President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman

by William Lee Miller

  “Tonight, Mother”: Clark Clifford, Counsel to the President—a Memoir (New York: Random House, 1991), p. 73.

  Missouri had a toxic mixture: Freehling, South vs. South, p. 55: “No Civil War area endured worse terrorizing. Some afflicted Missourians blamed the disorder on the indiscreet Lyon…but take away the tempestuous Connecticut Yankee and no becalmed Missouri would have emerged.” And even more certainly, it would not have emerged just from altering the decisions of a harried president to support Lyon.

  Broad historical treatments: William Gienapp, in “Border States,” notes and objects to this misleading feature of Civil War surveys.

  CHAPTER SEVEN. THE MORAL MEANING OF THE UNION AND THE WAR

  The Message to the Special Session on July 4, 1861, which has a central place in this chapter, is found in CW, 4:421–41. The notes are important to show changes as Lincoln wrote it. Douglas Wilson’s Lincoln’s Sword (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006) gives an illuminating discussion of its composition.

  “I consider the central idea”: Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), p. 20.

  “he [Lincoln] remarked that the real question involved”: Michael Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860–1865 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), p. 41.

  “He is engaged in constant thought”: Burlingame and Ettlinger, Inside, p. 20.

  “perfunctory manner”: James G. Randall, Lincoln the President (New York: Da Capo Press, 1977), vol. 1, pt. 1, p. 383.

  “an exalted commentary on fundamentals”: Ibid., vol. 1, pt. 1, p. 381.

  “a sweeping practical negation”: John G. Nicolay, The Outbreak of Rebellion (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), p. 41.

  “sugar-coated”: These quotations are also from Lincoln’s July 4, 1861, Message to Congress, CW.

  “merely asserted a right”: Jefferson Davis’s Inagural Address, February 18, 1861, AP.

  If the rebels claimed to have: John Hay, in his diary for May 8, 1861, reported a conversation about Jefferson Davis’s “manifesto” presented to the Confederate Congress that ignored “all mention of the right of revolution” and confined his defense of his position “to the reserved right of a state to secede.” Hay commented that Davis thereby impeded his “claim upon the recognition of the world.” Nations that would recognize new governments that have a de facto existence by virtue of a revolution would not recognize one that claimed existence on the basis of “the constitution of the government against which it rebels.” That would seem to be an internal dispute, a matter of conflicting interpretations with which no outside power should interfere. Hay wrote that Davis was anxious to satisfy the “restless consciences” of the border states, where, he implies, the sugarcoating of constitutional legitimacy was particularly important.

  “Any people anywhere”: Abraham Lincoln, “Speech in United States House of Representatives: The War with Mexico,” January 12, 1848, AL Papers.

  “My paramount object in this struggle”: One can argue that the significance of Lincoln’s letter to Greeley in its own time was almost exactly the opposite to its meaning in a modern seminar. That he would save the Union with slavery was not news—that would have been taken for granted, even expected, in a time when slavery still existed. That he would, on his own executive decision, abolish slavery, if doing so would save the Union—that was the news. And when he wrote the letter to Greeley, he had the preliminary emancipation proclamation in his desk.

  “the one for empire”: John M. Taylor, William Henry Seward: Lincoln’s Right Hand (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1991), p. 176.

  “an even start”: Douglas Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), p. 98.

  “I happen temporarily to occupy”: He made a similar statement to yet another Ohio regiment on August 31.

  When he was elected—they revolted: South Carolina’s declaration of the causes for its secession, with its many echoes of the Declaration of Independence, named the election of Lincoln as one such cause. It then went on to condemn voting by blacks in some northern states:

  This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

  On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.

  The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.

  “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union,” December 24, 1860, AP.

  CHAPTER EIGHT. BULL RUN AND OTHER DEFEATS: LINCOLN’S RESOLVE

  “inexpressibly bitter”: John G. Nicolay, The Outbreak of Rebellion (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), p. 208.

  “The solemn midnight March”: Michael Burlingame, ed., Lincoln’s Journalist (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), pp. 75–76.

  “a confused mob”: OR, ser. 1, vol. 2, p. 316.

  “Firing more in the distance”: One can follow the wires Lincoln received in Manassas Virginia Telegraph, July 21, 1861 (Dispatches), AL Papers.

  “We passed Bull Run”: OR, ser. 1, vol. 2, p. 316.

  “The men having thrown away”: Ibid.

  “He listened in silence”: N&H, 4:353.

  “General McDowell’s army”: OR, ser. 1, vol. 2, p. 747.

  “it is to be hoped”: Burlingame, Lincoln’s Journalist, p. 76.

  The novice in the executive mansion: Lincoln would be criticized for the breakdown of discipline because in his July 4 Message to Congress he placed the “unanimous firmness” of common soldiers and sailors—“to the last man, so far as known”—in invidious contrast to the large numbers of officers and had “proved false to the hand which had pampered them” he even pictured the common soldier as successfully resisting those “whose commands, but an hour before, they obeyed.” Critics suggested that the president implied that only the common soldier could be trusted and “his officer was a leader not entitled to confidence.” But it is difficult to believe that a short passage in the middle of a long presidential document could have had any such effect on the actual battlefield.

  “You are green”: Quoted often in biographies and histories. See, for example, James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 336, with citations.

  “A Commander-in-Chief”: James A. Rawley, Turning Points of the Civil War, 2nd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 54.

  “An old soldier feels safe”: OR, ser. 1, vol. 2, p. 334.

  “On the eve of the battle”: OR, ser. 1, vol. 2, p. 325.

  “Many of the volunteers”: OR, ser. 1, vol. 2, p. 316.

  “the largest citizens’ army”: Rawley, Turning Points, p. 58.

  “THE NATION’S WAR CRY”: Harry J. Maihafer, War of Words: Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War Press (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2001), p. 42.

  “[I]t is certain that the talk”: Walt Whitman, Specimen Days (Boston: David R. Godine, 1971), chap. 20, online at www.bartleby.com/229/1020.html.

  “All the forenoon”: Burlingame, Lincoln’s Journalist, p. 78.

  And so began a sleepless night: Nicolay and Hay do not report any expression of distress on Lincoln’s part but twenty-eight years later an assista
nt to the Indiana Republican who had been appointed superintendent of public printing, John D. Defrees, sent Nicolay a report saying that he had often heard his boss tell about finding Lincoln pacing the floor on the day after the Bull Run defeat, saying, “John, if hell is not any more than this, it has no terror for me.” AL Papers.

  “[W]hatever returns”: Whitman, Specimen Days, chap. 21. Whitman wrote about the battle itself: “All battles, and their results, are far more matters of accident than is generally thought; but this was throughout a casualty, a chance. Each side supposed it had won, till the last moment. One had, in point of fact, just the same right to be routed as the other. By a fiction, or series of fictions, the national forces at the last moment exploded in a panic and fled from the field.”

  CHAPTER NINE. ON HOLDING McCLELLAN’S HORSE

  “least militarized”: John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), p. 356.

  He became proud of the men: Defenders of McClellan, in the long future of endless debates about the Civil War, could even claim that the army with which Grant would finally defeat Lee, in 1864–65, was the army that McClellan had shaped back in 1861–62.

  “I almost think”: Stephen W. Sears, ed., The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan: Selected Correspondence, 1860–1865 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), p. 70.

  “You are aware”: Bruce Catton, Terrible Swift Sword (New York: Pocket Books, 1967), p. 77.

  “Who would have thought”: Sears, Papers of McClellan, pp. 70–71.

  “perfect imbecile”: Scott was a “perfect imbecile” who “understands nothing, appreciates nothing, and is ever in my way” (August 8); “the great obstacle…either a traitor or incompetent” (August 9—the previous day either “dotard or a traitor”); “the most dangerous antagonist I have” (August 15). All from various letters in Sears, Papers of McClellan.

  “who has treated me with distinguished kindness and courtesy”: Winfield Scott to Simon Cameron, October 31, 1861. N&H, 4:465.

  “I can do it all”: Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), p. 30.

  “the most stupid idiot”: “[T]he cowardice of the Presdt, the vileness of Seward, & the rascality of Cameron—Welles is an old woman—Bates an old fool” (October 31, 1861). All from various letters in Sears, Papers of McClellan. One historian has interpreted McClellan’s defect, in the categories of modern psychology, as “paranoid personality disorder.” The description includes: “individuals who suffer from this affliction interpret actions of other people as deliberately threatening or demeaning. They ponder innocuous and insignificant remarks and find hidden, unintended meanings that affront them…Mistrust rests at the core.” Joseph Glatthaar, Partners in Command: Relationships Between Leaders in the Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), p. 237.

  “my enemies are crushed”: McClellan to his wife, September 7, 1862, Sears, Papers of McClellan, p. 438.

  Shortly after McClellan was made general in chief: Burlingame and Turner, Inside, p. 32.

  “Never mind”: Ibid., p. 289.

  “the enemy probably have”: Sears, Papers of McClellan, p. 100.

  In fact, the peak strength: Although later inflations of the opposing armies would be supported by intelligence, usually mistaken, from Allan Pinkerton—an acquaintance of McClellan from his railroad days—this initial mistake was all his own. The president and the secretary of war had no independent source of information with which to contradict McClellan’s estimates. In anticipation of a problem not unknown in the superpower days to come, McClellan could get “intelligence” to tell him what he wanted to hear.

  “With the figures for his own forces”: Kenneth P. Williams, Lincoln Finds a General: A Military Study of the Civil War, 5 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 1:124.

  “The normal sick”: Ibid., 1:130.

  This mathematical wizardry: McClellan’s legerdemain with numbers was implicated in the hottest point of dispute with Lincoln, both at the time and among historians looking back. Departing for the peninsula, he promised to leave sufficient troops to protect Washington, but he manipulated the numbers and effectively left Washington undefended. When Lincoln discovered what McClellan had done, he held back McDowell’s first corps to be kept in front of Washington to protect the capital instead of allowing it to go to the peninsula. McClellan was indignant. When he was the commander defending Washington, that defense was the absolute top priority; when he wasn’t, it wasn’t.

  “The president told me”: James G. Randall, ed., The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, 2 vols. (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1925), 1:563.

  “such an overwhelming strength”: Sears, Papers of McClellan, p. 75.

  One distinguished military historian: T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), pp. 65–68.

  “A Massachusetts officer noted”: Catton, Sword, pp. 416–17.

  “Soldiers of the Army of the Potomac!”: Sears, Papers of McClellan, p. 211.

  “promenade”: Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941), p. 133.

  “He liked siege warfare”: Williams, Lincoln and Generals, p. 90.

  “indefinite procrastination”: The whole telegram from Lincoln is: “Your call for Parrot guns from Washington alarms me—chiefly because it argues indefinite procrastination. Is anything to be done?” May 1, 1861, CW, 5:203.

  “It is characteristic of him”: N&H, 5:414–15.

  One can count in Lincoln’s Collected Works: Sears counts fifty-three, apparently starting or ending some day different from my pick. In any case, there was a large number of messages, including, as Sears remarks, “some of the most masterful Lincoln ever wrote.”

  “By delay the enemy”: Lincoln’s quotation comes from his excellent letter of April 9. The authority is the English general Colin Ballard, the title of whose book tells the story: Military Genius of Abraham Lincoln; quoted in Williams, Lincoln Finds a General, 1:166.

  McClellan’s long telegram to Stanton: OR, ser. 1, vol. 11 (pt. I), p. 61. The telegram was sent at 12:20 a.m. June 28. Lincoln responded later that day.

  “The time has come”: Sears, Papers of McClellan, p. 344.

  “This…War…should be conducted”: McClellan to Lincoln, July 7, 1862, ibid., pp. 344–45.

  “had General McClellan willed it”: Stephen W. Sears, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1988), p. 253.

  “it really seemed to him”: Burlingame and Ettlinger, Inside, p. 37.

  “Mr. Lincoln certainly had the defects”: N&H, 6:28–29.

  “for my sake”: Sears, Papers of McClellan, p. 427.

  “There was a more…desponding feeling”: Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 1:105.

  “Again I have been called upon”: Sears, Papers of McClellan, p. 435.

  “I have all the plans”: In McClellan’s enthusiasm about finding Lee’s order he added, in the War Department telegram, “my respects to Mrs. Lincoln. Received most enthusiastically by the ladies. Will send you trophies.” Military historian Kenneth Williams writes that when Lincoln received this telegram, “on the critical morning of September 14, it is safe to assume that he did not hurry to Mrs. Lincoln to present his general’s regards, or send a messenger to Mrs. McClellan with the thrilling news that her husband had been well received by the ladies of Frederick. Nor did he probably give much thought to the promised trophies.” Williams, Lincoln Finds a General, 1:170–71.