Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  But Lincoln’s explanation to Schurz was inadequate. In truth, the voters, as the Cincinnati Gazette put it, “are depressed by the interminable nature of this war, as so far conducted, and by the rapid exhaustion of the national resources without progress.”154 Yet the president was clearly right in stating that the absence of many supporters serving in the military hurt the Republicans. A defeated Ohio state legislator told Lincoln that in his district 80 percent “of the forces Sent into the field are from the Union [i.e., Republican] ranks. … We could not induce the opposition to enlist, except an occasional one to keep up an appearance of Loyalty.”155 Ohio and other states which did not allow troops to vote in the field went Democratic; states like Iowa, which did, went Republican. If all soldiers had voted, and they had cast their ballots in the same fashion that eligible soldiers did, Republicans would have won majorities in every Northern state save New Jersey.

  In response to the defeat, Nicolay wrote an editorial for the Washington Daily Morning Chronicle, probably at Lincoln’s behest. It argued that because the Democrats had for the most part insisted during the campaign that they favored a vigorous prosecution of the war, their representatives in Congress therefore “must sustain the President in his war measures and war policy,” including emancipation. “Either they must do this or be false to their pledges to the people.”156 (The Chronicle, edited by John W. Forney, began publication in November 1862 and was widely regarded as an administration organ. John Hay as well as Nicolay wrote for it.)

  Soaring Rhetoric: The Second Annual Message to Congress

  When the Thirty-seventh Congress reconvened for its brief lame-duck session, the mood was sour. “It seems to me that this is the darkest day yet, and no ray of light as yet penetrates the thick clouds which hang over us,” Congressman Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts wrote from Washington on December 10. “There is no change for the better here. We have reached this state of things for want of capacity and that can’t be supplied.”157

  In his annual message, Lincoln once again urged Congress to adopt gradual, compensated emancipation, and the members paid unusually close attention as that document was read to them. “Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed,” he asserted; “without slavery it could not continue.” Instead of passing statutes like the Confiscation Acts, which courts could overrule, he suggested that constitutional amendments be enacted providing federal aid to states which abolished slavery by 1900; guaranteeing freedom to slaves already liberated by the war, with compensation to be paid to loyal slaveowners; and funding colonization efforts. In justifying compensation, he remarked that Northerners as well as Southerners were responsible for the introduction and continuance of slavery. In something of a non sequitur, he rebutted the Democratic contention that freed slaves would take the jobs of whites. “If there ever could be a proper time for mere catch arguments, that time surely is not now. In times like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and in eternity.” Liberated slaves would not move to the North, he predicted; even if they did, whites would outnumber them seven-to-one.

  Rhetorically Lincoln asked: “Is it doubted, then, that the plan I propose, if adopted, would shorten the war, and thus lessen its expenditure of money and of blood? Is it doubted that it would restore the national authority and national prosperity? Is it doubted that we here—Congress and the Executive—can secure its adoption, and perpetuate both indefinitely? … Will not the good people respond to a united, and earnest appeal from us? Can we, can they, by any other means, so certainly, or so speedily assure these vital objects? We can succeed only by concert. It is not ‘can any of us imagine better?’ but ‘can we all do better?’ ”

  In an inspired conclusion, Lincoln supplied the soaring rhetoric so conspicuously absent from the legalistic Emancipation Proclamation: “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall our selves, and then we shall save our country. Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth.”158

  Few of his state papers are more eloquent. The New York Tribune lauded its final passage extravagantly: “Sentiments so noble, so forcible, so profoundly true, have very rarely found their way into the manifestoes of rulers and Governments. … Their appearance in a President’s Message is an immense fact, significant, fruitful, enduring. The howls and jeers of a million ‘lewd fellows of the baser sort’ are soon stilled and forgotten; while the reverberations of one such voice are prolonged and diffused through centuries.” The editors also praised the compensated emancipation plan as “eminently a measure of conciliation and peace.”159 Lincoln’s “homely terseness and honest frankness of expression” pleased the Providence Journal.160 The moderate New York Times called the message “concise, clear and perspicuous” but expressed doubt that Congress would enact the emancipation plan.161

  Most observers shared the Times’s pessimism. Upon hearing the message, Orville H. Browning was surprised “by the hallucination the President seems to be laboring under that Congress can suppress the rebellion by adopting his plan of compensated emancipation, when if there was no opposition to it, it would require at least four years to have it adopted.”162 An Ohio congressman called the compensation proposal “a most impracticable scheme” that “nobody likes. Nobody will give it a cordial support & yet he has loaded his friends down with its odium while probably nothing will be done with it.”163 His colleague Henry L. Dawes was equally dismissive: “How it makes one’s heart bleed for his country to have its chief magistrate proposing measures to be accomplished in 1900 as a remedy for evils and perils which have thrust us … into the very jaws of death. Whether the Republic shall live six months or not is the question thundering in our ears and the chief magistrate answers I’ve got a plan which is going to work well in the next century.”164 James A. Garfield, who was present when the message was read aloud, found Lincoln’s scheme “most weak and absurd.” Garfield could scarcely believe his ears when he “heard no word or sentence that indicated that the administration intended to push the war to a triumphant conclusion. Indeed, it hardly contained a sentence which implied that we are in the midst of war at all.”165 A Boston abolitionist concluded that Lincoln “seems to be a man of inadequate calibre; he does not comprehend his position.”166 Henry Ward Beecher patronizingly remarked that although it was “pleasing to know the opinions of any intelligent man on public topics,” Lincoln “was not placed in the Presidential chair to read lectures to Congress on political economy, nor to manage a war with reference to New York politics, nor to undertake to draw out on paper how anyone may settle the questions of the next century. … There is the enemy. Defeat him.”167 Similar criticism appeared in many newspapers.

  Most Radicals found the message unsatisfactory. The New York Evening Post asserted that “to free men gradually, or by installments, is like cutting off a dog’s tail by inches, to get him used to the pain.”168 The message “greatly disappointed” Congressman James Ashley, but after speaking with the president, the Ohioan said he “felt confident that in heart he was far in advance of the message.”169 Henry Winter Davis called Lincoln’s proposed constitutional amendments “impossible in his way of viewing them, illusory to the loyal states & ridiculous in relation to the disloyal states
.” The message in general seemed to Davis “wise, liberal, eloquent & impressive—everything but practical & practicable,” with “every quality but the highest & the rarest—a knowledge that temporizing is fatal in great emergencies.”170 An exception was Charles Sumner, who approved of the message: “Massachusetts was satisfied—& all reasonable men ought to be so if we could get rid of slavery at the end of this century & that without any more fighting.” Sumner doubted that Lincoln’s “olive branch would be accepted.” But if it were, he asked “who would be fool enough to refuse it on our side [–] no real abolitionist certainly.”171

  Some wondered why Lincoln revived his compensated emancipation proposal one month before the Emancipation Proclamation was due to take effect. Abolitionist Moncure Conway asked: “if the President means to carry out his Edict of Freedom on the New Year, what is all this stuff about gradual emancipation?”172 Conway and others feared that the compensated emancipation plan would replace the Emancipation Proclamation. William Lloyd Garrison said: “we shall not be surprised if he substituted some other project for it. A man so manifestly without moral vision … cannot be safely relied upon in any emergency.”173 Conservative papers like the New York Herald and World speculated that the president would not issue the proclamation.

  Lincoln reportedly told a Border State delegation “that, as to his Emancipation proclamation, he had acted from the belief that it would effect good results; but, if he could be convinced to the contrary, he would modify his position on that subject.”174 But he immediately amended his statement, telling a Kentucky member: “You know me, and when I tell you that I have made up my mind that slavery is the right arm of the rebellion, you will be convinced that it is my purpose to lop it off!”175 And Lincoln assured Congress that his plan was “recommended as a means, not in exclusion of, but additional to, all others.” Moreover, one of the proposed amendments stipulated that every slave “who shall have enjoyed actual freedom by the chances of war, at any time before the end of the rebellion, shall be forever free.”176 On December 22, Lincoln assured Ashley that he would issue the Proclamation.

  Democrats dismissed the message because it rested on the assumption that “this Federal Government was created to do about every thing, instead of little or nothing, and that the chiefest object of its creation was to free negroes.”177 The Cincinnati Enquirer called it “[p]oor in manner, poorer still in argument, avoiding the topics for the discussion of which the people looked with the utmost anxiety, and giving prominence to ideas of which they are tired and disgusted.”178 The Border State delegations, to Lincoln’s chagrin (if not surprise), were unenthusiastic.

  It is not entirely clear why Lincoln once again trotted out his compensated emancipation scheme. David Davis observed that the president’s “whole soul is absorbed in his plan of remunerative emancipation. … He believes that if Congress will pass a Law authorizing the issuance of bonds for the payment of the emancipated negroes in the border states that Delaware, Maryland Kentucky & Mo. will accept the terms. He takes great encouragement from the vote in Mo.”179 The electoral triumph by Missouri Republicans who supported gradual, compensated emancipation led the president to hope that his scheme might be practicable there. Reports from Missouri indicated that his hopes were not unreasonable. The St. Louis Missouri Democrat appealed to Congress and the Northern people to fund Lincoln’s program. The president was also heartened by a group of Kentuckians, led by Congressman Samuel L. Casey, who met with him repeatedly in November and offered assurances that they could effectively promote gradual emancipation by establishing two newspapers and dispatching speakers throughout the state. Joseph Holt believed that if new leadership emerged in the Bluegrass State, it would accept the presidential plan. In Maryland, several knowledgeable leaders maintained that if Congress appropriated funds for compensating slaveholders, state legislators would abolish the peculiar institution; but in the absence of such federal help, they would not.

  If Missouri, Maryland, and Kentucky did free their slaves with financial help from Congress, backlash against emancipation would be minimized. If they did not, Lincoln at least wanted to appear magnanimous by demonstrating his willingness to go to great lengths in helping them avoid the shock of sudden, uncompensated emancipation. He had adopted a similar strategy during the secession crisis, and he would do so later in dealing with Confederate peace feelers. Lincoln’s decision to stick with the compensation plan also resembles his willingness to retain McClellan for such a long time. He knew that Little Mac enjoyed the support of the army, and therefore he wished to give the general every chance to prove himself. So, too, he wished to give slaveholders every chance to have emancipation implemented gradually and with compensation. Probably he shared Chase’s doubt that two-thirds of Congress would pass such amendments. Still more improbable was the likelihood that three-quarters of the states would ratify them.

  It was, however, possible that Congress might appropriate money to implement Lincoln’s plan. On December 10, 1862, Missouri Senator John B. Henderson introduced a bill (which Lincoln may have drafted) earmarking funds to compensate Missouri slaveholders. In the House, Congressman John W. Noell of Missouri offered a slightly different proposal. Lincoln, who said “that if no appropriation was made, then the bottom would be out of the tub,” took a keen interest in Congress’s action on these measures. On January 9, 1863, he told Senators Orville H. Browning and John P. Hale that in the past week blacks “were stampeding in Missouri, which was producing great dissatisfaction among our friends there, and that the democratic legislatures of Illinois & Indiana seemed bent upon mischief, and the party in those states was talking of a union with the lower Mississippi states.” He added that “we could at once stop that trouble by passing a law immediately appropriating $25,000,000 to pay for the slaves in Missouri—that Missouri being a free state the others would give up their scheme—that Missouri was an empire of herself—could sustain a population equal to half the population of the United States, and pay the interest on all of our debt, and we ought to drive a stake there immediately.” Fervently he appealed to those senators: “you and I must die but it will be enough for us to have done in our lives if we make Missouri free.”180

  The following day Lincoln wrote General Samuel R. Curtis in St. Louis: “I understand there is considerable trouble with the slaves in Missouri. Please do your best to keep peace on the question for two or three weeks, by which time we hope to do something here towards settling the question, in Missouri.” Each house of Congress passed a bill, but fierce resistance by Border State delegations blocked reconciliation of the two statutes, and the plan died with the expiration of the Thirty-seventh Congress in March. “If the Missouri bill had gone through,” Senator Henderson thought, “the others would have followed undoubtedly and the loyal slaveholders in all of the border States would have received pay for their slaves.”181

  Lincoln was bitterly disappointed. In exasperation he declared that the “dissensions between Union men in Missouri are due solely to a factious spirit which is exceedingly reprehensible. The two parties ought to have their heads knocked together. Either would rather see the defeat of their adversary than that of Jefferson Davis. To this spirit of faction is to be ascribed … the defeat of the Missouri Aid bill in Congress, the passage of which [I] strongly desired.”182

  Calamity: Replacing McClellan with Burnside

  Finding a replacement for McClellan proved difficult. Lincoln did not consider appointing Halleck, for, as he told the cabinet, he thought Old Brains “would be an indifferent general in the field; that he shrank from responsibility in his present position; that he is a moral coward, worth but little except as a critic, though intelligent and educated.”183 So he turned once again to Ambrose E. Burnside, who had twice declined the job. This time the president insisted, and the personable, modest, 38-year-old corps commander from Rhode Island accepted after protesting that he “was not competent to command such a large army.”184 He rightly feared that if he turned it dow
n yet again, Joseph Hooker, whom he despised, would be given the job. Burnside was chosen because he was next in rank behind McClellan and because none of the other corps commanders (with the possible exception of Hooker) seemed more capable than the man who had won battles at Roanoke Island, Fort Macon, and New Bern, North Carolina. Old Burn had acquired the reputation of a fighter and had invented a breechloading carbine used by cavalry. Moreover, he was a friend of McClellan and thus acceptable to that general’s many army admirers.

  Some in Congress would have preferred the appointment of Hooker. William P. Fessenden said Fighting Joe “has shown more brains than any of them, and it is in his favor that he despises McLellan, and does not hesitate to say so, openly.”185 When Congressman William D. Kelley recommended that Hooker be given command, Lincoln replied that “Burnside would be better, for he is the better housekeeper.”

  “You are not in search of a housekeeper or a hospital steward, but of a soldier who will fight, and fight to win,” Kelley protested.

  “I am not so sure,” the president said softly, “that we are not in search of a housekeeper. I tell you, Kelley, the successful management of an army requires a good deal of faithful housekeeping. More fight will be got out of well-fed and well-cared-for soldiers and animals than can be got out of those that are required to make long marches with empty stomachs, and whose strength and cheerfulness are impaired by the failure to distribute proper rations at proper seasons.”186