Put ambition for the collective interest above self-interest.
In the country at large, however, approbation and acceptance of emancipation vacillated with the fortunes of the Union troops. Despite the Union victory at Gettysburg, Lee’s army once again escaped, regrouped, and defeated General Ulysses S. Grant’s Union forces in a nightmarish sequence of battles at Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg. For both North and South, the spring of 1864 was a time of physical and spiritual depletion, darkness, and death. By summer’s end, the number of dead, wounded, captured, and missing in action had reached more than 580,000 in the North and nearly 470,000 in the South. Desperation gave rise to “a mad cry” for peace at any cost.
The mood of despondency that enveloped the North threatened Lincoln’s reelection. “The tide is setting strongly against us,” Republican National Committee chair Henry Raymond warned Lincoln in late August. If the election were held at that moment, he would likely lose his bid for a second term. So doubtful were the Republican committee members about Lincoln’s prospects for reelection that they had yet to mobilize the party machinery. The problem was not simply the lack of military success but the suspicion that Lincoln’s insistence on emancipation was the main obstacle to peace. For the Republicans to have any chance of victory, Raymond told Lincoln, he must commence peace talks “on the sole condition” of reunion, leaving the issue of slavery for later consideration.
“I confess that I desire to be re-elected,” Lincoln acknowledged. “I have the common pride of humanity to wish my past four years administration endorsed,” and at the same time, “I want to finish this job.” Nonetheless, he rejected Raymond’s plea that he dispatch a commissioner to Richmond to meet with Confederate president Jefferson Davis. To sound out conditions for peace without demanding the end of slavery Lincoln considered “utter ruination.” He would rather face electoral defeat than renounce emancipation. He “should be damned in time & in eternity,” he vehemently declared, if he abandoned his commitment to the twin goals of Union and freedom. Moreover, those who accused him of “carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition” must understand that “no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever.” The word firmness is insufficient to connote the iron will with which Abraham Lincoln now stood his ground.
Overnight, the fall of Atlanta on the third of September elevated northern spirits. “Glorious news this morning,” George Templeton Strong exulted. “It is [coming at this political crisis] the greatest event of the war.” As celebratory headlines filled northern newspapers and throngs congregated in cities and towns to fire guns and ring bells, Lincoln’s friend Leonard Swett, who only weeks before had written that Lincoln’s reelection “was beyond any possible hope,” now believed that God had given the Union its glorious victory to make “the ship right itself, as a ship in a storm does after a great wave has nearly capsized it.”
It was clear to both parties that the massive soldier vote might well sway the election. Democrats, remembering the devotion George McClellan had once inspired among his men, had chosen the former general as their nominee on a platform that severed abolition from reunion, thereby promising an early conclusion to the war. “We are as certain of two-thirds of that [soldier] vote for General McClellan as that the sun shines,” a Democratic operative jauntily predicted.
The soldiers’ vote was also of paramount importance to Lincoln, but for far deeper reasons than its numerical bearing on the outcome of the election. He trusted the fellowship that he had strengthened with their common investment in the war. Such intimacy did Lincoln feel for the rank-and-file servicemen that he said that if he had to make a choice he “would rather be defeated with the soldier vote behind [him] than to be elected without it.”
That circumstance never came to pass. Lincoln swept the Electoral College by a tally of 212 to 21, and captured more than seven out of ten soldiers’ votes. In casting their ballots for Lincoln, the soldiers knew that in all likelihood they were prolonging their personal risk and the duration of their wartime service. They were voting against their self-interest for the greater collective interest that Lincoln had powerfully expressed in his talks with them. This contest “is not merely for to-day, but for all time to come,” Lincoln had reiterated in numerous ways. “I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has. It is in order that each of you may have through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence; that you all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations. It is for this the struggle should be maintained.” And when they went to the polls, the soldiers voted not for their own safety but for the man who had come to represent the cause they fought for together.
* * *
Winning a second term fired Lincoln’s resolve to secure emancipation beyond the rebel South, to encompass the entirety of the nation. With all possible speed, he sought a formal guarantee that slavery would be abolished within the United States. Such an assurance could not rest upon an executive order but rather must be written into the law of the land by way of a constitutional amendment.
Executive war powers had enabled the circumvention of constitutionally protected slavery. Now, the supple Constitution must provide its own permanent remedy to abolish slavery in the form of the Thirteenth Amendment, introduced on January 6, 1865. Informed three weeks later that the requisite two-thirds passage was two votes short, Lincoln stridently intervened with his Capitol Hill emissaries. He made it understood that his transactional executive power extended to government jobs for relatives and friends, pardons, ministries abroad, and campaign contributions. It was not long before they had scoured up those two votes. When the final tally was announced, remarked a witness, “there was an explosion, a storm of cheers the like of which no Congress of the United States ever heard before.” To a crowd of celebrants who came to serenade him the next evening at the White House, Lincoln proclaimed that the occasion was one of “congratulation to the country and to the whole world.” But he reminded them that “there is a task yet before us—to go forward and consummate by the votes of the States that which Congress so nobly began.”
A week later, before an immense crowd at Boston Music Hall celebrating the House passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison asked the question “And to whom is the country more immediately indebted for this vital and saving amendment of the Constitution than, perhaps, to any other man? I believe I may confidently answer—to the humble rail-splitter of Illinois—to the presidential chain-breaker for millions of the oppressed—to Abraham Lincoln.”
Lincoln shrank from the heroic appellation “The Great Emancipator.” “I have only been an instrument,” he insisted. “The antislavery people of the country and the army have done it all.” Such humility did not suggest a lack of ambition. On the contrary, from the time he was a young man Lincoln had harbored a consuming ambition to make a difference in the world. During the nadir of his depression in his early thirties, he had confessed to Joshua Speed that he would gladly die but that he had “done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.” He would be remembered now. When Speed came to the White House shortly after the signing of the Proclamation, the two old friends reminisced about that grim early period in Lincoln’s life when his desire for remembrance had fueled his recovery from depression. Far beyond any grand projection when he was young, Lincoln had now rendered service to his fellow man. “I believe that in this measure,” Lincoln flatly declared of the Proclamation, “my fondest hopes will be realized.”
Abraham Lincoln never lived to see the completion of the task he had begun with his Proclamation—the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment by three-quarters of the states in December 1865. Slavery, the “wen” he had spoken of cutting out of the Constitution, had been excised at terrible cost at last. “A King’
s cure for all the evils,” he had said of the anticipated amendment. “It winds the whole thing up.”
In the great convergence of the man and his times, Lincoln had driven, guided, and inspired his cabinet, the Army, and his countrymen. “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history,” he had told the Congress a month before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. “The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. . . . In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”
It was through the language of his leadership that a moral purpose and meaning was imprinted upon the protracted misery of the Civil War. So surely did Lincoln midwife this process of social transformation that we look back at the United States before Abraham Lincoln and after him.
TEN
CRISIS MANAGEMENT
Theodore Roosevelt and the Coal Strike
It is a dreadful thing to come into the Presidency this way; but it would be a far worse thing to be morbid about it,” Roosevelt wrote a friend days after President William McKinley’s long-drawn death. “Here is the task, and I have got to do it to the best of my ability; and that is all there is about it.”
Widespread warnings of panic swirled that the stock market might well crash unless Roosevelt provided reassurance that a steady and cautious hand had taken the helm. Accordingly, the new president immediately asked every member of McKinley’s cabinet to stay on. His friends worried that some of these men might not be “loyal” to him, but he said that if those he kept “were loyal to their work,” that was the loyalty for which he cared the most; “if they were not,” he would swiftly change them. At the same time, he reached out to the conservative political boss Mark Hanna, McKinley’s closest friend, who was now face-to-face with the situation he had dreaded when he cautioned fellow Republicans against putting “that madman” Roosevelt in the vice presidency.
“I hope you will be to me all that you have been to him,” the disciplined new president now told the bereft Hanna. And furthermore, he issued a conciliating pledge: “In this hour of deep and terrible bereavement, I wish to state that I shall continue absolutely unbroken the policy of President McKinley for the peace, prosperity, and the honor of the country.”
Yet, even as Roosevelt publicly promised continuity, he knew that if he pursued McKinley’s conservative policies to the letter it “would give a lie to all he had stood for” in his fight to refashion the Republican Party into a progressive force. The breadth of his hands-on experience at different levels of government, from the state legislature to the police department to the governor’s chair, had sensitized Roosevelt to the hidden dangers of the age: the rise of gigantic trusts that were rapidly swallowing up their competitors in one field after another, the invisible web of corruption linking political bosses to the business community, the increasing concentration of wealth and the growing gap between the rich and the poor, the squalid conditions in the immigrant slums, the mood of insurrection among the laboring classes.
So, on his first day in office, Theodore Roosevelt signaled to journalists that despite his endorsement of the status quo, a new political era was dawning. The Constitution, he reminded them, had provided for his succession as president, and he was determined “to act in every word and deed precisely as if [he] and not McKinley had been the candidate for whom the electors cast the vote for President.” He had cut his political teeth in the endless crosscurrents and whiplash between machine bosses and reformers. He mistrusted and feared the former and often disappointed the latter. If it was necessary to temporarily bide his time to avoid upheavals in the market, anyone who thought he would follow the pro-business path laid out by William McKinley badly misconstrued his nature and his intentions.
The impact of Roosevelt’s outsized personality made it immediately clear that a new leader was in charge, one who fathomed the country’s challenges in a very different way than his predecessor. “The infectiousness of his exuberant vitality made the country realize there was a new man in the White House,” observed journalist Mark Sullivan, “indeed a new kind of man. His high spirits, enormous capacity for work, his tirelessness, his forthrightness, his many striking qualities, gave a lift of the spirits to millions of average men.”
Throughout his political career, Roosevelt’s conception of leadership had been built upon a narrative of the embattled hero (armed with courage, spunk, honor, and truth) who sets out into the world to prove himself. It was a dragon-slaying notion of the hero-leader, and Roosevelt had the good fortune to strike the historical moment in which he could prove his mettle. Under the banner of “the Square Deal,” he would lead his country in a different kind of war, a progressive battle designed to restore fairness to America’s economic and social life.
The Great Coal Strike of 1902—the subject of this case study—is emblematic of the widespread mood of rebellion among the laboring classes in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. The unfolding of the president’s creative handling of what was viewed as “the most formidable deadlock in the history of the country” offers a demonstration of groundbreaking crisis management.
* * *
As cold weather approached in the fall of 1902, widespread panic set in. Still, there were no signs of a settlement in the six-month-old strike between the United Mine Workers, the largest union in the nation, and a powerful cartel of railroad presidents and mine owners who monopolized anthracite (hard coal) production in Pennsylvania. The massive labor stoppage was already “the biggest and longest-running news story of the year.”
The Northeast depended almost entirely on anthracite coal for winter fuel. Like a black river with myriad tributaries, coal ran from the collieries and railroad cars in Pennsylvania to the factories and mills, the hospitals, schools, and dwellings of New York and New England. Damming that river of coal would plunge the entire region into a coal famine—and like a shortage of bread, coal famine presaged suffering and violence for the populace at large.
Indeed, as this seasonal tragedy began to play out before the public and wintertime drew closer, the coal strike “assumed a shape so acute” that even conservatives warned Theodore Roosevelt that “if the situation remained unchanged we would have within a fortnight the most widespread and bloody civil disturbance we have known in our time.”
What made this situation so frustrating for Roosevelt was the remarkable fact that neither legal nor historical precedent warranted presidential intervention to manage any single aspect of the crisis. So pervasive was the belief that government should refrain from interfering in the workings of an unregulated free market that quarrels between labor and management were considered wholly private matters. A chorus of voices, including Roosevelt’s family, closest friends, and colleagues, advised him that unless the state of Pennsylvania requested emergency troops to quell violent disorder, he had no power whatsoever to take action.
Not only did Roosevelt have no legal authority to intervene, but from a political vantage, he was forewarned to steer clear. Meddling would poison support from the business community, the Republican Party’s mainstay of support. Furthermore, if he tried and failed, the responsibility for failure would be laid at his door, damaging his party’s prospects in the upcoming fall midterms and his own political future.
Roosevelt’s handling of the six-month strike unfolded in three seasonal stages, beginning in the spring of the year.
SPRING
The catastrophe the strike would bring on by October was nowhere to be seen in May 1902, when 147,000 miners walked out. No one conceived then that the strike would become what labor leader Samuel Gompers later deemed “the most important event in the labor movement of the United States.”
The unexampled surge of industrial consolidation that produced the giant coal combination had begun a decade earlier when the coal-carrying railroads (the Reading, Lackawanna, Erie, and others) under the
auspices of J. P. Morgan, Wall Street’s most respected financier, had begun purchasing coalfields, using their power over freight rates to buy out one independent mine after another. The United Mine Workers had only recently gained footing in the anthracite region. Led by John Mitchell, a charismatic, conservative, articulate young leader who had worked in the mines before becoming a union official, the union had organized tens of thousands of anthracite miners.
All during the spring of 1902, Mitchell was under pressure from his rank-and-file miners to deal with a host of troubling issues, including low wages, ten-hour days, and brutal working conditions. To forestall the growing demand for a strike, which Mitchell feared would “risk everything in one great fight,” the union leader went to New York to discuss potential areas of agreement with the owners. When the owners, led by George Baer, the wealthy college-educated president of the Reading Railway, flatly refused to sit at the same table with “a common coal-miner, who had worked with his hands for 15 years and was now a labor agitator,” the miners voted to strike, their pride aggravated by the owners’ condescension.
Though Mitchell had initially opposed the idea of a strike, fearing the new union could not sustain a major conflict during its formative time, he now assured the workers that he was committed to do everything he could to make the strike successful. He implored them to stay together: “If you stand as one man and stand long enough and strong enough, you will win; if you divide, you will lose.”
Such was Mitchell’s authority that at his signal, almost every miner walked out on the first day, a response far exceeding the most sanguine hopes of union organizers. Mitchell’s hold on the men, many of them immigrants who barely spoke English, was legendary. Case in point: When news of President McKinley’s assassination first spread to the coal region, the workmen had gathered together, openly grieving. “Who shot our President?” they cried out. Upon learning that President McKinley, not President Mitchell, had been shot, they were greatly relieved.
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