by Larry Tagg
The sneers and laughter turned to rage after the closing gavel sounded. Lincoln’s snub, wrote George Julian, was “inexpressibly provoking to a large majority of Congress.” “No one at a distance,” he said, “could have formed any adequate conception of the hostility of Republican members toward Mr. Lincoln at final adjournment… . Mr. Wade said the country was going to hell, and that the scenes witnessed in the French Revolution were nothing in comparison with what we should see here.” Gurowski murmured darkly into his inkpot and scrawled in his diary, “Mr. Lincoln makes a new effort to save his mammy, and tries to neutralize the confiscation bill. Mr. Lincoln will not make a step beyond what is called the Border-States’ policy; and it may prove too late when he will decide to honestly execute the law of Congress.”
“What Will He Do with Them?” A.L.—“Darn these here blackbirds!—If nobody won’t buy ‘em I’ll have to open the cages and let ‘em fly.”
This was in mid-July, when the North was becoming aware that McClellan’s Peninsula campaign had failed. The collapse of the entire year’s efforts, both in Congress and on the battlefield, plunged Republicans into a deep despondency. The anxious managing editor of the Chicago Tribune forwarded to Lincoln a letter from one reader who wrote that “the President … hangs back, hesitates, and leaves the country to drift,” and he warned, “I am receiving daily many similar letters from all parts of the country for the [news]paper, evincing a deep-seated anxiety on the part of the people. I do not publish them because I know they would exercise a most serious influence on the public mind.”
Senator John Sherman of Ohio wrote to Secretary Chase, “Oh God, how I feel what a blessing it would be, if in this hour of peril we had a strong firm hand at the head of affairs—who would use boldly all the powers of his office to put down this rebellion … . I never knew apprehension & fear settle upon the great mass of our People before—If we fail my conviction is that history will rest the awful responsibility upon Mr Lincoln—[not] for want of patriotism but for want of nerve.”
“We are in a deplorable condition,” agreed Chase, “—armies inactive— councils uncertain—credit drooping.”
Such was the mood when, on August 1, Wendell Phillips ascended the stage in Abington, Massachusetts, and delivered an attack on Lincoln that resounded worldwide, a speech that prompted the London Times to write, “Anything more violent is scarcely possible to imagine, and anything more daring in time of Civil War was never perpetrated in any country by any sane man who valued his life and liberty.” Phillips’ oration derived its persuasive power from the collapse of his abolitionist audience’s faith in Lincoln. He began simply: “I think the present purpose of the government, so far as it has now a purpose, is to end the war and save slavery.” Then he warmed to his subject:
It may be said of Mr. Lincoln,—that if he had been a traitor, he could not have worked better to strengthen one side, and hazard the success of the other. There is more danger today that Washington will be taken than Richmond.
Our present policy neither aims to annihilate that state of things we call “the South” … nor replace it with a substitute. Such an aimless war I call wasteful and murderous. Better that the South should go to-day, than that we should prolong such a war. Until this nation announces, in some form or other, that this is a war, not against Jefferson Davis, but against a system … until we do that, we shall have no prospect of peace.
I do not believe in the government. I do not believe this government has got either vigor or a purpose. It drifts with events. The President has not uttered a word which gives even a twilight glimpse of any antislavery purpose. He may be honest,—nobody cares whether the tortoise is honest or not; he has neither insight, nor prevision, nor decision… .
I will tell you what he is. He is a first-rate second-rate man. He is one of the best specimens of a second-rate man, and he is honestly waiting, like any other servant, for the people to come and send him on any errand they wish. In ordinary times, when the seas are calm, you can sail without a pilot … to-day the nation’s bark scuds, under the tempest, lee-shore and maelstrom on each side, needing no holiday captain, but a pilot, to weather the storm.
Lincoln deepened the disappointment of the abolitionists when, on August 14, he invited a delegation of five local black men to the White House as part of an effort to convince twenty-five or fifty black families to volunteer for his pet project, the colony on the Chiriqui isthmus. His tack was unflattering. He began by emphasizing the breadth of the racial divide: “We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races.” He proceeded by discouraging the delegates about any prospects for equality on American soil: “Even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race… . On this broad continent, not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours. Go where you are treated the best, the ban is still upon you.” Finally, he argued that they had indirectly caused the war, and should not live side by side with whites: “But for your race among us, there could not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other… . It is better for us both … to be separated.”
After leaving the White House, the offended black delegation quickly sent back word—they weren’t going anywhere. Frederick Douglass, outraged at Lincoln, denounced him, charging, “In this address Mr. Lincoln [shows] all his inconsistencies, his pride of race and blood, his contempt for negroes and his canting hypocrisy.” Douglass declared in his monthly magazine that Lincoln had become the “miserable tool of traitors and rebels,” and had shown himself to be “a genuine representative of American prejudice and negro hatred.” The Pacific Appeal, an influential black newspaper, said the words of the President made it “evident that he, his cabinet, and most of the people, care but little for justice to the negro. If necessary, he is to be crushed between the upper and nether millstone—the pride and prejudice of the North and South.”
White antislavery leaders were just as disappointed. William Lloyd Garrison had been notable among abolitionists for his patience with Lincoln, but he exploded at this. “President of African Colonization” ran the headline of The Liberator. No more “humiliating … impertinent … untimely spectacle” could be found in all Christendom than this extraordinary meeting, Garrison roared. Lincoln had demonstrated that his “education (!) with and among ‘the white trash’ of Kentucky was most unfortunate for his moral development.” He was just an old Henry Clay colonization man after all. Salmon Chase exclaimed in his diary, “How much better would be a manly protest against prejudice against color!—and a wise effort to give freemen homes in America!”
The most highly advertised disappointment, however, was Horace Greeley’s. Greeley had signaled his opposition to Lincoln’s backwardness at the beginning of the year, when he scolded him onstage at the Smithsonian lecture on January 2. Ever since, he had lectured Lincoln from the pages of the Tribune, where he blew the emancipation trumpet all through the spring and summer. Finally, as the August heat baked the streets of Gotham, he prepared a public letter, the “Prayer of Twenty Millions,” whose title proclaimed Greeley’s towering—and wildly incorrect—presumption that he spoke for the entire Northern population. Greeley’s front page, nine-paragraph rebuke of the President appeared in the August, 20, 1862, issue of the Tribune:
To ABRAHAM LINCOLN,
President of the United States
DEAR SIR: I do not intrude to tell you—for you must know already—that a great proportion of those who triumphed in your election, and of all who desire the unqualified suppression of the Rebellion now desolating our country, are sorely disappointed and deeply pained by the policy you seem to be pursuing with regard to the slaves of the Rebels. I write only to set succinctly and unmistakably before you what we require, what we think we have a right to expect, and of what we complain.
I. We require of you … that you EXECUTE THE LAWS… .
II. We think you a
re strangely and disastrously remiss … with regard to the emancipating provisions of the new Confiscation Act… .
III. We think you are unduly influenced by the counsels … of certain fossil politicians hailing from the Border Slave States… .
IV. We think timid counsels in such a crisis calculated to prove perilous, and probably disastrous… .
V. We complain that the Union cause has suffered … from mistaken deference to Rebel Slavery… .
VI. We complain that the Confiscation Act which you approved is habitually disregarded by your Generals… .
VIII. On the face of this wide earth, Mr. President, there is not one disinterested, determined, intelligent champion of the Union cause who does not feel that all attempts to put down the Rebellion and at the same time uphold its inciting cause are preposterous and futile… .
IX. I close as I began with the statement that what an immense majority of the Loyal Millions of your countrymen require of you is a frank, declared, unqualified, ungrudging execution of the laws of the land, more especially of the Confiscation Act… .
Yours,
Horace Greeley
New York, August 19, 1862
The Tribune was read by millions of Republicans. Lincoln knew he could not ignore Greeley, but he was restrained by the conventions of the time that deemed it improper for a president to plead his case directly to the people. Newspaper reporters were still regarded as a raffish gang, not entirely respectable, and not entitled to published conversations with presidents. Lincoln was naturally cautious, and made even more so by the dilemmas of a divisive war, in which any statement would anger somebody. Consequently, he had made no public speeches and written few proclamations.
But when Greeley, the idealist, flung down the gauntlet in August 1862, Lincoln, the pragmatist, picked it up. He did what no President had ever done. He composed an open letter, to be published for every citizen to read and consider. He made his response to Greeley in the Washington National Intelligencer—a pro-slavery newspaper, chosen perhaps to chide the editor who presumed to speak for the entire North. It displayed Lincoln’s growing rhetorical power, and reached every reader in the nation. It exposed all the ligaments of his resolve, and rendered it with a distinctive literary vigor. Addressed to “Hon. Horace Greely [sic],” it was dated August 22, 1862:
As to the policy I “seem to be pursuing” as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt.
I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.
I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.
Yours,
A. LINCOLN
Lincoln’s reply to Greeley chimed the three a.m. of the Radical soul, when many anti-slavery men felt the death of hope. The message angered Republicans who saw in it the same indifference to the evil of slavery that Lincoln himself had once criticized in his old nemesis, Stephen Douglas. General Wadsworth, who had talked long with Lincoln, was sure “the president is not with us; has no antislavery instincts.” John Jay sadly concluded, “We are sold out at Washington.” William Lloyd Garrison, his spirits at rock bottom, called Lincoln “as near lunacy as any one not a pronounced Bedlamite,” and despaired, “I am growing more and more skeptical as to the ‘honesty’ of Lincoln. He is nothing better than a wet rag … .” “The truth,” lamented Secretary Chase, was that the President “has yielded so much to the Border State and negrophobic counsels that he now finds it difficult to arrest his own descent towards the most fatal concessions.” The dismay of the true believers was summed up by a Republican editor who wrote, “I … fear that the President is rapidly alienating his friends and will soon find himself without a party, if not without a country.”
But if they had read Lincoln’s reply to Greeley more closely, they would have seen that Lincoln had also hinted at a new sense of his own constitutional power. For he had seen, in the distance, the coming of a “second revolution.” He saw it in the swelling of the anti-slavery movement and in the increasing numbers of slaves pouring into the Union lines. After the recent defeats on the battlefield, he also saw the urgent need for new manpower and a mighty weapon against the rebels. With these in mind, he had already committed himself to bringing about “a new birth of freedom.”
In July, as Lincoln told it later, “I determined upon the adoption of the emancipation policy; and, without consultation with, or the knowledge of the Cabinet, I prepared the original draft of the [emancipation] proclamation, and, after much anxious thought, called a Cabinet meeting upon the subject.” At the July 22 meeting, “I said to the Cabinet that I had resolved upon this step, and had not called them together to ask their advice, but to lay the subject-matter of a proclamation before them … . Various suggestions were offered… . Nothing, however, was offered that I had not already fully anticipated and settled in my own mind, until Secretary Seward spoke. He said … ‘The depression of the public mind, consequent upon our repeated reverses, is so great that I fear the effect of so important a step… . It may be viewed as the last measure of an exhausted government … .’ His idea was that it would be considered our last shriek, on the retreat… . ‘Now,’ continued Mr. Seward, ‘I suggest, sir, that you postpone its issue, until you can give it to the country supported by military success, instead of issuing it, as would be the case now, upon the greatest disasters of the war.’”
Lincoln agreed. He put the draft of the proclamation aside. When he wrote his letter to Greeley, he was waiting for a general to give him a victory.
Chapter 23
Lincoln Awaits a Victory
“Mr Lincoln will be dangling at the end of a rope.”
Major General Henry Wager Halleck, “Old Brains” to his admirers, was an intellectual soldier, considered America’s foremost authority on the theory of war. He had written Elements of Military Art and Science, which Lincoln had read as part of his self-education as a wartime Commander-in- Chief. Halleck had been put in charge of the Western theater after Frémont’s ouster the previous autumn, and the victories won by his subordinate, General Grant, had inflated his reputation. On July 11, 1862, Lincoln, anxious to find someone to relieve him from the agony of military decisions, summoned Halleck to Washington to be General-in-Chief.
Halleck was reluctant to come East. Comfortable in the West, he did not want to get caught up in the notorious political infighting that made a careerkiller of military command in Washington. But an official summons from the President in wartime was impossible to refuse. Halleck arrived on July 23 to mend Lincoln’s fractured military system, which had crippled the war in the East during the President’s unfortunate four months in command.
A look at the war map showed General McClellan with 100,000 men at Harrison’s Landing, and, seventy-five miles to the north, the newly-installed General John Pope with the 43,000 men of Frémont, Banks, and McDowell. With Lee’s army
between them, this struck General Halleck as a horrifying predicament. The first principles of military science were the concentration of force and the value of the interior position. Both now belonged to Lee, who could strike at either of the separated Union armies and destroy it before help could arrive. Halleck decided that one of the Union armies must move to join the other, and that it must be McClellan who must move to join Pope. This transfer would reunite the Union army between the rebel army and Washington, just as Lincoln had desired in early spring.
McClellan, who until four months ago had been giving orders to Halleck, scorned him as “a man whom I know by experience to be my inferior.” McClellan was furious at the idea of receiving orders—from Halleck of all people—to quit the Peninsula and send his men to join Pope’s army. He assumed the new General-in-Chief was conspiring with the Radicals. On July 30, he wrote to his friend, Democratic kingmaker Samuel L. M. Barlow of New York City, “I know that the rascals will get rid of me as soon as they dare—they all know my opinion of them. They are aware that I have seen through their villainous schemes,&that if I succeed my foot will be on their necks.” When on August 3 he received Halleck’s order to leave the Peninsula, sail north, and march overland to join Pope, McClellan predicted it would be “disastrous in the extreme,” “a fatal blow.” He wanted to resign, but was dissuaded by his powerful Democratic friends in New York, mindful that he must remain without blemish for an 1864 presidential run.
The Radicals were delighted by the prospect of John Pope commanding the combined armies in northern Virginia. Pope had courted them from the beginning of the war, and after hearing his exaggerated versions of his triumphs in the West they had urged him for a command in the East. Lincoln had called him to Washington, and Pope had arrived on June 24, just as the Peninsula Campaign was coming to its climax. Enjoying his stroll through the parlors of power during his stay in the capital, he thrilled the Radicals with wicked insults of McClellan. They saw a brilliant future for Pope.
