The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln

by Larry Tagg

  There was no enthusiasm for honest old Abe. There is no beauty in him, that men should desire him; there is no insinuating, polished manner, to beguile the senses of the people; there is no dazzling military renown; no silver flow of rhetoric; in fact, no glittering prestige of any kind surrounds him; yet the people triumphantly elected him, in spite of all manner of machinations, and notwithstanding the long, long drag upon their patience and their resources which this war has produced.

  Lincoln’s hometown enemy, the Illinois State Register, called Lincoln’s reelection “the heaviest calamity that ever befell the nation … the farewell to civil liberty, to a republican form of government, and to the unity of these states.” This, however, was a noisy exception in a generally quiet Democratic press, which had used up all its rancor in the campaign and was dazed by defeat.

  Only the British press had the heart to roast Lincoln with any heat after the results were in. The London Punch published a John Tenniel caricature of Lincoln as “The Federal Phoenix”—hard, proud, and rising above a fire that consumed “commerce,” “United States Constitution,” “free press,” “credit,” “habeas corpus,” and “state rights,” over the caption:

  As the bird of Arabia wrought resurrection

  By a flame all whose virtues grew out of what fed it

  So the Federal Phoenix has earned re-election

  By a holocaust huge of rights, commerce, and credit.

  The London Herald dismissed his reelection as due “to the strength of his party and to his own lawless abuse of executive power, not to the belief of the people that no better man could have been chosen… . Mr. Lincoln is a vulgar, brutal boor, wholly ignorant of political science, of military affairs, of everything else which a statesman should know.” The London Standard predicted, “The renewal of Mr. Lincoln’s term is the inauguration of a reign of terror… . never were issues so momentous placed in so feeble a hand; never was so great a place in history filled by a figure so mean.” The aristocratic London Times, as usual, arched its brow higher than all the others, proclaiming:

  “The Federal Phoenix”

  We can regard the reappointment of Mr. Lincoln as little less than an abdication by the American people of the right of self-government, as an avowed step towards the foundation of a military despotism.

  Future historians will probably date from the second presidency of Mr. Lincoln the period when the American Constitution was thoroughly abrogated, and had entered on that transition stage, so well known to the students of history, through which Republics pass on their way from democracy to tyranny.

  The response from Richmond was muted. A few journals sounded what even they now realized were the opening notes of their death song. One example will suffice, printed in the Richmond Dispatch the day after the election. It has the tired rhythm of a rote recital:

  Yesterday … the freest people on earth … made a formal surrender of their liberties … to a vulgar tyrant … whose personal qualities are those of a low buffoon, and whose most noteworthy conversation is a medley of profane jests and obscene anecdotes—a creature who has squandered the lives of millions without remorse and without even the decency of pretending to feel for their misfortunes; who still cries for blood and for money in the pursuit of his atrocious designs.

  * * *

  Most Northerners cared only that Lincoln’s war was being won, and, in the weeks after his reelection, his star continued the ascent begun in September with the capture of Atlanta. In December, Sherman’s armies cut their communications and disappeared into the terra incognita of Georgia, slashing and burning their way toward Savannah on their historic March to the Sea. Grant, meanwhile, held Lee largely immobile around Richmond and Petersburg. The Confederacy was counting its last months of existence.

  Strengthened by his reelection and the progress of the armies, Lincoln sought a new harmony with Radicals in Congress over Reconstruction. On December 6, in his Annual Message, he closed with a warning to Southerners: the door to the amnesty he had extended a year earlier was still open, but “the time may come—probably will come—when public duty shall demand that it be closed … and more rigorous measures than heretofore shall be adopted.” Moreover, he cautioned them, the end of the war would end his war powers, and the people of the South would be thrown on the mercies of the Jacobins in Congress. In his conclusion, he stated blunt terms for peace: “The war will cease on the part of the government, whenever it shall have ceased on the part of those who began it.” This was a sterner Lincoln, not the Lincoln who had summoned “the better angels of our nature.”

  Many saw in it only blood. The Richmond Sentinel warned any would-be peacemakers in the South that the Message promised “absolute, unqualified submission, to be followed by spoliation of our property and the Africanization of our country.” From Paris, La France viewed the Message as a signal of the “maintenance of the destructive policy of which Mr. Lincoln is the … instrument,” that is, “implacable war, having no parallel for hatred and ferocity, except in the remote ages of barbarism—millions of men slaughtered and thousands of millions of money swallowed up, all to gratify an inflexible pride.”

  Seeing the Radicals appeased, the Democratic press in the North called the Message ludicrous. “Ridicule would seem to be the first and only weapon to be used against a production so full of nonsense,” said The Crisis; “Lincoln is a famous joker, and he may have intended his message for a colossal joke.” It depicted the country as a charnel-house: “Although the nation is filled with mourning, and the land is fertilized with the blood and bones of our citizens, butchered in a useless war, the chief ruler of the country congratulates the world that there are plenty more to be led to the slaughter.” And it heard tyranny in the Message where Lincoln vowed that he would never allow any man to be returned to slavery, calling it “the ultimatum of the despot flung in the faces of the people, at once a threat and a defiance.”

  The Radicals, too, held aloof. Henry Winter Davis demanded a test of strength on December 15, when he ordered a House vote on his resolution that Congress should make foreign policy, and that it was the President’s duty to obey. John Farnsworth, a Lincoln ally, moved to table the resolution, and Farnsworth’s suppression passed 69 to 63 with 50 abstaining, in what may be taken as an indication of Lincoln’s support in the House: 69 with him, 63 against him, and 50 wavering. For the Radicals, even this lukewarm backing for Lincoln was bitter news. Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote to Susan B. Anthony on December 29, “[Wendell] Phillips has just returned from Washington. He says the radical men feel that they are powerless and checkmated. Winter Davis told him the game was up—‘Lincoln with his immense patronage can do what he pleases; the only hope is an appeal to the people.’ They turn to such men as Phillips to say what politicians dare not say.”

  Phillips, Davis, and the other Radical Republicans still doubted Lincoln’s desire to end slavery. They remembered his letter of the previous April to Frankfort (Kentucky) Commonwealth editor Albert G. Hodges, written to soothe Kentuckians who resented losing their slaves to enlistment in the Union army. In his letter, he had defended the Emancipation Proclamation with the plea, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” Radicals read the disclaimer as a sign of weakness, and pointed to the fact that even now, in December of 1864, Lincoln’s promise of freedom was still just a promise. The great majority of those who had been slaves in 1861 were still in bondage, and the legal status of those who had been freed was still in question. The war was winding down, and the war powers on which the Emancipation Proclamation was based would soon disappear. Would Lincoln allow emancipation to end with the war? they wondered.

  Lincoln answered by throwing all his influence behind the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery in any part of the United States. With Lincoln recommending it as a “king’s cure” for the evils of slavery, the landmark amendment passed the Senate. On January 31, 1865, after a close vote against Dem
ocratic opposition in the House, the Speaker, with trembling voice, announced the Amendment’s fate: “The Joint Resolution has passed,” he cried, and, in the account of Noah Brooks:

  For a moment there was a pause of utter silence, as if the voices of the dense mass of spectators were choked by strong emotion. Then there was an explosion, a storm of cheers, the like of which probably no Congress of the United States ever heard before. Strong men embraced each other with tears. The galleries and aisles were bristling with standing, cheering crowds. The air was stirred with a cloud of women’s handkerchiefs waving and floating; hands were shaking; men threw their arms about each other’s neck, and cheer after cheer, and burst after burst followed. Full ten minutes elapsed before silence returned.

  The boom of a hundred cannon with heavy charges announced the great moment from Capitol Hill.

  Radicals, however, still feared that, now that he was elected, now that the war was almost won, and now that the arrow of the Thirteenth Amendment was speeding toward the heart of slavery, Lincoln would return to his first friends—the War Democrats and the conservative Republicans—to give him ballast in the coming collision over Reconstruction. They pointed to Louisiana as proof that, while Lincoln had given slaves their civil rights, he would still deny their political rights out of tenderness for the feelings of Southern whites. Radical men deplored the President’s instructions, the previous February, to hold new Louisiana elections according to the 1860 laws that barred blacks from voting, and saw a chance to foil Lincoln now that his new Louisiana government was seeking admission into the Union.

  Charles Sumner fought it hotly in the Senate; he was violently opposed to the admission of any state where ex-slaves were still denied ballots. In addition, he recognized that Louisiana’s readmission would be a benchmark for Reconstruction of the entire South according to Lincoln’s lax policies, and dreaded a system where all the returning governments would be beholden to the President. Sumner charged that the Louisiana government was gotten up by voters “drummed up from the riff-raff of New Orleans,” and called it “a mere seven months abortion, begotten by the bayonet, in criminal conjunction with the spirit of caste, and born before its time, rickety, unformed, unfinished, whose continued existence will be a burden, a reproach, and a wrong.” Benjamin Wade, too, denounced Lincoln’s ten percent principle as “the most absurd and impracticable that ever haunted the imagination of a statesman.” Faced with the hostility of Sumner, Wade, and their fellow Radical senators, Lincoln withdrew Louisiana’s bid for readmission, meaning to take it up again in December, when Congress reconvened.

  Immediately after the Louisiana defeat, on February 2, Lincoln slipped out of Washington—and out from under the fierce scrutiny of earnest men from all sides—and steamed for Hampton Roads, Virginia, to meet privately with three Confederate commissioners to discuss terms for peace. At this, “The perturbation in Washington was something which cannot readily be described,” according to Brooks.“The radicals were in a fury of rage; the excitement in and around the Capitol rose to a fever heat.” This is exactly what President McClellan would have done! they cried. Rumors floated back that Lincoln had offered to block emancipation if the South would return; one had it that Lincoln had written the word “Union” at the top of a piece of paper and shoved it across the table to the rebels, saying, “Let me have that one condition and you can write below it whatever peace terms you choose.” Thaddeus Stevens bellowed in the House that if the country were to vote over again for President, Benjamin Butler, not Abraham Lincoln, would be their choice. In a ten-thousand-word speech, George Julian summed up the war as a series of blunders by a faltering administration, hinting at impeachment and trial. Even in the Cabinet there was muttering. Diarist Gideon Welles complained, “None of the Cabinet were advised of this move, and without exception, I think it struck them unfavorably that the Chief Magistrate should have gone on such a mission.”

  The Hampton Roads Conference failed to produce peace—“Fools meet and separate” was Zack Chandler’s epitaph of the episode—and when Lincoln returned and his report was read in the House on February 10, the reading began amid stony silence, with every listener motionless in the packed chamber. When the President’s message reached the part that listed his three indispensable terms for peace—that national authority be restored throughout the states, that there would be no going back on the slavery question, and that there would be no peace short of the disbanding of the rebel armies—heads nodded as Lincoln’s iron-backed stance became clear. Smiles came with the recognition that the conference had achieved Lincoln’s purpose of showing that the South was not yet willing to return on any terms acceptable to the North, and that the war effort must continue. The listeners’ scorn turned to praise for the “noble course” which the President had taken.

  The stony silence resumed when Lincoln revealed privately to his Cabinet the generous terms he had tendered to the peace commissioners, which included payment of $400 million to slaveowners for the loss of their property. If his offer brought peace, the Union would save that much in war costs, he argued, and it would save soldiers’ lives. But his advisers were appalled. Lincoln, ready to urge his plan in Congress if he could find even one Cabinet supporter, was disappointed. “It did not meet with favor, but was dropped,” Welles curtly recorded in his diary.

  * * *

  Fortunately for Lincoln, his enemies in Congress failed also to agree on a Reconstruction plan, and with no hostile bills to torment him, he could devote his attention to his Second Inaugural Address. He had been pondering the meaning of the war at least since his “Meditation on the Divine Will,” seeking to discover how God was working in the agony of the national trial. Increasingly, in the weeks and months before his second inaugural, his conversations with visitors turned to theology. In the last days of his first term, he developed his conclusions in private and set them to the cadences of the King James Bible.

  Lincoln thought and wrote while visitors from all over the North filled Washington hotel rooms by the tens of thousands. Thousands of Confederate deserters, too, lurked in the streets and alleys, and Secretary of War Stanton, vigilant to the danger while the Confederacy was in its last desperate hours, marshaled an army for Lincoln’s safekeeping much larger than the paltry guard Winfield Scott had assembled four years earlier. All roads leading to Washington were patrolled. The bridges over the Potomac were clogged with sentries. Sharpshooters once more looked down from housetops, and every knot of onlookers was leavened with plainclothes detectives.

  It had rained for days leading up to the ceremony, and by Inauguration Day the unpaved streets were rivers of mud and standing water ten inches deep. March 4 dawned wind-whipped and drizzling, with bursts of rain. As the crowds gathered in the ooze, Brooks wrote, “Flocks of women streamed around the Capitol, in most wretched, wretched plight; crinoline was smashed, skirts bedaubed, and moiré antique, velvet, laces and such dry goods were streaked with mud from end to end.” The inaugural ritual, too, was a chaotic mess. Lincoln was not in the parade on the way to the Capitol; he had ignored it and gone there earlier that morning to sign bills. On the procession down Pennsylvania Avenue, horses and carriages got in a tangle that took twenty minutes to unsnarl. Gideon Welles wrote disgustedly, “There was great want of arrangement and completeness in the ceremonies. All was confusion and without order—a jumble.”

  Even standing in mud up to their ankles, however, everyone was buoyed by the expectation of a triumphal address from the President, full of personal vindication and the imminent victory of the Union armies. Instead, they heard Lincoln hurl a lightning bolt, one of the briefest Inaugural Addresses ever spoken, with no place for cheering.

  After he rose and took his place before the multitude, Lincoln passed over his reelection in one sentence, saying merely, “In this second appearing, … there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first.” He mentioned nothing he had said or done during his term, and dismissed the war news with an
other single sentence: “The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself; and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all.” After shrugging off the causes for jubilation that forty thousand people had journeyed to hear, Lincoln paused. The crowd stood silent.

  When Lincoln continued, he did not indulge in vindication, but instead drew parallels between the North and the South on the war: “All dreaded it—all sought to avert it… . Both parties deprecated war.” He then drew his only distinction between the warring sides: “But one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.” It was here that the crowd cheered for the only time. Lincoln waited for the clamor to die down, then finished his second paragraph with four simple words: “And the war came.”

  He passed on to four sentences on slavery. When he said, “All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war,” there was some applause. But the crowd would be still for the rest of the speech.

  Lincoln sustained the note of parity: “Neither side expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other… . The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully.” Lincoln then ventured one lone Northern criticism of the South—“It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces”—then carefully balanced it by reminding his listeners of Jesus’ injunction from the Sermon on the Mount, “but let us judge not that we be not judged.”