Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Lincoln’s letter, which he asked Conkling to read slowly to the crowd at the Illinois capital, masterfully defended the Emancipation Proclamation and the decision to enroll black troops, but avoided discussing the unpopular Conscription Act. With iron logic, Lincoln bluntly challenged Peace Democrats to answer some tough questions: “You desire peace; and you blame me that we do not have it. But how can we attain it? There are but three conceivable ways. First, to suppress the rebellion by force of arms. This, I am trying to do. Are you for it? If you are, so far we are agreed. If you are not for it, a second way is, to give up the Union. I am against this. Are you for it? If you are, you should say so plainly. If you are not for force, nor yet for dissolution, there only remains some imaginable compromise.” But, Lincoln averred, no compromise that restored the Union was possible. Neither the Confederacy’s army nor its civilian leadership had shown interest in such a compromise. “In an effort at such compromise we should waste time, which the enemy would improve to our disadvantage; and that would be all.”

  Lincoln boldly addressed the race issue, challenging his critics: “you are dissatisfied with me about the negro. Quite likely there is a difference of opinion between you and myself upon that subject. I certainly wish that all men could be free, while I suppose you do not.” As he had done a year earlier in his public letter to Horace Greeley, Lincoln emphasized that he issued the Emancipation Proclamation and approved the recruitment of black troops as practical, Union-saving measures. He chided critics for their reluctance to avail themselves of his generous offer to pay for slaves: “I suggested compensated emancipation; to which you replied you wished not to be taxed to buy negroes. But I had not asked you to be taxed to buy negroes, except in such way, as to save you from greater taxation to save the Union exclusively by other means.” To those who objected that the Emancipation Proclamation violated the Constitution, Lincoln insisted that “the constitution invests its commander-in-chief, with the law of war, in time of war,” which permitted the seizure of property. Was there any doubt, he asked rhetorically, “that by the law of war, property, both of enemies and friends, may be taken when needed? And is it not needed whenever taking it, helps us, or hurts the enemy? Armies, the world over, destroy enemies’ property when they can not use it; and even destroy their own to keep it from the enemy.”

  Military leaders, Lincoln assured his critics, had praised the Emancipation Proclamation and the enlistment of black troops as essential weapons in prosecuting the war. “Among the commanders holding these views,” he pointed out, “are some who have never had any affinity with what is called abolitionism, or with republican party politics; but who hold them purely as military opinions. I submit these opinions as being entitled to some weight against the objections, often urged, that emancipation, and arming the blacks, are unwise as military measures, and were not adopted, as such, in good faith.”

  Lincoln offered a brief, somewhat whimsical progress report on the war, paying tribute to all who made that progress possible: “The signs look better. The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea. Thanks to the great North-West for it. Nor yet wholly to them. Three hundred miles up, they met New-England, Empire, Key-Stone, and Jersey, hewing their way right and left. The Sunny South too, in more colors than one, also lent a hand. On the spot, their part of the history was jotted down in black and white. The job was a great national one; and let none be banned who bore an honorable part in it. And while those who have cleared the great river may well be proud, even that is not all. It is hard to say that anything has been more bravely, and well done, than at Antietam, Murfreesboro, Gettysburg, and on many fields of lesser note. Nor must Uncle Sam’s Web-feet be forgotten. At all the watery margins they have been present. Not only on the deep sea, the broad bay, and the rapid river, but also up the narrow muddy bayou, and wherever the ground was a little damp, they have been, and made their tracks. Thanks to all. For the great republic—for the principle it lives by, and keeps alive—for man’s vast future,—thanks to all.”

  In an eloquent conclusion, Lincoln meditated on the larger significance of the war: “Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time. It will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost.”143

  With this powerful letter, Lincoln helped scotch the Copperhead snake. It was read at the huge Springfield rally, which, Conkling told the president, “was a magnificent success,” drawing between 50,000 and 75,000 people. “The most unbounded enthusiasm prevailed. The speeches were of the most earnest, radical and progressive character and the people applauded most vociferously every sentiment in favor of the vigorous prosecution of the war until the rebellion was subdued—the Proclamation of Emancipation and the arming of negro soldiers and every allusion to yourself and your policy.”144 A mass meeting of young men in New York greeted the Conkling letter “with shouts, cheers, thanksgiving, & tears.”145 Lincoln’s insistence that emancipation would not be reversed pleased many Radicals, who called the document “a blow at the copperheads which they will find it hard to parry” and “one of the heaviest blows they have ever received—unless we except Gov. Seymour’s mob.”146 Charles Sumner told Lincoln that his “true & noble letter” was a “historic document” in which the “case is admirably stated, so that all but the wicked must confess its force. It cannot be answered.”147 Sumner’s venerable constituent, the abolitionist Josiah Quincy, praised Lincoln’s “happy, timely, conclusive & effective” letter.148 Said the Chicago Tribune: “It has been feared that even he looked upon his Proclamation as a temporary expedient, born of the necessities of the situation, to be adhered to or retracted as a short-sighted or time-serving policy dictated; and that when the moment for attempting compromise might come, he would put it aside. The Springfield letter dispels all doubts and silences all croakers. In a few plain sentences, than which none more important were ever uttered in this country, Mr. Lincoln exonerates himself from the charge urged against him, shows the untenableness of the position that his enemies occupy, and gives the world assurance that that great measure of policy and justice, which … guarantees freedom to three millions of slaves, is to remain the law of the republic.”

  Democrats protested that if “the proclamation cannot be retracted, then every provision in the constitution pertaining to slavery is abrogated. … The Constitution has been murdered—assassinated—by him who solemnly swore to ‘preserve, protect and defend it.’ ” The Louisville Daily Democrat inferred that “at the end, if there ever be an end, we shall have, not a restoration of the Union, but something else, which may be desirable or not, no one can foresee.” The New York Old Guard declared: “If it has any meaning at all it means that the object of this struggle is to free negroes. And to do this he is willing to shed the blood of a quarter of a million of white men.”149

  Although some Republicans who had anticipated that Lincoln would discuss Reconstruction issues were disappointed, most cheered the Conkling letter. The New York Times rejoiced “that it is plain that the President has no power to make a man once legally free again legally a slave. The President’s argument for the employment of colored troops is unanswerable.”150 The New York Evening Post lauded the “singularly clear and ingenuous letter,” which radiated “manly honesty, a sincere desire to do right, a conscientious intention to observe faithfully his oaths of office, and to do his duty as an American citizen, and a lover of democratic institutions and of that liberty upon which our government is founded.”151 The North American Review thought that Lincoln has “been reproached with Americanisms by some not unfriendly British critics,” but the editor agreed with George Templeton Strong, who judged that some sentences “a critic would like to eliminate, but they are delightfully characteristic of the man.” The letter, Strong accurately predicted, was “likely to be a conspicuo
us document in the history of our times.”152 (The Democratic Illinois State Register was less tolerant of presidential colloquialisms: “Mr. Lincoln speaks of ‘Uncle Sam’s webbed feet’ as if the government were a goose,” and “in the radical view of who constitutes ‘the government,’ perhaps he is right.”)153 A Radical admirer of the letter acknowledged that it “is a queer mingling of sense and humor.”154

  Charles Eliot Norton, who had been a harsh critic of Lincoln’s rhetoric, praised “the extraordinary excellence of the President’s letter.” In Norton’s opinion, the president rose “with each new effort, and his letters are successive victories.” Those public letters since the one to the Albany Democrats “are, as he says to General Grant of Vicksburg, ‘of almost inestimable value to the country,’—for they are of the rarest class of political documents, arguments seriously addressed by one in power to the conscience and reason of the citizens of the commonwealth.” Such public letters, Norton boldly asserted, were “of the more value to us as permanent precedents—examples of the possibility of the coexistence of a strong government with entire and immediate dependence upon and direct appeal to the people. There is in them the clearest tone of uprightness of character, purity of intention, and goodness of heart.”155 John Hay deemed the Conkling letter “a great thing” despite some “hideously bad rhetoric” and “some indecorums that are infamous.” It “takes its solid place in history, as a great utterance of a great man. The whole Cabinet could not have tinkered up a letter which could have been compared with it. He can snake a sophism out of its hole, better than all the trained logicians of all schools.”156

  English reaction was generally positive. The London Star echoed Hay, calling the letter a “manifesto of a truly great man in the exigency of almost unequaled moment” and “a masterpiece of cogent argument.” As “an appeal to the spirit of the nation it is sublime in the dignified simplicity of its eloquence,” which was “worthy of a Cromwell or a Washington.”157 The eminent British analyst of slavery, John Elliot Cairnes, was especially impressed by the Conkling letter, which he thought “an immense advance” over the Greeley letter; it proved that Lincoln was “a man of truly statesmanlike caliber of mind. To my taste there has been none like him since Washington. The metal indeed received the temper slowly, but now that it has got it, ‘it can stand the strain of being in deadly earnest.’ ”158

  The Democrats’ most egregious blunder in the 1863 electoral campaigns was nominating Clement L. Vallandigham for governor of Ohio instead of a more moderate candidate. The Ohio contest became a referendum on the war rather than alleged government violations of civil liberties. From exile in Canada, where Vallandigham had settled weeks after Lincoln banished him to the South, the former congressman was unable to mount a serious campaign against his opponent, John Brough, a rotund, witty, persuasive orator and former Democrat who had served as Ohio’s state auditor as well as president of a railroad. Unlike the incumbent governor, David Tod, Brough warmly supported emancipation. Republicans denounced Vallandigham as a traitor for opposing the war effort. Noting that he had been a brigadier in the Ohio militia in antebellum days, they ridiculed him as a general who was “invincible in peace, invisible in war.”159 Republicans soft-pedaled the slavery issue, for as Murat Halstead warned, “if the vote were taken in Ohio between Vallandigham and the ‘radical policy’ of the President, the foolish and hopelessly impracticable proclamation &c, the election of Vallandigham would be the result. The essential thing in this canvass is to keep the Administration out of sight as much as possible, and talk of the cause of nationality and nothing else.” Halstead grew optimistic when General Burnside left Ohio for Tennessee: “now we will beat Vallandigham without the soldiers vote, if there can be a few moments quiet on the nigger question.”160

  But the Democrats would not keep quiet on that issue. Appealing to race prejudice, they called Brough a “nigger-lover,” a “fat Knight of the corps d’Afrique,” and a candidate of the “nigger-worshipping Republican party.” Their rallies featured young women standing beneath banners imploring: “Father, save us from Negro Equality.” Announced a Democratic paper in Iowa: “We had rather sleep with Democrats than Niggers.” One Democrat warned that the “ ‘irrepressible conflict’ between white and black laborers will be realized in all its vigor upon Ohio soil if the policy of Lincoln and Brough is carried.” Another urged fellow Buckeyes to let “every vote count in favor of the white man, and against the Abolition hordes, who would place negro children in your schools, negro jurors in your jury boxes, and negro votes in your ballot boxes!” Democrats portrayed their candidate as a “Martyr to Freedom of Speech.”161

  As the campaign heated up, Republicans in mid-September rejoiced at the news from Maine, where they won the gubernatorial election by a landslide and captured an overwhelming majority of the legislature. On October 13, as Ohio voters flocked to the polls, Lincoln said he felt nervous. Thomas F. Meagher, a War Democrat and founder of the Irish Brigade, explained why the stakes were unusually high: “The importance of the coming contest in Ohio … cannot be exaggerated. The triumph of the National Government in this contest … will be of no less (possibly of greater) consequence, than the repulse of the armed enemy at Gettysburg and the capitulation of Vicksburg have been. Defeated in Ohio, the malcontents and conspirators of the North are beaten everywhere. Their backbone is broken; and the surest way to kill a copperhead or any other reptile … is to break his back.”162

  When Brough triumphed over Vallandigham by a margin of slightly less than 100,000, capturing 95 percent of the soldier vote, Lincoln was vastly relieved and immensely delighted, regarding the outcome as a popular verdict on his presidency. The following day he told Gideon Welles that he “had more anxiety in regard to the election results of yesterday [in Ohio] than he had in 1860 when he was chosen. He could not have believed four years ago that one genuine American would or could be induced to vote for such a man as Vallandigham; yet he has been made the candidate of a large party, their representative man, and has received a vote that has discredited the country.”163

  When Brough called at the White House and lamented that he had not prevailed by 100,000 votes, Lincoln said he was reminded of a “man who had been greatly annoyed by an ugly dog” and “took a club and knocked the dog on the head and killed him; but he still continued to whack the animal, when a passer-by cried out to him, ‘Why, what are you about, man? Don’t you see the dog is dead? Where is the use of beating him now?’ ‘Yes,’ replied the man, whacking away at the dog, ‘I know he is dead, but I wanted to teach the mean dog that there is punishment after death.’ Poor Val was dead before the election, but Brough wanted to keep on whacking him, as the man did the dog, after death.”164

  Lincoln was also gratified by the outcome in Pennsylvania, where Governor Andrew G. Curtin stood for reelection despite suffering from such poor health that he could not campaign extensively. The Democrats had nominated George W. Woodward, the cold, calculating chief justice of the state supreme court who maintained that both the Enrollment and the Legal Tender Acts were unconstitutional. He had done his best to impede the draft. During the secession crisis, he called slavery an “incalculable blessing” and expressed the hope that if the country were to be split, the dividing line would run north of the Keystone State. On September 4, Secretary Chase, who actively campaigned for Brough in Ohio, informed a friend that “Gov. Curtin’s reelection or defeat is now the success or defeat of the administration of President Lincoln.”165 That same day, Curtin warned Lincoln that if “the election were to occur now, the result would be extremely doubtful.”166 As October began, Curtin reported that he was “having a hotly-contested canvass.”167

  On election day, a letter by General McClellan, who was angling for the 1864 Democratic presidential nomination, appeared in Democratic newspapers stating that “I would, were it in my power, give to Judge Woodward my voice and vote.”168 Little Mac’s intervention proved futile, for Curtin, known as the “Soldiers’ Friend
,” bested Woodward by over 15,000 votes, winning 51.5 percent of the ballots cast. But McClellan did improve his chances to win his party’s nod for the presidency a few months later. According to Alexander K. McClure, Lincoln took “unusual interest” in the Pennsylvania campaign “and his congratulations to Curtin upon his re-election were repeated for several days, and were often as quaint as they were sincere.”169 George William Curtis urged friends to “rejoice over Penn. & Ohio. It is the great vindication of the President, and the popular verdict upon the policy of the war.” He asked rhetorically, “Is it not the sign of the final disintegration of that rotten mass known technically as the Democratic party?”170

  Republicans also won gubernatorial races in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts, as well as carrying numerous local elections. Lincoln’s spirits soared, especially at the landslide in the Bay State.

  Transforming the Free State into a Free State: Elections in Maryland

  The November elections in Maryland (for congressmen, state comptroller, and local offices) caused Lincoln some anxiety, for he was especially eager to promote emancipation there. But the public was led to believe otherwise when on October 3, Montgomery Blair delivered an intemperate speech at Rockville attacking the “ultra-abolitionists” and sharply criticizing Charles Sumner’s “state suicide” theory, which he compared unfavorably to Lincoln’s Reconstruction policy. At times Blair sounded like a Democrat as he championed states rights and denounced Radicals for supporting measures that “would make the manumission of the slaves the means of infusing their blood into our whole system by blending with it ‘amalgamation, equality, and fraternity.’ ”171