by Larry Tagg
This went unnoticed by most of its hearers. Even John Hay, a poet with a fine ear, disposed of the affair in one sentence, writing “the President in a fine, free way, with more grace than is his wont, said his half dozen words of consecration, and the music wailed and we went home through the crowded and cheering streets.” The rest of the listeners were also caught by surprise by the brevity of the President’s address. It created an awkward moment at the end. When Lincoln finished, the crowd was silent for a time, not realizing that the thing was over. The only sound was laughter—by people watching a photographer who had not been quick enough to get a picture of the President giving his speech. Clark Carr, who was on the platform, stated, “So short a time was Mr. Lincoln before them that the people could scarcely believe their eyes when he disappeared from their view. They were almost dazed. They could not possibly, in so short a time, mentally grasp the ideas that were conveyed, nor even their substance. Time and again expressions of disappointment were made to me. Many persons said to me that they would have supposed that on such a great occasion the President would have made a speech.”
Lincoln, veteran of a thousand stump speeches, knew when he wrote it that his Gettysburg Address was too brief to have much of an impact on the listening crowd. But he was aiming at bigger game. By limiting his address to so few words, he was insuring that it would be printed, in full, on the front page of every newspaper in the land. The readers of his speech in those thousands of city, town, and rural sheets would have time to reflect on the ideas it proposed.
The Gettysburg Address’ first readers were the newspaper editors. Copperhead Wilbur Storey of the Chicago Times scanned it closely and perceived Lincoln’s subversion of the Constitution and the audacity in his suggestion that the Founding Fathers’ guiding principle had been equality. Storey, in his editorial, quoted the Constitution, noted its lack of equality in paragraphs on taxation and slavery, and raged indignantly:
Mr. Lincoln occupies his present position by virtue of the constitution, and is sworn to the maintenance and enforcement of these provisions. It was to uphold this constitution, and the Union created by it, that our officers and soldiers gave their lives at Gettysburg. How dare he, then, standing on their graves, misstate the cause for which they died, and libel the statesmen who founded the government: They were men possessing too much self-respect to declare that negroes were their equals, or were entitled to equal privileges.
The Times accused Lincoln of pushing the abolition doctrine, denounced him for his “boorishness and vulgarity” and for being “less refined than a savage.” “The cheek of every American must tingle with shame,” it concluded, “as he reads the silly, flat, and dish-watery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States.”
The Harrisburg Patriot and Union dismissed the Gettysburg Address: “We pass over the silly remarks of the President; for the credit of the nation, we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall no more be repeated or thought of.” The London Times scoffed, “the ceremony was rendered ludicrous by some of the sallies of that poor President Lincoln… . Anything more dull and commonplace it would not be easy to produce.”
By late 1863, however, no one looked for anything but petty poison from the Copperhead press in America or the mouthpiece of the aristocracy in England. The few nay-sayers were at odds with the general opinion of the Gettysburg Address. The Springfield Republican was one of many that conceded its ability to kindle strong emotion, calling the Address “a perfect gem,” and admitting, “We had grown so accustomed to homely and imperfect phrase in his productions that we had come to think it was the law of his utterance. But this shows he can talk handsomely as well as act sensibly.”
The Gettysburg Address was the last and finest of Lincoln’s epic triad of literary compositions in the last six months of 1863, all written in an attempt to soften the hearts of Northerners and dedicate this racist, stiff-necked people to the great work begun by the Emancipation Proclamation.
The Gettysburg speech is even more impressive in view of the fact that Lincoln had to carve out time to write it during the first three weeks of November, a period when he was hard at work composing his Annual Message to Congress. One question that demanded an official answer from Lincoln was, since it was not a law but a war measure, whether the Emancipation Proclamation would be rescinded when the war ended. On December 9, Lincoln put all such questions to rest, announcing in his Annual Message that “while I remain in my present position I shall not attempt to retract or modify the emancipation proclamation; nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the acts of Congress.” John Hay told his diary, “the effect of this paper is something wonderful. I never have seen such an effect produced by a public document. Men acted as if the millennium had come. Chandler was delighted. Sumner was beaming.”
Lincoln’s Annual Message was fortunate in its timing, coming during a period of good feeling after Grant’s spectacular victory at the Battle of Chattanooga two weeks earlier. When Hay recorded the rosy glow after the Annual Message, he was intoxicated by talk that the war would soon come to a glorious end and that Lincoln would be reelected by a grateful nation.
The people in the farms and cities of the North refused to celebrate before they saw the results of the spring campaigns. They knew from three bitter years of experience that war was the most capricious of human endeavors. Anything could happen, any number of political flags might be flaunted, any number of careers might come in and go out with the ebb and flow of combat. The nineteen-foot statue of “Armed Liberty” had been hoisted to the top of the brand-new Capitol dome only the week before the opening of Congress. There would be battles under it that would be just as crucial for the country as the coming battles in the field. It soon became clear that Hay had been mistaken about the Radicals. Chandler was not delighted, and Sumner was not beaming.
Part Four
Lincoln’s Reelection
“The Most Extraordinary Change in
Publick Opinion Ever Known.”
Chapter 29
The 1864 Republican Nomination
“The politicians have again chosen this presidential pigmy as their nominee.”
When, at the end of the Annual Message to Congress, he first heard Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, Charles Sumner slammed his books and papers down on his desk and scattered them on the floor in a fit of temper amid members of both Houses and beneath a packed public gallery. As everyone rose to leave, he complained hotly to his friends: Why had Lincoln said nothing about whether the rebel states were in or out of the Union? Was this the justice to be meted out to traitors? Were South Carolina and the rest going to get away with trying to destroy the Union and lose nothing but their slaves?
Sumner’s tantrum was the public’s first peek at a rupture in the Republican Party over the Reconstruction of the nation. It was a split that not only threatened Lincoln’s nomination as the party’s presidential candidate in 1864, but also endangered his chances in the election itself. Indeed, the Reconstruction argument would prove a calamity to the nation for a century.
Sumner’s tirade had to do with the legal status of the rebellious states. As early as February 11, 1862, Sumner had put into the Congressional Record the lengthy theory that underlay the Radical plan for Reconstruction. More recently, in October of 1863, he had argued it again, elaborately, in a fifty-page article in the Atlantic Monthly. Known as the “State Suicide” theory, it said that if any state declared its intention to destroy the United States government by seceding, it was itself destroyed. Rebellious states, by this theory, had already lost their statehood and had become United States territories—that is, land owned by the United States—and therefore, like all territories, were under the jurisdiction of Congress. To be admitted to the Union again, Sumner and the Radicals would insist that each rebellious state not only fra
me a new constitution that outlawed slavery, but also obliterate its aristocracy and divide its land among Union soldiers, poor whites, and former slaves. Only when the old order was in ashes could the South be embraced again by the Union, and its representatives apply to Congress.
Lincoln, on the other hand, had always denied that any state could go out of the Union. He had always stressed national healing. He saw that hearts and minds were better won with lovingkindness. And, instead of constructing a fifty-page theory, he had acted. Not wanting to leave the seceded states to the harsh measures of the Radicals, Lincoln had made it his business to begin the work of Reconstruction under the war powers. At the time the Annual Message was read in December 1863, he had already started Reconstruction in the rebel states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee.
The features of Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction were simple: All rebels would be given full amnesty who took an oath of future loyalty to the United States and pledged to obey its laws and proclamations, including the one that freed the slaves. When one-tenth of the voters in a seceded state had taken the oath, they could establish a state government that could once again take its place in the Union. To make sure that the old secessionist troublemakers were not soon back in their seats in Washington and to placate the Radicals, Lincoln would let Congress determine whether representatives sent by the new states would be seated.
The Radicals could not fathom that Lincoln’s purpose was to speed the end of the war. Senator William Fessenden called Lincoln’s Amnesty and Reconstruction proclamation “a silly performance.” “Think of telling all the rebels they may fight as long as they can,” he sputtered, “and take a pardon when they have had enough of it.” He and the other Radical leaders fervently believed that the generous, simple-minded Lincoln was not the man to handle the bitter business of Reconstruction. They still feared that he might listen to the serpent-tongued Seward and compromise on slavery at the moment of victory. Even if he didn’t cave in and renounce emancipation, they were afraid that slave owners would be back in power in the South unbowed and unpunished, and freed slaves would remain poor and powerless.
* * *
The Radicals’ main motive in holding sway on Reconstruction, however, was not love for the black man—it was power. They realized that the officials of rebel states who were reorganized under Lincoln’s plan were likely to be Lincoln supporters, adding pro-Lincoln delegates to next summer’s Republican convention. This would not do, for by the end of 1863, they had decided that the best way to force a Radical Reconstruction was to ditch Lincoln as the party candidate in 1864. They would throw him over for someone less independent.
For months, there had been signs that the Radicals had dismissed Lincoln as the next Republican candidate. The Harper’s Weekly Washington correspondent, “The Lounger,” noticed in late August that Lincoln had no home among any faction:
At this moment, he stands a little outside of all parties even among loyal men. The rebels, and their tools the Copperheads, of course, hate him. The War Democrats doubt some points of his policy. The Conservative Republicans think him too much in the hands of the radicals; while the Radical Republicans think him too slow, yielding, and half-hearted.
In September there was an ill omen for Lincoln in Henry Ward Beecher’s newspaper, The Independent, when it gave him a back-handed compliment for “a comprehensive policy and a wisdom in its execution which promise to broaden his sun at its setting.” Mention of Lincoln’s “setting sun” was Beecher’s promise that the Radicals would look for a new candidate for the coming presidential election.
As they gathered for the start of Congress, Radical leaders spoke more frequently of the “one-term rule” that had applied since Andrew Jackson’s time. For the last thirty-two years, over the span of eight presidencies, there had been no second terms, they pointed out.
Thaddeus Stevens provided another straw in the wind in November when, on the morning of the Gettysburg Cemetery Dedication, a man asked him where Lincoln and Seward were. “Gettysburg,” he said sourly. “Let the dead bury the dead.”
That same week, Zachary Chandler schooled Lincoln on right thinking. He informed Lincoln in writing that his recent election triumph was owed to bold radicalism, and he should let that be a lesson to him. “Conservatives & traitors are buried together,” Chandler snarled, “for Gods sake dont exhume their remains in Your Message. They will smell worse than Lazarus did after he had been buried three days.” Lincoln’s answer to Chandler was characteristic— funny, flinty, and wise at the same time:
I am very glad the elections this autumn have gone favorably, and that I have not, by native depravity, or under evil influences, done anything bad enough to prevent the good result.
I hope to “stand firm” enough to not go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country’s cause.
Yours truly
A. LINCOLN
Though Lincoln made light of it, it was clear to everyone by the end of 1863 that Radicals were already girding for battle with Lincoln over the Republican nomination, and that the main issue would be Reconstruction.
The Radicals were not alone in their distaste for the sitting President. The masses may have admired Lincoln’s public letters of the previous months, but Washington men, who saw him at short range, were appalled by Lincoln’s off-color stories and other grotesqueries. Also, “There is a strong feeling among those who have seen Mr. Lincoln, in the way of business, that he lacks practical talent for his important place,” Sumner grumbled to a correspondent, adding that Chase “did not think him competent.” Count Gurowski muttered into his diary about the “infatuation” of the people, “taken in” by the “great shifter” in the White House while their elected leaders groaned at his offenses. “The best men in both the Houses observe Lincoln and his workings,” he wrote. “They know his length, his breadth, his mind, his nerve, and his cerebellum. The people at large does not know Mr. Lincoln, but judge him by his nickname, and by what greedy politicians and newspapers write and spread about him.” He lamented the masses who willfully ignored their leaders on the Hill:
The people sends to Congress a man in whose brains and integrity it seemingly has confidence, and nevertheless, in such a grave, mighty question as a Presidential election the people … pays no attention to the opinion of its Congressmen, [who] are better acquainted with [Lincoln’s] good and bad qualities, his capacities and incapacities, his peculiarities, his character and the want of it.
As for Lincoln’s re-election, Gurowski pointed out, “The majority in Congress is against it.”
The earnest men in Washington could not comprehend a man who, they said, had joked his way through three years of national tragedy. One solemn Massachusetts man remarked to strait-laced Governor Andrew, “It is only just to say, that the reports from Washington in 1863 did impute a frivolity of language and demeanor in the President, which could not but offend many earnest men.” He related an incident when an envoy from the Massachusetts State House traveled to the White House to present President Lincoln with a parchment copy of the state’s latest grave resolve on slavery:
“The Chief Magistrate of the nation sat in an armchair, with one leg over the elbow, while the emissary of Massachusetts presented the parchment with a long speech.
“The President took the document, slowly unrolled it, and remarked in a quaint way, ‘Well, it isn’t long enough to scare a fellow!’
“The Massachusetts envoy said as he left the room, ‘That is certainly an extraordinary person to be President of the United States!’”
Tales like these contributed to widespread doubt of Lincoln’s fitness to be President. Even Lincoln’s old Illinois friend Orville Browning wrote in 1864, “I am personally attached to the President, and have … tried to … make him respectable; tho’ I never have been able to persuade myself that he was big enough for his position. Still, I thought he might get through, as many a boy has got through college, without disgrace, and wit
hout knowledge, but I fear he is a failure.” George Wilkes of New York, the abolitionist editor of the Spirit of the Times, publicly predicted ruin: “The nation cannot live with Abraham Lincoln and Seward at its head during the next terrible four years,” he cried. “Even if honest, they are unequal to the task.”
As the election year opened, Lincoln had almost no friends in Congress to counter the hostile moves of the Radicals against him. Many remarked on Lincoln’s almost total lack of popularity in Washington. Carl Schurz reported, “Mr. Lincoln had only one fast friend in the lower House of Congress, and few more in the Senate.” That one fast friend was Isaac Arnold of Chicago. Arnold told the story of how one day Thaddeus Stevens appeared at his desk with a visitor to the House chamber and told him, “Here is a man who wants to find a Lincoln member of Congress. You are the only one I know, and I have come over to introduce my friend to you.”
According to Indiana Radical George Julian, “The opposition to Mr. Lincoln was secretly cherished by many of the ablest and most patriotic men of the day… . Of the more earnest and thorough-going Republicans in both Houses of Congress, probably not one in ten really favored [his nomination].” Springfield Republican Shelby Collum visited Washington in early 1864, and reported, “I talked with numerous Representatives and Senators, and it really seemed to me as if there was hardly any one in favor of the renomination of Mr. Lincoln.” Count Gurowski, likewise, after mixing daily with men in lobbies, clubs, and department offices, wrote on February 4, “I have not yet met one single earnest and clear-sighted man, from whatever State he may come, that avows his preference for Lincoln.” The Detroit Free Press correspondent at Washington agreed: “Not a single Senator can be named as favorable to Lincoln’s renomination as President.”
