President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman

by William Lee Miller

  “Mr. Johnson’s course”: Grant, Memoirs, p. 751. Very soon Andrew Johnson switched—already on the next page of Grant’s Memoirs: in “a complete revolution of sentiment,” as the issue of black suffrage arose, he favored the white South.

  “an ignorant usurper”: Jefferson Davis, speech at Richmond, Virginia, Spotswood Hotel, June 1, 1861, The Papers of Jefferson Davis, 11 vols. (to date), edited at Rice University and available online at http://jeffersondavis.rice.edu.

  “barbarous”: Davis to the Congress of the Confederate States, Richmond, V a., November 18, 1861, and elsewhere, ibid.

  “for the gratification of the lust”: Speech at Jackson, Mississippi, House Chamber, Mississippi Capitol, December 26, 1862, ibid.

  “Its glory is all moonshine”: Sherman, quoted in Keegan, Warfare, p. 6.

  “No traitor has been hung” “was particularly desirous to avoid”: Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 2:43.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN. TEMPTATION IN AUGUST

  The treatment of Lincoln’s August 1864 tribulations I have drawn on most is David E. Long, The Jewel of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln’s Re-election and the End of Slavery (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994). I have also used Matthew Pinsker’s excellent book about Soldiers’ Home, Lincoln’s Sanctuary: Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers’ Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), which examines with sensitivity parts of Lincoln’s life that happened there, including events in this month. The two books about the 1864 election are William Frank Zornow’s Lincoln and the Party Divided (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1954), and John C. Waugh, Reelecting Lincoln: The Battle for the 1864 Presidency (New York: Crown, 1997).

  “failed to accomplish what he had been sent to do”: U. S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (New York: Library of America, 1990), p. 489. Gideon Welles reported in his diary entry for May 9, 1864, that Lincoln said he had at first rather “cousined up” to Banks as a general but more recently had come to think he had erred in doing so. He expressed his disappointment rather incongruously by quoting lines from the romantic Irish melodist Thomas Moore that in their original setting express the disappointment not of a president about his general but of a young maiden about her lover:

  Oh! ever thus, from childhood’s hour,

  I’ve seen my fondest hopes decay…

  Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 2:26.

  “[Franz] Sigel is in full retreat”: Grant, Memoirs, p. 489.

  “the enemy had corked the bottle”: Ibid., pp. 493–94.

  “as desperate fighting as the world has ever witnessed”: Ibid., p. 512.

  If a full report of the concentrated killing: Long, Jewel of Liberty, explains and discusses the holding back by some mixture of accident and design of the devastating news about the casualties at Cold Harbor. The accidents included a telegraphic breakdown and the absence of the reporters from critical newspapers, some to cover the Republican convention in Baltimore; the design included something approaching a cover-up by Grant and Stanton. “Grant’s initial release, if not an outright fabrication, was a serious distortion of the truth” (pp. 201–4).

  “in every town, township, ward of a city”: Proclamation Calling for 500,000 Volunteers, July 18, 1864, CW, 4:449.

  “What is the presidency to me”: Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln (New York: Modern Library, 1968), p. 448.

  “Lincoln’s clear-sighted unwillingness”: Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 90.

  “I venture to remind you”: Horace Greeley to Lincoln, Negotiations at Niagara Falls, July 7, 1864, AL Papers.

  “Chase apparently would not only swap horses”: Zornow, Party Divided, p. 108.

  “at once asked for a Bible”: David Homer Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), pp. 194–95.

  “He never sleeps at the White House”: This and the Whitman quotes that follow are all from Specimen Days in Prose Works (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1892); published October 2000 by Bartleby.com.

  “the most vigorous attack”: N&H, 9:125.

  “[T]he President of the United States and the greatest man of his time”: John Eaton, Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedmen: Reminiscences of the Civil War (New York: Longmans, Green, 1907), p. 175.

  “Mr President: I am a War Democrat”: Charles D. Robinson to Abraham Lincoln, August 7, 1864, AL Papers.

  The next day Lincoln took up his pencil: Lincoln to Charles D. Robinson, August 17, 1864, CW. The second draft of this letter, in ink, is undated in CW.

  “President Lincoln did me the honor”: Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1994), p. 795.

  “We were long together”: Frederick Douglass to Theodore Tilton, October 15, 1864, in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip S. Foner, 5 vols. (New York: International Publishers, 1952), 3:422–24.

  Ten days later Douglass wrote Lincoln: Douglass to Lincoln, August 29, 1864, AL Papers.

  “You think I don’t know I am going to be beaten”: Zornow, Party Divided, p. 112.

  “staunchest friends in every state”: Henry J. Raymond to Lincoln, August 22, 1864, quoted in N&H, 9:218.

  “Nothing but the most resolute and decided action”: Ibid.

  “experimental”: N&H, 9:220.

  “I went in as usual unannounced”: Welles, Diary, 2:119–20.

  “The President and the stronger half of the cabinet”: N&H, 9:221.

  “to facilitate examination and discussion of the question”: N&H, 9:220.

  “upon the first convenient occasion”: Lincoln to Isaac Schermerhorn, September 12, 1864, AL Papers.

  “The announcement was received”: Congressional Globe, January 31, 1865, p. 531.

  CHAPTER TWENTY. THE ALMIGHTY HAS HIS OWN PURPOSES

  March 4, 1865: The quotations comparing the Second Inaugural with the First are from the New York Times articles “Inauguration Day,” March 6, 1861, p. 1, and “Washington,” March 12, 1865, p. 5. The description of Lincoln on the two occasions is drawn from John Hay’s description of the two life masks by Leonard Volk made in 1860 and in 1865, published in an 1890 Century magazine article, “Life in the White House in the time of Lincoln.” One account of the vice president’s “disgraceful” behavior, that of Colonel John W. Forney, is quoted in a New York Times article printed years afterward, on September 10, 1871 (p. 3). Salmon Chase describes the sun’s sudden appearance at the inauguration in a letter written to Mrs. Lincoln on the same day, March 4, 1865, which can be found in the Robert Todd Lincoln Collection at AL Papers. The moment is also accounted for in Noah Brooks’s Washington in Lincoln’s Time (New York: Century, 1895), p. 74. The names of states that were now free—Arkansas free, Louisiana free, etc.—are chapter titles in vol. 8 of N&H.

  “quite trivial falsification”: Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 77–156.

  “Not one man in America”: Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 809.

  “puts the relation of our moral commitments”: Reinhold Niebuhr, “The Religion of Abraham Lincoln,” Christian Century 82 (February 10, 1965), p. 173.

  “If slavery is right”: Address at Cooper Institute, New York City, February 27, 1860.

  “master rhetorical stroke”: Douglas L. Wilson, Lincoln’s Sword (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), p. 272.

  “The first expression”: Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates (New York: Library of America, 1994), p. 802.

  “Recognizing me, even before I reached him”: Ibid., p. 804.

  A CONCLUSION. ABRAHAM LINCOLN AMONG THE IMMORTALS

  The quotations expressing condolences from around the world come from the U
.S. State Department document “The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln…and the Attempted Assassination of William H. Seward, Secretary of State, and Frederick W. Seward, Assistant Secretary, on the Evening of the 14th of April, 1865. Expressions of Condolence and Sympathy Inspired by These Events” (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1867). Also available online at www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=ACK9017.Quotations from the Houses of Parliament come from the London Times for May 1, 1865, reprinted in that collection.

  “That means nigger citizenship”: Lewis Paine (aka Powell) heard Booth say this. Paine told Thomas T. Eckert, who testified about it in House Report, 7, 40th Cong., 1st sess. (1867), p. 674.

  “President Lincoln looming in the distance”: James G. Randall, Lincoln the President, 2 vols. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1977), vol. 1, pt. 2, p. 32.

  “embodied in verse of rare felicity”: Lord Charnwood, Abraham Lincoln (New York: Pocket Books, 1939), p. 493.

  “Yes, he had lived”: This is the stanza most often quoted. It appears, along with one more stanza, in N&H and is quoted in Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). But Punch’s full poem, which appeared in the issue for May 6, 1865, and is printed in full on pp. 540–41 in the State Department’s collection, has nineteen stanzas and many more words of contrition and appreciation, worthy of quotation.

  “What need hath he now”: Peterson, Memory, p. 25.

  “In fact it was among the common people”: N&H, 10:345–46.

  “one of the most interesting”: Quoted in Peterson, Memory, p. 26.

  “It forms a large quarto”: N&H, 10:346.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My strongest personal debts for this book, except for the supreme obligation indicated by the dedication, are to Lou Cannon, the noted journalist and Reagan biographer, who once again in the midst of his own writing projects gave every chapter the benefit of his superior editorial judgment; to Michael Burlingame, the scholar who has all of Lincoln at his fingertips and is endlessly generous in giving help to the rest of us; to William Freehling, the much-honored historian of the prewar South, who miraculously appeared in Charlottesville and miraculously arrived at Lincoln in his own work just in time to encourage me on this book with lunches, chapter readings, editorial criticism, and wise counsel; and to Alexis Luckey, an experienced writer and editor working for a master’s degree, who brought judgment and insight as well as the skills of a research assistant to the making of this book. After a year assisting me at the Miller Center and a stint teaching in Japan, she generously agreed to come back again in the last throes of this book, and solved the mysteries of formatting.

  I have once again a strong institutional debt to the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. That excellent center provided—as on three previous books—a congenial place to work, a computer link, a most helpful library connection, stimulating events and surroundings, and gatherings at which my chapters could be discussed. The former director of the Center, Philip Zelikow, gave this particular project his vigorous endorsement, and the new director, former Virginia governor Gerald Baliles, went out of his way to show support as well. The Miller Center staff has been uniformly helpful and encouraging. The former communications director, Margaret Edwards, read chapters, organized a discussion, and continued to support this book after she had left the Center to pursue her own projects. Chief of staff Robin Kuzen, with a picture of Lincoln on her office wall, has been a staunch supporter of this book and of its predecessor, as well as of their author through the years of their production.

  The Miller Center draws especially able students. I have been privileged to have the assistance, in successive years, through this two-book Lincoln project, of Ashley McDonald, who was present at the creation; Jason Baker; Jonathan Riehl from the Law School, for two years; Brooke Caroline Greene; and finally and most importantly for this book Alexis Luckey.

  Professor Sid Millkis, an expert on presidential greatness, gave advice and criticism of my effort to deal with this greatest of presidents; his colleague Martha Derthick, not only a political scientist but also a discriminating editor, gave me the benefit of close readings of some parts of this book.

  Living in Charlottesville has the immense advantage that people you want to see not only visit but sometimes also stay, as in the case of the providential appearance of William Freehling mentioned above. A friend from my youth, Thomas C. Sorensen, after a career in government and foreign affairs and then in investment banking, moved on his retirement from London to Charlottesville, and we had seven years of conversation—including considering what I was going to write about Lincoln—before his death in 1997. William F. May, the eminent religious ethicist, a friend for fifty years, moved on his retirement from Dallas to Charlottesville. I remember Bill May giving a characteristically penetrating critique of my first venture into the Lincoln field, an essay on the Second Inaugural, thirty years ago; we renewed our conversation, and Bill and Beverly May gave essential support to the author in finishing this book.

  I wish also to thank the Roasted Bean Coffee Group, meeting every morning on the Charlottesville mall, for their continuous encouragement throughout the writing of this book.

  The world of Lincoln studies has been welcoming and accommodating. Since I came into the Lincoln world, two Lincoln organizations have taken me into the official machinery: the Abraham Lincoln Institute, which sponsors the annual Lincoln Symposium at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College, whose codirector, Douglas Wilson, gave encouragement once again on this book, as on its predecessor. Through the symposium I met Jennifer Weber, the emerging scholar who had just read Lincoln’s Virtues and, in the midst of work on her own book on the Copperheads, and of a move to her first academic post, generously read chapters of this book, to its great benefit.

  Others who have given some specific incidental help or particular encouragement at some stage of my Lincoln project include Michael Greco, John Sellars, Clifton McCleskey, Joseph Fornieri, Fred Martin, Jr., Gary Gallagher, Merrill Peterson, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Holt, Harold Holzer, Thomas Swartz, Kim Bauer, Linwood Holton, Ed Ayers, Ron Soodalter, Karen Needles, Michael Musick, Thomas P. Lowry. I thank them all, and others who have helped this undertaking as well.

  My agent, Henry Dunow, set this book on course. Jane Garrett, my editor at Knopf, supported it from the start and gave it her incisive criticism. Leslie Levine, at Knopf’s New York office, was cheerfully helpful in many ways. My greatest debt is indicated by the dedication.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  William Lee Miller, now Scholar in Ethics and Institutions at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, is the author of Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography, which the Abraham Lincoln Institute chose as the best book on Lincoln published in 2002. The Lincoln Group of New York gave it its Award of Achievement, and the Civil War Round Table gave it the Barondess Award for the best Lincoln book of the year.

  Miller is a member of the board of the Abraham Lincoln Institute and of the Lincoln Studies Group and of the advisory board of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.

  He is also the author of Arguing About Slavery: John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle in the American Congress, which won the D. B. Haldeman Award for the best book on Congress in 1996, and The First Liberty: America’s Foundation in Religious Liberty, published in 1986 and reissued in revised form after the 9/11 attacks.

  Mr. Miller retired from the faculty of the University of Virginia in 1999 as Commonwealth Professor and as the Thomas C. Sorensen Professor of Political and Social Thought and of Religious Studies. He had taught also at Yale University, Smith College, and Indiana University, where he was founding director of the Poynter Center on American Institutions.