The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln

by Larry Tagg

  Lincoln’s September 24 nationwide suspension of habeas corpus, in response to the rolling thunder of anti-draft violence across the North, was a shock to every patriot. Even Republicans condemned it. Senator William Fessenden of Maine called it “an exercise of despotic power.” Orville Browning, until now one of Lincoln’s few friends in Washington, turned away from the President forever after the twin proclamations, writing in his diary that the “useless and … mischievous proclamations” served only “to unite and exasperate … the South, and divide and distract us in the North.”

  Democrats not only wrote their resentment into their diaries, they shouted it from the rooftops. On September 29, James Brooks told a packed house at the Democratic Union Association meeting in New York City, “The proclamation [suspending habeas corpus] is a corollary of Proclamation No. 1. It substantially says to the free white people of the North, if you discuss and agitate this subject of emancipation, if you make war against the Administration upon this subject, you shall be incarcerated in Fort Lafayette.” The crowd roared its defiance. Lincoln’s hometown Illinois State Register cried that he was “seeking to inaugurate a reign of terror in the loyal states by military arrests … without a trial, to browbeat all opposition by villainous and false charges of disloyalty against whole classes of patriotic citizens, to destroy all constitutional guaranties [sic] of free speech, a free press, and the writ of ‘habeas corpus.’” One St. Louis merchant wrote to former Postmaster General Joseph Holt in Washington, pleading, “Stop him! Hold him!—is all I can say by way of advice to you, as the friend of the President. Beg him … never to publish a proclamation… . His proclamations have paralized [sic] our armies.” Lincoln, he said, would “drive the ship of state on the shoals of proclamations or the snags of ‘Habeas Corpus.’”

  From a safe distance, the smug Richmond Dispatch, under the headline “The Twin Proclamations,” etched its remarks with acid:

  The people of Yankeedom are … as absolutely the slaves of a military despotism as the Russians or Austrians. For them there is no law but the law military. They are learning, in its full force, the meaning of Julius Caesar’s terrible saying, “inter arma silent leges” (“in time of war the laws are silent”). The law, indeed, has no more voice in Yankeedom at this moment than it had in Rome when the whole republic was writhing under the iron grasp of the great Dictator. The courts had as well be closed, if they are not already, for the voice of its victims cannot be heard beyond the walls of the military prison. Lincoln has effected a complete triumph over the Yankee nation. He has set aside its laws and trampled its boasted Constitution under foot. Those who were once his fellow citizens, are now his timid and abject slaves. They scarcely dare whisper opposition to their nearest and dearest friends… . Security to life, security to limb, security to property, the freedom of speech, the liberty of the press—all that renders life worth preserving—all that the fathers of the Revolution thought they had guaranteed by the Constitution—all, all, are swept into nonentity by the mere dash of his pen. History does not record a usurpation so bold, so open, so thoroughly successful. Caesar, Cromwell, or Bonaparte never attempted a revolution so astounding. Yet Caesar, Cromwell and Bonaparte were among the greatest men that ever lived, and Lincoln is one of the smallest.

  Chapter 25

  Emancipation Rebuked

  “All the Blame on Mr. Lincoln”

  Democrats in the North immediately recognized Lincoln’s unpopular proclamations as a two-headed club they could wield against the Republicans in the coming midterm elections. With Election Day only weeks away, Republicans trembled at warnings by men such as elder statesman Thomas Ewing, who said that the twin proclamations had “ruined the Republican party in Ohio.” One Lincoln man running in southern Ohio wailed that the Emancipation Proclamation “will defeat me and every other Union candidate for Congress along the border.” There on the north bank of the Ohio River, where white voters feared an inundation of freed blacks, a new, amended Democratic slogan caught the ear of the masses: “The Constitution as it is, the Union as it was, and the Niggers where they are.” Crowds cheered speeches by Democrats who scorched the Emancipation Proclamation as “another advance in the Robespierrian highway of tyranny and anarchy,” and vowed “no more bloodshed to gratify a religious fanaticism.” An Ohio editor cried that if “the despot Lincoln” thought white men “should be shot for the benefit of niggers and Abolitionists … he would meet with the fates he deserves: hung, shot or burned.” In October, Leslie’s Newspaper reported, “Party feeling runs high in Ohio, and political meetings seem like half-battles. Men go to them armed as to a fray, and bloodshed often occurs.”

  Voters in Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania shared Ohioans’ dread of a rush of freed slaves across their borders. Pennsylvania’s Valley Spirit printed one of many cautionary tales that became popular: “Three big, ugly, black female niggers came to a farm house in his neighborhood and asked to stay all night. But they were told they could not stay.” At this denial, “there came a second lot, consisting of four big, ugly, black male niggers.” The white family, which until now had been fully in favor of Lincoln’s emancipation policy, “became still more frightened … said they could give them their supper, but could not possibly accommodate them through the night.” To this, the black people answered with an accusation of hypocrisy: “‘O yes, dat’s de way we am served; you white people in de Norf told us to run away from our masters, an’ would treat us like brudders an’ dis am the way we am treated.’” According to the story, the former slaves took the meal and spent the night anyway, without “so much as even ‘thanky.’” The Valley Spirit used the example to make a dire forecast: “This is only the beginning. Before a great while these runaway blacks will be among us as thick as five in a bed.”

  In Illinois, where Negrophobia was codified into a state law to keep blacks out, Secretary of War Stanton committed a blunder that resulted in a windfall for Democratic candidates. On September 18, he ordered thousands of “contraband” blacks, freed slaves temporarily being housed on the levees around Cairo, onto northbound trains to be resettled throughout Illinois. The move created an uproar. Democratic editors accused Lincoln of an unconstitutional attempt to “Africanize” their lily-white Prairie State.

  Republican Senator Orville Browning was so dismayed by Lincoln’s September proclamations that he refused to campaign; he urged his fellow Illinoisans to go to the polls, but would not tell them how to vote. In central Illinois, Democrat John Stuart Todd got attention by refusing to debate Lincoln’s friend Leonard Swett, claiming that if he expressed his views freely, he might be thrown in prison.

  A tight governor’s race made the New York election the most sensational in the North. Horatio Seymour, the Democratic candidate for governor, made Lincoln’s trampling of civil liberties his main issue, stirring voters with the pledge that he would fight arbitrary arrests “even if the streets be made to run red with blood.” The New York World blew the battle trumpet for an electoral revolt against Lincoln. It was the apocalypse: “This election decides whether we are to have free speech, a free press, free political gatherings, and free elections.” It told its readers that a Republican victory would mean that “a swarthy inundation of negro laborers and paupers shall flood the North, accumulating new burdens on taxpayers, cheapening the labor by black competition … and raising dangerous questions of political and social equality.”

  In New York City, Democratic crowds cheered Seymour when he called the Emancipation Proclamation “a proposal for the butchery of women and children, for scenes of lust and rapine, and of arson and murder.”

  Increasingly, as the war dragged on and bitterness deepened, Lincoln’s own middle course was losing support across the North as extremists on both sides—those who hated him for going too far, and others who despised him for not going far enough—gained strength. The popular flight from moderation grieved him. As the 1862 fall elections drew near, observers noticed a deepening of his natural mel
ancholy. He seemed “literally bending under the weight of his burdens,” said one who saw him then. “His introverted look and his half-staggering gait were those of a man walking in his sleep.”

  A nervous John Hay wrote from Illinois, “Things look badly around here politically.” Even the optimistic Seward shivered at an “ill wind” of discontent. Lincoln’s party, split into warring factions and hamstrung by the lack of any good news, campaigned listlessly.

  It surprised nobody, then, that when the Northern voters went to the polls in October and November, they returned a thumping Republican defeat—what the New York Times called “a vote of want of confidence” in Abraham Lincoln. The middle states that had swept the Railsplitter into the presidency in 1860— Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York—deserted him. All of them sent new Democratic majorities to Congress. Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania also elected Democratic state legislatures. New Jersey was a Republican donnybrook—Democrats carried the state legislature, four of its five seats in the House, and delivered a new Democratic governor. The worst blow of all was in New York, where the victory of Horatio Seymour gave the Democrats a new national leader to oppose Lincoln. Perhaps the most embarrassing defeat was in Lincoln’s own Springfield district, where Leonard Swett lost.

  In all, the number of Democrats in the House almost doubled, from 44 to 75, cutting the Republican majority from 70 to 55 percent. The President and his party were saved an even worse beating only by the fact that the Republican governors of the Midwestern states were not up for election. Heartsick at the Republicans’ ruin, Alexander McClure of Pennsylvania wrote, “I could not conceive it possible for Lincoln to successfully administer the government and prosecute the war with the six most important loyal States declaring against him at the polls.”

  * * *

  Everybody had a theory to explain the disaster. Many blamed “that unwise, ill-timed and seditious” Emancipation Proclamation. The newspaper headlines were succinct in their appraisals: “No Emancipation” was the verdict of the Dubuque Herald; “Abolition Slaughtered” was the view of the Indianapolis State Sentinel. The Illinois State Register reported the Springfield results as “The Home of Lincoln Condemns the Proclamation.” “Fanaticism, Abolitionism and Niggerism Repudiated” was the thoughtful analysis of the Valley Spirit. Voters, it said, had decided “against the unconstitutional proclamation of the President, proclaiming freedom to 3,000,000 negroes in the South, to be turned loose upon the country, to enter into competition with white men and eat out their substance, and against fanaticism, bigotry, tyranny and despotism in all their different phases and forms.”

  Others blamed the defeat on arbitrary arrests, a source of outrage ever since the Merryman case in the summer of 1861. Earnest judicial reformer David Dudley Field was horrified by Lincoln’s habeas corpus edict, and wrote to him after the election debacle that “unless there is an immediate&continued change in the conduct of the war, and the practice of arresting citizens without legal process is abandoned, there is every reason to fear that you will be unable, successfully, to carry on the government.”

  Still others blamed Lincoln’s oldest foe, the failure of the war. “The New York and other elections are simply a reproof of the inactivity of the Government,” declared Boston lawyer John Chipman Ropes. “They have nothing to do with the nigger question. With the administration military success is everything—it is the verdict which cures all errors.” William Cullen Bryant’s comment in the New York Evening Post catalogued Lincoln’s military impotence:

  The people after their gigantic preparations and sacrifices have looked for an adequate return, and looked in vain. They have seen armies unused in the field perish in pestilential swamps. They have seen their money wasted in long winter encampments, or frittered away on fruitless expeditions along the coast. They have seen a huge debt roll up, yet no prospect of greater military results.

  Some Democrats glorified the election as the rising up of an oppressed people, throwing off their chains. The southern Illinois Salem Advocate gushed:

  We saw the President of the United States stretching forth his hand and seizing the reins of government with almost absolute power, and yet the people submitted. On the 4th day of November, 1862, the people arose in their might, they uttered their voice, like the sound of many waters, and tyranny, corruption and maladministration trembled.

  Most, however, saw an accumulation of ruin. Politician-general John Cochrane of New York wrote to Lincoln his impression of the Waterloo there:

  I do not think that the majorities have spoken designedly upon any one subject in hostility to your administration—Some have been adverse to the proclamation— others have been impelled by some uncertain indefinite sense that all was not right: and the greatest numbers have greedily visited their disappointment that the war is not finished&was not finished in 60 days upon the first responsible party they could discover— They have been aching for a head to smash— They thought they saw one, and they smashed Wadsworth’s [the Republican candidate for governor of New York]—The restlessness of men when suffering and their usual conclusion that a change, no matter for what, will benefit them, have been fully asserted in the result of the election— I have toiled hard, but I confess with a bruised spirit & a desponding heart for the principles & conduct of your administration.

  The day after the election, diarist George Templeton Strong attempted to read the mind of the multitude:

  Probably two-thirds of those who voted for Seymour meant to say by their votes, “Messrs. Lincoln, Seward, Stanton & Co., you have done your work badly, so far. You are humbugs. My business is stopped, I have got taxes to pay, my wife’s third cousin was killed on the Chickahominy, and the war is no nearer an end than it was a year ago. I am disgusted with you and your party and shall vote for the governor or the congressman you disapprove, just to spite you.

  Another angry New Yorker admonished the President as the returns came in:

  This great nation has given to you almost absolute authority. The people have, for nineteen months, poured out, at your call, sons, brothers, husbands & money.— What is the result?— Do you ever realize that the desolation, sorrow, grief, that pervades this country is owing to you? — that the young men who have been maimed, crippled, murdered, & made invalids for life, owe it to your weakness, irresolution, & want of moral courage?

  Lincoln bowed his head against a storm of recriminations from resentful Republicans everywhere. “I deplore the result in New York,” wrote Charles Sumner; “It is worse for our country than the bloodiest disaster on any field of battle.” William W. Orme of Illinois desponded, “I think the country is ruined.” Pittsburgh Congressman J.K. Moorhead, returning to Washington from his district, scolded Lincoln, “it was not your fault we were not all beaten.” He brought word from Pennsylvania state leaders, one-time Lincoln supporters who now said they “would be glad to hear some morning that you had been found hanging from the post of a lamp at the door of the White House.” Historian George Bancroft lamented to fellow liberal Francis Lieber:

  [Lincoln] is ignorant, self-willed, and is surrounded by men some of whom are almost as ignorant as himself. So we have the dilemma put to us, What to do, when his power must continue two years longer and when the existence of our country may be endangered before he can be replaced by a man of sense. How hard, in order to save the country, to sustain a man who is incompetent.

  In a column headlined “All the Blame on Mr. Lincoln,” the Democratic Crisis gloated over the misery in Lincoln’s party, reprinting an article from the Republican Cincinnati Commercial that was a litany of complaints:

  The result … is attributable to the mismanagement that has characterized the conduct of the war; the want of a sound policy, vigorously pursued; the manifold corruptions and extravagances in contracts; the failure of military plans through the untimely interference of civilians, who thought they knew all about it; a rather blind belief in the efficacy of proclamations over powder effect
ively used; and the desire of a patient and patriotic people for some change which may better the situation, and which, at most, cannot make matters much worse, and all of which is charged to the account of the Administration, though it be ever so innocent.

  Lincoln deluded himself about the reasons for his party’s election losses, preferring to believe, “The democrats were left in a majority by [Republican men] going to the war,” as he explained to Carl Schurz in a letter. This was wrongheaded. Just as many Democrats had joined the army as Republicans, and Schurz, who had spent months as a general, knew it. He lectured the President in his reply:

  I fear you entertain too favorable a view of the causes of our defeat in the elections… . Let us indulge in no delusions as to the true causes … . The people had sown confidence and reaped disaster and disappointment. They wanted a change, and … they sought it in the wrong direction. I entreat you, do not attribute to small incidents … what is a great historical event. It is best that you … should see the fact in its true light and appreciate its significance: the result of the elections was a most serious and severe reproof administered to the administration… .’’

  * * *

  Lincoln did agree with those who complained that the war was not being fought aggressively enough, and he sought a quick cure. As early as October 6 he had directed McClellan to follow up his victory at Antietam by crossing the Potomac and forcing a battle with Lee. Four weeks later, the tardy Young Napoleon had still killed no rebels, so Lincoln sacked him on November 5, the day he received the election returns from New York.

  Here was a defining moment for Lincoln at mid-term. He could have cemented the faith of the Radicals by doing what they had been demanding for a full year and installing a Republican in McClellan’s place. Instead, he named a Democrat, an army favorite, McClellan’s friend and right-hand man General Ambrose Burnside. By making the change of commanders seem like a legitimate military succession rather than a political purge, Lincoln tried to limit the damage to the morale of the Army of the Potomac.