by Larry Tagg
And in the first week of July 1863, the war tide turned. On July 3, word came that, after three days of the bloodiest fighting of the war, the Army of the Potomac, under the command of General George Gordon Meade, had beaten Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania. The next day, Independence Day, Grant captured Vicksburg on the Mississippi River and with it, 30,000 enemy soldiers. When Navy Secretary Welles rushed to the White House and gave Lincoln the news that the citadel on the Mississippi had finally fallen, the President threw his arms around him and exclaimed, “I cannot, in words, tell you my joy over this result. It is great, Mr. Welles, it is great!”
Chapter 28
Lincoln Addresses the Nation
“Silly, flat, and dish-watery utterances.”
The elation over the Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg ended a year of dejection over Union defeats. With Lee’s wounded army streaming back into Virginia and with the Confederate grip on the Mississippi River broken, the feeling rose that the war might soon be over. Across the North, ceremonial cannon boomed and bands tootled down avenues lined with cheering crowds. Grudgingly, it seemed, confidence in Lincoln’s leadership swelled. Republican congressmen received letters from their districts like the endorsement written to Senator Trumbull, “[I]f [Lincoln] don’t go forward as fast as some of us like, he never goes backwards.”
Lincoln was aided in the last half of 1863, however, not only by the Union’s sudden good fortune on the battlefield, but also by his willingness to break with precedent and speak directly to the American people. The season saw three dramatic displays of the literary gifts he brought to that task. The first was in June, after Lincoln received a letter protesting Vallandigham’s arrest from a committee of New York Democrats chaired by railroad president Erastus Corning. The letter blasted Lincoln’s whole system of arbitrary arrests and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus.
Lincoln responded to the committee in the same “unpresidential” way he had responded to Horace Greeley’s “Prayer of Twenty Millions” in August of 1862—with a public letter. Over the previous months, Lincoln had written down his thoughts about the restriction of civil liberties as they occurred to him, scribbling them on slips of paper and then storing them away in a drawer in his desk. When he received the bitter petition from the Corning Democrats, he laid out the little scraps of paper on his desk and from them crafted his defense of his policy on habeas corpus, military arrests, and his war powers.
Lincoln’s reply to Corning lucidly, systematically, and gently argued his point: “that the constitution is not in it’s [sic] application in all respects the same, in cases of Rebellion or invasion, … as it is in times of profound peace and public security.” Printed in the New York Tribune, his public letter was reprinted as a pamphlet, and ten million people read it. Citizens across the North felt an emotional tug when they read his defense of political arrests: “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert?” They liked Lincoln’s homely reassurance that he could no more believe Americans would permanently lose their cherished rights “than I am able to believe that a man could contract so strong an appetite for emetics during temporary illness as to persist in feeding upon them during the remainder of his healthful life.”
Lincoln’s Corning Letter was seen as a forceful vindication of his policy on the civil liberties in general and Vallandigham case in particular. Readers began to acknowledge the quality of his writing—so contrary to the fussy, elaborate style that was called fine writing at the time—for its clarity, its immediacy, its supple logic, and its humanity.
In August, Lincoln built on the success of the Corning Letter when James C. Conkling, chairman of the Illinois Republicans, invited him to speak at a rally in Springfield. Lincoln declined to appear personally but used the occasion to write a letter defending the Emancipation Proclamation and the recruitment of black soldiers. The letter, which Conkling read to the gathering of 50,000 (“very slowly,” according to Lincoln’s explicit instructions), defended emancipation in a bold, direct tone. “There are those who are dissatisfied with me,” he began. “To such I would say: You desire peace; and you blame me that we do not have it. But how can we attain it? There are but three conceivable ways.” He listed the ways, showed the folly of the first two— surrender and compromise—and ended with a direct appeal to his critics’ desire to accomplish the third: military victory. “[T]he emancipation policy, and the use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion,” he answered his critics now.
The Conkling Letter showed a different Lincoln than the tentative, conflicted emancipator of January. By the time he wrote it, the President was convinced of the rightness of the Emancipation Proclamation and was resolved never to retract any part of it. Lincoln’s Democratic enemies raged against the Conkling Letter. But it was as the New York Times said: the President had spoken so well, argued so cogently, and hit the nail so squarely on the head that “Even the Copperhead gnaws upon it as vainly as a viper upon a file.”
Parts of the Conkling Letter indulged in colorful rhetoric. The President spoke poetically of the Vicksburg triumph—“the Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea”—and mentioned the navy as “Uncle Sam’s Web-feet.” Here, Lincoln’s style, calculated to appeal to the “plain man,” seemed like clowning to serious critics. The more whimsical parts of the letter led the London Times to the conclusion that Lincoln was drunk when he wrote it.
London’s stuffy Evening Standard, too, registered once again the now-familiar complaints of the old guard against Lincoln’s literary style:
[Lincoln,] like many of his countrymen [possesses] … a very uncertain notion of grammar, and very loose ideas of the structure of English sentences. This might be forgiven, if through the haze of his clumsy diction we could discern a gleam of common sense or political sagacity or a sign of the dignity which befits his high office … . Whenever we read the effusions of that miserable buffoon who fills the seat of Washington, and Adams, and Madison, we are forced to pity the nation which is doomed to atone for its crimes and follies by doing penance before all the world in an attitude of such utter and abject humiliation.
Even in America there were those who still clung to the old, ornate, literary “high culture,” and could not see that Lincoln was creating a simpler, more direct, more American style of writing. The nation’s foremost man of letters, the high priest of the Boston intelligentsia, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was one of those. Tone-deaf to Lincoln’s new music, Emerson sighed mournfully:
You cannot refine Mr. Lincoln’s taste, or extend his horizon; he will not walk dignifiedly through the traditional part of the President of America, but will pop out his head at each railroad station and make a little speech, and get into an argument with Squire A. and Judge B. He will write letters to Horace Greeley, and any editor or reporter or saucy party committee that writes to him, and cheapen himself.
Some classically trained scholars who had criticized Lincoln’s utterances since the beginning of the war, however, were listening with new ears. Radical Charles Sumner, for example, showed a new-found appreciation for Lincoln’s prose after the publication of the Conkling epistle: “Thanks for your true and noble letter. It is a historical document. The case is admirably stated, so that all but the wicked must confess its force. It cannot be answered.” Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, made this confession:
Sooth to say, our own politicians were somewhat shocked with his state-papers at first. Why not let make them a little more conventional, and file them to a classical pattern? ‘No,’ was his reply. ‘I shall write them myself. The people will understand them.’ ‘But this or that form of expression is not elegant, not classical.’ ‘The people will understand it,’ has been his invariable reply.
Stowe now admitted a need for a revision of the critics’ view. “There are passages in the state-papers,” she wrote,
“that could not be better put; they are absolutely perfect. They are brief, condensed, intense, and with a power of insight and expression which make them worthy to be inscribed in letters of gold.” She saw that, most importantly, “the state-papers of no President have more controlled the public mind.”
The late summer of 1863 was golden for Lincoln. Not only had the war taken a sharp upturn for the Union side, but his public writing was adding momentum to the war effort. Still radiating the aura of the victories of July, and with no session of Congress to torture him, Lincoln spent quiet August days at the Soldiers’ Home north of Washington, away from the heat, the flies, the stink, and the pestilence of the White House. Here he was briefly delivered from care. “The Tycoon is in fine whack,” wrote John Hay on August 7. “I have rarely seen him more serene and busy.”
* * *
Lincoln’s idyll was brought short by worry over the coming fall elections. Rebel leaders had helped the banished Clement Vallandigham make his way to Windsor, Canada, and from there he was dictating a new strategy to the Copperheads, emphasizing the Democrats’ superiority for the task of reconciliation of North and South. Copperhead leaders in the northern cities, however, still gripped the weapons that felt familiar in their hands. They harped on the old issues of lost rights and the popular dread of waves of freed blacks swarming into northern towns and cities. They cried for an immediate peace, pointing to the immense reserves of will and might in the rebellious states. They framed the 1863 fall campaign—as they did every electoral campaign during the Civil War—as a referendum on Lincoln’s abuses and failures.
In the Northwest, campaign rallies drew tens of thousands of people. Republican governors and senators criss-crossed the contested states giving stump speeches. In Ohio, the sensational race between martyr-in-exile Vallandigham and Union Party candidate John Brough brought the Copperheads’ views and Lincoln’s into sharp contrast. From Columbus, The Crisis waved Vallandigham’s banner. On August 7, it huffed and puffed in a long column which unfurled the anti-Lincoln manifesto:
It is now no longer a question whether Mr. Lincoln … will establish a military despotism, for such a despotism is already established: the only question involved is whether he can make that despotism permanent… . The elective franchise will … constitute our sole remaining hope of resisting his tyranny.
Any advantages or victories obtained over the rebels is of small import to us as compared with the preservation of our own freedom. At what avail is the subjugation of the South to military rule, when, at the same time, our own constitutional rights are taken from us? The president is ostensibly conducting two wars: one against the South and the other against freedom in the North. The white race seems to be the especial object of hate. His acts, and especially his enlistment of black soldiers, indicate his object to rule the whites in the South through the blacks; and to rule the whites in the North through the soldiery and a corrupt judiciary… .
We read history to little purpose, if we indulge the hope that a military usurper, when he has once firmly set his heels upon the necks of a subject people, will voluntarily relinquish the advantages of his position… .
[Lincoln and the Republicans] are using their best endeavors to set up a Government outside of the Constitution… . This they call restoring the Union, when, in truth, it is destroying the Union, and all engaged in the treasonable undertaking are as disloyal as Jeff Davis and his followers… . Jeff Davis has as much right to set up a new Government, as has Mr. Lincoln to change, by force, the old one. Both are treasonable, and the only true Union men are those who oppose them both.
These complaints at least had the virtue of being sincere. One week before Election Day, however, in a last-ditch effort to steal the election, the Copperhead press smeared Lincoln with an out-and-out lie, accusing him of plotting the cancellation of the next presidential election—the ultimate betrayal of democracy. The Crisis, under the banner “Lincoln to Be Declared Perpetual President,” announced, “It is now stated that a bill has been prepared and will be placed before the next Congress declaring Lincoln President while the war lasts.” The Cincinnati Enquirer printed the story at the same time, crying, “Thus the mad fanatics are plotting against our liberties, and if we do not speak right soon through the ballot-box, the last vestige of our republican government will have been swept away.”
It didn’t work. On October 13, John Brough, representing Lincoln’s views, beat Clement Vallandigham by 100,000 votes, a huge margin. When he heard the news, Lincoln, like a herald angel, wired Brough: “Glory to God in the highest. Ohio has saved the Nation.” Almost everywhere across the North it was the same. Even in the Border States, the Union Party, standing for Lincoln, swept the fall elections. The battlefield victories of July, the strength of Lincoln’s public letters, and the growing sense that emancipation and black soldiers were speeding the end of the war were irresistible.
Lincoln told Gideon Welles that he had been more worried about the results of this election than he had been about his own in 1860. For good measure, he had arranged furloughs for swarms of soldiers and government clerks to return home to vote—“This state has really been carried by fraud, but we have control of the State which is very important,” one Ohio Republican conceded. Another was sure that Pennsylvania would have been lost “if it had not been for the soldiers we got at the last.”
“Abduction of the Yankee Goddess of Liberty.” “THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS (ABRAHAM LINCOLN) BEARS HER AWAY TO HIS INFERNAL REGIONS”
Democratic newspapers reported their defeats with curled lip. The day after the election, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle sneered, “The Democracy fail in [Ohio], but they fail contending for free speech, for a free press, for trial by jury, as opposed to drumhead court martial. Contending for such principles, victory would be glorious,—defeat brings no dishonor.”
* * *
Just as the hostile editors were printing their barbed epitaphs of the 1863 elections, Lincoln received an invitation to attend the dedication of a soldiers’ cemetery at the Gettysburg battlefield in Pennsylvania. The dead soldiers were being interred by state, with emphasis on each state’s sacrifices. Lincoln’s attendance was not especially coveted; the event’s Board of Commissioners had sent out similar invitations to scores of prominent men. The Honorable Edward Everett, regarded as the greatest living American orator, had been enlisted to give a speech. According to Clark E. Carr, the Illinois committee man who sent Lincoln his invitation, asking the President to take part in the ceremony was an afterthought. Only when Lincoln sent a message that he would attend did the idea occur to anyone that he should be asked to speak.
For one thing, admitted Carr, “it did not seem to occur to any one that he could speak upon such an occasion.” Since his inauguration, Lincoln had given no speeches except a few embarrassed, desultory remarks to serenaders at the White House. No member of the Gettysburg committee except Carr had ever heard him address a crowd. “While all expressed high appreciation of his great abilities as a political speaker, as shown in his debates with Senator Douglas, and in his Cooper Institute address,” wrote Carr, “the question was raised as to his ability to speak upon such a grave and solemn occasion as that of the memorial services.” Lincoln’s image as an amiable, uncouth jokester was so deeply etched that it disqualified him from making properly sober remarks even now, three years after his election. The committee feared he might stand up and give a stump speech or, worse, tell a funny story. They were aware of a rumor that the year before, during a grim tour of the battlefield at Antietam in an ambulance, with bodies yet piled high all around and the field still wet with blood, Lincoln had thoughtlessly desecrated the ground and dishonored the dead by calling for a ribald minstrel song from his banjo-playing companion, Ward Lamon. (Lincoln had in fact been miles from the battlefield when he asked Lamon to sing a sad melody called “Twenty Years Ago,” but the story would not die.)
Despite its misgivings, the committee, in the end, cautiously decided to invite Li
ncoln to say a few words after Everett’s oration. To assure that Lincoln would take his duties seriously, however, David Wills, a prosperous Gettysburg banker who was the organizer of the event, included strict instructions in his invitation. He emphasized that the occasion would be “imposing and solemnly impressive,” and asked Lincoln to make “a few appropriate remarks”—that is, to be dignified and brief. Wills ended the letter by once more reminding Lincoln that his part would be the “last solemn act to the Soldier dead.”
Lincoln used the next two weeks to cobble together 272 words that started with a rhyme (“Four score”) and whose sound and rhythm, whose simplicity of expression and delicate structure, carried it, rising and falling, through two minutes of sublime grace to a conclusion powerful enough to ennoble three days of butchery, rededicate the struggle for the Union, and reaffirm the nation’s ideals. His theme—the central idea that gave rise to the Emancipation Proclamation and provided moral purpose to the nation’s struggle—was the idea that was closest to his heart: the self-evident truth proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence “that all men are created equal.” For the nation’s first eighty-seven years, until the moment Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, America’s central document had been the Constitution, with its knotty inequalities and legal compromises. Lincoln, in his two minutes on the Gettysburg hillside, replaced the Constitution with the Declaration as the guiding American article of faith. He not only consecrated the cemetery, he announced a revolution rededicating America to Jefferson’s first principle.
