The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln

by Larry Tagg

  Morale in the North plummeted. As fresh gouts of blood spattered the nation’s psyche, all the old familiar disgust with Lincoln returned. Mailboxes in Washington overflowed with letters from prominent men in their gloom: “It makes me sick to think what we have lost & the prospect of having nearly five years more of this thing”; “I pray god we may have a change, as anything positive can hardly be worse”; “Mr. Lincoln may mean well, but he has far greater faculty for perpetuating evil than good, he is a politician never a statesman, he lives, breathes, and has his being in the brief hour that fortune—ever blind—has allotted to him. Vacillating in policy, undecided in action, weak in intellectual grasp, he writhes in contortions of dissimulation.”

  With Northern discouragement watered by the rivers of coffins flowing north from the stalemates in front of Petersburg and Atlanta, Lincoln in Washington suffered one crisis after another. The first was a patronage battle with Secretary Chase over a Treasury Department appointment. Chase did what he always did when he felt himself slighted: he handed in his resignation. Now that his nomination was won, Lincoln surprised the Secretary by accepting it, writing, “You and I have reached a point of mutual embarrassment in our official relations which it seems can not be overcome, or longer sustained, consistently with the public service.” On the heels of the news, of course, a delegation of Radicals stormed the White House to protest. Lincoln kept the peace by replacing Chase with one of them—William Fessenden, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee—the next day.

  * * *

  A few days later, however, there came a crisis not to be patched over: the passage by Congress of the Wade-Davis Bill, the Radicals’ challenge to Lincoln’s Reconstruction policy.

  Lincoln had a dangerous enemy in Maryland Rep. Henry Winter Davis. Davis was young, good-looking, and aristocratic, blessed with eloquence and a voice that was “clear and cold, like starlight.” Davis was a protégé of Thaddeus Stevens, and he spoke in the scriptural cadences of Wendell Phillips. He was also, according to Noah Brooks, “a singularly violent politician,” “mischievous in his schemes, and hollow-hearted and cold-blooded.” He had hoped for a Cabinet appointment, and after Lincoln had appointed his Maryland rival Montgomery Blair Postmaster General instead, Davis had been insatiable in his hatred of the President, antagonistic to his every act.

  In response to Lincoln’s Amnesty and Reconstruction Proclamation in December of 1863, then, Davis introduced a hostile bill in the House that reserved Reconstruction to Congress. Davis’ scheme demanded that in every Southern state a majority of voters—rather than Lincoln’s one-tenth—take the loyalty oath before the state could form a government and be allowed to send representatives to Congress. In addition, the Radical loyalty oath would be stronger: the swearer must vow he had never been disloyal to the government, rather than that he merely would be loyal in the future. It thus disqualified almost every experienced Southern leader from a place in the new order. Further, the bill included the unconstitutional demand that slavery be abolished in every reconstructed state.

  Henry Winter Davis’ bill was a censure of Lincoln’s lack of firmness, a rebuke of Lincoln’s unwillingness to give the fatal blow to the Slave Power, a corrective to Lincoln’s attempt to reconstruct the nation without consulting Congress. Davis accused the President of low motives for his lenient plan, insisting that Lincoln was merely making Reconstruction a spoils system, with every officer of each newly-reconstructed state beholden to him. Davis’ cry was a repetition of the Southern cry in 1860 that Lincoln was an illegitimate usurper. This time, however, Lincoln was skewing the electoral system to enslave Northern radicals. Better by far to fling aside the President’s governments in Louisiana and Arkansas, Davis argued.

  Debate on the bill in the House seemed to require that every Lincoln-hater take the podium. One was Garrett Davis of Kentucky, who called Lincoln a usurper equal to Caesar, Cromwell, and Bonaparte. “He is no statesman,” he told the House, “but a mere political charlatan. He has inordinate vanity and conceit. He is a consummate dissembler, and an adroit and sagacious demagogue. He has the illusion of making a great historical name for himself in connection with the total abolition of slavery in the United States.” Louisiana and Arkansas, he said, were “lawless and daring political enterprises” for the purpose of producing electoral votes for Lincoln in November.

  With the help of such men, Davis’ bill passed the House in May. Ben Wade pressed it in the Senate, and it passed there on July 2, with only two days left in the session. In the furious last minutes before Congress adjourned at noon on July 4, 1864, Lincoln sat in the frescoed and chandeliered President’s Room just off the Senate chamber, signing eleventh-hour bills. On the floor of the House, as the clock ticked toward twelve, anxious members tilted toward Lincoln’s door, straining for word on whether he had signed the Wade-Davis Bill. Charles Sumner stood over Lincoln’s shoulder, fretting over its fate. Zack Chandler entered the President’s Room and threatened Lincoln with the loss of Ohio and Michigan in the coming election if he didn’t sign. “The important point,” he chafed, “is that one prohibiting slavery in the reconstructed states.”

  “That is the point on which I doubt the authority of Congress to act,” replied Lincoln. After Chandler left, he turned to those in the room and said, “I do not see how any of us now can deny and contradict all we have always said, that Congress has no constitutional power over slavery in the states.” He said further, “This bill … seems to make the fatal admission that States whenever they please may of their own motion dissolve their connection with the union [under the “State Suicide” theory]. Now we cannot survive that admission, I am convinced. If that be true, I am not President, these gentlemen are not Congress.” Lincoln “pocketed” the bill, declining to sign it into law.

  The clock struck twelve, the Speaker sounded the gavel, and the doors of the chamber were thrown open. “In the disorder which followed,” wrote Noah Brooks, “Davis standing at his desk, pale with wrath, his bushy hair tousled, and wildly brandishing his arms, denounced the President in good set terms… . I certainly was astonished to hear the bitter denunciations heaped upon the head of President Lincoln by some of the radical Senators and Representatives. Malcontents poured out of the doors of the Capitol on all sides … and the first session of the Thirty-eighth Congress ended in a curious condition of unrest and dissatisfaction.” The Radicals returned to their homes plotting schemes of revenge. Lincoln admitted to Hay as they left the Capitol building, “If [the Radicals] choose to make a point upon this I do not doubt that they can do harm. They have never been friendly to me & I do not know that this will make any special difference as to that. At all events, I must keep some consciousness of being somewhere near right: I must keep some standard of principle fixed within myself.”

  * * *

  The matter, however, was dropped for the moment in a panic over the sudden appearance of the rebel army moving toward the outskirts of Washington. From the Capitol dome, Confederates could be seen massing to the north. Jubal Early, at the head of 12,000 men detached from General Lee’s army in Richmond, had sped down the Shenandoah Valley, crossed the Potomac River near Harpers Ferry, and laid waste to the Maryland countryside in his approach to the capital. Washington’s communication with the rest of the loyal states was cut off. Nobody could know the size of the enemy army, and terrified guesses rose as high as 45,000 men.

  Washington was more vulnerable than at any time since the days after Fort Sumter. There were no quality troops available—they had all gone to fill the gaping holes in Grant’s lines on his drive to Richmond. The heavy artillerists, the men who knew how to work the big guns in the forts surrounding the capital, were gone, too, crouching in the steaming trenches outside Petersburg with rifled-muskets in their hands. What remained in the capital were government clerks, local militiamen commanded by a neighborhood grocer, and invalids from the Veteran Reserve Corps. “Washington was in a ferment,” wrote Noah Brooks from the scene. While rebel
cannon boomed in the distance, “men were marching to and fro; able-bodied citizens were swept up and put into the District militia; and squads of department clerks were set to drilling in the parks.” Even the locals could not be coordinated, however. Organization in Washington was nearing collapse. Halleck and Stanton worked at cross-purposes with each other. Each had his favorite generals, who proliferated until Halleck wrote a dispatch to New York: “We have five times as many generals here as we want, but are greatly in need of privates. Anyone volunteering in that capacity will be thankfully received.”

  As smoke mushroomed above burning buildings just outside the city, Maryland refugees streamed into Washington in wild disorder with their household goods stacked crazily on their wagons. They were jostled by Washington secessionists pouring into the streets shouting with joy. Stanton, seized with dread, had his secretary take his bonds and gold from the War Department safe and hide them in his mattress at home. On the night of July 10, Stanton sent a carriage to snatch the Lincolns, who were staying at the Soldiers’ Home north of town. The President irritably got into the coach and returned to the White House, where he was soon further embarrassed to learn that a gunboat was waiting at a Potomac wharf to speed his escape if the rebels should overrun the forts and enter the city.

  The next afternoon Lincoln rode back to the north edge of town and mounted the parapet of Fort Stevens to witness the developing battle. The bullets whizzed by him as he stood upright in his black suit and stovepipe hat until a soldier—legend has it that it was future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—shouted, “Get down, you damn fool, or you’ll get your head knocked off!” Amused at the soldier’s presumption, he did, quickly.

  That day, the veteran Sixth Corps of the Army of the Potomac arrived, sent from Grant by steamer. Blocked by Washington’s defenses and the recent reinforcements, Early slipped safely back into Virginia. Noah Brooks regretted the ability of the rebel host to withdraw unscathed: “Grant’s distance from the scene, Halleck’s disinclination to take the responsibility of pursuit, and Lincoln’s firm refusal to decide any military question of detail, resulted in the safe departure of Early and his forces.”

  Immediately there were critics. Stanton’s aide Charles Dana called it an “egregious blunder.” Gideon Welles noted in his diary that in the eyes of the entire country, the administration appeared “contemptible” in this, “our national humiliation.” Correspondent Brooks reported the deepening of defeatism caused by this latest rebel “invasion.” “In the country at large,” he wrote, “the effect … was somewhat depressing. The capital had been threatened; the President’s safety had been imperiled; only a miracle had saved treasures, records, and archives from the fate that overtook them when Cockburn seized the city during the War of 1812.” The Washington Chronicle and National Intelligencer told the nation that such a narrow escape so late in the war was more evidence of the impotence of the President and his generals. The New York Herald agreed, blaming “the great noodles who mismanage our military and all other matters at Washington.”

  With the national pride still stinging from the Early raid, Lincoln brought the country still lower when, on July 18, he sent out a proclamation, bare of rhetoric, calling for a new draft of half a million men to take place September 5. The call staggered the nation, and the Democratic press reacted in a wild spasm. Editorials like the following from the Newark Evening Journal burst into print:

  It will be seen that Mr. Lincoln has called for another half million of men. Those who wish to be butchered will please step forward. All others will please stay at home and defy Old Abe and his minions to drag them from their families. We hope that the people of New Jersey will at once put their feet down and insist that not a man shall be forced out of the state to engage in the Abolition butchery, and swear to die at their own doors rather than march one step to fulfill the dictates of the mad, revolutionary fanaticism which has destroyed the best government the world ever saw, and now would butcher its remaining inhabitants to carry out a more fanatical sentiment. This has gone far enough and must be stopped. Let the people rise as one man and demand that this wholesale murder shall cease.

  The New York Daily News cast Lincoln in a grisly fantasy, “The Walpurgis Dance At Washington”:

  One, tall, and bony and lank, stood forward from the rest,

  And told a ribald story with a leer to give it zest,

  And said: “Our fire burns feebly, we must pile it up anew;

  Tell me the fuel to feed it with ye friends and comrades true!”

  And they shouted with mad rejoicing:

  BLOOD! BLOOD! BLOOD! Let the witches’ cauldron boil with a nation’s tears for water!

  BLOOD! BLOOD! BLOOD! Slabby and thick as mud, to sprinkle the hungry soil for the carnival of slaughter.

  Many called the new draft political suicide. The Crisis editor Samuel Medary announced, “Lincoln is deader than dead.”

  With bleak news everywhere, the nation’s finances went into a tumble. Union defeats sent the price of gold up. Financial confidence in the nation sank as speculators began to bet against a Union victory. The value of the new paper money was at so low an ebb—$2.60 in greenbacks to buy $1.00 in gold—that Greeley panicked in print: “Gold goes up like a balloon … . The business of the country is all but fatally deranged… . There is a danger of Social Convulsion … . Every necessity of life grows hourly dearer.” A friend wrote to Greeley a letter from Buffalo confirming his fears. “Among the masses of the people,” it warned, “a strong reaction is setting in favor of the Democrats and against the war. I have been among the mechanics, and the high prices of provisions are driving them to wish a change… . I write mainly today to say that I am alarmed.”

  * * *

  With confidence in Lincoln now in free fall, Frémont’s backers in New York grew bold. They issued a new handbill, a call to arms titled “Ten Reasons Why Abraham Lincoln Should Not Be Elected President of the United States a Second Term.” Radicals in Washington now openly advertised their disenchantment with Lincoln as the party candidate. A reinvigorated Salmon Chase spread word that there was “great and almost universal dissatisfaction with Mr. Lincoln among all earnest men.” Charles Sumner, who spoke guardedly when in Washington, was more candid in his opinion of Lincoln when he was among his friends in Boston. On July 23, 1864, abolitionist Amos Lawrence wrote in his diary, “Took tea at Mr. Longfellow’s with Charles Sumner. The latter wishes to see a president with brains; one who can make a plan and carry it out.” Sumner’s opinion of Lincoln was “not higher than it was three years ago,” according to another friend who saw him then. Senator Grimes of Iowa confessed to editor C. H. Ray of the Chicago Tribune, “This entire administration has been a disgrace from the very beginning to every one who had any thing to do with bringing it into power. I take my full share of the … shame to myself. I can atone for what I have done no otherwise than in refusing to be instrumental in continuing it.”

  Seeing Lincoln wounded, the Radicals went in for the kill. On August 5, Greeley devoted two columns in the New York Tribune to a sensational declaration by Ben Wade and Henry Winter Davis. It became famous as the Wade-Davis Manifesto, the fiercest, most public challenge to Lincoln’s—or, for that matter, any President’s—authority ever issued by members of his own party. It charged Lincoln with “grave Executive usurpation” and “a studied outrage on the legislative authority.” It accused him of “personal ambition” and “sinister motives” in installing his “shadows of governments” in Arkansas and Louisiana in order to pile up electoral votes. It called his pocket veto of the Wade-Davis bill a “rash and fatal act,” a strike at the “rights of humanity” and “the principles of Republican Government.” It exhorted citizens to “consider the remedy of these usurpations and, having found it, fearlessly to execute it.” Such a remedy could only be impeachment—or, what would be quicker, casting Lincoln off as the party’s candidate.

  James Gordon Bennett leaped up and applauded from be
neath the banner of the New York Herald. He exulted, “the dissatisfaction which had long been felt by the great body of American citizens has spread even to [Lincoln’s] own supporters.” This “remarkable document,” he reported, charged the President with “arrogance, ignorance, usurpation, knavery and a host of other deadly sins … . Nothing that Vallandigham or the most venomous of the copperhead tribe of politicians have uttered in derogation of Mr. Lincoln has approached in bitterness and force the denunciations which Messrs. Wade and Davis, shining lights of the Republican party, have piled up in this manifesto.” Bennett then presumed to hold the mirror up to the ruined chief: “As President of the United States he must have sense enough to see and acknowledge he has been an egregious failure. One thing must be self-evident to him, and that is that under no circumstances can he hope to be the next President of the United States.” Bennett gave Lincoln the same public advice he always gave him: quit now.

  The Wade-Davis Manifesto, said the New York World, was “a blow between the eyes which will daze the President.” It certainly dazed everyone around him. Lincoln’s friend Noah Brooks wrote that the manifesto, “coming as it did … like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky, threw politicians of every stamp into the wildest confusion.” “Its appearance,” he said, “created something like a panic in the ranks of the President’s supporters.” J.K. Herbert, after a visit to the State Department on August 6, testified, “No such bomb has been thrown into Washington before… . The trepidation of the White House is worse to-day than ever it was when poor Old Jim B. [President Buchanan] sat up there & trembled.”

  The first reaction of Washington insiders was that Lincoln was a beaten man. “Union men were quite unanimous in sustaining Mr. Wade and Mr. Davis, as was the majority of both Houses of Congress,” reported A. G. Riddle from the Capitol. Thaddeus Stevens was heard to say, “If the Republican party desires to succeed, they must get Lincoln off the track and nominate a new man.” Herbert, the day after the Manifesto appeared in the Tribune, heard kingmaker Thurlow Weed say, “Lincoln is gone. I suppose you know as well as I.” Weed, in fact, told Lincoln so to his face: “I told Mr Lincoln that his re-election was an impossibility,” Weed wrote to Seward. “At any rate, nobody here doubts it; nor do I see any body from other States who authorises the slightest hope of success.”