The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln

by Larry Tagg

  But “silence” had been the watchword of Lincoln’s successful presidential run. He defended his continuing refusal to speak on the grounds that speaking “would do no good. I have already done this many—many, times; and it is in print, and open to all who will read. Those who will not read, or heed, what I have already publicly said, would not read, or heed, a repetition of it. ‘If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.’” But anyone wanting a statement of Lincoln’s views would have to go back almost a year, to the Cooper Union speech in February, the last time he had spoken for the record. By now, during the months of November and December, when, according to Henry Adams, “the country was in a condition of utter disorganization,” when in Washington there was “a strange and bewildering chaos, the fragments of broken parties and a tottering Government,” the delirious rush of events in the Deep South brought tremendous pressure upon Lincoln to declare a policy. The shameless New York Herald did not even wait until Election Day to start turning the screws, falsely reporting on November 2 that Lincoln had a statement he would publish as soon as his presidency was assured. Then, on November 8, when the imaginary proclamation had failed to materialize, the Herald demanded one immediately, and did so again the next day, and again frequently thereafter. “There is only one man in the United States who has it in his power to restore the country to its former happy and prosperous condition,” it declared, “and that man is the President elect. … If Mr. Lincoln will speak out in a manner calculated to reassure the conservative masses of all the States, the present cloud will pass away like a summer shower… .”

  This and other demands from all sides for some word of good will drew no response from the President-elect, who still kept regular hours at the governor’s office in the Illinois statehouse, oblivious to the fact that, from the moment of his election, the nation held him personally responsible for the secession movement. On the question of the disintegration of the nation, Lincoln’s visitors found him eerily undisturbed. To friends and foes who wrote to him eager to learn his plans, he replied with a “Form Reply to Requests for Political Opinions” signed by his secretary John Nicolay, as follows:

  Your letter to Mr. Lincoln of [blank] and by which you seek to obtain his opinions on certain political points, has been received by him. He has received others of a similar character; but he also has a greater number of the exactly opposite character. The latter class beseech him to write nothing whatever upon any point of political doctrine. They say his positions were well known when he was nominated, and that he must not now embarrass the canvass by undertaking to shift or modify them. He regrets that he can not oblige all, but you perceive it is impossible for him to do so.

  All his letters to friends were headed “Private,” “Confidential,” “Private and confidential,” “Strictly confidential,” or “For your eye only.” He told them, “By the lessons of the past, and the united voice of all discreet friends, I am neither [to] write or speak a word for the public.” He urged them to burn his correspondence, because, he said, “It is best not to be known that I write at all.”

  “Badgering Him.” J[ames]. G[ordon]. B[ennett].—“Bow! Wow!Come out, Mr. Lincoln”

  When he did share his thoughts privately with friends, his words were conciliatory and gentle; they spoke of restraint and common sense, exactly the affirmations the crisis demanded from the President-elect. Why, then, were his public pronouncements so guarded and rare? He touched on the reason in a letter to the editor of the Democratic Louisville Journal. After first chiding the Southern editor for “impressing your readers that you think I am the very worst man living,” Lincoln explained that he abstained from comment “because of apprehension that it would do harm. … I have bad men to deal with, both North and South—men who are eager for something new upon which to base new misrepresentations—men who would like to frighten me, or, at least, to fix upon me the character of timidity and cowardice. They would seize upon almost any letter I could write, as being an ‘awful coming down.’ I intend keeping my eye upon these gentlemen, and to not unnecessarily put any weapons in their hands.” Here he referred not only to the extremists in the South who were hoping to goad him into an injudicious statement or something which they could twist, but also to the radicals in his own party who were scouring his every utterance for a hint of backsliding. He was explicit about the need to keep peace within his own party when he answered another man who begged him to say something to reassure merchants “honestly alarmed.” “There are no such men,” Lincoln maintained. “If I yielded to their entreaties I would go to Washington without the support of the men who now support me. I would be as powerless as a block of buckeye wood.”

  It is revealing that during this period he wrote and spoke so obsessively about “timidity” and “cowardice,” about being left “powerless.” His preoccupation bespoke an overriding concern about lack of stature—among the giants of his own party as well as those of the opposition. During this period, his natural good will was overridden by a nagging fear that to make it public would encourage “bold bad men to believe they are dealing with one who can be scared into anything.” Where his anonymity had worked for him so recently as a candidate, it now worked against him as an elected leader. At a time when his views were not yet known, he was intimidated into concealing them until his Inaugural Address on the 4th of March.

  * * *

  To those who would know his policy sooner, his stock reply was: My views are well known; you have only to read my speeches. But he did not realize that in the South his views were not well known—or worse, known only in the distorted translations of hostile editors—and it had been a long, long time since he had given a speech. Worse yet, his two defining speeches—the Cooper Union speech of the year before, and the House Divided speech that opened his Senate run in 1858—were not written to calm anyone, but rather to exhort and inflame the enemies of slavery. The Philadelphia Evening Journal, for one, was not soothed by taking Lincoln’s advice and reading them. “To expose Mr. Lincoln and to cover with shame the party that nominated him,” scolded the Journal, “we need only to quote from these harangues (the house divided speech and others).”

  Consider, as Southerners did, that speech. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln had begun, paraphrasing the Bible scripture. Then, he portrayed an apocalyptic contest between two diametrically opposed sides:

  I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South.

  The speech that followed was a rallying cry for Republicans to put slavery on the path to extinction before the Democrats nationalized it. To destroy any doubt that such was the Democrats’ goal, Lincoln went on to trace “the design,” the conspiracy—always, in those days, a conspiracy—by 1850s proslavery Democrats to prepare the nation, step by step (or, in his house-building analogy, “plank by plank”) for a future Supreme Court decision that would spread slavery nationwide. If he had known the Southern mood, Lincoln would have realized that, to Southern ears, the House Divided speech was the shrill call-to-arms of a paranoid Black Republican.

  The Cooper Union speech had not been as incendiary as the House Divided speech, beginning instead as a carefully-researched, closely-reasoned argument that aimed to show that the Founding Fathers had never intended slavery to be extended. After his hour-long history lesson, however, Lincoln went on to turn the testimony of the Founders against the slaveholders, insisting that they, not the Republicans, were guilty of agitating the slavery question. Then, building to his c
limax, he proclaimed to Republicans—just as he had done earlier in the House Divided speech—that their duty was to stand firm in the belief that they were right and that slavery was wrong, and to “stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively.” The speech was anything but conciliatory, and Southerners could only see it as another utterance by an uncompromising, implacable foe.

  As one editor put it, Lincoln’s record, “brief as it is, is to his disadvantage.” These were the only words Lincoln had for the citizens to ponder. He did not intend to make any further statement of his policy until he stood on the inaugural platform.

  * * *

  In waiting until then to unfold his views, however, he would have the problem of what to do in the meantime, during that agonizingly long interval in which he would be fiercely scrutinized—and still legally powerless. Here Lincoln was hamstrung by the antique American system which observed a wait of a full four months between a President’s election on the first Tuesday in November and his inauguration the following March 4—unchanged since George Washington. In the national emergency brought on by Lincoln’s election, the weeks and months between November and March were a deadly chasm. How would a man, not yet in power, work the machine under the dome of the Capitol from a frontier town 700 miles away?

  Lincoln’s silence, during these four crucial months, left a vacuum when leadership was urgently needed. In the weeks following the election, with everyone left to speculate on what the Cotton States would do and what stance Lincoln would take at his inaugural, the Republicans could adopt no uniform policy toward the South. Newspaper editors struck out in all directions, declaring their individual preferences—for compromise, for use of force, for peaceable separation. Concerned citizens heard a cacophony of voices, many irresponsible, some openly malignant, all now shouting as loudly as possible in an attempt to magnify their influence.

  On November 9, two days after he trumpeted Lincoln’s election, Horace Greeley, arch-Republican, brought the victory cheers to a confused hush with an eccentric proclamation from the pages of the New York Tribune: “If the Cotton States shall become satisfied that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go. … We hope never to live in a republic whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets.” Greeley’s “Go in peace” policy was a cagey gambit with a dual purpose: to deflect any thought of compromise in the North, and to affect with the South the same attitude as the man who says to his wife who is threatening to leave, I’m not stopping you! Go ahead—there’s the door! Whatever Greeley’s deep game, Lincoln undoubtedly read the provoking editorial with dismay.

  On November 13, the Republican New York Times blithely reported, “Disunion sentiment is rapidly losing ground in the South. … There seems to be a great panic about disunion. We cannot, for the life of us, see the least foundation for it. Our Southern brethren talk loudly about secession,—but they have done little else for the last ten years.” This smug skepticism had been a staple of the Republican Party, and Lincoln shared it. But on November 14, the Times did an abrupt about-face. It made a proposal for the settlement of the fugitive slave problem, in “a spirit of compromise and conciliation which, at the present moment, would be of incalculable value to the cause of Union.” Thus, the Times signaled an awareness of the crisis.

  On November 17, the Democratic New York Herald called on Lincoln to release his electors—in effect, to resign two weeks after his election. It warned, “If he persists in his present position, in the teeth of such results as his election must produce, he will totter into a dishonoured grave, driven there perhaps by the hands of an assassin, leaving behind him a memory more execrable than that of Arnold—more despised than that of the traitor Catiline.”

  Two weeks after his victory, already feeling extreme pressure to make some sort of reassuring statement, Lincoln made one awkward attempt at conciliation. He did not deliver it himself, however. He wrote two paragraphs and inserted them in the speech of Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull at the Grand Republican Jubilee in Springfield on November 20. There, Trumbull spoke the words with Lincoln sitting behind him on the platform to signal his authority. “All of the States will be left in as complete control of their own affairs respectively, and at as perfect liberty to choose, and employ, their own means of protecting property, and preserving peace and order within their respective limits, as they have ever been under any administration,” Trumbull began. He should have stopped there, but he plunged on, “Disunionists are now in hot haste to get out of the Union precisely because they perceive they can not, much longer, maintain apprehension among Southern people that their homes, … and lives, are to be endangered. … With such, ‘Now or never’ is the maxim.” In Lincoln’s script, these taunting remarks were followed by even more bitter sarcasm: “I am rather glad of this military preparation in the South. It will enable the people the more easily to suppress any uprisings there, which [the secessionists’] misrepresentations of purposes may have encouraged.” Here, for all to hear, were Lincoln’s fatal delusions made clear. He saw the secessionists as a small minority, frantic to push their program through before the Union-loving masses in the South threw them over, as he was sure they would soon do—and without any compromise by Republicans.

  Just as Lincoln had predicted, Trumbull’s speech satisfied no one. The Washington Constitution and other Southern critics denounced the speech as a declaration of hostility toward the South. The Boston Courier and others in the North rebuked it for weakness, thinking they saw in it a foreshadowing of the abandonment of Republican principles. After this failure, Lincoln swore off attempts at public statements, and quickly went back underground. With the prairie lawyer again hushed in Springfield, attention turned to the Thirty-sixth United States Congress, convening in Washington on December 3.

  Chapter 10

  The Flight Toward Compromise

  “Prepare yourself for a complete disorganization of our party.”

  From June until November 1860, Republican congressmen had been campaigning in their districts—either for themselves, each other, or Abraham Lincoln. They had given speeches, shaken hands, kissed babies, raised money, given interviews for newspapers, written pamphlets, handed out literature, mixed with the voters at rallies and picnics, and waved from carriages in parades—but they always hewed closely to orders handed down by their state party bosses. The Republican strategy differed from state to state, but everywhere Republican candidates sounded the single note that stirred voters in every town, hamlet, and farm community from Minnesota to Maine: outrage at the wickedness of the Slave Power in the South, its corrupting influence, its long-term conspiracy to pervert the values of the American republic to its own selfish ends.

  * * *

  Once Congress was met on December 3, however, things changed. Now that the representatives from districts all over the North were talking face-to-face with their counterparts from the South, the hard-line speeches that had sounded so bold and righteous in front of the cheering crowds of autumn seemed strident and simplistic in the cold light of winter. The Republican fable that secession was a bluff, that the Cotton States had no real intention of leaving the Union, and that their threats were mere bluster meant to frighten timid voters and extort new concessions, was meeting hard reality in the noisy halls and chambers under the Capitol dome.

  On the Hill, the word “compromise” had the aura of a hallowed tradition, not the stigma of weakness. It was not surprising, then, that in December, under these new circumstances, the harsh campaign rhetoric was forgotten and a new appreciation for the need for adjustment with the South grew up among the Republican congressmen. Within days after convening, both Houses hurried to form committees to hammer out a compromise acceptable to all sides. Many Republican leaders thought they discerned wisdom in dropping the anti-slavery Chicago platform.

  But for Lincoln—still a private citizen, still in exile, still far removed in his borrowed office on the prairie and insulated from the pressures for compromi
se—the issue of slavery in the territories was etched in crystal, and his resolve remained diamond-hard. There must be no compromise. For him this was essential. The territories in the West had always represented the future of the nation, and he regarded the exclusion of slavery in the territories as the key issue over which the election had been fought. He saw his election as a signal that the nation had turned away from slavery—forever. In the territorial issue dual weighty themes were thus bound up: the foundation of the new society in the West, and the nation’s first step in its journey toward the ultimate extinction of slavery.

  Lincoln left no doubt that here he expected Republicans to stand firm. He also opposed any attempt to reestablish the Missouri Compromise line that would permit slavery in national territory below the latitude of 36°30’. It is hard for us to understand his sensitivity on this point, since there was no real danger of slavery taking root in the arid plateaus and deserts of the New Mexico Territory below that line. The southern border of the United States, however, which seems etched in granite to us, seemed a mere tissue to Americans in 1860. The people of Lincoln’s time had seen the southern border change radically after the Mexican War, by the Treaty of Guadelupe-Hidalgo in 1848 and again by the Gadsden Purchase in 1853. In the 1850s there had been constant attempts by Southerners to move it further south by the formal purchase or outright seizure of Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua, in order to add more slave territory and eventually make a dozen more slave states. Lincoln realized that if slavery were permitted in national territory below any given latitude, it would only act as an incentive to grab more territory to the south. If Republicans surrender on the territorial question, he wrote, “it is the end of us, and of the government.”