by Larry Tagg
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The Radicals despised Lincoln. The easy-going, joke-telling, live-and-letlive man in the White House could never be one of them.
The Radical Republicans in these early war months must have pinched themselves in disbelief over their good fortune. Before Fort Sumter, they had been a small splinter group, scorned as shrill abolitionists. They had been easily pushed aside by the big men, the Southern Democrats. Then the outbreak of the war had vaulted them into the vanguard of a nation that was suddenly at war with slaveholders, and the vacant desks of the Southern Democrats in Congress had left them—as the most unified and passionate bloc—in control of both Houses.
The Radicals in Congress were battlers, happy only when they were storming a castle. They were stern, imposing, impatient, intolerant, unyielding, and utterly humorless. They were provincials—almost all were born and raised in New England, or descended from New Englanders—and they took strength from their ignorance of the wider world. Although never a majority, they derived power beyond their numbers from their talent and their devotion to a solid front. In the Senate, they were led by men who headed the powerful committees that shaped war legislation:
Ben Wade of Ohio was the chairman of the Committee on Territories. It is a clue to his temper that he had kept a squirrel rifle at his desk on the Senate floor during the previous Secession Winter. “Bluff” Ben’s square-jawed, clean-shaven face showed his combativeness. He had a voice that thundered and little black eyes that blazed. Fellow Republican and former law partner Joshua Giddings wrote that Wade “denounced the President as a failure from the moment of his election and began to lay his plans for his own advancement.”
Michigan’s hero, Zachary Chandler, chairman of the Committee on Commerce, was as brawny and fierce as Ben Wade, and he too wielded power like a blunt instrument. He subscribed to Thomas Jefferson’s notion that the “tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Before Sumter, Chandler had welcomed the beckon of war, saying, “Without a little blood-letting this Union will not be worth a rush.” Gideon Welles sketched him as “steeped and steamed in whisky— coarse, vulgar, and reckless.”
If Wade and Chandler were the war horses of the Senate Radicals, Charles Sumner, chairman of Foreign Relations, was the show horse. He was the most elegantly tailored man in the Capitol, both in his clothes and in his ideas. Six feet two inches tall, handsome and broad-shouldered, born to Boston money, he typically wore a cape over a maroon vest, with a blue-violet necktie and high silk hat, checkered trousers, and fawn-colored English gaiters. So conscious of his manners that he would not allow himself to slouch even in private, he was as pompous and fastidious in his speech as he was in his appearance.
The Radicals in the Senate were matched in the House by leaders like the club-footed, knit-browed, “despotic ruler of the House” Thaddeus Stevens, chairman of Ways and Means, who ached to loosen the purse strings of the nation for a war of extermination. Lincoln had provoked Stevens’ resentment in March by naming Simon Cameron to sit for Pennsylvania in the Cabinet rather than him, and Stevens was never cordial with Lincoln thereafter.
At first, their differences with Lincoln were not so profound and heated as they would later become. But the day after Lincoln’s April 15 call for troops they were already criticizing Lincoln for half-measures, even as they were just beginning to feel their new muscle. Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, the Radical mouthpiece, said that 75,000 troops were not enough—500,000 should have been called. A few days later, after Baltimore’s Mayor Brown forced Lincoln to detour troops around his city, the disgusted Ben Wade complained bitterly about the new President’s surrender in a letter to a friend, ending ominously, “the stern demand for justice of a united people cannot and must not be baffled by the imbecility or perverseness of one man though he be the President of the United States.”
Another rift appeared after Lincoln issued a proclamation on April 19 calling for the blockade on the ports of the South. Thad Stevens ran to the White House to point out that, by international law, Lincoln’s call for a “blockade” signaled recognition of the Confederacy as a belligerent nation, not just an insurgency. (The proper legal phrase in case of an insurgency would have been to “close the ports.”) Stevens later recalled Lincoln’s response:
“Well, that is a fact. I see the point now, but I don’t know anything about the law of nations and I thought it was all right.”
“As a lawyer, Mr. Lincoln, I should have supposed you would have seen the difficulty at once.”
“Oh, well, I’m a good enough lawyer in a western law court but we don’t practice the law of nations up there, and I supposed Seward knew all about it, and I left it to him. But it’s done now and can’t be helped, so we must get along as well as we can.”
From then on, whenever Lincoln would call the war an internal “conflict” against insurgents who still deserved the protection of the Constitution, Stevens would point to the blockade, insisting that legally Lincoln had acknowledged the Confederacy as a nation at war, without any protection by the Constitution and therefore subject to the law of nations, which declared inter arma silent leges: “in war, anything goes”—just the kind of fight to the death he and the Radicals demanded.
Thus, Lincoln was forced to campaign in May and June on two fronts, as he would throughout the war. While he struggled to build an army and win battles on Confederate soil, he had to work to unify the will of the political leaders in Washington at the same time. As he summoned the Army of the Potomac from the hamlets of the North and faced them toward Bull Run, he labored alone to handwrite the forty-odd foolscap pages of his Message to Congress.
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In that era Presidents still adhered to the example set by Thomas Jefferson, who had refused to stand in front of Congress, considering such appearances a vestige of English rule, where kings opened Parliament. So, in the Jeffersonian tradition, on July 5 Lincoln sent his secretary to the Capitol with his Message, and a clerk read it before Congress in a monotone. Lincoln’s language was characteristically clear and lawyerly. After reviewing the events of secession and justifying his response, he whittled away at the issues until the vital nub of the conflict was in view:
[It] embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes. It presents the question, whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration … can always … break up their Government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. It forces us to ask: “Is there, in all republics, this inherent, and fatal weakness?” “Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”
A few found fault with Lincoln’s Message. The London Spectator’s gun was double-barreled: “Mr. Lincoln writes like a half-educated lawyer, and thinks like a European sovereign.” The London Herald sang a familiar tune:
We lay down the President’s message with a strong feeling of disappointment. It is far from equal to the occasion. Mere awkwardness of style and form we take no account of. The age of cultivated American statesmanship has long passed away. The refined intellect of the United States now shuns political life. It would have been absurd to expect from a man who has passed the best part of his life in the backwoods and the wooden capital of a new State the elegance and lucidity which distinguish the State papers of the first fifty years of the Union.
Closer to home, the The Crisis of Ohio charged that the Address’ “partisan tone, and sectional principles … merit the instant notice and condemnation of every lover of the old constitutional rights of the States, and of all who still hope yet to preserve, and finally restore the old Union, upon the principles of justice, conciliation and peace.”
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��s arch-Democrat Clement Vallandigham, giddy in his first chance to denounce Lincoln on the floor of the House, was ready with a laundry list of reproaches. He called Lincoln’s April 15 call for troops an exercise in “wicked and most desperate cunning.” Andrew Jackson, he said, had acted with the authority of Congress, unlike “our Jackson of today, the little Jackson at the other end of the avenue, and the mimic Jacksons around him.” Lincoln the usurper, he said, had struck down personal liberty and free speech, and for these “shameless peculations and frauds … the avenging hour … will come hereafter.” Vallandigham was echoed in the Senate by Lazarus Powell of Kentucky, who rose to condemn Lincoln, roaring, “There never was a king, potentate or sovereign, when he was assuming powers that did not belong to him for the purpose of crushing the liberties of his people, who did not do it under the plea of necessity.”
But these critics were out of step with the martial tread of the North. Any criticism of Lincoln’s Message was damped by the North’s new military zeal and the suspense over the army’s impending march toward Richmond. Few patriots had the heart to quibble with the President’s Address while the thunderheads of the battle at Bull Run approached.
There was also genuine enthusiasm for Lincoln’s speech. Gone was the cautious, forbearing tone of the Inaugural. People heard for the first time the clank of metal in Lincoln. His ability to illuminate the fundamental issues of secession, and his forceful account of the events surrounding Sumter and his response to them impressed many, including the recently critical New York Times correspondent, who couldn’t resist opening with a jab at Lincoln’s “obvious faults in style,” but went on to praise the Message, saying, “it is evidently the production of an honest, clear-headed and straightforward man,” and he credited “its direct and forcible logic and quaint style of illustration.” The editor of Harper’s Weekly, too, signaled a revised view of the rustic Illinoisan: “I can forgive the jokes and the big hands, and the inability to make a bow. Some of us who doubted were wrong.”
Radical Republicans, though, scowled in their desks. Why, they asked, on the grand occasion of the first Republican Congress in the history of the nation, was there no mention at all of slavery? Frederick Douglass complained, “Any one reading that document, with no previous knowledge of the United States, would never dream from anything there written that we have a slaveholding war waged upon the Government … while all here know that that is the vital and animating motive of the rebellion.”
For the Message’s failure to mention slavery, it was still fashionable to blame the evil influence of Seward, Lincoln’s most conspicuous advisor. A disappointed Wendell Phillips told a crowd, “We have an honest President, but, distrusting the strength of the popular feeling behind him, he listens overmuch to Seward.” Count Gurowski had complained as early as the previous spring, “Lincoln is under the t[h]umb of Seward; to a degree almost ridiculous, Seward brings him out to take airing as were he Lincoln’s nurse.” Now, Gurowski voiced the Radical view in his diary entry for August: “Mr. Lincoln in some way has a slender historical resemblance to Louis XVI—similar goodness, honesty, good intentions; but the size of events seems to be too much for him.”
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Another reason for the sulking among many Republican legislators was wounded pride over the loss of their historical prerogatives. The superiority of Congress over the President was a hallowed tradition, polished by the recent string of lumpish Presidents. The Chief Executive’s job had always been to do the will of the legislators, but now suddenly the worm had turned. As Lincoln’s Message pointed out, he had already taken all the important emergency measures in the spring; they were by now faits accomplis. Congress, not summoned until after war was decided, was now expected to rubber stamp the decrees of this least presidential of Presidents.
The Radicals’ first job, as they saw it, was to get back their right to direct the war. From the first gavel on Independence Day, they labored to recapture the war power from the little-regarded President and push their agenda to end slavery and punish the traitors. They began by proposing a Confiscation Act, aimed at taking away the property of anyone who had held office under the Confederacy, or who had taken up arms against the government, or who had aided treason in any way. Little was decided, however, while the nation held its breath for the impending battle in Virginia.
Then, the day after the battle ended in disaster at Bull Run, Kentucky Unionist John J. Crittenden introduced a resolution that stated the war’s purpose in bedrock conservative terms: “to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several States unimpaired”—that is, to restore the Union, and slavery, as it was. Most Radicals (or “Jacobins,” as Lincoln’s secretaries liked to call them, after the extreme revolutionary club of the French Reign of Terror) swallowed hard and voted for Crittenden’s resolution even though it directly opposed everything they stood for, believing that to object now would divide popular support for the all-out war that they wanted so badly. Old Thad Stevens did take the floor to blister Crittenden’s proposal, declaring, “A rebel has sacrificed all his rights. He has no right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness… . If their whole country is to be laid waste, and made a desert, in order to save the Union from destruction, so let it be!” Crittenden’s conservative resolution, however, was approved almost unanimously.
From this low point the Radicals rekindled their opposition to what they saw as Lincoln’s weak and vacillating prosecution of the war. The beacon of the Radicals’ ascendancy would be the Confiscation Act. Lincoln had a traditional American horror of any bill that would take private property, but despite that and his distaste for Thad Stevens’ ugly threat to make the South “a desert,” he did not oppose the act. Lincoln was hands-off with Congress, and would remain so. He had lived his political life in the Whig Party, traditional foes of presidential meddling. Also, Lincoln was still a novice at the presidency and knew it and didn’t mind admitting it. His “frequent avowals of ignorance” were what had disgusted John Bigelow in May. (Lincoln had recently provided another example when he remarked to German diplomat Rudolph Schleiden, “I don’t know anything about diplomacy. I will be very apt to make blunders.”) He was learning the ropes. He was unfamiliar with Wade, Chandler, Sumner, Stevens, and the rest, and didn’t want to try a test of wills with those mighty Washington insiders. For their part, each of them thought he was smarter than Lincoln, who still seemed like a good-natured, well-meaning joker. With Lincoln silent, on July 26, the Radicals pushed through their punitive Confiscation Act of 1861, by which the courts could seize any property used for “insurrectionary purposes.”
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After Bull Run, the war on the Potomac went quiet and the scene of action passed to the West. There, in Missouri, continued, writ large, the battle that had recently risen in Congress—between conservatives and radicals, between a program of restoring the old Union and a program of abolition and punishment. This dispute would torment Lincoln’s entire presidency. In its many forms it would distress him almost as much as the armies of the Confederacy. The furious debate would rise again and again—over the hiring and firing of generals, over military strategy, over emancipation, over the makeup of the Cabinet, and finally over the reconstruction of the nation. The argument would not die down, and the war of words would outlast both the Civil War and Lincoln.
In the summer of 1861, after losing Virginia and saving Maryland, Lincoln saw the necessity of keeping the other Border States, Missouri and Kentucky. This time Lincoln read the feeling in Kentucky rightly. Lincoln knew that conservatism and compromise, the lifelong teachings of Henry Clay, still claimed the heart of opinion there. True, Governor Magoffin was anti-Lincoln: he had rebuffed the President’s April 15 call for troops with a vow to “furnish no troops for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern States.” But he was not anti-Union: a week later he refused a similar call from Jefferson Davis. Lincoln in April wrote to Kentucky Senator Garrett Davis his friendly assurance
s “that if Kentucky made no demonstration of force against the United States he would not molest her.” He listened patiently to deputations of Kentuckians, kept in touch with Union men by word of mouth, and was careful to confer secretly so his enemies couldn’t hang him by a written pledge. When Kentucky officially declared a policy of “neutrality” in mid-May, Lincoln calmly accepted this attitude in the face of fierce resentment from Northern editors who clamored, Who is not for us is against us! and Better an honest traitor than a hypocrite! Opinion-makers in the North attacked Lincoln for his tenderness with Kentucky. Sabers rattled along the length of the Ohio River as the governors of contiguous Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio all hinted darkly at an invasion. New England’s opinion was that of James Lowell, who gnashed his teeth at Lincoln’s “Little Bo-Peep Policy” (“let them alone and they’ll come home”). Time, however, would bear out Lincoln’s wisdom. In mid-September, a Confederate army violated Kentucky’s neutrality, and the Bluegrass placed itself shakily under the Union banner.
Lincoln’s hand was not as sure in Missouri. In the spring, when all eyes were on the East, when Washington was threatened and when the cry was “Forward to Richmond,” Lincoln had been too distracted to concentrate for long on the war on the frontier. Missouri’s secessionist Governor Claiborne Jackson was vehemently anti-Lincoln; he had declared the President’s call for troops “inhuman and diabolical.” Meaning to take the state into the Confederacy, he gathered the state militia just outside St. Louis at “Camp Jackson,” and armed them with cannon smuggled upriver from Baton Rouge.
To counter the menace, Lincoln handed off matters there to the scion of one of Missouri’s most prominent families, the Blairs. Lincoln was still under the spell of Old Man Blair in Washington, whom he consulted in almost every important decision. It was one of Blair’s sons, Montgomery, Lincoln’s Postmaster General, whose iron-backed stance had prevailed on Sumter. Now, Lincoln left the defense of Missouri to the other son, Frank Blair, Jr., at forty-one the youngest of the clan and the idol of Missouri Republicans.
