Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  On January 12, Jefferson Davis expressed his outrage in a message to the Confederate Congress in which he called the Emancipation Proclamation “a measure by which several millions of human beings of an inferior race, peaceful and contented laborers in their sphere, are doomed to extermination, while at the same time they are encouraged to a general assassination of their masters by the insidious recommendation ‘to abstain from violence unless in necessary self-defense.’ Our own detestation of those who have attempted the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man is tempered by profound contempt for the impotent rage which it discloses.” Davis warned that white officers commanding black units would be turned over to Confederate state governments for punishment as instigators of slave uprisings and that black troops would be restored to their masters.382 The Richmond Enquirer deemed the Emancipation Proclamation “little more than the indecent expression of Lincoln’s rage and fiendishments” and predicted that it would “tell the world how bad he is.”383 Caleb Cushing, former U.S. attorney general and chairman of the 1860 Democratic conventions in Baltimore and Charleston, bemoaned “the unspeakable calamities which the Republicans and their President have brought upon us.” Among those calamities Cushing listed “possible servile war, probable foreign war, the attempted total prostration of all constitutional rights and liberty throughout the Northern States, and the proposed massacre of eight millions of white men women and children in the Southern States in order to turn four millions of black men into vagabonds [and] robbers.”384

  The most telling criticism of the Proclamation came from eminent lawyers who questioned its constitutionality. In an influential pamphlet, Benjamin R. Curtis, a former associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, denied that military necessity justified emancipation and argued that since the seceded states were still technically in the Union, the president could not abrogate their laws. Moreover, Congress had provided for emancipation in the Second Confiscation Act. Curtis did not “see that it depends upon his [Lincoln’s] executive decree, whether a servile war shall be invoked to help twenty millions of the white race to assert the rightful authority of the Constitution and the laws of their country, over those who refuse to obey them.”385

  Several prominent attorneys, including Charles P. Kirkland, Charles Mayo Ellis, and Grosvenor P. Lowrey, issued pamphlets challenging Curtis’s arguments. Lincoln read Kirkland’s work, A Letter to the Hon. Benjamin R. Curtis, which he called a “paper of great ability.”386 Kirkland chastised Curtis for ignoring the reality of wartime conditions: “It is difficult to imagine under what hallucination you were laboring when you gave utterance to those sentiments,” he wrote.387

  Lincoln appreciated the constitutional argument and would eventually find a way to make emancipation unambiguously legal through an amendment to the Constitution. But for the moment, the implied war powers of the president were cited to justify the mighty act. Professor Theophilus Parsons of the Harvard Law School, temperamentally a conservative, insisted that while the president had no power in peacetime to liberate slaves, “there can be no doubt that he has a constitutional power to do this as a military act, grounded on a military necessity; that the Commander-in-chief of our army must have the right to judge of the existence and the force of this necessity.”388

  When warned that the Proclamation would “would rouse the South as one man and send a force into the field twice as great as then existed,” Lincoln replied: “we’ll double ours then.”389 According to one resident of Richmond, the “actual effect of the President’s proclamation has been to make the people more determined. They claim that they will now be able to raise ten men voluntarily where they could not raise three before.”390

  In the evening of New Year’s Day, Lincoln confided to Indiana Congressman Schuyler Colfax that the “South had fair warning, that if they did not return to their duty, I should strike at this pillar of their strength. The promise must now be kept, and I shall never recall one word.”391 And he did not.

  Lincoln said the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation was “the central act of my administration” as well as “the great event of the nineteenth century,” and speculated to Charles Sumner “that the name which is connected with this matter will never be forgotten.”392 And it has not been.

  A few weeks after issuing the Proclamation, Lincoln told a group of abolitionists that it had “knocked the bottom out of slavery” but he did not expect “any sudden results from it.”393 Though not sudden, the results would be profound.

  30

  “Go Forward, and Give Us Victories”

  From the Mud March to Gettysburg

  (January–July 1863)

  The winter and early spring of 1863 found Lincoln and his constituents once again mired in the Slough of Despond. In February, when Benjamin Brown French suggested to the president that doubtless “he would feel glad when he could get some rest,” he “replied that it was a pretty hard life for him.” French confided to his diary that Lincoln was “growing feeble. He wrote a note while I was present, and his hand trembled as I never saw it before, and he looked worn & haggard.”1 As 1862 drew to a close, George William Curtis remarked that everything “is very black,” and journalist Benjamin Perley Poore noted that the year was ending “somewhat gloomily, and no one appears hopeful enough to discern dry land upon which our storm-tossed ark of State may rest, while many think that we are drifting—drifting—drifting—toward a cataract which may engulf our national existence.”2 “Exhaustion steals over the country,” Montgomery Meigs observed. “Confidence and hope are dying.”3 Representative Frederick Pike of Maine reported that in January, “nine tenths of the men in Washington, in Congress & out, said it was no use to try any further.”4 That same month Henry B. Stanton confessed that he “was more gloomy than ever,” for it seemed clear to him that the nation was “rapidly going to destruction” and was “never so badly off as at this moment.” He told Susan B. Anthony that Radicals like Owen Lovejoy and John P. Hale “have pretty much given up the struggle in despair. You have no idea how dark the cloud is which hangs over us.”5 In February, William O. Stoddard wrote from the White House that “the growth of a discontented spirit in portions of the North” was more “ominous than anything else.”6

  That discontent led to sharp criticism of Edwin M. Stanton, whom Lincoln defended repeatedly. To those who suggested that Nathaniel P. Banks be made secretary of war, Lincoln tactfully replied: “General Banks is doubtless a very able man, and a very good man for the place, perhaps; but how do I know that he will do any better than Stanton? You see, I know what Stanton has done, and think he has done pretty well, all things considered. There are not many men who are fit for Stanton’s place. I guess we may as well not trade until we know we are making a good bargain.”7 To other critics of the war secretary Lincoln pointed to the Democratic newspapers, which had been denouncing Stanton: “See how these anti-war journals hound him on—they are my bitter enemies also, and shall I take advice of them about the reconstruction of my cabinet?”8

  Discontent: Presidential Popularity Ebbs

  Lincoln’s own popularity sagged badly. David Davis thought that if it were peacetime, the administration “would be the most completely broken down one, that was ever known.”9 In Washington, Richard Henry Dana observed that the “lack of respect for the Pres[iden]t, in all parties, is unconcealed.”10 From Baltimore, John Pendleton Kennedy asked: “Is there any thing in history to parallel the extraordinary dilemma we are in? The finest army of brave men almost ever collected in one body: the most willing and noble people that ever sustained a good cause—a propitious season for operations—for we never had had so beautiful a winter as this—abundance of all kinds of munitions; every thing necessary for success—and all this mighty equipment brought to a still-stand, checkmated, not by the superior vigor or skill of the enemy, but by the ineptitude of the cabinet! What a contemptible exhibition of jealous factions in the Senate, what incapacity in the General in Chief, what triflin
g with this tremendous emergency in the President!”11 Lincoln’s friend Hawkins Taylor of Iowa found a “general feeling [of] contempt entertained by the people of the West towards the administration for its want of vigor” as well as “a widespread feeling of despair for the success of our Army and a strong disposition for the North West to unite and take care of herself.”12

  Constituents mused to Ohio Senator John Sherman that while Lincoln probably meant well, it was not clear that he “has ability sufficient for this crisis,” and noted that the “people are beginning to denounce our President as an imbecile—made on too small a scale for his position.”13 One Buckeye expressed the fervent wish that “Lincoln had the military genius, the firmness and decision of Napoleon the first.”14 A former Whig congressman from Ohio despairingly warned that “unless something is soon done to change the current of events our national destruction is inevitable. The multiplicity of Executive blunders coupled with the failures of our armies are producing the effect upon our people which is fast driving them to a sort of hopeless indifference.”15 Murat Halstead of the Cincinnati Commercial charged that “the foolish, drunken, stupid Grant” could not “organize or control or fight an army.” Even worse, in Halstead’s view, was Lincoln’s “weak, puling, piddling humanitarianism” that kept him from shooting deserters.16 The president, he declared, was little more than “an awful, woeful ass” and a “damned fool.”17 A treasury official in New Orleans, fearing that Lincoln was “too good,” wished to see him replaced with a “strong war man” like Benjamin F. Butler.18 Also expressing the wish that Butler were president instead of Lincoln was Thurlow Weed, who told John Bigelow: “We are in a bad way.”19 In February, the abolitionist Jane Grey Swisshelm complained that “when committees wait upon the President to urge strong measures, he tells them a story. A delegation waited on him some time ago, on important business, and he told them four anecdotes! A Western Senator visited him on official business and reciprocated by telling an anecdote the President had not before heard. After he rose to leave Mr. Lincoln remarked: ‘Wait a moment; I want you to give me the notes of that story!’ The notes were given, carefully taken down and filed away on his desk.”20

  Even allies in Illinois were growing critical. Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune wrote dismissively that “Lincoln is only half awake, and never will do much better than he has done. He will do the right thing always too late and just when it does no good.”21 In Quincy, Jackson Grimshaw growled that the administration “is kind to all but its friends. It has dug up snakes and it can[’]t kill them, it has fostered d[amne]d rascals & crushed honest men. If it were not that our country, our homes, our all is at stake … Lincoln, Baker, Bailhache Edwards etc. might go to —.”22

  Republican congressmen also disdained Lincoln. In late January, William P. Cutler of Ohio confided to his diary that “all is dark, and it would almost seem that God works for the rebels and keeps alive their cause. … [H]ow striking is the want of a leader. The nation is without a head.”23 Henry L. Dawes concurred, telling his wife that “[n]othing lifts as yet the dark cloud which rests on our cause. The Army is palsied, the government imbecile, and the nation distracted.” Lincoln, Dawes sneered, “is an imbecile and should be sent to the school for feeble minded youth.”24 In January, congressmen laughed out loud at the reading of a presidential message and declined to refer it to a select committee. Little wonder then that Noah Brooks thought Lincoln “does not have the cordial and uniform support of his political friends.” Though they might agree with him on issues involving emancipation, confiscation, and the suspension of habeas corpus, nonetheless there ran beneath this superficial harmony “an undercurrent of dissatisfaction and an open manifestation of the spirit of captious criticism.” Brooks frequently heard Republicans “abuse the President and the Cabinet, as they would not allow a political opponent to do.” Brooks was dismayed “to see Republicans, who would vote for sustaining the President in any of his more important acts, deliberately squelch out a message from the White House, or treat it with undisguised contempt.”25 A Missourian wrote from Washington that leading men “are beginning to speak of the President in tones of mingled pity, contempt and scorn. Few if any look to him for relief in this ‘winter of our discontent.’ He is regarded as a debauched man politically.”26

  A case in point was Conservative Unionist Congressman John W. Crisfield of Maryland, who told his wife in late January that the “conviction of the President[’]s incapacity is every day becoming more universal.” In Crisfield’s view, the “election of Lincoln, the blundering ignorance of his administration, and the want of statesmanship, in the management of this civil war … have done more [to] discredit the capacity of man for self-government” than “all the emperors, kings, and despots” in history.27 Crisfield’s Radical colleague, Martin F. Conway of Kansas, publicly denounced Lincoln as “a politician of a past age” who was “anti-slavery, but of a genial Southern type” and “has not made war upon the South in any proper sense.” Nor could he be considered “a Northern man in any sense; neither by birth, education, political or personal sympathies, or by any belief in the superiority of Northern civilization, or its right to rule this continent. The idea of Northern nationality and domination is hateful to him.”28 Conway was partially right; much as he hated slavery, Lincoln was a nationalist who did not view the South as a moral pariah.

  Senators as well as congressmen were growing disenchanted. In January, William Pitt Fessenden of Maine denounced Lincoln’s “entire want of executive ability” and scornfully remarked that “there never was such a shambling, half and half set of incapables collected in one government before since the world began.”29 He predicted that “unless we speedily achieve some decided military successes, the President will find himself compelled by public opinion to reorganize his Cabinet,” for, Fessenden believed, confidence in the administration “is rapidly wasting away, and the people will not much longer sustain a war so unfortunately conducted.”30 With more venom, Ohio Senator John Sherman told his brother: “How fervently I wish Lincoln was out of the way. Any body would do better. I was among the first of his political friends to acknowledge how fearfully we were mistaken in him. He has not a single quality befitting his place. … He is unstable as water—afraid as a child & yet sometimes stubborn as a mule. I never shall cease to regret the part I took in his election and am willing to pay a heavy penance for this sin. This error I fear will be a fatal one as he is unfit to control events and it is fearful to think what may come during his time.”31

  Yet Senator Sherman publicly defended Lincoln: “We do no good to our cause by a constant crimination of the President, by arraigning him … as a tyrant and imbecile. Sir, he is the instrument in the hands of Almighty God, holding the executive power of this Government for four years.” Somewhat patronizingly, he added: “If he is a weak man, we must support him; if we allow his authority to be subdued and overrun, we destroy the authority of the Government.”32 The new secretary of the interior, John Palmer Usher, concurred, assuring an Indiana banker that there was “not on earth a more guileless man [than Lincoln], and but few of more wisdom. It is by and through him that the nation is to be saved at all. Abraham Lincoln with all his energies is seeking to maintain the life of the nation. Whoever attacks and paralyzes him in that effort is the foe of his country.”33

  Pelion Heaped on Ossa: Presidential Woes Mount

  On January 25, when a group of abolitionists called at the White House, Lincoln analyzed the sources of Northern discontent. To Wendell Phillips, who insisted that the public was not satisfied with the way the Emancipation Proclamation was being implemented, the president replied that “the masses of the country generally are only dissatisfied at our lack of military successes. Defeat and failure in the field make everything seem wrong.” Bitterly, he added: “Most of us here present have been long working in minorities, and may have got into a habit of being dissatisfied.” When some of his guests objected, Lincoln said: “At any rate, it has been ve
ry rare that an opportunity of ‘running’ this administration has been lost.”34 When the delegation chided him for not issuing the Emancipation Proclamation earlier, he said the public had not been ready to support it. If that were so, objected Moncure Conway, then why had conservative papers like the Chicago Times, Boston Post, and New York Herald supported Frémont’s emancipation order? The president replied that he had been unaware of that fact. According to Conway’s journal, “there was a burst of surprise around the room at this ignorance which was brutal. When assured that it was so—and that we could bring (if necessary) the files of those papers to prove it, he was staggered completely & sank back in his chair in silence.” Conway speculated that the president “was surrounded a mile thick with Kentuckians who would not let him know the truth.” He also expressed doubts about the honesty of Nicolay, “who superintends his reading.”35 Soon afterward, in a lecture titled “The Vacant Throne of Washington,” Conway told a Boston audience that “we find no man, in the station of power and influence, adequate to the work.”36

  Other participants in that meeting found Lincoln more impressive than Conway did. George Luther Stearns said: “It is of no use to disparage his ability. There we were, with some able talkers among us, and we had the best position too; but the President held his ground against us.” Frank Bird acknowledged that Lincoln “is the shrewdest man I ever met; but not at all a Kentuckian. He is an old-fashioned Yankee in a Western dress.”37

  At the same time, Conservatives and Moderates pressed Lincoln to rescind the Emancipation Proclamation. They were convinced, as Senator Sherman put it, that Negrophobia was generating significant backlash against emancipation. Democrats would “fight for the flag & the country,” Sherman told his brother, “but they hate niggers,” were “easily influenced by a party cry,” and “stick to their party while its organization is controlled by the [worst] set of traitors in this country North or South.”38 Sherman received a warning from Murat Halstead of the Cincinnati Commercial that there was “a change in the current of public sentiment out west.” If the president “were not a damned fool, we could get along yet. … But what we want is not any more nigger.”39 On January 12, Sherman’s colleagues Orville H. Browning and James R. Doolittle, as well as Thomas Ewing, agreed that Republicans “were upon the brink of ruin, and could see no hope of an amendment in affairs unless the President would change his policy, and withdraw or greatly modify his proclamation.”40 Even Radical Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire acknowledged that the Republicans “had made a great mistake upon the slavery question, and that it would have been better both for the cause of the Country, and of emancipation if nothing had been said in regard to the negro since the war commenced.”41 Seward doubted the efficacy of the Proclamation, regarding it “as useful abroad” but ineffective at home. Indeed, he thought “it was rather in spite of it that the actual emancipation had taken place.”42