Abraham Lincoln

by Stephen B. Oates

  The need for slave soldiers: ibid.; the quotation “You need more men” from Donald, Sumner, 60; the quotation “Let the slaves” from Arna Bontemps, Free at Last: The Life of Frederick Douglass (New York, 1971), 224.

  Lincoln’s response to the pressures: the quotation “I think Sumner” from Fawn M. Brodie, Thaddeus Stevens, Scourge of the South (paperback ed., New York, 1966), 155; the quotation “too big a lick” from Donald, Sumner, 60; Lincoln’s gradual emancipation plan in CW, 5: 145-46, 317-19, and Charles M. Segal (ed.), Conversations with Lincoln (New York, 1961), 165-68; the quotations “milk-and-water gruel” and “I utterly spit at it” from Brodie, Stevens, 156.

  My account of the congressional attack against slavery comes from the following: the Stevens profile from ibid., 68, 86-93, 193; the quotation “I trust I am not dreaming” from McPherson, Negro’s Civil War, 44; the quotation “his pride of race” from Foner, Life and Writings of Douglass, 3: 24; the quotation “would never prosper” from Douglass, Life and Times, 336.

  The quotation “strong hand on the colored element” is from Lincoln, CW, 7: 281-82. Gideon Welles, “History of Emancipation,” Galaxy (Dec., 1872), 842-43, and Welles, Diary (ed. John T. Morse, Jr., 3 vols., Boston, 1911), 1:70-71, describe the carriage ride in which Lincoln discussed emancipation. Lincoln’s letter to Greeley is in CW, 5:388-89. For interpretations of the letter similar to my own, see Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro, 128, and V. Jacque Voegeli, Free but Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro in the Civil War (Chicago, 1967), 46.

  Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation is in CW, 5:433-36. The quotation “We shout for joy” is from Foner, Life and Writings of Douglass, 3:25; the quotation “Hurrah” from Trefousse, Wade, 187; the quotation “contained precisely” from Brodie, Stevens, 158; Sumner’s remarks in his Complete Works, (20 vols., reprint of 1900 ed., New York, 1961), 9:199-200, 247. For a discussion of emancipation and Lincoln’s message to Congress, Dec., 1862, see my own With Malice Toward None, 325-26, and Franklin, Emancipation Proclamation, 81. The Democratic response is in ibid., 81-82; the quotation “From the genuine abolition view” from Douglass, Life and Times, 541-42. The final proclamation is in Lincoln, CW, 6:28-30. The quotation “my name” is from Segal, Conversations with Lincoln, 234-35; the quotation “let us not cavil” from Franklin, Emancipation Proclamation, 113; the quotation “played his grand part” from Julian, Political Recollections, 226, also 250; the quotation “the sunlight” from the Liberator, Jan. 9, 1863; the quotation “The time has come” from McPherson, Negro’s Civil War, 50.

  3: THE MAN OF OUR REDEMPTION

  The quotation “of minor significance” is from Randall, Mr. Lincoln, 347. See my comments on the “insignificant” and “free-no-slaves” argument in Our Fiery Trial, 137-38. The quotation “events of the war” is from Sandburg, Lincoln: The War Years, 4:217; the quotation “the colored population” from Lincoln, CW, 6:149.

  The best studies of Lincoln and black troops are Dudley T. Cornish, The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861-1865 (paperback ed., New York, 1966), and Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro, 153-83. The quotation “ALL SLAVES” is from ibid., 166; the quotation “with clenched teeth” from Lincoln, CW, 6:410; the Negro soldier and the “Sambo” image in John T. Hubbell, “Abraham Lincoln and the Recruitment of Black Soldiers,” Papers of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 2 (Springfield, 1980): 20-21.

  For Lincoln and colonization, see the excellent summary in Neely, Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia, 63; the quotation “entirely a fantasy” from Neely, “Abraham Lincoln and Colonization: Benjamin Butler’s Spurious Testimony,” Civil War History, 25 (March, 1979): 77-83. George M. Fredrickson, “A Man but Not a Brother: Abraham Lincoln and Racial Equality,” Journal of Southern History, 41(Feb., 1975), 39-58, is simply wrong in arguing that Lincoln continued “to his dying day to deny the possibility of racial harmony and equality in the United States and persisted in regarding colonization as the only real alternative to perpetual race conflict.” For Lincoln’s desire to frighten rebel leaders out of the country, see Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln (New York, 1952), 517.

  On the reaction to Lincoln’s Proclamation, the quotation “brink of ruin” is from Browning, Diary, 1:610-13, 616; the quotation “an act of justice” is from the Proclamation itself; Lincoln’s assertion that blacks who had tasted freedom would never again be slaves in CW, 6:358; the quotation “a coarse, but an expressive figure” from ibid., 6:48-49; the quotation “He is stubborn” from Brodie, Stevens, 201; the quotation “His mind acts slowly” from Magdol, Lovejoy, 401. Lincoln’s abortive peace proposal to Jefferson Davis is in Lincoln, CW, 7:517-18; see also John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln, A History (10 vols., New York, 1890), 9:221.

  For Lincoln and the Thirteenth Amendment, see Albert G. Riddle, Recollections of War Time (New York, 1895), 323-24, and Julian, Political Recollections, 250. The quotation “if slavery is not wrong” is from Trefousse, Radical Republicans, 299, and Lincoln, CW, 7:281; the quotations “stand here and denounce” and “the greatest measure” from Brodie, Stevens, 204; the quotation “It seemed to me” from Julian, Political Recollections, 251; the quotations “great moral victory” and “King’s cure” from Lincoln, CW, 8:254-55; the quotation “people over the river” from Segal, Conversations with Lincoln, 17.

  Lincoln’s Second Inaugural is in CW, 8:332-33. For Lincoln, Douglass, and the blacks, see Douglass’s article in the New York Tribune, July 15, 1885; Douglass, Life and Times, 347-49, 484-86; Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro, 196-205, 233; Randall, Mr. Lincoln, 363-68; the quotation “similarity with which I had fought” from Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream, 174.

  4: NECESSITY KNOWS NO LAW

  On Lincoln’s emergency measures, see Harold M. Hyman, A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution (New York, 1973), 50-64; the quotations “their ability,” “without authority of law,” and “These measures” from Lincoln, CW, 5:240-43, 4:429; the quotation “all the acts, proclamations” from J. G. Randall and David Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction (2nd ed., revised, Lexington, Mass., 1969), 279.

  My account of martial law and military arrests is based on Hyman, More Perfect Union, 65-155; James G. Randall, Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln (paperback ed., Urbana, Ill., 1964), 118-85; the quotations “most efficient corps” and “Are all the laws” from Lincoln, CW, 6:263, 4:430-31; also Benjamin P. Thomas and Harold M. Hyman, Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War (New York, 1962), 157-58, 280-81, 375; Welles, Diary, 1:321.

  For the Vallandigham case, see Frank L. Klement, The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (Lexington, Ky., 1970), 102 ff., and Bruce Catton, Never Call Retreat (Garden City, N.Y., 1965), 102-4, 172-74; the quotation “I see nothing before us” from ibid., 104; Lincoln’s open letter in Lincoln, CW, 6: 260-69.

  On Lincoln and confiscation, the quotation “the traitor” is from Lincoln, CW, 5:328-31. Randall, Mr. Lincoln, 349, asserts that Lincoln “shrank from enforcing the confiscation acts,” but the evidence belies this claim. The President not only ordered General John C. Frémont, commander of Missouri, to abide by the first confiscation act, but insisted in his Annual Message, Dec. 3, 1861, that he had faithfully enforced it. Moreover, as I point out in the text, Lincoln compelled conquered rebel states to obey all congressional laws relating to slavery before those states could be reconstructed.

  On the 1864 election, the quotation “The election was a necessity” is from Lincoln, CW, 6:101; the Stowe quotations are from Mitgang, Lincoln, A Press Portrait, 377, 378.

  5: THE WARRIOR

  T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York, 1952), remains the standard study of the subject and one of the best Lincoln books in existence. I have, however, learned from Warren W. Hassler, Commanders of the Army of the Potomac (Baton Rouge, La., 1962), which is sympathetic to McClellan and extremely unflattering to Lincoln and Stanton; from Randal
l, Lincoln the President: From Bull Run to Gettysburg (paperback ed., New York, 1945), which is also sympathetic to McClellan; and from a spate of modern biographies of individual generals too numerous to list. But see in particular the biographies of Grant by William S. McFeely and Bruce Catton, and of Sherman by James M. Merrill, John Bennett Watters, and B. H. Liddell Hart.

  The quotation “I am thinking” is from Browning, Diary, 1:523; the quotation “good many bloody struggles” and Lincoln’s “general idea of the war” from Lincoln, CW, 1:510, 5:98-99; the quotation “pain me very much” from Lincoln, CW, 5:286; the quotation “fighting, and only fighting” from Randall, Lincoln the President, 87; the quotation “we may as well” from John Hay, Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries and Letters of John Hay (selected by Tyler Dennett, reprint of 1939 ed., New York, 1972), 46; the quotation “He is an admirable engineer” from Williams, Lincoln and His Generals, 178; the quotation “Beware of rashness” from Lincoln, CW, 6:79; Hooker’s remark about the rebel army from Williams, Lincoln and His Generals, 238; the quotation “My God!” from Allen T. Rice (ed.), Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (New York, 1888), 402; the quotation “hurt this enemy” from Hay, Diaries (Dennett, ed.), 46, also 218-19; the quotation “hold on with bull-dog grip” from Lincoln, CW, 7:499; the quotation “We are not only” from Merrill, William Tecumseh Sherman (Chicago, 1971), 258, 266; the quotation “There is many a boy” from Stephen E. Ambrose, “William T. Sherman,” American History Illustrated (Jan., 1967), 57. In sum, said Chauncey Depew, Lincoln “knew the whole situation better than any man in the administration, and virtually carried on in his own mind not only the civic side of the government, but all the campaigns.” Rice, Reminiscences, 428-29.

  6: TOWARD A NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM

  My interpretation is similar to that in Peyton McCrary, Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction: The Louisiana Experiment (Princeton, N.J., 1978). McCrary’s is now the standard book-length study of Lincoln’s approach to southern restoration, replacing William B. Hesseltine, Lincoln’s Plan of Reconstruction (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1960), which is dated both in its scholarship and its preconceptions. Several older historians, especially those in or from the South, have faulted McCrary’s inescapable conclusions that Lincoln stood with his advanced Republican colleagues on critical reconstruction questions; apparently these historians prefer the mythical version. Those who approach McCrary’s book with an open mind will find it exhaustive, accurate, and persuasive, without the kind of pro-southern sentimentality that mars older writings on the subject.

  McCrary’s work, like my own, is part of a growing body of modern scholarship that has reassessed Lincoln’s stance toward the freedmen, conquered Dixie, and Congress and the advanced Republicans. See, for example, Harold M. Hyman, Lincoln’s Reconstruction: Neither Failure of Vision nor Vision of Failure (the Third R. Gerald McMurtry Lecture, Fort Wayne, Ind., May 8, 1980), and Hyman, More Perfect Union, 209-15, 276-81; Herman Belz, Reconstructing the Union (Ithaca, N.Y., 1969), particularly 147, 162-63, 258-62, 290-91; Donald, Sumner, 179-209; Trefousse, Radical Republicans, 280-304; Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro, 185 ff.; and Bruce Catton, Never Call Retreat, 288-95. Wrote the venerable Catton: “Mr. Lincoln is usually pictured as occupying a middle role between opposing extremes in this situation [the need for revolutionary change in Dixie], but actually he was not. He was at one of the extremes himself.” He disagreed with the advanced Republicans “only on the method by which the change was to come.”

  On phase two of Lincoln’s approach, the quotation “a radical extension” is from Belz, Reconstructing the Union, 291-92. On phase three, Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, appended to his Message to Congress, Dec. 8, 1863, is in Lincoln, CW, 7: 49-56; see also 6:358, 7:89-90, 8:106-7. The quotation “how to keep the rebellious populations” is from Hay, Diary (Dennett ed.), 113; the quotations “opposing elements,” “which accepts as sound,” and “to now abandon them,” from Lincoln, CW, 7:51; Lincoln’s Message to Congress, Dec. 6, 1864, from ibid., 8:152. Lincoln’s reference to the southern ruling class and “odious and detested” slave dealers is in ibid., 2:322.

  For Lincoln’s closeness to advanced and moderate congressional Republicans, see Lincoln’s own remarks in Hay, Diary (Dennett ed.), 113, and Hyman, Belz, Donald, and Trefousse, cited above. The quotation “like two schoolboys” is from Turners, Mary Todd Lincoln, 185.

  On Lincoln and the welfare of the freedmen, the quotation “laboring, landless, and homeless class” is from Lincoln, CW, 7:55 and 6:265; see also 6:49. Lincoln warned that he would not tolerate abuses of southern blacks and that white authorities must recognize their permanent freedom and provide for their education. But he dropped the apprenticeship idea entirely, as I state in the text. See ibid., 7:145, 217-18 and 8:20, 30-31, 107, 402. For the refugee system, consult Voegeli, Free but Not Equal, 95-112; Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro, 188-90; Cornish, Sable Arm, 112-31; and Bell I. Wiley, Southern Negroes, 1861-1865 (Baton Rouge, 1938), 199-259.

  On Lincoln and Negro voting rights, the quotations “the very intelligent,” “better for the poor black,” “saving the already,” and “as bad promises” are from Lincoln, CW, 7:243 and 8:107, 402, 404. For differing accounts of the compromise, see Donald, Sumner, 196-97, Belz, Reconstructing the Union, 258-62, 290-91, and McCrary, Lincoln and Reconstruction, 287-89. Lincoln’s last speech is in CW, 8:399-404. The quotation “never so near our views” is from David Donald (ed.), Inside Lincoln’s Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase (New York and London, 1954), 268. See also McCrary, Lincoln and Reconstruction, 304.

  For Lincoln’s last Cabinet meeting, see Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, 357-58, 358n., and my own With Malice Toward None, 427-28. The quotation “It may be my duty” is from Lincoln, CW, 8:405; the quotation “open the gates” from Thomas, Lincoln, 517. Belz, Hesseltine, and others have argued that in April, 1865, Lincoln considered a new approach to reconstruction, that he hoped to work through existing rebel legislatures to effect civil reorganization. There is no convincing evidence to support this. See my own “Toward a New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction, 1854-1865,” Lincoln Herald, 82 (Spring, 1980): 296.

  Part Five: Final Act

  1: THE THEATER

  The profile of Lincoln’s humor and humanity draws from Zall, Abe Lincoln Laughing, 6, 151; the Seward quotation is from Randall, Mr. Lincoln, 237. My sketch of Booth and the assassination is based on George S. Bryan, The Great American Myth (New York, 1940), 75-185, 201-2, which is still the most reliable account of the murder; Thomas Reed Turner, Beware the People Weeping: Public Opinion and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Baton Rouge, 1982), 18-64; Louis J. Weichmann, A True History of the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln and of the Conspiracy of 1865 (ed. Floyd E. Risvold, New York, 1975), 3-216, plus John Surratt’s Rockville Lecture, ibid. 428-40; Ralph Borreson, When Lincoln Died (New York, 1965), 15-46, containing excerpts from eyewitnesses; Dorothy Meserve and Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr., Twenty Days (New York, 1965), 11 ff.; Luthin, Real Lincoln, 610-18, 625-50; David M. DeWitt, The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln and Its Expiation (New York, 1909), 1-54; and Benn Pitman (comp.), The Assassination of the President and the Trial of the Conspirators (Cincinnati, 1865). The Booth quotations are from Bryan; the quotation “If he is elected to misgovern” from La Cross (Wis.) Democrat, Aug. 29, 1864; the quotation (“assassination is not an American habit”) from Frederic Bancroft, Life of William H. Seward (New York, 1900), 2: 418; the quotation “awed to passive docility” from Luthin, Real Lincoln, 656; the quotation “served Lincoln right” from Lincoln Lore (Apr., 1961).

  As for the peephole in the state-box door, nobody saw Booth bore it or chip the plaster from the frame of the outer door. But circumstantial evidence points to Booth, since an iron-handled gimlet was found in his room at the National Hotel after the assassination. Authorities assume that he used this instrument to fix the outer door and to make the peephole, then scraping it clean wi
th a small knife. Booth had such free access to Ford’s, was so well known to the people there, that he could easily have made his preparations without attracting attention. See Luthin, Real Lincoln, 627-28, and DeWitt, Assassination of Lincoln, 42, a volume based on contemporary testimony and official records and reports.

  The chief government witness against Booth’s accomplices, Louis J. Weichmann, whose True History of the Assassination was only recently published, contended that the facts indicate that somebody involved in the assassination plot was in the state box earlier that day, boring the hole in question, making the mortise in the outer door frame, and leaving a wooden bar for Booth to insert into it and thus to lock out people from the auditorium.

  In 1963, however, a National Park Service pamphlet, Restoration of Ford’s Theater, An Historic Structures Report, hurled new evidence into the peephole controversy. The pamphlet quoted Frank Ford, son of theater-owner Harry Ford, who wrote in 1962 that workmen acting on his father’s instructions had made the hole, so that the guard that night could peer through at the President without disturbing him. People can believe that if they want to. But I am suspicious of hearsay evidence offered almost a century after the event. Therefore I am inclined not to accept Frank Ford’s claim until it can be substantiated by contemporary evidence.

  2: AFTERMATH

  My sources for Booth’s death, diary, and body are Bryan, Great American Myth, 228-314; Turner, Beware the People Weeping, 74-75, 100-24; Luthin, Real Lincoln, 665-71; and William Hanchett, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies (Urbana, Ill., 1983). The quotations “Well, my brave boys” and “Tell my mother” are from Bryan, Great American Myth, 264, 265; the quotation “There was nothing in the diary” from Turner, Beware the People Weeping, 75; the quotation “God Almighty ordered” from Mitgang, Lincoln, A Press Portrait, 476; the quotation “Abe has gone to answer” from the Chattanooga Daily Rebel as reprinted in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, May 10, 1865.