President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman
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Seventeen hundred miles of mourners stood for hours, stood in the rain, lined the road, crowded the stations and the squares, in the most astonishing funeral in the nation’s history.
The citizens of Pella, Iowa, said: “[W]e acknowledge in Abraham Lincoln the genuine embodiment of true democracy…not only in our beloved country, but also in the whole civilized world.”
Or as it was put by José Santos Valenzuela, first vice president of the Workingmen of Santiago, Chile: “The memory of Abraham Lincoln will live in the heart of humanity so long as the current of the Potomac flows or the Andes endure.”
NOTES
All quotations from Abraham Lincoln in this book, unless otherwise indicated, are drawn from The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, 11 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Abraham Lincoln Association/Rutgers University Press, 1953). The documents are available online at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/.
ABBREVIATIONS
AL Papers
The Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress, a collaborative project of the Library of Congress Manuscript Division and the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. The collection includes incoming and outgoing correspondence and enclosures, drafts of speeches, and notes and printed material. Most of the twenty thousand items are from the 1850s through Lincoln’s presidential years. The collection is available online at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/malquery.html.
AP
The Avalon Project at Yale Law School, Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy, online at www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/federal/fed.htm.
CW
The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, 11 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Abraham Lincoln Association, Rutgers University Press, 1953), online at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/.
N&H
John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York: Century, 1917).
OR
United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 3 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901), online at http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/browse.monographs/waro.html.
ORN
United States Naval War Records Office, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, 30 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894–1922), online at http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/browse.monographs/ofre.html
INTRODUCTION. HONEST ABE AMONG THE RULERS
the quite unlikely equal and “friend”: Lincoln addressed at least one letter to these great and good friends: His Majesty the Tycoon of Japan; Her Majesty Isabel II; His Highness Mohammed Said Pacha, Viceroy of Egypt and its Dependencies; Alexander II, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias; His Majesty Dom Luiz I, King of Portugal; His Majesty Somdetch Phra Paramendr Maha Mongut, King of Siam; His Majesty William I, King of Prussia; His Royal Highness Frederick, Grand Duke of Baden; His Royal Majesty Francis Joseph I, Emperor of Austria; His Excellency Señor Don José M. Acha, Constitutional President of the Republic of Bolivia; His Excellency Señor Don Francisco Solano López, President of the Republic of Paraguay; His Excellency Señor Don Bartolomé Mitre, President of the Argentine Republic; His Excellency The Marshal Don Miguel San Roman, Constitutional President of the Republic of Peru; His Excellency Señor Don Jesús Jiménez, President of the Republic of Costa Rica; His Majesty Leopold, King of the Belgians; His Majesty Frederick VII, King of Denmark; His Majesty Christian IX, King of Denmark; His Majesty Kamehameha V, King of the Hawaiian Island; His Excellency General Don José Maria Medina, President of the Republic of Honduras; His Majesty Charles XV, King of Sweden and Norway; Señor Don Atanasio Cruz Aguirre, President of the Oriental Republic of Uruguay; and His Imperial Majesty Napoleon III, Emperor of the French. Lincoln’s letters to these great and good friends, which can be found in The Collected Works, communicated about such matters as the marriage of a niece; the birth of a prince to a well-beloved daughter-in-law; the decease of a royal nephew; the demise of a late king and the recipient’s recent accession to the throne; the death of a cousin, accompanied by deep sympathy as well as sincere and hearty congratulations upon accession to the throne; the death of a brother, conveying profound sorrow and also pleasure at the intelligence of the recipient’s constitutional succession to the throne; the birth of a prince; the birth of a son; the elevation by constitutional forms to the presidency; the decease of the wife of a royal’s well-beloved cousin; the happy birth of a princess to a beloved daughter-in-law; an elevation to the presidency; the death of a justly lamented parent; and the birth and baptism of an infant.
CHAPTER ONE. A SOLEMN OATH REGISTERED IN HEAVEN
“good and well disciplined men”: Major Anderson in OR, ser. 1, vol. 1, p. 197.
“strange, penniless, uneducated”: CW, 1:320. Lincoln was describing, on March 26, 1843, how astonished older citizens of Menard County would be to hear he was a candidate of the aristocracy, given that they saw him in the way the well-worn quotation describes.
“What a happy conception”: From Buchanan’s March 4, 1857, inaugural address, in The Works of James Buchanan: Comprising His Speeches, State Papers, and Private Correspondence, ed. Bassett Moore, 10 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1910), 10:105.
take and hold the hat: David Herbert Donald, in Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), flatly accepts Douglas’s hat-holding and gives sources (p. 283); Benjamin Thomas, in Abraham Lincoln: A Biography (1952; repr. New York: Modern Library, 1968), accepts it too but allows that it has been questioned (pp. 245–46). Reinhard Luthin, in The Real Abraham Lincoln (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1960), rather mocks the whole matter (p. 261).
“a rope of sand”: James Buchanan said that “the Confederacy is a rope of sand” in his fourth annual message, December 3, 1860, Works of James Buchanan, 2:12; the entire address is on pp. 7–43.
“As a specimen of absurdity”: John G. Nicolay, The Outbreak of Rebellion (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), pp. 19–20.
Frederick Douglass’s response to the whole address: Frederick Douglass wrote in his magazine about Lincoln’s inaugural:
Making all allowances for circumstances, we must declare the address to be but little better than our worst fears, and vastly below what we had fondly hoped it might be…Mr. Lincoln opens his address by announcing his complete loyalty to slavery in the slave States and quotes from the Chicago platform a resolution affirming the rights of property in slaves, in the slave States…[H]e also denies having the least “inclination” to interfere with slavery in the States. This denial of all feeling against slavery, at such a time and in such circumstances, is wholly discreditable to the head and heart of Mr. Lincoln. Aside from the inhuman coldness of the sentiment, it was a weak and inappropriate utterance to such an audience, since it could neither appease nor check the wild fury of the rebel Slave Power…It was, therefore, weak, uncalled for and useless for Mr. Lincoln to begin his Inaugural Address by thus at the outset prostrating himself before the foul and withering curse of slavery…The occasion was one for honest rebuke, not for palliations and apologies…Some thought we had in Lincoln the nerve and decision of an Oliver Cromwell; but the result shows that we merely have a continuation of the Pierces and the Buchanans, and that the Republican President bends the knee to slavery as readily as any of his infamous predecessors.
Frederick Douglass, “The Inaugural Address,” Douglass’ Monthly (April 1861).
“[He] shows conclusively”: Seward’s witty comment is quoted from Frederic Bancroft, The Life of William Seward, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900),2:3.
“The courteous old gentleman”: Michael Burlingame, ed., At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), p. 119. He goes on to say: “Lincoln listened with that weary, introverted look of his, not answering, and the next day, when I recalle
d the conversation, admitted he had not heard a word of it. Through every chamber of his heart and brain were resounding those solemn strains of long-suffering warning which he that day addressed to the South: ‘With you, not with me, rests the awful issue. Shall it be peace or the sword?’” Lincoln had not in fact said this line, which Hay is remembering from the draft—it was “solemn” issue, not “awful”—and it was cut in the editing in the Willard.
“[W]hile the battery on the brow of the hill”: N&H, 3:344.
“in a room upstairs over a store”: William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln (1942; repr. New York: Da Capo Press, 1983), p. 386.
“It follows from these views”: CW, 4:253. The First Edition and Revisions of the First Inaugural Address—Lincoln’s draft and changes, quoted here and on later pages—can be found in CW, 4:249–62.
Mississippi’s declaration: AP.
The proclamation by the Texas convention: Ibid.
“SIR: I herewith demand”: Colonel John Cunningham, December 30, 1860, OR, ser. 1, vol. 1, p. 7.
“SIR: I am constrained to comply”: F. C. Humphreys, December 30, 1860, ibid.
“The public interest”: N&H, 3:371.
As Joshua Shenk has observed: Joshua Shenk, Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), p. 179.
“little better than our worst fears”: Douglass, “Inaugural Address.”
“This, then, was the much vaunted ‘firm’ policy”: David M. Potter, Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), p. 329.
“This commentary certainly highlights”: Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), p. 273.
“That draft…was a no-nonsense document”: Donald, Lincoln, p. 283.
“an imperfectly blended mixture of opposites”: Ibid.
Donald quotes the ending challenge to the South: Ibid., pp. 283–84.
“will be construed as a threat”: Orville Browning to AL, February 17, 1861, AL Papers.
“Mr. Douglas said”: “The New Administration,” New York Times, March 5, 1861, p. 1 (ProQuest Historical Newspapers).
“let grass grow where it may”: This quotation was reported by Lucius E. Chittenden, who was at the meeting; Michael Burlingame, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), p. 199.
“outstanding precedent”: Edward S. Corwin, The President: Office and Powers (New York: New York University Press, 1984), p. 64.
He did not continually invoke: A newspaper report of the remarks he made when as president-elect he was speaking to a gathering of German citizens in Cincinnati. The Cincinnati Daily Commercial, in one of two varying newspaper accounts, has him using the familiar and vulnerable utilitarian slogan “The greatest good of the greatest number.” This was on February 12, his birthday, in 1861:
Mr. Chairman, I hold that while man exists, it is his duty to improve not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating mankind; and therefore, without entering upon the details of the question, I will simply say, that I am for those means which will give the greatest good to the greatest number.
The familiar slogan is vulnerable to logical criticism because it has two superlatives that may conflict; but joined with the other familiar utilitarian slogan—“Everyone to count as one, none to count as more than one”—it did great good in the world because its universalism encouraged reform, a moral challenge to existing injustices. Although Lincoln certainly was a moral agent who calculated consequences, he nevertheless had too much shaping by duties to be strictly a utilitarian.
“At a dark period of the war”: John Hay, in Burlingame, At Lincoln’s Side, p. 126.
CHAPTER TWO. ACT WELL YOUR PART, THERE ALL THE HONOR LIES
“on the whole with great success”: CW, 4:252. The notes show the changes Lincoln made.
President Polk, whom some would name as the best: “When his four years in the president’s office were completed, James K. Polk would have added to the United States the huge state of Texas,…the American piece of ‘Oregon,’ which included today’s states of Oregon and Washington; the territory that is now the states of California, Nevada, and Utah, most of New Mexico and Arizona, and parts of what have become Wyoming and Colorado. If the test of presidential greatness should be sheer acreage, then James K. Polk would rank very high indeed.” William Lee Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), p. 483.
Hamilton argued strongly for “unity”: Federalist 79, AP.
“Have republics in practice”: Federalist 6, AP, p. 59.
“a rough farmer”: David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner, 2 vols. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 2:18.
When Senator Charles Sumner: Ibid., 2:383.
“could not get rid of his misgivings”: Ibid.
“I must…affirm”: This statement by Charles Francis Adams came in a mitigating context, with a mitigating introduction. Adams was speaking in 1873 to the two houses of the legislature of New York, in honor of the late William Seward. He introduced his remark by saying:
Let me not be misunderstood as desiring to say a word in a spirit of derogation from the memory of Abraham Lincoln. He afterward proved himself before the world a pure, brave, capable and honest man, faithful to his arduous task, and laying down his life at last for his country’s safety. At the same time, it is the duty of history, in dealing with all human actions, to do strict justice in discriminating between persons, and by no means to award to one honors that clearly belong to another.
The other of course is Seward. Adams, observing events strictly from a diplomatic post in London, communicating primarily with Seward, and perhaps a bit of a snob to start with, thought the worthy accomplishments of the Lincoln administration were largely the work of Seward. The passage appears in Adams’s Address on the Life, Character, and Services of William Henry Seward (Albany, N.Y.: Weed, Parsons, & Co., 1873), pp. 48–49, and is quoted in William E. Barton, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925), 2:18.
“that he had done nothing to make any human being”: 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. 197.
“He reminded me of the conversation”: Ibid.
“Despite the stature which Abraham Lincoln afterward assumed”: David M. Potter, Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), p. 315. Then Potter wrote—as I say, with a certain exasperation:
This fact may seem too obvious to justify notice, and, indeed, it would be, were it not for the fact that the Lincoln legend has obscured the shortcomings of the man, and has glossed over the periods of his life during which he groped and blundered. Consequently the picture of Lincoln coming east from Springfield with his misgivings and his misconceptions is lost. Instead, there is a picture of a man following the well-marked path of destiny to abolish slavery, to console Mrs. Bixby, to reach maximum at Gettysburg, to give his life in the cause of Union, and, finally, to belong to the ages.
Given the power of the Lincoln legend: I wrote in Lincoln’s Virtues (p. xiii) a warning that applies double strength to President Lincoln, that the myth can have a perverse effect on true appreciation:
If his instant and constant wonderfulness is stipulated in advance, taken for granted from the outset, and woven into the national memory as a universally accepted fact, then his actual moral achievements are discounted. Exaggerated preliminary expectations that he was a spectacularly virtuous man may diminish our appreciation of the ways in which he may actually have become one.
He was not exactly a “child of nature”: On September 30, 1859, as a rising politician, Lincoln spoke to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society—the state fair, in other words—in Milwaukee. He made no reference at all
to his own farming and made it clear that he was not a farmer: “I suppose it is not expected of me to impart to you much specific information on Agriculture. You have no reason to believe, and do not believe, that I possess it—if that were what you seek in this address, any one of your own number, or class, would be more able to furnish it.”