no “radical,” wrote in his diary of June 1, 1864: “No traitor has been hung. I doubt of there will be, but an example should be made of some of their leaders, for present and for future good.” But Lincoln did not believe in such executions after the war. He hoped the rebel leaders would escape; in any case, he did not propose their execution. When at the end of the war the subject came up—the war crimes of Confederate leaders, now in territory about to come into the control of Union forces—President Lincoln, according to Welles in his diary, said that he “was particularly desirous to avoid the shedding of blood, or any vindictiveness or punishment. No one need expect that he would take any part in hanging or killing these men, even the worst of them.” His suggestion? “Frighten them out of the country…scare them off,” Lincoln said, throwing up his hands, according to Welles, as if to scare sheep.

  The decisions about what actually to do with the Confederate leaders would be made by others, after Lincoln was dead, but surely his influence played a role. While Lincoln was still alive, Grant handed Lee his sword and returned their horses to the Confederate officers at Appomattox. No high Confederate official, political or military, was executed, not even Jefferson Davis, who was released after two years in prison. No Southern generals were imprisoned, let alone executed. Temporary exile was the severest penalty any other Confederate official suffered.

  Lincoln was quite explicit in disavowing vengeance. In the draft of a letter to Secretary of War Stanton in March 1864, the president said, “[The government] can properly have no motive of revenge, no purpose to punish merely for punishment’s sake.” On November 19, 1864, he wrote to General William Rosecrans: “I wish you to do nothing merely for revenge, but that what you may do shall be solely done with reference to the security of the future.”

  That is a particularly clear statement of Lincoln’s position: do nothing “merely” for revenge, do whatever may be done “solely” for the security of the future. But what the security of the future required would be disputed. Lincoln would, once again, with respect to that policy point, recommend generosity, or the avoidance of harsh treatment. He wrote in his March 18, 1864, letter to Stanton: “While we must, by all available means, prevent the overthrow of the government, we should avoid planting and cultivating too many thorns in the bosom of society.” That was a figure of speech he would use on other occasions. In response to a “serenade” (a friendly visit by citizens) on November 11, 1864—after the 1864 election—he said: “So long as I have been here I have not willingly planted a thorn in any man’s bosom.”

  In the whole sweep of human history there cannot have been many war leaders—especially in civil wars, especially in wars on the giant scale of the American Civil War—who could make such a claim.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Temptation in August

  WHEN WE THINK NOW about the presidential election of 1864, we know who won, and we have made the winner into a national monument. Therefore it is not easy for us to think our way back before that election and to accept the idea that this monumental figure really might have been defeated. But if we are to appreciate the temptations and decisions of August 1864, we must really imagine this: for a moment Lincoln himself believed, with good reason, that he would lose. And that belief put him in a tight moral squeeze.

  AS DESPERATE FIGHTING AS THE WORLD HAS EVER WITNESSED

  LINCOLN WAS in deep political trouble in the summer of 1864 mainly because of the appalling news from the battlefield. Abruptly reversing the high hopes of early spring, the reports began in May to tell of failure, stalemate, defeat, and, in June, carnage. The overarching design by the new general in chief, U. S. Grant, to press the Confederate armies simultaneously at all points—much as Lincoln had wanted his generals to do all along—when actually put into execution began to falter at almost all points. Three politicians appointed to generalships who had ancillary roles all demonstrated plainly the defects of political generals. Former Speaker of the House Nathaniel Banks, out in the Department of the Gulf, “failed to accomplish what he had been sent to do on the Red River, and eliminated the use of forty thousand veterans whose cooperation in the grand campaign had been expected.” In the Shenandoah Valley, from which Grant expected good news, he was told instead: “[Franz] Sigel is in full retreat…He will do nothing but run; never did anything else.” Benjamin Butler moved too slowly on Richmond with the Army of the James and got his army bottled up between rivers, and “the enemy had corked the bottle and with a small force could hold the cork in its place.”

  But the most devastating reports would come from the focus of primary attention, the Army of the Potomac. With that ill-starred army Grant himself*69 engaged Robert E. Lee in relentless, brutal, and apparently endless battle for two bloody months, to no apparent gain, with a new level of casualties, in “as desperate fighting as the world has ever witnessed.” In the battle of the Wilderness the armies fought for three inconclusive and terrible days (May 3–5) in the confusing thicket of underbrush and trees not far from the site of the battle of Chancellorsville. The war had gone on so long that multiple spots in Virginia had been fought over repeatedly. The Union forces in the Wilderness had a staggering seventeen thousand casualties. Instead of withdrawing, as past commanders of the Army of the Potomac would have done, Grant kept after Lee and fought a two-week series of gory battles at Spotsylvania Court House. The grisliest fighting was still to come. Grant pursued Lee to a desolate crossroads outside Richmond called Cold Harbor, where he ordered an attack on the entrenched Confederates. There were seven thousand Union casualties in less than an hour. In this battle some Union
soldiers are reported to have pinned to their uniforms little notices of their names and addresses, in the expectation that they would be killed. If a full report of the concentrated killing at Cold Harbor on June 3 had reached the public in a timely fashion, the despair of the Northern public would have been even deeper than it was.

  While Grant was sending troops into apparently futile killing fields in Virginia, Sherman was stymied in front of Atlanta and lost a difficult battle at Kennesaw Mountain. Shortly thereafter Confederate general Jubal Early brought despair of another kind to the Northern public: he made humiliating cavalry raids up into Maryland towns, and on July 11 he turned up right under the government’s nose, in Silver Spring, on the outskirts of Washington, threatening the capital itself. If Oliver Wendell Holmes, a young officer on duty during the firing on Fort Stevens, really did say to the tall civilian president standing there observing the battle, “Get down, you damned fool,” it was on July 12, during this raid.†70 At the end of July, Early produced another humiliation for the North: when the residents of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, refused to come up with half a million dollars, he burned the city to the ground.

  The almost unremitting bad news from the war, after three and a half years of exploded hopes and wrenching disappointments, brought an enormous yearning for peace and deeply eroded the political standing of the commander in chief.

  The usual link between a war president’s popularity and the progress of the war was tightened by this president’s close identification with this particular war. He had appointed these generals and urged them on and backed them. He certainly knew, as well as anyone, the war’s terrible costs. “[The war] has carried mourning to almost every home,” he told the Great Central Sanitary Fair in Philadelphia on June 16, with his characteristic literary flair, “until it can almost be said ‘the Heavens are hung in black.’” And yet in that same speech he gave a grimly determined answer to the universal question: When will this cruel war be over? He said, “We accepted this war for an object, a worthy object, and the war will end when that object is attained.” He even went on to underscore that answer: “Under God, I hope it never will end until that time.” “General Grant is reported to have said I am going through on this line if it takes all summer,” Lincoln told the Philadelphia fairgoers. “…I say we are going through on this line if it takes three years more.”

  WE CAN NOT HAVE FREE GOVERNMENT WITHOUT ELECTIONS

  LOOMING OVER the carnage on the battlefield was the anticipation of the presidential election coming in November. The familiar line from Clause-witz of course works in reverse: armies also pursue their military ends by means of politics. The two means, politics and war, affect each other, especially in a war over issues internal to one nation. The coming election entered into the military calculations on both sides: even after his troops suffered horrendous losses, Grant would fight “on this line if it takes all summer,” in part because withdrawing would hurt the administration politically; Lee, in spite of his horrendous losses and exhausted manpower reserves, fought on in the hope that the election would change the Union’s commander and therefore its policy.

  It is altogether to the credit both of Abraham Lincoln and of the United States that in the midst of this mighty scourge of war, and indeed at one of its most perilous moments, this election went forward as scheduled and proceeded without violence to an honest result. “I am struggling to maintain government, not to overthrow it,” Lincoln said to another serenade, on October 19, 1864—that is, before the election. “We can not have free government without elections,” he said afterward. “If the rebellion could force us to forgo, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.” Holding the election as scheduled, with all its strife, would do a great good. “It has demonstrated that a people’s government can sustain a national election, in the midst of a great civil war. Until now it has not been known to the world that this was a possibility.”

  WHAT IS THE PRESIDENCY TO ME IF I HAVE NO COUNTRY?

  THE ELECTION would not be postponed—and neither would the deeply unpopular call for troops. On July 19 Grant wrote Lincoln that he should issue an immediate call for 300,000 troops; his esteem for his chief was boosted when he learned that Lincoln had the previous day issued a call not for 300,000 but for 500,000 troops. Moreover, the call planted some political dynamite in the president’s own path to reelection; although it sought volunteers, the bottom of the barrel had been scraped, and in fact volunteers were going to be few. Lincoln’s call also provided that “in every town, township, ward of a city, precinct or election district” in which volunteers had not filled the assigned quota, a draft for troops to serve one year should be held immediately after September 5. (In other words, at the worst possible time for the October and November elections.) Grant, Sherman, and Union soldiers in the field were much gratified by Lincoln’s call, which would reinforce them and put devastating new pressure on the weakened rebel armies. But the call for troops, with the sting of a draft in its tail, was, to put it mildly, not welcomed by the Northern public or by Republican politicians, who urged the president to modify or postpone it. But he would not do it. “What is the presidency to me,” Lincoln said to a protesting Ohio committee, “if I have no country?” Republican leaders in Indiana in particular pleaded with him to postpone the draft until after the election. He did what he could do to help in that difficult state, which had not provided, as other states had done, for soldiers to vote in the field; he wrote a letter to General Sherman in which he urged (but did not order) the general to let Indiana soldiers go home to vote. But he nevertheless flatly stated in that same letter that “the draft proceeds, notwithstanding its strong tendency to lose us the state.” Mark Neely writes, “Lincoln’s clear-sighted unwillingness to allow partisan concerns to interfere with decisions critical to the army was an admirable trait crucial to winning a major war in a democracy.”

  But however admirable in the large view, the draft was politically staggering in the short view. It was another element, alongside military stalemate and bloody casualty lists, that endangered Lincoln’s reelection. The revulsion at the war after three and a half years and after the shock of defeats in the early summer was deep. The desire for peace was palpable, ubiquitous, immense. The Copperheads—Peace Democrats—surged in strength, and the yearning for peace affected all parties.*71 The great amorphous atmosphere of public opinion, filled with yearning and revulsion and hope and frustration, can hold contradictions without reconciling them, impossibilities without testing them against reality. The public yearned deeply now for peace. At the same time much of the public wanted badly to preserve or restore the Union. And out of these yearnings came the illusion that somehow they could have both—the end of this awful war, but also the country put back together. The shrewdest of rebels saw that it was not their role to enlighten the Northern public that achieving “peace” now would not bring reunion.

  BLAMING BLACKS AND EMANCIPATION AND LINCOLN

  AND IF PEACE was not to be, those who desired it had a familiar scapegoat: the black man. Hostility to emancipation was a noxious part of the illusion that one could have peace with reunion. The Emancipation Proclamation, and the recruitment of black soldiers, had found favor with a significant part of the public, going beyond the older antislavery circles, and also among generals and ordinary soldiers, as black soldiers fought bravely at Port Hudson, Milliken’s Bend, Fort Wagner, and other places. At the same time, however, the entrenched racial prejudice planted deep in the culture by 250 years of slavery persisted; it was pervasive in the North as well as the South, and much of the hostility was grounded in what would later come to be called “racism.” It was there already; it was magnified by the frustration of stalemate, bloodshed, and defeat; and it was manipulated and exploited for political purposes. The Democratic Party campaign against Lincoln and the Republicans in 1864 would be the most explicitly and virulently racist campaign by a major party in American history.*72
In a repugnant hoax intended to heighten racist hostility to emancipation, two Democratic newspapermen would invent the word “miscegenation,” pandering to fears of an alleged threat to white women by black males and of the mixture of “racial” lines in the population. In the setting of 1864 that theme was tied to the war: Lincoln was continuing the war in order to free slaves and bring about racial equality and amalgamation. The notion that Lincoln’s insistence on freeing slaves was impeding the achievement of a peace with reunion was widespread, including among the War Democrats, whom Lincoln needed in order to be reelected.

  OUR BLEEDING COUNTRY LONGS FOR PEACE

  LINCOLN HAD to pay attention to peace illusions even though he knew they were illusions. The loquacious vibraphone Horace Greeley, whose itinerary through Civil War politics would resemble the homeward journey of a New Year’s Eve reveler, was now on the side of negotiating peace. His was a voice Lincoln could not ignore, however much he might have liked to; Greeley edited the most widely read newspaper in the country and was a barometer of the feeling in Lincoln’s own Republican constituency.

  Greeley now claimed to know not only that Confederates in general yearned for peace but that they were ready to deal. He had a way of presumptuously reminding the president of conditions he certainly did not need to be reminded of: “I venture to remind you that our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country also longs for peace—shudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions…and of new rivers of human blood. And a widespread conviction that the Government…[is] not anxious for Peace…is doing great harm.”

  Greeley proposed that Lincoln investigate the peace proposals of some Confederate emissaries up in Niagara Falls in Canada. Lincoln responded by indicating that Greeley himself should do it: “I not only intend a sincere effort for peace, but I intend that you shall be a witness that it is made.” Greeley had not bargained for that, and squirmed but could not get out of it. He found out that Lincoln was right—those Confederates had no authority or readiness to deal. In each of the illusionary projects for peace during that troubled summer, Lincoln assigned the chief proponent to be the chief operative to check it out—and then find it to be empty. Davis and the rebels would not accept any peace that did not grant them independence.