Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  And, father cardinal, I have heard you say

  That we shall see and know our friends in heaven:

  If that be true, I shall see my boy again;

  For since the birth of Cain, the first male child,

  To him that did but yesterday suspire,

  There was not such a gracious creature born.

  But now will canker-sorrow eat my bud

  And chase the native beauty from his cheek

  And he will look as hollow as a ghost,

  As dim and meagre as an ague’s fit,

  And so he’ll die; and, rising so again,

  When I shall meet him in the court of heaven

  I shall not know him: therefore never, never

  Must I behold my pretty Arthur more.

  His eyes were wet when he finished. The passage spoke directly to the demons Lincoln had wrestled since February; he still struggled with the hard fact that he would never see Willie again in this life, and with the rationalist’s doubt that he would find his son in a world beyond death. The consolations of hope shared space in his mind with the dread that such comforts were but figments of a yearning imagination. Upon finishing his recitation, Lincoln asked of those keeping him company: “Do you ever dream of some lost friend and feel that you were having a sweet communion with him, and yet have a consciousness that it was not a reality? That is the way I dream of my lost boy Willie.”

  Such moments of self-revelation were few. Most people saw the hale and laughing Lincoln of fast-growing legend, the man who met the crisis of the Union with an ever-ready arsenal of apt anecdotes and light asides. On this trip, too, Lincoln was often quick with a story or a joke. When Stanton mentioned that he’d received, just before boarding the ship, a confusing telegram from a general in the field, Lincoln launched into a tale of a boy’s attempt to answer a question he didn’t understand. The lad was assigned to show off a horse up for sale. As he guided the steed through its paces, a man sidled up to him and asked if the animal had “a splint.” “Well, mister,” the boy replied carefully, “if it’s good for him he has got it, but if it isn’t good for him he hasn’t.”

  At another point in the trip, Lincoln lightheartedly confessed that his great weakness was his inability to say no—“Thank God for not making me a woman,” he said, laughing. At yet another, he eyed a fine hairbrush offered to him by a wealthy volunteer colonel from New York named LaGrand Cannon. “I can’t do anything with such a thing as that!” Lincoln scoffed. “It wouldn’t go through my hair. Now, if you have anything you comb your horse’s mane with, that might do.” When visiting with members of the Miami’s crew, Lincoln told stories of his days as a flatboat pilot and challenged the strapping young sailors to contests of strength. On deck one morning, he spotted an ax and proceeded to lift it, using just two fingers, straight out from his body, with arm and ax both fully extended. The heavy head of the implement hung in space some six feet from Lincoln’s body as he held the ax steady for what seemed like minutes. Lowering his arm, he invited the sailors to try it. No one could match the feat.

  On the morning of May 10, three and a half days after arriving on the scene, Lincoln sent his army into battle. Touching Rebel soil on the beach Lincoln had chosen, lead elements of a Union force numbering some 5,000 men moved inland as the president watched offshore. As the blue-coated soldiers approached, the Confederates around Norfolk fell back, offering scant resistance. Wool and Chase followed about three hours behind the lead Federal elements, while the president returned to the fort. There, Lincoln discovered that some of the troops included in his plan of attack had never moved. Flinging his hat in a flash of fury, the president called for Colonel Cannon to take dictation, then spat out an order pushing the regiments into action.

  Wool and Chase, meanwhile, advanced through scenes of grim victory: wrecked and abandoned Rebel camps, burning bridges, and captured artillery. Nearing Norfolk, they were met late in the afternoon by a delegation of local officials riding in fine carriages led by the mayor, who announced their desire to surrender the undefended city. Wool and Chase traded their horses for a carriage and then rode in style to city hall, where the formal documents were signed. They promptly returned to the landing in a rig that had been used by the Confederate commander Benjamin Huger that very morning.

  It was nearing midnight under a bright moon and sultry sky when Wool and Chase reached Fort Monroe with the surrender in hand. Lincoln was wide awake; the night was hot and he was worried about their safety. “No time for ceremony, Mr. President: Norfolk is ours!” Wool cried. “You can imagine his delight when we told him,” Chase reported. Stanton, who had been sleeping, answered the commotion in his nightshirt and “fairly hugged General Wool” when he heard the news. Lincoln guffawed at the sight of his god of war in pajamas embracing the uniformed general. “Look out, Mars!” he crowed. “If you don’t, the General will throw you.” The president joked that a painting should be commissioned for the new Capitol rotunda, illustrating the capture of Norfolk with a grand tableau of Stanton dressed for bed.

  After a few hours’ rest, Lincoln was up early and eager to get back to Washington, where even his secretaries were not sure what had become of him. (“I suppose he will be home in a day or two if the rebels don’t catch him,” Nicolay shrugged.) But as the presidential party gathered in the parlor of Wool’s headquarters in advance of their departure, Commander Goldsborough arrived with more good news: the Virginia, which had stalked so many Union nightmares over the previous two months, was in flames in the Elizabeth River. Rather than let the ironclad fall into Union hands, Confederate officers had ordered her torched and scuttled. Lincoln’s urgency about returning to the capital evaporated, for this was a spectacle he could not pass up. He extended his visit a few more hours to take a tour past the smoking hulk of the former Merrimack and far enough to see the Stars and Stripes fluttering over the Norfolk shipyard.

  Lincoln was proud of what he had accomplished in his week away from the White House, and the success of his Norfolk campaign further increased his confidence as a military strategist and commander. Even Chase was impressed by the president’s ability to take the fight to the enemy. Summing up Lincoln’s adventures on the battlefield, the Treasury secretary penned a tribute that could not have been easy for a rival to write: “So has ended a brilliant week’s campaign of the President, for I think it quite certain that if he had not come down, [Norfolk] would still have been in possession of the enemy and the [Virginia] as grim and defiant and as much a terror as ever. The whole coast is now virtually ours.”

  * * *

  As Jefferson Davis pondered “the drooping cause of our country” and prepared to send his family to safety outside the threatened Confederate capital, Lincoln stepped onto the dock at the Washington Navy Yard on May 12, just in time to catch a grenade unhelpfully lobbed by a friend. In 1860 David Hunter was a hot-tempered army man with a checkered career when he struck up a correspondence with the soon-to-be president, warning him of the danger of assassination. Lincoln was sufficiently impressed to invite the aging officer to ride with him from Illinois to the inauguration. Throngs met Lincoln’s train at every stop, so Hunter volunteered for duty as a bodyguard and suffered a dislocated shoulder while holding back a jostling crowd. When the war soon followed, Hunter’s military experience and familiarity with the president earned him a quick commission as brigadier general and, in the spring of 1862, command of the Department of the South. This undermanned but symbolically important Union toehold covered coastal regions of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

  Hunter’s headquarters was at Port Royal, South Carolina, the strategic point controlling the cotton-rich Sea Islands. Located midway between Savannah and Charleston, Port Royal was originally targeted in autumn 1861 because the North needed a Southern base for refueling and repairing ships of the Union blockading fleet. But with the arrival of the Yankees, the region quickly became a laboratory for testing the future status of slaves within Union lines. The region�
��s plantation owners had burned their crops and frightened their slaves by warning them that the Northerners would sell them into even harsher bondage in Cuba. At first, the field workers hid in the swamps, but when they finally emerged they received a grudging welcome into the Union camps. By February there were some nine thousand plantation workers under the care of the Federal army around Port Royal.

  The novel status of the so-called contrabands produced a thicket of questions. Were they still slaves? How should they be treated? Who was responsible for them? The answers were political gunpowder. To hard-war abolitionists, the matter was clear: these were now free men and women whose skills in cultivating cotton should be put to work immediately to relieve the shortages causing such stress in Europe. For soft-war conservatives, no step could be more damaging to prospects for peace than tampering with slavery.

  Lincoln wasn’t ready to resolve all these questions, so he deferred his decision about how to respond. In the meantime, he assigned Chase the job of setting up schools for the workers and organizing them to get a crop in the ground. Zealous missionaries and Ivy Leaguers flocked to sign up as Port Royal Treasury agents, but their pure hearts weren’t always matched by good judgment or efficiency. By early May, the administration was ankle deep in a confetti of minutiae concerning the Port Royal contrabands, ranging from the supposed need for more church-sanctioned marriages among the field workers to the status of an order for “one or two thousand red flannel suits for the blacks, with a view to organization.” How, exactly, a legion of farm workers would endure the Hilton Head summer while clad in flannel from head to toe was not on the reformers’ agenda.

  These halting first steps into the postslavery future were just getting under way when Hunter took command. He was eager to make a splash and afire with the progressive Republican conviction that “rebellion and slavery were intertwined abominations to be struck and conquered simultaneously.” Short on troops, the general began to think about training the contrabands and making them soldiers. He also decided that slavery was inconsistent with the Union army’s emerging legal values. Officers were under orders not to return contrabands who reached Union lines, which to Hunter meant that the contrabands weren’t slaves any longer. If they were not slaves, then they must be free people; therefore, the other roughly 900,000 slaves in his department would likewise be free as soon as the government raised enough troops to push inland from the coast. Wherever the Federal troops went, in other words, the slaves would be liberated. On May 9, Hunter issued a proclamation announcing this policy.

  Hunter’s order had little practical effect on the lives of the Port Royal contrabands, and even less on the lives of slaves beyond his reach. Red flannel or no, the opportunity for the plantation workers to do anything other than grow cotton was, for the moment anyway, more theory than fact. As a symbol, however, the order was potent indeed. Hunter’s reasoning might be plain to abolitionists, but most of the Union army did not share his views. McClellan wanted nothing to do with the slaves on the peninsula; out west, “both Generals Halleck and Grant regarded the slave as still a slave,” as Sherman later observed.

  Lincoln was caught by surprise when he read about Hunter’s proclamation in the Washington newspapers. He didn’t object to the theory, but he did object to Hunter’s blundering step into the middle of his delicate political dance. “I wanted him to do it, not say it,” he told a visiting politician.

  Hunter’s bomb had a predictable result when it detonated in the capital. As Nicolay and Hay later put it, “the usual acrimonious comments immediately followed: radicals approved it, Democrats and conservatives denounced it; and the President was assailed for inaction on the one hand and for treachery on the other.” The influential conservative newspaper The New York Herald speculated that Stanton was secretly to blame, having taken over “the nigger business” from Seward and Chase.

  Surveying the reaction, Lincoln mused that the upcoming congressional elections would show that he had become a man without a party, too radical for the Democrats, not radical enough for the Republicans. For months, the president had been warning Northern conservatives that war, by its nature, was a radical engine, and that the terms of the slavery debate were changing almost daily. Their chance to have a hand in shaping the future was slipping away.

  Everywhere people demanded to know what the president intended to do. Would he support Hunter and risk a conservative revolt? Or would he overrule Hunter as he had overruled Frémont’s emancipation order the previous autumn—a step that would further damage his standing with the antislavery voters who had put him into office? McClellan, for one, speculated that Lincoln lacked “the moral courage” to disappoint the abolitionists yet again.

  Hunter’s order was an indication of the shifting mood, but not the only one. In Congress, Senator Lyman Trumbull, of Illinois, was steadily advancing a revision to the Confiscation Act of 1861 that would effectively transform the Union army into an emancipating force, “confiscating” the slaves in Rebel territory and setting them free. Another bill nearing passage would ban slavery in all Federal territories, obliterating the old Mason-Dixon Line and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. In the South, slaves themselves were taking action: on May 13, a group led by an enslaved steamboat pilot, Robert Smalls, seized control of the Rebel steamer Planter in Charleston, birthplace of the rebellion. Coolly steering the ship past Rebel forts, calling out the secret passwords he had memorized, Smalls reached the Union’s blockading ships and surrendered the vessel. Having flawlessly executed a daring and well-laid plan, Smalls and his raiders were immediately hailed in the North as proof that emancipated slaves could make good soldiers.

  Lincoln read the currents on this rapidly turning tide, but he was not willing to give up his place at the helm to David Hunter or anyone else. When Chase argued in favor of letting Hunter’s order stand, Lincoln replied, “No commanding general shall do such a thing, upon my responsibility, without consulting me.”

  * * *

  About this time, Lincoln was reading a treatise by the eminent legal scholar William Whiting on “the war powers of the President.” Whiting argued that the law of nations and the Preamble of the Constitution gave the executive extraordinary authority in time of war to take all necessary steps to save the country. While the Constitution did not give Congress or the president power to bypass state slavery laws in times of peace, Whiting explained, emancipation as a war measure was entirely legal. “A handful of slave-masters have broken up [the] Union, have overthrown justice, and have destroyed domestic tranquility,” Whiting wrote, echoing the opening phrases of the Constitution. “Taking away [their] slaves from the ‘aid and service’ of the enemy, and putting them to the aid and service of the United States, is justifiable as an act of war.”

  Whiting’s analysis matched Lincoln’s own growing sense of the way forward. He no longer doubted that he could steer around Chief Justice Taney by framing emancipation as a military necessity; the only question now was timing. The public, he feared, still wasn’t ready. On May 19, a week after his return from the peninsula, Lincoln rescinded Hunter’s order, while at the same time expressly reserving the authority to decide when and whether emancipation was necessary.

  Never were the nuances of Lincoln’s strategy for dealing with slavery more fully exercised than on that day in Washington. By overruling Hunter, he signaled to conservatives that he would give them one last chance to adjust to the oncoming revolution. Along with his decision, he also renewed his appeal for gradual and compensated emancipation, warning against willfully ignoring the rapid changes afoot. “You can not be blind to the signs of the times,” he pleaded. Compared to a sudden military emancipation, his gradual approach “would come as gently as the dews of heaven, not rending or wrecking anything. Will you not embrace it?”

  At the same time, by explicitly asserting his own emancipating power, Lincoln took the next big step toward the defining act of his presidency. Even as he did so, however, he sent a contradictory signal. On
the very day that he countermanded Hunter’s proclamation, he also promised a delegation from the loyal slave state of Maryland that federal authorities in the District of Columbia would not ignore the Fugitive Slave Act, which required the arrest and return of runaways seeking freedom in the capital. This assurance, however heartless it might have seemed, served to underline Lincoln’s pledge to conform his actions to the law. Wherever citizens still respected constitutional authority, Lincoln would respect their right to own slaves—though he hoped they would freely choose emancipation. Once again, Lincoln sought to strike an almost impossible balance as he inched his way forward.

  By now, Lincoln had come to believe that slavery could not survive the war; whether emancipation came gradually or suddenly, the move toward it had begun and could not be stopped. After overturning Hunter’s order, the president put Seward to work explaining this important reality to the European powers. Until this point, he and Seward had put a fence around the subject of slavery, even though doing so weakened the Union cause in Europe by making the effort to put down the rebellion look no more principled than a naked power play. But with Union forces effectively liberating slaves by the thousands from Fort Monroe to New Orleans, the time had come to take down the fence. Lincoln instructed Seward to write another long dispatch to U.S. diplomats laying out the strength of the Northern cause, this time focusing on economic and political matters—that is, on slavery.

  Seward’s essay, reflecting the president’s “strong desire” to communicate “the true condition of the present strife,” offered a keen analysis of the inexorable course of the war. With each Federal advance, the South was growing weaker economically through the loss of slave labor and the erosion of its tax base. Its ports were being seized, its cotton and tobacco fields occupied. At least a hundred slaves per day, on average, were leaving their masters and coming into the Federal lines, “and as the army advances the number increases,” Seward wrote. Meanwhile, the North’s economy was growing stronger every day, thanks to unprecedented spending on ships, trains, guns, and uniforms. The muscle of the North was industry, which the war fed; the muscle of the South was land and slaves, which the war sapped. This process, the secretary of state argued, had become irreversible: the North was winning, the slaves were gaining freedom, and the only question remaining was how long and how bloody the struggle would be. Would Europe continue to encourage the hopes of the Rebels, even at the risk of sparking a violent uprising by impatient slaves?