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*39If any English public gathering had adopted the ghostwritten resolution, Lincoln would surely have produced a response fully endorsing everything they had said. Then we would have had a nice parallel to that wonderful moment back in 1789 when James Madison wrote the House’s response to President Washington’s inaugural—which Madison himself had drafted—and then drafted Washington’s reply to the response he had written for the House.
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*40Estimated Union casualties were 18,000; Confederates, 4,500.
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*41A document in Lincoln’s handwriting, together with the editors’ note, in CW, 5:442–43, tells the story of the dismissal of Major Key.
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*42The James Hackett story can be found in two letters Lincoln wrote to him: the letter of August 17, 1863, CW, 6:392–93, and Lincoln’s great response—“I am used to it”—written on November 2, 1863, CW, 6:558–59. See the notes to both letters.
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*43David Herbert Donald writes that it is “one of [Lincoln’s] most perfectly balanced sentences.” Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 569.
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*44“If any citizen of the United States…or any person whatever…of the crew of any ship owned…or navigated in behalf of…any citizen of the United States, shall…seize any negro or mulatto not held to service or labour by the laws of either of the states…of the United States, with intent to make such negro or mulatto a slave…such citizen or person shall be adjudged a pirate and…shall suffer death.” Warren S. Howard, American Slavers and the Federal Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), p. 26.
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*45In the important letter to A. G. Hodges, Esq., April 4, 1864.
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*46Lincoln’s famous letter to Greeley was published on August 22, 1862.
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†47Douglas Wilson and Allen Guelzo both praise the rigor of this letter. Wilson indicates that Lincoln had already written the body of it and just took the opportunity of Greeley’s letter to issue it.
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*48“Looked at coldly, the timing of the [preliminary, September 22] Proclamation amounted to political suicide: Lincoln was putting the most highly charged issue of the war before the voters, and the voters into the hands of the opposition, without any time for the shock to wear off.” Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 168.
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*49One can follow the complicated tale of the composing of these multiple versions in Douglas Wilson’s Lincoln’s Sword and the surrounding story—including the debated point about in what place or places Lincoln did his writing—in Guelzo’s Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
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*50The three are labeled “articles” so they are sometimes regarded as parts of one amendment, but on the other hand Lincoln does introduce them as “amendments,” plural.
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*51[H]onor was inseparable from hierarchy and entitlement, defense of family blood and community needs. All these exigencies required the rejection of the lowly, the alien, and the shamed.” Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 4.
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*52Both Dr. Wright’s responses throughout this episode and this statement of Secretary Seddon are precise illustrations of themes of Southern “honor” as examined by Bertram Wyatt-Brown: the sharp sense of insult when those who do not belong are in the wrong place, and the “necessity for valiant action” and “morally purifying violence.” See Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence.
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*53Cameron was the subject of one of American history’s classic wisecracks. His rival, Pennsylvania Republican Thaddeus Stevens, said Cameron would steal anything except a red-hot stove. When Cameron protested, Congressman Stevens recanted with beautiful ambiguity: “I said that Secretary Cameron would steal anything but a red hot stove. I now withdraw that statement.”
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*54“I am pressed with a difficulty…which threatens division among those who, united are none too strong. An instance of it is known to you. Gen. Hunter is an honest man. He was, and I hope, still is, my friend. I valued him none the less for his agreeing with me in the general wish that all men everywhere, could be free. He proclaimed all men free within certain states, and I repudiated the proclamation…Yet in repudiating it, I gave dissatisfaction, if not offence, to many whose support the country could not afford to lose. And this is not the end of it. The pressure, in this direction, is still upon me, and is increasing. By conceding what I now ask, you can relieve me, and much more, can relieve the country, in this important point.”
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*55Douglass said about Lincoln, in his 1876 speech, “Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”
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*56When a young schoolteacher who wanted to become a lawyer asked Lincoln for “the best mode of obtaining a thorough knowledge of the law,” he answered that the mode is “simple, though laborious and tedious. It is only to get the books, and read and study them carefully. Begin with Blackstone’s Commentaries… Read it carefully through—say, twice.” Lincoln to John M. Brockman, September 25, 1860, CW, 4:121.
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*57The complete poem—“The Sleeping Sentinel” by Francis De Haes Janvier—can be found on the Civil War poetry Web site: http://www.civilwarpoetry.org.
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*58On September 4, 1862, John F. Lee resigned from the army. Lee had been the Judge Advocate; Holt in the new post would be the Judge Advocate General.
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*59For the pardon cases in the text and notes for this chapter we cite only the date. They all may be found in CW.
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*60This is not the only time that telling one’s story well had an effect on the lover of good storytelling, Abraham Lincoln. On July 1, 1864, he issued an order for the release of a Confederate prisoner that read: “This man being so well vouched, and talking so much better than any other I have heard, let him take the oath…and be discharged.”
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*61For example, on April 13, 1863, Holt made an appointment to consider court-martial cases on the following day; on April 25 a presidential message to Holt said it would be impossible to take up court-martial cases that day; one infers much juggling to find the time to consider 48 cases; 67 cases; 72 cases.
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*62Sherman was garrulous, spraying ideas in many directions, and he was also a quick-shot moralist, needing to articulate moral reasons for what he would do.
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*63Mark Grimsley explains why the Lost Cause indictment of the Union army soldiers as immoral and indiscriminately destructive continues to persist. The myth served a variety of agendas, both during the war and much later: in prolonging the rebellion; in assuaging the humiliation of defeat and Reconstruction; as a scapegoat for the South’s economic devastation long after the war (even though much of the army’s damage to infrastructure was repaired in just a few years); and finally as a prophetic illustration of the brutality of modern warfare in the coming century. See The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 219–22.
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*64To give the more exact official number
s, counting both sides and those who died of disease, 617,528 dead. In the U.S. Army 110,070 would be killed in action or would die from wounds; more than twice as many, or 249,498, would die from disease.
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*65“In the first month of the 1864 campaign, from the Wilderness through Cold Harbor, the Army of the Potomac…suffered 55,000 casualties, not far from the total strength with which the rival Army of Northern Virginia began the month. In the process the Federals inflicted 32,000 casualties upon Lee’s army.” Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 144.
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*66“From Georgia alone they confiscated 6,871 mules and horses, 13,294 head of cattle, 10.4 million pounds of grain, and 10.7 million pounds of fodder as Georgia farmers unwillingly contributed almost 6 million rations of beef, bread, coffee, and sugar to the Union infantry and artillery. Statistics from the Carolinas campaign are much less complete, yet they do indicate that foragers stripped the countryside of at least 7 million pounds of foodstuffs, 11.6 million pounds of corn, 83 million pounds of fodder, and 11,825 horses and mules.” Joseph T. Glatthaar, The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns (New York: New York University Press, 1985), p. 130.
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*67Francis Lieber was a well-known German-born jurist and political philosopher who strongly supported the Union, even though he had taught before the war in South Carolina. During the war he taught at Columbia University in New York.
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*68One of the more interesting of Davis’s condemnations of the Yankee enemy—the Puritan enemy—is this from a speech in the Mississippi capitol in 1862: “Our enemies are a traditionless and a homeless race; from the time of Cromwell to the present moment they have been disturbers of the peace of the world. Gathered together by Cromwell from the bogs and fens of the North of Ireland and of England, they commenced by disturbing the peace of their own country; they disturbed Holland, to which they fled, and they disturbed England on their return. They persecuted Catholics in England, and they hung Quakers and witches in America.” Jefferson Davis, speech at Jackson, Mississippi, House Chamber, Mississippi Capitol, December 26, 1862.
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*69Technically, General Meade still commanded the Army of the Potomac; Grant as general in chief made his headquarters with that army and directed strategy.
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†70Alas, Holmes apparently did not say it. Matthew Pinsker tells what historians find really happened at Fort Stevens on July 11 and 12 in Lincoln’s Sanctuary: Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers’ Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 136–42, especially p. 140.
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*71“Motivated by a horror over the loss of life, both Republicans and Democrats moved into the antiwar column…These recent converts were not ideologically driven hard-liners. They did not use the same kind of rhetoric the Copperheads did…These newcomers simply wanted the bloodletting to end. Because they were people who responded to the head-lines, they were particularly fickle. They gave the hard-liners tremendous force and influence over the summer, but as soon as the Union fortunes turned, so did they—as the Democrats would find out to their dismay.” Jennifer L. Weber, “The Divided States of America: Dissent in the Civil War North” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2003), p. 180, since published as Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
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*72“The vulgarity of their tactics almost surpasses belief.” James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 789.
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*73This little document, with the date July 18, 1864, was identified in the controversy that followed both by reference to Niagara and by the phrase “To Whom it may concern.”
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*74Mary and Tad left at some point in August for the still cooler hills of New Hampshire. Through the key events to come, Lincoln was alone at the Soldiers’ Home.
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*75Swett wrote to his wife, apparently on Monday, August 22, “Unless material changes can be wrought, Lincoln’s election is beyond any possible hope. It is probably clean gone now.” David E. Long, The Jewel of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln’s Re-election and the End of Slavery (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), pp. 193, 322n.
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*76The Buffalo Union League would ask Lincoln for a public letter in September, and Lincoln would attempt a draft, but although the situation had changed, he put it aside and did not finish it.
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*77CW, 7:506–8.
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*78It was folded in such an intricate way that scholars in later years would have difficulty preserving it while unfolding it. CW, 7:514; see also the notes on that page.
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*79Clay uttered this famous phrase in the Senate on February 7, 1839, when warned that a speech he was about to give—ironically, a speech critical of abolitionists—would harm his presidential chances. Lincoln probably would have enjoyed, although not himself used, the best riff on Clay’s pronouncement, the perennial twentieth-century socialist candidate Norman Thomas’s comment: “Of course I would rather be right than be president, but I am quite willing at any time to be both.” There might have been times when he would have affirmed the version of Harry Truman, soon after the moon, the sun, and all the stars dropped on him in 1945: “I would rather be anything than president.”
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*80Richard Carwardine, in his Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), has shown how important American Protestantism was as a political force that supported Lincoln, the Republicans, and the attack on slavery. When one asks why Lincoln chose this topic for this key address, then presumably that regular connection was a prime answer. But on this topic he surely did not say what most in the churches might have expected him to say.
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*81The notable early twentieth-century film The Birth of a Nation, with its fiercely antiblack plot celebrating the Ku Klux Klan, derived from the racist novel The Clansman, invokes Lincoln and the Second Inaugural at the end. See Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 170. The implication is that charity, with no malice, was extended to the defeated white South, while black Americans were caricatured and demeaned, not only left out of this “charity” but deeply harmed by it.
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*82“There are moments in the lives of most men,” wrote Douglass, “when the doors of their souls are open…and their true character may be read…I caught a glimpse of the real nature of this man, which all subsequent developments proved true.”Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1994), p. 802.
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Table of Contents
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
ABOUT THIS BOOK
PART ONE
INTRODUCTION: HONEST ABE AMONG THE RULERS
1. A Solemn Oath Registered in Heaven
2. Act Well Your Part, There All the Honor Lies
3. On Mastering the Situation: The Drama of Sumter
4. On Not Mastering the Situation: The Comedy of the Powhatan
5. Days of Choices: Two April Sundays
6. Realism Right at the Border
7. The Moral Meaning of the Union and the War
8. Bull Run and Other Defeats: Lincoln’s Resolve
9. On Holding McClellan’s Horse
10. The Trent and a Decent Respect for the Opinions of Mankind
11. Too Vast for Malicious Dealing
PART TWO
A SECOND INTRODUCTION: LINCOLN’S NATION AMONG THE NATIONS
12. I Felt It My Duty to Refuse
13. In Givin
g Freedom to the Slave, We Assure Freedom to the Free
14. The Prompt Vindication of His Honor
15. And the Promise Being Made, Must Be Kept
16. The Benign Prerogative to Pardon Unfortunate Guilt
17. Must I Shoot a Simple Soldier Boy?
18. A Hard War Without Hatred
19. Temptation in August
20. The Almighty Has His Own Purposes
A CONCLUSION: ABRAHAM LINCOLN AMONG THE IMMORTALS
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY WILLIAM LEE MILLER
COPYRIGHT
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 64
