“He is ambitious, talented, but not considerate, persistent, or profound,” Gideon Welles characterized Greeley. A contradictory man, Greeley opposed women’s suffrage but eagerly hired the women’s rights activist Margaret Fuller and made her his foreign correspondent; he urged international copyright (there was none) to protect American authors; he suggested that young men go west to homestead the land; he promoted vegetarianism; and he deplored the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850. An early member of the Republican Party and a backer of Lincoln in 1860, in 1858 he’d swung his considerable journalistic weight behind Stephen Douglas. Initially, he had supported secession (let the erring sisters go), but then he had urged in his paper that the untried bluecoats march “On to Richmond” before the First Battle of Bull Run. Though not directly responsible for the rallying cry—his associate Charles Dana had approved the headline in Greeley’s absence—Greeley acknowledged that the buck did stop with him.
He was thus a man of parts. His “Prayer of Twenty Millions,” published in 1862, had been a plea for emancipation. He had supported the draft and bravely did not flee the Tribune offices during the draft riot of 1863. Yet he also supported peace and never more so than in the dark summer days of 1864, when Lincoln seemed to drift, or so it was supposed, and Northerners grew wearier than ever, worried about the war debt and darkly dubious about whether General Grant, the newly appointed commander in chief of the entire Union army, would make good on his expensive summer campaign, costly in dollars, costlier in men.
“I propose to fight it out on this line if takes all summer,” Grant had said, and he continued to batter the Confederates—and his own army. As general in chief, the highest post possible, of the army, since March 1864, the quiet Grant had moved his headquarters east and planned to engage Lee’s forces as long as possible and as fiercely as possible. But there had been 95,000 casualties between May and early July: the statistics defy comprehension. In the tangled, dark Wilderness of Virginia, for instance, the battle was long, fierce, and useless, said one of Grant’s biographers. It resulted in 17,500 Union casualties, 7,000 Confederate. Near Spotsylvania Courthouse, at the so-called Bloody Angle, for eighteen hours men killed each other with bullets and bayonets, and waged what one scholar called an “atavistic territorial battle.” The trench floors were slimy with blood; men stood on wounded men to fight hand to hand regardless of storms, mud, and the bodies of dismembered comrades lying nearby. And after the battle at the crossroads known as Cold Harbor, near the Chickahominy River, in early June, Grant threw so many men against the entrenched Confederates that even he would say, in sorrow, that no advantage whatever was gained. The losses had been insane. Mary Lincoln again thought Grant a butcher; she wasn’t alone. The bone-tired Lincoln, lanky and funereal and slightly stooped, paraphrased Henry IV, Part I, saying that the “heavens are hung in black.”
“Many a man has gone crazy since this campaign began from the terrible pressure on mind & body,” wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who had already been wounded three times. “I hope for success strongly before the end of the summer,” he said, “—but at what a cost.” Grant’s and Lee’s armies prepared for a long siege outside Petersburg, twenty miles southeast of Richmond, in intricate, forbidding trenches. The Army of the Potomac was battle-weary; so many men had died, so many men were leaving, their term of enlistment coming due. Lincoln called for 500,000 volunteers: more men to be thrown on the pyre of dead men. If the men didn’t show up, he’d authorize a new draft.
“Our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country also longs for peace—shudders at the prospect of fresh conscription, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood,” Horace Greeley had assailed Lincoln. Greeley decided to take matters into his own hands. He thought he himself could broker peace with the Confederacy by meeting with Southern agents in Canada. Two emissaries from Richmond, who were ready to negotiate, he said, were waiting for him on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Not wishing to alienate Greeley or seem averse to peace, Lincoln cleverly told the editor he would meet with whatever bona fide commissioners, authorized by Jefferson Davis, that Greeley might find there and bring to Washington. The president was thereby able to placate Greeley, pretending to hear peace proposals while, once again, demonstrating that the Confederacy was not going to tender them. If Davis wanted peace, Lincoln knew, it would be peace with disunion.
Lincoln was right. For one thing, the men Greeley met were not at all authorized by Jefferson Davis. And, as Lincoln had rightly surmised, Davis would not settle for anything less than Southern independence. Plus, Lincoln had also sent his secretary John Hay to Niagara Falls. A good man for the job, courteous, keen-witted, and eminently loyal, Hay had carried a note from Lincoln promising safe passage to the alleged envoys, if indeed they were envoys, as long as their peace proposition embraced “the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery, and which comes by and with an authority that can control the armies now at war.” But the envoys—Clement Clay, a former senator from Alabama, and James Holcombe, a man “tall spare false looking,” as John Hay recalled, “with false teeth false eyes & false hair”—had no authority at all.
Outfoxed by the president, who had maneuvered him into making the foolish trip, Greeley returned in shame to New York City very much aware that he’d been duped: by the Confederate secret agents, by Copperheads and Peace Democrats trying to finagle Lincoln out of office, by his muddle-headed confidence in his own abilities, and not least by the president himself. “Greeley is an old shoe,” Gideon Welles remembered Lincoln saying. “ ‘In early life, and with few mechanics and but little means in the West, we used,’ said he, ‘to make our shoes last a great while with much mending, and sometimes, when far gone, we found the leather so rotten the stitches would not hold. Greeley is so rotten that nothing can be done with him. He is not truthful; the stitches all tear out.’ ”
Lincoln had defeated another foe within his own ranks.
Yet Greeley never gave up easily. Much to Lincoln’s annoyance, he published his self-serving justifications in his widely read paper. Nor were the Confederate agents easy to slough off. In high dudgeon they also released to the papers a letter to Greeley in which they accused Lincoln of closing a door to negotiations that they had opened. What Lincoln had done, they opined, was to preclude negotiations—and to prescribe in advance “the terms and conditions of peace.” That is, they continued, the president’s letter returned to the “original policy of ‘No bargaining, no negotiations, no truces with the rebels except to bury their dead, until every man shall have laid down his arms, submitted to the Government, and sued for mercy.’ ” What was left? they asked. Just the imperial will of Lincoln, fresh blasts of war to the bitter end, and the destruction of all hope.
Attempting to discredit Lincoln, to splinter Republicans further, and to hearten Copperheads and Peace Democrats, the Confederate agents were successful enough to make Lincoln amenable to the importuning of two other men: James R. Gilmore, an author who wrote under the name of Edmund Kirke, and Colonel James Jaquess, a Methodist clergyman presently on furlough from the 73rd Illinois Regiment. Lincoln granted the two agents from the North safe travel through Virginia, for they hoped to talk with Jefferson Davis—unofficially—and bring back news of the Southern president’s point of view, which Lincoln knew would yet again strengthen his own hand. He also knew that Davis could not decline to meet with those backdoor emissaries, for Davis valued propaganda and the press as much as he did, and he knew that Davis would scuttle the benighted plan of those Union do-gooders who wanted to settle the war.
Lincoln was right—so he approved the publication of Gilmore’s account of the interview. Spare and iron-willed, Davis had predictably forbidden any talk of peace without Southern independence. “Withdraw your armies, and peace will come of itself. We do not seek to subjugate you,” he had presumably said, reiterating the sentiments of his 1861 inaugural. “Let us alone, and peace will come at once.” As for emancipa
tion, he scoffed at it. “Emancipation!” he laughed. “You have already emancipated nearly two million of our slaves, and if you take care of them, you may emancipate the rest.” That was the kind of battle cry that Lincoln could profitably use to advantage. “You may emancipate every negro in the Confederacy, but we will be free!” Davis stolidly concluded. “We will govern ourselves. We will do it, if we have to see every Southern plantation sacked, and every Southern city in flames.”
THOUGH THE REPUBLICANS had already nominated Lincoln for a second term, Greeley was still sniping in August that “Mr. Lincoln is already beaten. He cannot be elected. And we must have another ticket to save us from utter overthrow.” A Peace Republican, Greeley was also arguing in tangled fashion for universal emancipation. That the Union could never have peace, emancipation, and one united country, given the intractable position of the Confederacy, was something he did not seem to understand. Lincoln did. Only a military victory could preserve the Union, he believed. And he would not renege on emancipation, which, as he further believed, only a constitutional amendment could guarantee.
On August 23, 1864, the day before the Democratic convention, an exhausted and sallow president brought the members of his cabinet a piece of paper, its pages folded. Later it would be called his “blind memorandum.” He asked his cabinet to sign the paper without reading it.
“This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be re-elected,” he had secretly written. “Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President-elect as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will secure his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards.”
A FEDERAL SOLDIER promised his family that “Lincoln’s re-election will end this war. You have no idea how hopeful the soldiers are. No croaking from them. None but non-combatants whine and find fault with the administration.”
On November 11, Lincoln showed his cabinet the message they had signed the summer before. A dark and rainy election day had come and gone, with Lincoln winning the electoral vote decisively (221 to 21) and trouncing George B. McClellan.
Lincoln was able to lead a relatively undivided Republican Party to victory. To appease the party’s Radical faction and recalibrate the cabinet now that Chase was gone, Lincoln had accepted Montgomery Blair’s resignation as postmaster general. And though Wendell Phillips had counseled voting for neither Lincoln nor McClellan—two evils, he called them—the president had the support of William Lloyd Garrison, Salmon Chase, and Anna Dickinson. Campaigning against McClellan at Cooper Union, Dickinson had entertained a huge crowd with the anecdote of the old woman who asked, “Why will the people keep attacking poor, dear, little George McClellan? I’m sure he never attacked anybody.”
Even the austere Henry Winter Davis, mustering his considerable eloquence, had explained what he—and all Republicans—must do: “The great mass of the American people having, as it were, been surprised into the renomination of the present candidate—then for a moment pausing, as if frightened at what they had done—then listening to the first echo from Chicago, and forgetting every doubt, throwing aside every hesitation, subjecting every criticism to the dictates of the highest reason and the highest statesmanship, as one man, turned to the candidate whom before they had doubted, with a resolution that they must make an election—not between two individuals, not between the personal qualities of Abraham Lincoln and George B. McClellan, not between the public services of the one or the other, but an election between the overthrow and the salvation of the Republic.”
The issue was and remained the war. And since Rear Admiral David Farragut, lashed to the rigging on his flagship, had damned the torpedoes in Mobile Bay, smashing Confederate gunboats in August, the Union felt strong, stronger, more justified, emboldened. Farragut’s victory had taken place just a few weeks before General William Tecumseh Sherman dispatched his famous telegram on September 3. “Atlanta is ours,” the redheaded general cried, “and fairly won.” Blood-dimmed though it was, the tide had turned again.
(14)
ARMED LIBERTY
Violence: it was lodged in the heart of the lone bandit and the vigilante, whether in Mississippi, Texas, California, or on the Great Plains, and the war had let it run free, often to the point of mass murder. Of course, the country had been born in revolution and war and before that had earned its stripes in the woods and on the plains, fighting tribes of Indians, claiming territory, hanging witches, and tarring and feathering Tories. The Reverend Cotton Mather had praised Hannah Dustin for ax-murdering the Indians, including young boys, who had killed her baby and kidnapped her, and the citizens of Salem, Massachusetts, had heard the sobs of their neighbors who were tortured in the name of religious purity. More recently, Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion in Virginia had taken the lives of about sixty men, women, and children, and it had unleashed a gory reign of terror afterward, with black men and women chased from the state or murdered, their heads left at the sides of roads or stuck on posts as a bleak rebuke and warning. Violence: it happened in the city. The Ursuline Convent near Boston was set afire in 1834 when a group of men disguised as monks, their faces painted, forced out the nuns and then sacked the place and torched it. No one was held accountable. A mob in Boston attacked William Lloyd Garrison, and in Illinois in 1837 a mob killed the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy. He was shot five times while defending his fourth printing press, which was then smashed to pieces and tossed into the Mississippi River. The next year Pennsylvania Hall, built to house antislavery meetings, was burned to the ground just four days after its dedication. In 1844 the Mormon leader Joseph Smith and his brother were gunned down in a Carthage jail. That same year, workers, women, and children in Philadelphia mobbed the streets to protest the government’s approving railroad construction down a main thoroughfare in the district of Kensington; they absconded with railroad ties, tore up a portion of the road, and burned the timber used to build it; for the moment, popular sovereignty won the day. Ten years later in Boston, when the self-appointed Vigilance Committee tried to free the fugitive slave Anthony Burns, a guard was mortally stabbed. In New York City, gangs of b’hoys, or working-class young men, were belligerent, armed, and dangerous, and in 1856 Democratic Party supporters gathered in Baltimore with guns and clubs. In Ohio, Margaret Garner, a fugitive slave from Kentucky, cut her two-year-old daughter’s throat rather than see her sent back into slavery. In 1859 Congressman Daniel Sickles, later a Federal general, shot and killed Philip Barton Key, the son of Francis Scott Key, with a two-dollar pistol. His plea of temporary insanity worked, and one of his lawyers, Edwin Stanton, was later secretary of war. John Brown liked to kill in the name of justice. “It seems to me that every society rests on the death of men,” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., would say; wounded three times in three years, he had been at such killing fields as Ball’s Bluff, Fair Oaks, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor.
Justice, violence, and political expression: people taking the law into their own hands or stepping to their own drummer, as Thoreau had advised, although the naturalist also believed that no human being “past the thoughtless age of boyhood” would ever wantonly murder “any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.” Yet Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, had once said, “I have no objection to the liberty of speech, when the liberty of the cudgel is left free to combat it.” Southerners and Northerners—not all, but certainly governors, senators, congressmen, lawyers, even a president—settled disagreements with pistol and balls, or they chose their seconds and named their weapons for their gentlemanly duels: Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, Congressman John Randolph of Virginia, Hawthorne’s friend Congressman Jonathan Cilley of Maine (who was killed), Sam Houston, Thomas Hart Benton, Henry Wise, and the fire-eater William Yancey, to say nothing of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Ben Wade took his squirrel rifle to the Senate chamber and sometimes threatened to use it, a
nd in 1842 Abraham Lincoln accepted a challenge from the Illinois state auditor, James Shields, a Democrat, who he’d intimated was a fool and a liar. Lincoln ingeniously wiggled out of the duel by outrageously selecting large cavalry broadswords as his weapon of choice. Though he was never proud of what had happened, always, for him and others, the issue at stake was honor, that ephemeral quality linked somehow to manhood, self-reliance, revenge, chivalry, and the pursuit of prosperity, all of which were connected by hostility and revenge to a country forging a tradition which, in part, was a tradition of violence. D. H. Lawrence commented, many years later, “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”
Maybe so, maybe not. Throughout the North, armed vigilance committees protested the capture of fugitive slaves in their states and fought and killed to protect them. Violence in the streets too, as the New York draft riots painfully proved, and in the bush, and outside the so-called rules of engagement: that was what happened at Fort Pillow, for sure, when frustrated men murdered other men as the flag of truce reportedly waved overhead. “My life had stood—a loaded gun—,” Emily Dickinson wrote during the war. A poem of murder, killing, rape, it jars the reader, any reader, especially those who know its author as a recluse living in a New England college town. But she was also a poet of violence: creativity is violence, sacramental and erotic, mystical and horrific, a scalping of the soul, as she wrote, that dances like a bomb—and has its bandaged moments. Dickinson refashioned aggression into poetry. The milder Stowe too had transformed it into her wildly successful—and brutal—Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which Uncle Tom is battered and slaves are roasted alive on blasted trees. So too did the stories of fugitive slaves, most notably by Frederick Douglass or Harriet Jacobs, chronicle the lives of men and women tracked by dogs and whipped, humiliated, hunted, and raped. So too did the final, echoing words of John Brown tell an American story: “I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will never be purged away; but with Blood.”
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