The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln

by Larry Tagg

  Even so, soldiers bristled at Lincoln’s beheading of their idol. According to McClellan, “Many were in favor of my refusing to obey the order, and of marching upon Washington to take possession of the government.” There was campfire talk of mass resignations. “Officers and men unite in denouncing [McClellan’s removal] as an outrage upon the army,” one soldier wrote home. It was unfair, protested another: “Upon every occasion when General McClellan was upon the eve of a decisive battle … he has been prevented from striking the blow by the interference of the government.” New York aristocrat Colonel Wainwright reported that regret among the officers was universal, “and a few even going so far as to beg him to resist the order, and saying that the army would support him.” General Thomas Meagher of New York’s famous Irish Brigade blasted Lincoln’s action as notorious and criminal, “which the Army of the Union will never forgive.” Scholar-soldier Francis A. Walker lamented, “When the chief had passed out of sight, the romance of war was over for the Second Corps.”

  While McClellan’s devotees were furious at his ouster, it was not equally true that his enemies were delighted. Rather, they were incensed that Lincoln missed another opportunity to put one of their own—Frémont, for instance, or “Fighting Joe” Hooker—in his place. After the repudiation of Lincoln in the elections, the Radicals now began to fear that he would swerve from his September promises. To them, his appointment of the Democrat Burnside was a first sign of retreat. The old doubts about Lincoln’s timidity and vacillation returned. Boston intellectual Charles Eliot Norton summoned a metaphor: “I am much afraid that a domestic cat will not answer when one wants a Bengal tiger.” Count Gurowski wrote his lack of confidence to Governor Andrew: “You can not change Lincoln’s head, you can not fill his small but empty skull with brains.” As political leaders gathered in Washington for the December session of Congress, there were grumblings by powerful men who maintained that Lincoln was but a “tow-string of a President” who had to be bound up “with strong, sturdy rods in the shape of Cabinet ministers.”

  Radicals squinting for signs of an about-face by Lincoln on emancipation thought their worst fears confirmed when his Annual Message to Congress was read on the floor of the House on December 1, 1862. In his Message, Lincoln recommended three constitutional amendments that offered compensation to any state that produced a gradual plan to abolish slavery by the year 1900, and included a new plea for colonization of freed blacks in some “place or places in a climate congenial to them.” After page upon page of close argument for his elaborate proposal, he closed with phrases that reached new heights of rhetorical power: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present… . In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free… . We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth.” While those lines will be remembered forever, what has been forgotten is that when he wrote them, Lincoln was arguing for a plan that would have delayed the blessings of freedom to black slaves for two more generations.

  That Lincoln included the “gradual—by 1900—compensated—with colonization” emancipation amendments in his Annual Message on December 1 reveals the deep doubts that still plagued him about the Proclamation scheduled for January 1. His Illinois friend, Judge Davis, who visited the President while he was preparing the Message, wrote that “Mr. Lincoln’s whole soul is absorbed in his plan of remunerative emancipation and he thinks if Congress don’t fail him, that the problem is solved.” If so, Lincoln was laboring under an illusion. The idea of adding these amendments to the Constitution was a will-o’-the-wisp. One of Lincoln’s bedrock tenets had been that secession was unconstitutional and that the rebel states were still in the Union, so all three amendments would have to be ratified by unanimous consent of the free states plus six slave states in order to have the three-fourths approval required by the Constitution.

  The anti-slavery men wept bitterly when they heard Lincoln’s amendments. They feared that the new proposal meant that he was reneging on his promise to issue the Emancipation Proclamation on New Years Day. “May the Lord hold to rigid account the fool that is set over us,” one abolitionist wrote to William Lloyd Garrison; “What suicide the Administration is guilty of! What a weak pattern of Old Pharoah! What a goose!” In the columns of The Liberator, Garrison ranted, “The President is demented—or else a veritable Rip Van Winkle,” adding that the Message’s proposal “borders upon hopeless lunacy” and offered grounds for impeachment. “A man so manifestly without moral vision, so unsettled in his policy, so incompetent to lead, so destitute of hearty abhorrence of slavery,” he told his readers, “cannot be safely relied on in any emergency.”

  * * *

  Then, an emergency. On December 14 came awful news that the Army of the Potomac had suffered a crushing defeat at Fredericksburg. General Burnside, in his inaugural battle as army commander, had hurled his divisions first against the Confederate right without success, and then against the left atop well-defended Marye’s Heights. A succession of attacks followed, each a bloody failure. Burnside retreated, leaving thousands of dead and dying in piles on the frozen Virginia ground. After hearing a full account of the disaster, Lincoln groaned to a friend, “If there is a worse place than Hell, I am in it.”

  As word of the massacre spread across the North, grief and wrath settled upon the people. Burnside was largely spared; the blame was heaped at Lincoln’s door. Citizens were anguished by this newest, bloodiest evidence of Lincoln’s ineptitude. “How long is such intolerable and wicked blundering to continue?” demanded the New York Evening Post. “The War is a failure!” cried the Albany Atlas and Argus. Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune recorded:

  The feeling of utter hopelessness is stronger than at any time since the war began. The terrible bloody defeat of our brave army … leaves us almost without hope… . The public discontent waxes greater daily… . By a common instinct everybody feels that the war is drawing towards a disastrous and disgraceful termination… . Sometimes I think nothing is left now but “to fight for a boundary.”

  Even the moderate Harper’s Weekly ran a cartoon that pictured an angry Spirit of Columbia pointing an accusing finger at Lincoln. Harper’s spoke of a nationwide collapse of trust in Lincoln’s government, and predicted ruin:

  We are indulging in no hyperbole when we say that these events are rapidly filling the heart of the loyal North with sickness, disgust, and despair. Party lines are becoming effaced by such unequivocal evidences of administrative imbecility; it is the men who have given and trusted the most, who now feel most keenly that the Government is unfit for its office, and that the most gallant efforts ever made by a cruelly tried people are being neutralized by the obstinacy and incapacity of their leaders. Where this will all end no one can see. But it must end soon. The people have shown a patience, during the past year, quite unexampled in history. They have borne, silently and grimly, imbecility, treachery, failure, privation, loss of friends and means, almost every suffering which can afflict a brave people. But they can not be expected to suffer that such massacres as this at Fredericksburg shall be repeated. Matters are rapidly ripening for a military dictatorship.

  “Columbia Confronts the President.” Columbia: “ Where are my 15,000 sons—murdered at Fredericksburg?” Lincoln: “This reminds me of a little joke.” Columbia: “Go tell your joke at SPRINGFIELD.”

  The best men of the North wrote letters to their friends in Washington, or scribbled wretched entries in their diaries. “A year ago we laughed at the Honest Old Abe’s grotesque genial Western jocosities, but they nauseate us now,” wrote George Templeton Strong, predicting that Lincoln would have to “resign and make way for Hamlin,” and that it would be “a change for the better, none for the worse being conceivable.” One Pennsylvania constituent of Congressman Edward McPherson informed him that back home, “almost everybody is dissatisfied with the administration. President Lincoln is denounced by many of his most devoted friends in former times.” Another Pennsylvanian repor
ted that the locals were “utterly disgusted,” believing “that the present administration is utterly incompetent,” and a third that “if things are not more successfully managed the President will be generally deserted.” From the Republican stronghold of Massachusetts, Charles Sumner was hearing much the same. “I am losing confidence in the executive capacity of Mr. Lincoln’s administration,” wrote one leader from Worcester; “I see plainly that doubt and discouragement are spreading among the people,” he said, reporting “a fixed belief that the managers … at Washington are incompetent … .” A Boston man told Sumner that Lincoln’s resignation “would be received with great satisfaction” and might “avert what … will otherwise come—viz., a violent and bloody revolution at the North.” Southern poetasters minted jeering rhymes:

  The days are growing shorter,

  The sun has crossed the line,

  And the people are all asking,

  “Will Abraham resign?”

  Republican senators were frantic, worried that Democrats would seize on the wave of hopelessness in the North and start a movement that would settle for peace on terms dictated by Richmond. “Folly, folly folly reigns supreme,” moaned Zack Chandler to his wife. “The President is a weak man, too weak for the occasion… . The country is done for unless something is done at once.”

  * * *

  Seeing Lincoln so universally reproached, the senators resolved that they, and not the President, must direct the war. They would start by deciding who should and who should not be in the Cabinet. A successful raid by the Republican senators on the Cabinet would establish the senators’ authority over the man they saw as the overmatched rude boy in the Executive chair. Much more, it would signal the return of the legislature’s control over American government.

  Burnside’s Fredericksburg fiasco had precipitated nothing less than a war between Congress and the President. “Reorganization” of the Cabinet would be the watchword of the coup attempt, and Seward would be the target. The Radicals had always distrusted Seward as a sinister influence on the simple Lincoln; now they feared he might sway the President from issuing the Emancipation Proclamation or make him sign a disgraceful peace with the Confederacy. They agreed with Joseph Medill: “Seward must be got out of the Cabinet. He is Lincoln’s evil genius. He has been the President de facto, and has kept a sponge saturated with chloroform to Uncle Abe’s nose all the while.” Lincoln remarked to a friend, “They seemed to think that when I had in me any good purposes, Mr. Seward contrived to suck them out of me unperceived!” Conservative Republican senators went along, believing that Seward was an enemy of the legislature—Wasn’t it he who had convinced Lincoln to put off calling a special Congress after Sumter, and to schedule his important acts for times when Congress was not in session?

  For months, Secretary Chase had filled the ears of the senators with anti-Seward mutterings, calling him “a back stairs and malign influence which controlled the President.” Chase had complained that the other Cabinet members had no say on policy, that under Lincoln’s lax administration they only met “now and then for talk on whatever happens to come uppermost, not for grave consultation on matters concerning the salvation of the country.” Angered by Chase’s stories, alarmed by the collapse of hope after Fredericksburg, and betting that Lincoln, wounded by recent defeats at the polls and on the battlefield, would cave in and reshuffle his Cabinet to include more men like their ally Chase, the Republican senators met behind closed doors on December 16 and 17. According to Orville Browning, who attended, “Many speeches were made denouncing the President and expressing a willingness to vote for a resolution asking him to resign.” In the end, it was determined to appoint a Committee of Nine to meet with Lincoln and demand that he remake the Cabinet to exclude anybody not in harmony with their demand for a “vigorous & successful prosecution of the war” (that is, William Seward), and that he be bound in his policies by the “result of [the] combined wisdom and deliberation” of the reorganized “Cabinet council.”

  That evening, Seward, having heard about the caucuses and unwilling to be a burden on the President, gave his resignation to Lincoln and started packing his bags to leave Washington. Alerted to the senators’ plot by the surprise appearance of Seward’s resignation, Lincoln sent for his friend Orville Browning, and questioned him about the secret meetings. Browning admitted that they were “exceedingly violent towards the administration.” Hearing this, Lincoln snapped, “They wish to get rid of me, and I am sometimes half disposed to gratify them.” He then gave way to melancholy. “We are now on the brink of destruction,” he said. “It appears to me the Almighty is against us, and I can hardly see a ray of hope… . Since I heard last night of the proceedings of the caucus I have been more distressed than by any event of my life.”

  An Illinois friend who saw him at this time described Lincoln as “perplexed to death nearly.” Joshua Speed, Lincoln’s dear friend from Kentucky, saw him that week and reported “the president looked haggard and care-worn beyond what [I] expected.” Lincoln’s old friend Noah Brooks, newly arrived in the capital, recalled, “His eyes were almost deathly in their gloomy depths, and on his visage was an air of profound sadness. His face was colorless and drawn.”

  Lincoln was showing the strain of the coup attempt. Nothing less than the survival of his government—in fact, of the American system of government— was at stake. If he surrendered cabinet choices to the senators, and his policy to the “Cabinet council,” he would lose control of the government; if he refused, he would lose the support of the Senate at the height of a terrible civil war.

  At seven p.m. on the evening of December 18, he met with the hostile Senate Committee of Nine for three hours, during which they hammered him with their resolutions. Lincoln listened calmly while the senators launched their indictments and pressed their demands, then he adjourned the meeting until the following evening. By the time Lincoln politely ushered them out of the White House with the promise that he would think it over, the senators felt confident that they had ousted Seward and insured a unified, right-thinking Cabinet that would dominate Lincoln’s policies thereafter.

  Lincoln, however, had other ideas. The next morning he convened five Cabinet members—Blair, Smith, Stanton, Chase, and Welles—and asked them to attend his meeting with the angry senators. That night, when the senators crowded into the room with the unexpected Cabinet members, Lincoln produced an inspired bit of political theater. He began with a solemn, careful review of his major decisions, which demonstrated that there was already unity in the Cabinet—here the Illinois lawyer stretched things a bit—and that, even if some members only acquiesced after a decision was made, the Secretaries generally agreed.

  “Did they not?” he asked the Cabinet members. All eyes went to Chase. Everyone in the room knew it was he who had spent months whispering to the senators, engineering the loss of confidence in the Cabinet’s performance in general and William Seward in particular. Now he would have to take his place with the accusers or with the President.

  With everyone present leaning forward, Chase faltered. His lips fluttered; he protested; he dodged; he went silent.

  Lincoln’s embarrassment of Chase deftly demonstrated that no Cabinet member could afford to side with an attack by hostile senators—if that became the fashion, how long could any of them expect to last? When the fiery discussion over Seward had burnt itself out, Lincoln asked for a roll call vote. Discouraged by Chase’s desertion, only four senators voted to remove the Secretary of State. Seward was saved, and the meeting broke up, said Welles, “in milder spirit than it met.” Senator Trumbull turned to Lincoln and growled a parting shot: “Secretary Chase had a very different tone the last time I spoke with him!”

  The next day Washington buzzed with rumors: the whole Cabinet would resign! new slates were being proposed! Lincoln was still in a bind, since a refusal to accept Seward’s resignation would be a slap in the face to the senators. The answer to the problem, ironically, was provided by Chase, wh
o delivered one of the truly Providential gifts of Lincoln’s presidency. That morning, December 20, he appeared at the White House. According to Welles, who was there with Stanton, Chase said he “had been painfully affected by the meeting” the night before and had prepared his resignation.

  Lincoln lit up. “Where is it?” he asked quickly.

  “I brought it with me,” Chase said, and pulled it from his pocket.

  The President leaped at him. “Let me have it,” he said, and reached for it with his long arms and fingers. There was a short tug of war, and then Lincoln had it away from Chase, who seemed reluctant to part with it, objecting that there was something further he wished to say. But Lincoln would not hear him. He hastily opened the letter, read it, and, as an air of satisfaction spread over his face, said, “This cuts the Gordian knot. I can dispose of this subject now without difficulty.”

  Stanton offered to submit his resignation as well. “I don’t want yours,” said Lincoln. “This is all I want—this relieves me—my way is clear—the trouble is ended. I will detain neither of you any longer.”

  Chase’s resignation, neatly balancing that of Seward, offered a solution to the crisis that Lincoln happily summed up in a prairie metaphor: “I can ride on now. I’ve got a pumpkin in each end of my bag!” He addressed identical notes to Seward and Chase declining to accept their resignations. Both men would remain, and the Cabinet would continue as before. Just as important, all Republican factions now understood that there would be no tampering with the Departments. If they insisted on one man’s ouster, his opposite would go also.