Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  The step would be gradual, Lincoln repeated, and a suitable place in South America would be found for colonizing the freed slaves. His voice was pleading—until he turned to the threat. “I am pressed with a difficulty not yet mentioned,” he said. General David Hunter’s emancipation proclamation had more support than border staters might realize, and the Union needed Hunter’s supporters just as much as the Union needed the conservatives. Lincoln had dared to offend the abolitionists by repudiating Hunter’s order because he believed so strongly in the gradual approach. But if this way failed, he hinted, a military order would be the only option left. “The pressure, in this direction, is still upon me, and is increasing.”

  He closed with a flourish that went past poetry into desperation. He told the congressmen that they had the power to save the nation. Accept his offer, he said, and the country’s “form of government is saved to the world; its beloved history, and cherished memories, are vindicated; and its happy future fully assured, and rendered inconceivably grand.” To the men before him now, “more than to any others, the privilege is given.”

  Privilege or no, the offer was refused. Two days after the meeting, by a vote of twenty to eight, the delegations rejected Lincoln’s emancipation plan. They gave a host of reasons. The government couldn’t afford it; the Rebels would be outraged; loyal slaveholders would resist; the abolitionists would not be appeased. Lincoln tried to answer the first point by asking Congress to authorize bonds to cover the cost of his plan, but it was too late.

  One objection from the border state delegations struck Lincoln with force and seemed to provide a narrow opening. Loyal slaveholders rejected the compensated-emancipation plan, he was told, because it would cause them to lose their slaves while Rebels kept theirs. “They felt it would be unjust,” Lincoln recalled, because “the blow must fall first and foremost on” the Confederacy. Yet buried in this complaint was the suggestion that public opinion was shifting—that loyal slave owners were becoming reconciled to the idea that “slavery was doomed.” They could not be “induced to lead” the way to emancipation, but they might be willing to accept it when it came.

  * * *

  On July 13, the morning after the meeting, while Lincoln was still waiting for a formal reply to his appeal, he recounted his conversation with the border state delegations to Seward and Welles. The men were riding in the presidential carriage on a sad mission to the summer residence of Edwin Stanton, in the wooded uplands north of Georgetown. Stanton’s infant son had died after receiving a failed vaccination, and the family was holding a private funeral. The carriage had not gone far when Lincoln stunned his colleagues by announcing that he had “about come to the conclusion” that emancipation “was a military necessity absolutely essential for the salvation of the Union.… We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.”

  Up to this point, Lincoln had always been “prompt and emphatic,” as Welles put it, in cutting off discussion of compelled emancipation. Now he had clearly changed his mind: “It was forced on him by the rebels themselves,” Welles later wrote. “He saw no escape.” The enemy had proved surprisingly resilient, but behind one army was another. Slaves were building fortifications, hauling supplies, feeding troops, raising crops—all tasks that freed whites to kill Yankees. The president now believed that only force would return the Rebels to the Union, and that meant stripping them of their war-making resources, slaves included.

  The conversation that morning was unleavened by jokes or snatches of poetry. “He dwelt earnestly on the gravity, importance, and delicacy” of this step, Welles reported. Convinced that public opinion in the North was hardening, the president felt that a majority of the people were ready to “strike more vigorous blows,” and that they were finally “prepared for” emancipation.

  Lincoln asked for reactions from his traveling partners. Seward seemed “startled,” Welles thought, and said that such a big step, involving “consequences so vast and momentous,” deserved something better than a hasty judgment. Seward wanted to reflect before he gave his answer, but his initial thought was that emancipation was “expedient and necessary.” Welles agreed. As the men parted later that day, Lincoln assured them that he was serious: “Something must be done.”

  But would it work? What if McClellan was correct, and the army “disintegrated” over emancipation? What if Lincoln lost Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri to the Rebels? The next morning, July 14—the same day the border states representatives formally refused Lincoln’s last overture—the Senate passed Trumbull’s Confiscation Act. Orville Browning rushed to the White House in distress. The senator minced no words in telling Lincoln that the bill “was a violation of the Constitution and ought to be vetoed.” Browning promised that a veto would produce “a storm of enthusiasm in support of the Administration in the border states” and that Democrats everywhere would swarm to Lincoln. But if he signed it, “the [D]emocratic party would again rally, and reorganize an opposition.” Lincoln promised to give the matter “his profound consideration.”

  He apparently slept little that night as he worked through his next step. When Browning called at the cottage after breakfast the next day, the president was busy writing in the library. He had asked not to be interrupted, but made a brief exception for his friend. Browning was alarmed by Lincoln’s appearance. “He looked weary, care-worn and troubled. I shook hands with him and asked how he was. He said, ‘tolerably well.’” Worried, Browning reminded Lincoln of all that was riding on his shoulders, and urged his friend to take care of himself. Lincoln’s huge right hand was still wrapped around Browning’s as he replied “in a very tender and touching tone—‘Browning, I must die sometime.’ … He looked very sad, and there was a cadence of deep sadness in his voice. We parted … both of us with tears in our eyes.”

  * * *

  The British public was appalled by the latest news from the American battlefields. Their own nation’s recent bloodlettings in Crimea and India had temporarily fostered an antiwar spirit in the country, so the butchery at Shiloh and on the peninsula filled them with revulsion. The North appeared to be madly pursuing an impossible goal: the South could not be beaten and dragged back into the Union. What lay ahead was nothing but barbaric, fruitless struggle. A large segment of the public believed that it was time for the most powerful nation on earth, Great Britain, to step in and separate the fighters.

  This tide of opinion washed into the House of Commons on July 18, when debate began on a proposal to call for intervention by the British government. Sympathy for the South appeared strong. Supporters of the Rebels spoke of states’ rights, the need for cotton, and the strength of Southern armies. They charged Lincoln with foot-dragging hypocrisy on the subject of slavery, going so far as to suggest that the institution would die out faster in an independent Confederacy than in a reconstructed Union. William Lindsay, the sponsor of the mediation proposal, boasted to Lord Russell that Parliament would force Her Majesty’s government to act within two weeks. The British press was full of sensational and exaggerated reports of the Seven Days battles. “The de facto independence of the Confederate States was regarded by most Englishmen … as unchallengeable,” according to one historian, and the influential Times of London called on the British cabinet to consider formal recognition of the Southern nation if McClellan’s army failed to advance.

  Ambassador Adams counseled Washington to prepare for a “possible emergency” from the direction of Europe. Disgust at the war and sympathy for the South “is showing itself strongly in private circles here as well as in the newspapers,” he wrote, adding that it was “impossible” to counter those sentiments as long as the administration continued its confusing policy on slavery. Unaware that Lincoln had moved so far toward emancipation, Adams warned that Europeans found Lincoln’s position baffling, especially since he appeared to be standing on legal niceties. A clear abolition stance would turn the tables by showing that the North was fighting “for the fuller establishment of free principles,” not
“dominion of one part of the people over the other,” Adams argued.

  Currents were also running against the Union inside the British cabinet, but they followed a more complicated course. Palmerston and Russell agreed that the North’s cause was hopeless and that the sooner the conflict ended, the better for England. But the shocking scale of the war, which incensed the public, had the opposite effect on these experienced statesmen. They understood that armies engaged in such savagery would not be easy to pry apart; how could anyone expect “a successful offer of mediation” in the midst of this extreme conflict? “The Thirty Years’ War in Germany was a joke” compared with what was happening in America, the prime minister said. Lincoln and Seward did what they could to encourage this cautious response; in a strongly worded message, Seward urged Adams to explain to Russell that an effort to intercede on the side of the Rebels could turn “this civil war, without our fault [into] a war of continents—a war of the world.”

  For the time being, the British cabinet’s careful approach prevailed, and Parliament adjourned for the summer without passing Lindsay’s mediation proposal. But Palmerston’s government would not stand idly by; once it found a safe way to take action, it intended to do so. To act alone would be dangerous; to act with the other great powers might be less so. That, however, would mean doing something quite unnatural: England would have to cooperate with France.

  * * *

  As it happened, Louis-Napoleon was thinking along the same lines. On July 16, while the sickly emperor was taking the water cure in the mineral baths of Vichy, he met with the Confederate emissary John Slidell. Since arriving in Paris some six months earlier, Slidell had been angling for such a meeting; McClellan’s retreat had at last made it possible. The emperor, who fancied himself a military genius like his uncle, wanted to talk about Lee’s triumphs outside Richmond, which had been reported in the French newspapers the previous evening. Slidell knew no more than what he had read in those same papers, but he was delighted to hear Napoleon expound on the French sympathy for underdogs and his own belief that the South could not be conquered. Like Ambassador Dayton, Slidell was struck by the emperor’s candor. It was true, Napoleon told him, that France had always seen a strong United States as a necessary counterweight to British power, but now that the Union was breaking up, he preferred to side with the South.

  Pressing his advantage, Slidell suggested that France, with its ironclad battleships, could easily break the Union blockade, which would open the flow of money and guns that the Confederacy needed for victory. Napoleon rejected the idea; like Palmerston, he had no interest in a war with the North. What he would like to do, he told Slidell, was join Great Britain in an effort to mediate the conflict. Alas, the emperor added, his overtures to England had thus far been rebuffed.

  Slidell had a final card to play. The South was tired of waiting for England and France, with all their ancient grudges and competing interests, to fashion a joint intervention, so Richmond had recently given its emissary an unusual instruction: offer a bribe. Now Slidell smoothly told the emperor that the French determination to install a puppet regime in Mexico—a move stoutly resisted by the Lincoln administration—made this the perfect time for France to ally itself with the Confederacy. A Southern victory would make Mexico safe for France. To encourage Napoleon’s active support, the South was prepared to pay France a hundred thousand bales of cotton, worth more than $12 million. What was more, Richmond would provide duty-free access to Southern markets for all the French cargo that could be packed into the ships sent to collect that cotton. By the estimate of Judah Benjamin, the Confederate secretary of state, the bribe could not possibly be worth less than a hundred million French francs.

  The emperor registered, but did not react to, this irregular proposal, and after more than an hour of conversation the meeting ended amiably. Napoleon repeated that he hoped to hear from England, yet he also managed to leave Slidell with the feeling that he was moving toward a decision to act alone if necessary.

  * * *

  On July 15, as Congress prepared to adjourn, Lincoln sent messages to the House and Senate asking that the lawmakers delay their departure another day. Word somehow circulated that the president was preparing to veto the Confiscation Act. (Indirect communication was a Lincoln specialty; one irritated congressman complained of his “back-kitchen way of doing this business.”) Lincoln’s complaint was that the legislation could be construed as punishing a certain class of people without benefit of a trial—making it an unconstitutional “bill of attainder.” This was a flaw too obvious for Chief Justice Taney and the Supreme Court to miss.

  Congressional leaders quickly drafted a resolution clarifying Trumbull’s bill. Lincoln went to the Capitol to be on hand for any last-minute questions or negotiations. When the resolution passed easily, Lincoln signed the bill—“an act to destroy slavery,” in the words of Nicolay and Hay. As a precaution, the president attached his lightly revised veto message, so that his interpretation of the new law would be public record. He also approved changes to the Militia Act of 1795, authorizing the enlistment of blacks in the military. And with those two dramatic actions, the momentous second session of the 37th Congress of the United States came to a close.

  In the span of less than eight months, this tempestuous Congress had written the future of the nation. It wrenched American history away from the dead end of slavery and toward the hard, slow course of freedom; it created a modern monetary and fiscal machinery; it established a first-class army and navy; and it opened the frontier to bootstrapping families and supported their toil with a federal Bureau of Agriculture.

  The Congress of 1862 also passed legislation that provided the means for establishing a rail link from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The transcontinental railroad’s odyssey through Capitol Hill was an unseemly business involving millions of dollars in bribes, for some of the greatest fortunes in American history were at stake. Disputes over the cost and the final route nearly killed the bill in the Senate, but the president had kept the lawmakers moving forward.

  As a student of geography and a former railroad lawyer, he was well versed in the subject of possible paths west. Lincoln had arrived in Washington believing that the railroad ought to follow the easy route along the Platte River valley through Nebraska and what became Wyoming. As president, he came to realize that the most plausible proposal for the difficult western end of the line called for crossing the rugged Sierra Nevada at the Donner Pass. With these understandings he became, in the words of one historian, “the greatest friend of the Pacific Railroad … exhorting [men of] Congress and business to do their parts.” Lincoln signed the law authorizing the immense undertaking on July 1, 1862.

  Perhaps most visionary of all, the 37th Congress provided for the world’s foremost system of widely available college education. Lincoln believed “that the very best, firmest, and most enduring basis of our republic was education, the thorough and universal education of the American people.” In signing Justin Morrill’s bill to use federal lands to endow state colleges and universities for the education of the farming and working classes, Lincoln endorsed the transformation of American society and unleashed a mighty engine of economic development. Some of the finest universities in the world—among them Cornell, the University of California–Berkeley, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, to say nothing of dozens more—grew out of that bill, with the result that many millions of Americans and students from around the globe would never have to say, as Lincoln did: “That is what I have always regretted—the want of a college education. Those who have it should thank God for it.”

  After Congress adjourned, Charles Sumner offered an understated assessment: “Our session has been busy.” Then he added, with justified pride: “I doubt if any legislative body ever acted on so many important questions.” Nicolay, who had been Lincoln’s often irritable gatekeeper through the hectic months of congressional activity, sighed with relief. “I am heartily glad that Congress is at last gon
e,” he wrote, “and am sure I shall enjoy the relief from the constant strain of petty cares and troubles which their presence imposes.” And yet, he added: “It has done well, and much more than could reasonably have been expected of it—certainly much more than any former Congress has done.”

  * * *

  The press of work had forced Lincoln to borrow a third secretary, this one from the Interior Department. William O. Stoddard was an amiable young newspaper editor from Illinois whose chief virtue was his ability to get along with Mary Lincoln. Among the tasks he took on was keeping track of all the inventions and prototypes pushed on the president by would-be arms dealers. “Every proposed vender of condemned European firelocks was possessed by the idea that he might make a sale of them if he could induce the President to overrule the decisions of the Bureau of Ordnance,” Stoddard recalled. The various weapons would accumulate in the White House until there was a stack of promising candidates. Then Lincoln and “Stodd” would go test fire them. At that time, the Mall was an overgrown expanse—in Stoddard’s words, “badly littered with rubbish”—and “in the middle of it was a huge pile of old building lumber.” Placing a target on the woodpile, the men backed up a respectable distance and started shooting.

  Lincoln was fascinated by innovation. He loved visiting the navy yard to observe Dahlgren’s tests of new artillery, and under the tutelage of Joseph Henry at the Smithsonian Institution he kept abreast of scientific and medical advances. That summer, the president was also personally sponsoring a series of top-secret chemical experiments intended to improve the formula for gunpowder. The year 1862 was a time of tremendous technological progress—of innovations ranging from the mass production of condensed milk in cans to the first underwater ships, called “submarines.” The nightmares of generations yet unborn made their first ominous appearances: a schoolteacher in New York, John Doughty, wrote Stanton to explain how artillery shells could be loaded with chlorine gas to force the enemy from their trenches, while an inventor named Richard Gatling opened the first machine-gun factory.