by Larry Tagg
Brownson and others like him saw their savior in “The Pathfinder,” General John Charles Frémont, who in late spring announced himself as the Radical candidate for the nomination. Frémont had been sulking in New York City for two years, nursing his grudge over the earlier quarrel with Lincoln in Missouri. Both New York City and Missouri had always been hotbeds of disaffection with the President, and Frémont was the perfect tool for plotters eager to destroy Lincoln’s chances in the fall.
On March 18, 1864, Frémont devotees rallied at the Cooper Union building in New York. Horace Greeley dropped by to give encouragement, and the group issued a circular, calling all like-minded citizens to meet with them in convention in Cleveland on May 31. In it they denounced “the imbecile and vacillating policy of the present Administration in the conduct of the war, … its treachery to justice, freedom, and genuine democratic principles in its plan of reconstruction, whereby the honor and dignity of the nation have been sacrificed to conciliate the still existing and arrogant slave power, and to further the ends of unscrupulous ambition.” A new pro-Frémont newspaper, New Nation, was launched. Its inaugural editions featured editorials like the following:
We propose before ostracizing honest Abe from the White House to consider his right to the name of “Honest.” … Mr. Lincoln’s honesty is of a strange description. It consists in nearly ruining his country and in disregarding its interest in order to make sure of power for four years longer… . Even if President Lincoln were the honest man that his paid organs represent him to be, how dangerous would his reelection prove to the liberties of the people, under existing circumstances, surrounded as he is with the military influences that he has at his back!
Wendell Phillips, always alert for a chance to torture Lincoln, gave his benediction to Frémont’s upcoming Cleveland gathering. An unlikely ally, the Democratic press, contributed countless columns of publicity, touting the coming assembly as a summit of the utmost gravity.
The event, however, was a fizzle. The hall was hired only at the last minute, and proved to be too big for the small crowd—composed largely of St. Louis longhairs with thick German accents—that never counted above four hundred. None of the big names showed. The Cleveland Convention adopted the Radical reconstruction platform, nominated John C. Frémont by acclamation, and placed John Cochrane on the ticket as Vice-president, all in one day. The conventioneers christened their party the “Radical Democracy” as a beacon to Lincoln-haters of every stripe, Democrats as well as Republicans.
Frémont hurried his acceptance speech into print before it could be drowned out in the hubbub of the approaching Baltimore Convention. In it, he sketched an apocalyptic clash with an unprincipled tyrant:
This is not an ordinary election. It is a contest for the right even to have candidates, and not merely, as usual, for the choice among them… . The ordinary rights secured under the Constitution and the laws of the country have been violated, and extraordinary powers have been usurped by the Executive… . To-day we have in the country the abuses of a military dictation without its unity of action and vigor of execution—an Administration marked at home by disregard of constitutional rights, by its violation of personal liberty and the liberty of the press, and, as a crowning shame, by its abandonment of the right of asylum [for Border State slaves]… .
If Mr. Lincoln should be nominated … there will remain no other alternative but to organize against him every element of conscientious opposition with the view to prevent the misfortune of his reelection.
The Democratic press hailed the Frémont men’s courage and wisdom, but few paid his candidacy much attention. As meager as the Cleveland Four Hundred seemed to most observers, however, when Lincoln received a telegram with news that the Radical convention had numbered four hundred men, he immediately opened a Bible, found I Samuel 22:2, and read it aloud to everyone present in the telegraph office: “And every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them; and there were with him about four hundred men.”
Lincoln’s Bible reading probably revealed his deep misgivings about his own political future. He knew that the Biblical four hundred had gathered around the future King David, and that David and his four hundred had ultimately brought down the powerful King Saul.
Lincoln had pored over the primer on leadership contained in the Biblical account of Israel’s great kings—Saul, David, and Solomon. He had always been uneasy that the Radicals had led the fight against slavery that had ennobled the war. And he was quick to perceive omens. Lincoln likely thought he had found one in Samuel’s account of David’s four hundred malcontents, and thought he himself too much resembled King Saul—no longer God’s man.
For Lincoln knew that Frémont’s candidacy, even if the public at large ignored it, still had the power to deny him another term. The hopeless candidate of a splinter party had cost his hero, “The Great Compromiser” Henry Clay, the presidency in 1844, when abolitionist James Birney polled only 62,000 votes—less than 3% of votes cast. Pro-slavery Democrat James K. Polk beat Clay by 38,000 votes.
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In the countdown to the Republican convention, the voices of the Democratic editors became a continuous howl. They were joined—or rather rejoined—by James Gordon Bennett’s mighty New York Herald. In late fall, Bennett, with his ear always to the ground, had heard the rumble of Lincoln’s Republican enemies gathering and sensed that Lincoln was vulnerable. On December 16, 1863, the Herald abruptly announced that he had “proved a failure.” From that moment, the Herald’s published opinion of the President plummeted. On February 19, 1864, it carried a smear entitled “Lincoln the Joker”:
President Lincoln is a joke incarnated. His election was a very sorry joke. The idea that such a man as he should be the President of such a country as this is a very ridiculous joke. The manner in which he first entered Washington—after having fled from Harrisburg in a Scotch cap, a long military cloak and a special night train—was a practical joke. His debut in Washington society was a joke; for he introduced himself and Mrs. Lincoln as “the long and short of the Presidency.” His inaugural address was a joke, since it was full of promises which he has never performed. His Cabinet is and always has been a standing joke. All his State papers are jokes. His letters to our generals, beginning with those to General McClellan, are very cruel jokes. His plan for abolishing slavery in 1900 was a broad joke. His emancipation proclamation was a solemn joke. His recent proclamation of abolition and amnesty is another joke. His conversation is full of jokes … . His title of “Honest” is a satirical joke. The style in which he winks at frauds in the War Department, frauds in the Navy Department, frauds in the Treasury Department, and frauds in every department, is a costly joke. His intrigues to secure a re-nomination and the hopes he appears to entertain of a re-election are, however, the most laughable jokes of all.
The Chicago Times reprinted an anti-Lincoln editorial from the South Carolinian to quicken the pulses of its readers:
Better cringe under the sternest despotism of Europe—better the dominion of the fiend himself, even though he should come to us … with the hoof, horns, and tail of the old legends—better, a thousand times better extermination from the very face of the earth, than to own as a master, for the faintest shadow of a second, this mean, wily, illiterate, brutal, unprincipled, and utterly vulgar creature—in a word, this Yankee of Yankees!
In April, the New York World spread the rumor that Lincoln no longer bothered to call Cabinet meetings—he now ran the government single-handed, in his own vulgar style:
In the knots of two or three which sometimes gather, Mr. Lincoln’s stories quite as often occupy the time as the momentous interests of a great nation, divided by traitors, ridden by fanatics and cursed with an imbecility in administration only less criminal than treason.
On May 18, the New York Daily News insisted, “No influence except compulsion can induce any respecta
ble proportion of the people to cast their votes for that compound of cunning, heartlessness, and folly that they now execrate in the person of their chief magistrate.”
But Lincoln’s grip on the levers of the Republican Party machinery was unbreakable. On June 7, when the Republican Party met in convention in Baltimore, Lincoln’s victory was so certain, the lack of suspense about the result so complete, that Democratic editors dismissed the whole affair. The Chicago Times sneered that Lincoln could lay his hand on the shoulder of any one of the “wire-pullers and bottle-washers” in the convention hall and say, “This man is the creature of my will.” The New York Herald cited the empty spectacle as evidence that what was needed was to do away with conventions altogether— hadn’t they delivered one political hack after another for twenty-eight years, and brought on a civil war? Why depend on “that self-constituted and irresponsible gathering of vagrant politicians known as the National Party Convention?” it asked, proposing instead a caucus of the members of both Houses (where it knew Lincoln had few friends) to decide a nominee.
As everyone had predicted, Lincoln’s appointees delivered an easy victory in Baltimore. The Radicals bit their tongues and sat sullenly. Their scribe, Count Gurowski, hinted darkly, “What a chill runs through the best men! Many, many have not yet made up their minds to go for him.” Attorney General Edward Bates noted in his diary, “The Baltimore Convention … has surprised and mortified me greatly. It did indeed nominate Mr. Lincoln, but … as if the object were to defeat their own nomination. They were all (nearly) instructed to vote for Mr. Lincoln, but many of them hated to do it … .”
The Democratic journals all thumbed their noses. The Chicago Times’ jaundiced version of the convention’s results was, “I, A. Lincoln, hereby nominate myself as a candidate for reelection.” Joseph Bennett, in the columns of the New York Herald, declared, “The politicians have again chosen this Presidential pigmy as their nominee.” The New York World fell into a swoon:
The age of statesmen is gone; the age of rail-splitters and tailors, of buffoons, boors, and fanatics, has succeeded… . In a crisis of the most appalling magnitude, requiring statesmanship of the highest order, the country is asked to consider the claims of two ignorant, boorish, third-rate backwoods lawyers [Lincoln and Vice Presidential nominee Andrew Johnson], for the highest stations in government. Such nominations, in such a conjuncture, are an insult to the common-sense of the people. God save the Republic!
The Cincinatti Gazette phrased its displeasure in the rhythms of the familiar “We Are Coming, Father Abraham”:
We’re coming Father Abraham, to make you doubly great,
Another child of Destiny—conserver of the State—
Be what you’ve been—do as you’ve done—tax, banish and proclaim;
Joke, draft, arrest and shake your mane; you play no losing game.
From your supreme prerogative no right can be reserved,
Of rights make trifles, Father Abe, and the nation is preserved.
The Republicans’ most radical New York bugle, the Tribune, carried Horace Greeley’s reluctant bow to the party’s decision. He wrote regretfully:
We cannot but feel that it would have been wiser and safer to spike the most serviceable guns of our adversaries by nominating another for President, and thus dispelling all motive, save that of naked disloyalty, for further warfare upon this Administration. We believe that the Rebellion would have lost something of its cohesion and venom from the hour in which it was known … that the President, having no more to expect or hope, could henceforth be impelled by no conceivable motive but a desire to serve and save his country, and thus win for himself an enviable and enduring fame.
The bitterness of Greeley’s disappointment was half-hid among his highsounding phrases. To more plainly speak the editor’s heart, the Tribune also printed Wendell Phillips’ flaming reaction to Lincoln’s nomination: “The Baltimore Convention was largely a mob of speculators and contractors willing to leave to their friend, Mr. Lincoln, his usurped power of reconstruction,” Phillips said. He trusted that the radical Cleveland Conventioners might still “prevent the disaster of Mr. Lincoln’s reelection.” If not, he saw calamity: “As long as you keep the present turtle at the head of the Government you make a pit with one hand and fill it with the other.”
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Lincoln did not hear them, however. They were, suddenly, the least of his problems. For, on June 3, while the Republican delegates gathered in Baltimore to wave banners, General Grant—after a solid month of horrifying combat in the tangled woods of northern Virginia—launched an attack at Cold Harbor that, in fewer than sixty minutes, slaughtered 7,000 of his own men in a hopeless assault against Lee’s entrenched army. A new, implacable swell of warweariness settled over the North, and public disgust with the war effort and Lincoln’s leadership entered its most hostile phase.
Chapter 30
The Fall and the Temptation
“The obscene ape of Illinois is about to be deposed.”
The abyss of grief in June was so deep because hopes in May had been so high. Many people of the North were confident they had finally gotten the right general in the right place. After Ulysses S. Grant’s capture of Vicksburg the previous 4th of July and his rout of the rebel army at Chattanooga in November, Congress offered him the rank of lieutenant general, whose three stars had previously been worn in the field only by George Washington. When he arrived in the nation’s capital to take command, Grant was embarrassed by all the hoopla; he shunned the spotlight as fiercely as McClellan had sought it. Rather than attend adoring receptions in the parlors of the powerful, he headed straight for the front, with the remark that he was tired of the “show business.”
On May 4, 1864, Grant’s new-model Army of the Potomac began crossing the Rapidan River on its overland trek toward Richmond. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia pitched headlong into it the next day inside the depths of the Wilderness, a nearly impenetrable area of second growth timber, heavy brush, and soggy terrain. Predictions of certain victory crackled along the wires from the ocean to the prairies. All of Washington, announced correspondent Noah Brooks, “is pervaded with a feeling which can scarcely be called excitement, it is too intense… . People go about the streets with their hands full of ‘extras’ from the newspaper offices… . Every loyal heart is full of joy at the glorious tidings which continue to come up from the front, and citizens everywhere are congratulating each other upon the near prospect of an end of this wasteful and wicked war.”
Within days the rhythm of Brooks’ dispatches had changed to a slow drumbeat of sorrow: “All Washington is a great hospital… . Boatloads of unfortunate and maimed men are continually arriving… . The town is full of strangers from the North who have come in quest of friends and relatives who are in the hospitals or lying dead upon the battlefield… .” Union casualties were overwhelming: 18,000 in just the two days of havoc in the clotted undergrowth of the Wilderness, and another 18,000 in front of the strong rebel breastworks at Spotsylvania. On May 25, Brooks was on hand as 3,000 maimed soldiers were put ashore at the Sixth Street wharf: “The long, ghastly procession of shattered wrecks; the groups of tearful, sympathetic spectators, the rigid shapes of those who are bulletined as ‘since dead’; the smoothly flowing river and the solemn hush in foreground and on distant evening shores—all form a picture which must some day perpetuate for the nation the saddest sight of all this war.”
Well into May, as the fighting mounted and the casualties increased, Grant had written Lincoln, “I will fight it out on this line if it takes all summer,” and the phrase had become famous. After meeting the hard reality of Lee’s dug-in defenders, however, Grant changed his line often, sliding to his left over and over in an effort to slip around his enemy’s flank and place his army between his enemy and Richmond. Then came the shocking slaughter of Cold Harbor, where thousands fell in less than an hour. After that grisly lesson, Grant changed his line yet again.
Continuing to m
ove by his left, Grant skirted Richmond on its eastern side and took the same step McClellan had proposed at the end of the Peninsula Campaign two years earlier: he crossed the Army of the Potomac to the south side of the James River and, threatening Richmond from the southeast, advanced against the vital rail hub of Petersburg. Lee, however, traveled the chord of Grant’s arc and reached Petersburg before him. In late June, at the end of Grant’s long march, the rebel army defied the Union army from the safety of trenches throw up around the city. Grant’s grinding campaign had cost some 60,000 men in just six gruesome weeks, and in the end his army was about where McClellan’s had been two years earlier. The Overland Campaign had ended in a siege. Sherman’s Western armies, moving south from Chattanooga, covered large swaths of territory but in the end were stymied outside Atlanta by overturned earth, sharpened logs, and a determined rebel army under General Joe Johnston.
