Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Lincoln insisted that Governor Gamble enjoyed no special treatment at the hands of the administration. After coming to Washington in 1861 and negotiating an arrangement whereby militia would be organized in Missouri and supported by federal funds, Gamble had repeatedly tried to assert complete control over those troops, and Lincoln had consistently refused. The governor had taken even more offense than the seventy delegates did at the suggestion that Missouri Republicans engaged in a “pestilent factional quarrel.”

  Lincoln also insisted that he had shown no favoritism toward Schofield. He told his visitors that they had presented only nebulous charges against that general, whom he had never met and with whom he had no personal relationship. “I cannot act on vague impressions,” he insisted. “Show me that he had disobeyed orders; show me that he has done something wrong & I will take your request for his removal into serious consideration.” He praised the general for doing his duty without complaint and for providing Grant with valuable reinforcements during the Vicksburg campaign. Schofield, Lincoln argued, could not fairly be held responsible for the Lawrence massacre; Quantrill’s raid was the sort of act that “could no more be guarded against than assassination.” Ominously foreshadowing his own fate, he said to Senator Lane: “If I make up my mind to kill you for instance, I can do it and these hundred gentlemen could not prevent it. They could avenge but could not save you.”

  To the complaint that Schofield had carried out Lincoln’s order suspending the writ of habeas corpus, the president expressed understandable puzzlement. Why should he cashier an officer for implementing his orders? As for the crackdown on the Missouri press, Lincoln defended Schofield, saying that “when an officer in any department finds that a newspaper is pursuing a course calculated to embarrass his operations and stir up sedition and tumult, he has the right to lay hands upon it and suppress it, but in no other case.” He noted that he had approved Schofield’s order regarding the press only after the leading Radical newspaper in St. Louis, the Missouri Democrat, had endorsed it.

  “We thought it was then to be used against the other side,” interrupted a member of the delegation.

  “Certainly you did,” replied Lincoln caustically. “Your ideas of justice seem to depend on the application of it. You have spoken of the consideration which you think I should pay to my friends as contradistinguished from my enemies. … I recognize no such thing as a political friendship personal to myself,” he remarked. “You insist upon adherence to the policy of the proclamation of Emancipation as a test of such political friendship.” The committeemen, he said, “seem to be determined to have it executed” in Missouri, which was specifically exempted from its operation.

  “No sir, but we think it a national test question.”

  Of course, Lincoln rejoined, he thought the Proclamation was “right and expedient.” He had issued it “after more thought on the subject than probably any one of you have been able to give it.” He was better satisfied with people who agreed with him on that subject than those who did not. But, he pointed out, “some earnest Republicans, and some from very far North, were opposed to the issuing of that Proclamation holding it unwise and of doubtful legality.” Were these critics to be dismissed as enemies of the Union cause? “Now when you see a man loyally in favor of the Union—willing to vote men and money—spending his time and money and throwing his influence into the recruitment of our armies, I think it ungenerous unjust and impolitic to make his views on abstract political questions a test of his loyalty.” Bluntly, Lincoln suggested that his visitors, in demanding that the Conservatives of Missouri be proscribed, were latter-day Torquemadas: “I will not be a party to this application of a pocket Inquisition.”

  In defending Missouri’s Conservatives, Lincoln insisted that they did not resemble the Copperheads, who were deliberately undermining the war effort. One bold visitor contradicted him. In reply, Lincoln delivered a little sermon: “In a civil war one of the saddest evils is suspicion. It poisons the springs of social life. It is the fruitful parent of injustice and strife. Were I to make a rule that in Missouri disloyal men were outlawed and the rightful prey of good citizens as soon as the rule should begin to be carried into effect I would be overwhelmed with affidavits to prove that the first man killed under it was more loyal then the one who killed him. It is impossible to determine the question of the motives that govern men, or to gain absolute knowledge of their sympathies.”

  When a delegate interjected, “Let the loyal people judge,” Lincoln asked sharply: “And who shall say who the loyal people are? You ask the disfranchisement of all disloyal people: but difficulties will environ you at every step in determining the questions which will arise in that matter.” They should rely on their long-established test oath for voters to keep secessionists from casting ballots.

  “Are we to be protected at the polls in carrying out these laws?” asked a delegate.

  “I will order Gen. Schofield to protect you at the polls and save them from illegal interference. He will do it you may be assured. If he does not I will relieve him.”

  Senator Jim Lane interrupted: “Do you think it sufficient cause for the removal of a General, that he has lost the entire confidence of the people.”

  Pointedly Lincoln shot back: “I think I should not consider it a sufficient cause if he had lost the confidence unjustly, it would [not] be a very strong reason for his removal.”

  When Lane asserted, “General Schofield has lost that confidence,” Lincoln exclaimed: “You being judge!” (Lane alleged that Lincoln told him “that whoever made war on General Schofield, under the present state of affairs, made war on him—the President.”)82

  The meeting grew ever more tense as the delegates murmured their agreement with Lane.

  Lincoln swiftly added that he had evidence that Schofield “has not lost the confidence of the entire people of Missouri.”

  “All loyal people,” they objected.

  “You being the standard of loyalty.”

  A delegate from a rural district, bellowing like an enraged bull, complained about “the sufferings me and the rest of the board suffers, with the guerillas achasing of us, and we a writing to Mr. Scovil for help & he not giving it to us, so we couldn’t collect the broken bonds.”

  “Who’s us?” asked the president.

  “The Board.”

  “What board?”

  “The Board for collecting the broken bonds,” came the somewhat nervous reply.

  Sternly Lincoln queried: “Who appointed you & by what law, & how were you acting & by what right did you ask a military force from Gen. Schofield?”

  The answer to these questions revealed the gentleman to be, in the words of John Hay, a cattle thief and “a sportive and happy free plunderer on the estates of misguided traitors.”

  Similar exchanges followed, which Hay described: “a question or two from the President pricked the balloon of loud talk and collapsed it around the ears of the delegate to his no small disgust and surprise. The baffled patriot would retreat to a sofa & think the matter over again or would stand in his place and quietly listen in a bewildered manner to the talk and discomfiture of another.”

  Without naming Drake, Lincoln addressed charges made by him: “I am well aware that by many, by some even among this delegation,—I shall not name them,—I have been in public speeches and in printed documents charged with ‘tyranny’ and willfulness, with a disposition to make my own personal will supreme. I do not intend to be a tyrant. At all events I shall take care that in my own eyes I do not become one. I shall always try and preserve one friend within me, whoever else fails me, to tell me that I have not been a tyrant, and that I have acted right. I have no right to act the tyrant to mere political opponents. If a man votes for supplies of men and money; encourages enlistments; discourages desertions; does all in his power to carry the war on to a successful issue,—I have no right to question him for his abstract political opinions. I must make a dividing line, some where, between those who ar
e the opponents of the Government and those who only oppose peculiar features of my administration while they sustain the Government.”

  As the contentious meeting drew to a close, Lincoln reiterated his support for gradual emancipation and chided the Radicals for letting him down. “My friends in Missouri last winter did me a great unkindness. I had relied upon my Radical friends as my mainstay in the management of affairs in that state and they disappointed me. I had recommended Gradual Emancipation, and Congress had endorsed that course. The Radicals in Congress voted for it. The Missouri delegation in Congress went for it,—went, as I thought, right. I had the highest hope that at last Missouri was on the right track. But I was disappointed by the immediate emancipation movement. It endangers the success of the whole advance towards freedom. But you say that the gradual emancipation men were insincere;—that they intended soon to repeal their action; that their course and their professions are purely fraudulent. Now I do not think that a majority of the gradual Emancipationists are insincere. Large bodies of men cannot play the hypocrite.

  “I announced my own opinion freely at the time. I was in favor of gradual emancipation. I still am so. You must not call yourselves my friends, if you are only so while I agree with you. According to that, if you differ with me you are not my friends.

  “But the mode of emancipation in Missouri is not my business. That is a matter which belongs exclusively to the citizens of that state: I do not wish to interfere. I desire, if it pleases the people of Missouri, that they should adopt gradual emancipation. … I think that a union of all anti-slavery men upon this point would have made emancipation a final fact forever. Still, I do not assume any control. I am sorry to see anti-slavery men opposing such a movement.”

  (According to one delegate, Lincoln “spoke kindly, yet now and then there was a little rasping tone in his voice that seemed to say: ‘You men ought to fix this thing up without tormenting me.’ ”)83

  Lincoln recollected that as he listened to the delegates, he “saw that their attack on Gamble was malicious. They moved against him by flank attacks from different sides of the same question. They accused him of enlisting rebel soldiers among the enrolled militia: and of exempting all the rebels and forcing Union men to do the duty: all this in the blindness of passion.” Lincoln scolded them for jeopardizing the chances of Unionist candidates for the U.S. senate (the Radical B. Gratz Brown and the Conservative John B. Henderson) at the upcoming session of the Missouri Legislature. Sternly he told them that “their duty was to elect Henderson and Gratz Brown.” (In November, when the legislature chose those two men, Lincoln said “nothing in our politics … has pleased me more.”)84

  After the delegation left, Lincoln in a good humor told Edward Bates that some of its members “were not as bad as he supposed” and that he “really thought some of them were pretty good men.”85 John Hay was not so positive. He concluded that the delegation’s “incoherent, vague, abusive, prejudiced” case “did no good.” They had “claimed to advocate no man—but asked for Butler—to speak without prejudice—yet abused Schofield like drabs; to ask for ascertained rights and they rambled through a maze of ridiculous grievances and absurd suggestions. In the main ignorant and well-meaning, they chose for their spokesman Drake, who is neither ignorant nor well-meaning, who covered the marrow of what they wanted to say in a purposeless mass of unprofitable verbiage which they accepted because it sounded well, and the President will reject because it is nothing but sound. He is a man whom only facts of the toughest kind can move and Drake attacked him with tropes & periods which might have had weight in a Sophomore Debating Club. And so the great Western Delegation from which good people hoped so much for freedom, discharged their little rocket, and went home with no good thing to show for coming—a little angry and a good deal bewildered—not clearly seeing why they have failed—as the President seemed so fair and their cause so good.”86 Hay thought that Lincoln “never appeared to better advantage in the world. Though he knows how immense is the danger to himself from the unreasoning anger of that committee, he never cringed to them for an instant. He stood where he thought he was right and crushed them with his candid logic.”87

  Three days later, Drake delivered supplementary statements to the White House. When he called there yet again on October 5, a servant informed him that the president “is sorry, but he really can’t see you. He has a hundred pages of the manuscript you left him to read yet!” Washingtonians chuckled when they learned of that rebuff.88

  Reflecting on the upcoming elections in Missouri, Lincoln told Hay: “I believe, after all, those Radicals will carry the state & I do not object to it.” (In fact, at the hotly contested statewide judicial elections in November, the three Radical candidates for the Supreme Court narrowly outpolled their conservative opponents.) The Radicals, Lincoln added, “are nearer to me than the other side, in thought and sentiment, though bitterly hostile personally. They are utterly lawless—the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with—but after all their faces are set Zionwards.”89 He believed that the Radicals “have in them the stuff which must save the state and on which we must mainly rely. They are absolutely uncorrosive by the virus of secession. It cannot touch or taint them.” The Conservatives, on the other hand, “in casting about for votes to carry through their plans, are tempted to affiliate with those whose record is not clear. If one side must be crushed out & the other cherished there could be no doubt which side we would choose as fuller of hope for the future. We would have to side with the Radicals.” (Lincoln was indeed ideologically closer to the Radicals than to Governor Gamble, whose conservatism led him in early 1861 to declare that Southern secessionists had legitimate complaints; to protest against troops who permitted slaves to escape to Union lines; to issue an order forbidding Home Guard soldiers to harbor runaway bondsmen; and to discriminate against Radicals when appointing officers.)

  But the Radicals’ intolerance offended Lincoln. “They insist that I shall hold and treat Governor Gamble and his supporters—men appointed by loyal people of Mo. as reps. of Mo. loyalty—and who have done their whole duty in the war faithfully & promptly—who when they have disagreed with me have been silent and kept about the good work—that I shall treat these men as copperheads and enemies to the Govt. This is simply monstrous.” Lincoln found it noteworthy that some fierce Radicals, notably their leader Charles D. Drake, had once been bitter opponents of abolition. Others had been Confederates. He did not object “to penitent rebels being radical: he was glad of it.” But he thought it only fair for them to be more forbearing in dealing with Gamble. In matters political, Lincoln “was in favor of short statutes of limitations.”90 His problems with Radicals had more to do with their style than with their ideology. While he shared much in common with them, he did object to what he deemed the “self-righteousness of the Abolitionists.”91

  In his written response to the Committee of Seventy, Lincoln reiterated some of the arguments he had made verbally to those “unhandy devils” a week earlier, but now he wished to defend his Missouri policies to the larger public. He rejected the delegation’s contention that Schofield and the Enrolled Missouri Militia caused the Unionists’ woes. “The whole can be explained on a more charitable, and, as I think, a more rational hypothesis,” he assured them. “We are in civil war. In such cases there always is a main question; but in this case that question is a perplexing compound—Union and Slavery.” Thus several political combinations emerged, causing severe strains within the pro-Union coalition: gradual versus immediate emancipationists; proslavery Unionists versus antislavery Unionists; Unionists who cared little about slavery, but were inclined to favor it versus those who cared little about slavery, but were inclined to oppose it. All the permutations of Unionism “may be sincerely entertained by honest and truthful men.” Yet “sincerity is questioned, and motives are assailed.” Once war breaks out, “blood grows hot, and blood is spilled. Thought is forced from old channels into confusion. Deception breeds and thrives. Co
nfidence dies, and universal suspicion reigns. Each man feels an impulse to kill his neighbor, lest he be first killed by him. Revenge and retaliation follow. … Every foul bird comes abroad, and every dirty reptile rises up. These add crime to confusion. Strong measures, deemed indispensable but harsh at best, such men make worse by maladministration. Murders for old grudges, and murders for pelf, proceed under any cloak that will best cover for the oc[c]asion. These causes amply account for what has occurred in Missouri, without ascribing it to the weakness, or wickedness of any general.” Schofield was no more to blame for this chaos than were Frémont, Hunter, Halleck, and Curtis, under whom such anarchy was just as bad.

  Lincoln acknowledged that the assessment regime and the provost marshal network were flawed. “To restrain contraband intelligence and trade, a system of searches, seizures, permits, and passes, had been introduced. … That there was a necessity for something of the sort was clear; but that it could only be justified by stern necessity, and that it was liable to great abuse in administration, was equally clear. Agents to execute it, contrary to the great Prayer, were led into temptation. Some might, while others would not resist that temptation. It was not possible to hold any to a very strict accountability; and those yielding to the temptation, would sell permits and passes to those who would pay most, and most readily for them; and would seize property, and collect levies in the aptest way to fill their own pockets. Money being the object, the man having money, whether loyal or disloyal, would be a victim. This practice doubtless existed to some extent, and it was a real additional evil, that it could be and was, plausably charged to exist in greater extent than it did.” Critics of assessments and provost marshals had a valid point but ignored the necessity for them, while defenders made valid points about the necessity for them and ignored the mistakes, and each side “bitterly assailed the motives of the other. I could not fail to see that the controversy enlarged in the same proportion as the professed Union-men there distinctly took sides in two opposing political parties. I exhausted my wits, and very nearly my patience also, in efforts to convince both that the evils they charged on each other, were inherent in the case, and could not be cured by giving either party a victory over the other.”