Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Although some Republicans pooh-poohed the movement in favor of Frémont as “principally confined to the craziest portion of the infidel Dutch,” others joined it, including a band of New York Radicals who launched the Frémont Campaign Club on March 18 at Cooper Union.286 Among the attendees were such abolitionist luminaries as Parker Pillsbury and George B. Cheever. After adopting a platform condemning the “irresolute and feeble” policy of the administration and calling for a “vigorous, consistent, concentrated prosecution of the war,” they were startled by the sudden entrance of Horace Greeley. The Tribune editor announced his support for a one-term limit on the presidency, recommended postponing the Republican national convention until it was clear what Grant’s summer campaign might yield, and declared that “the people of New York were in favor of putting down the rebellion and its cause, and sustaining Freedom,” and that Frémont “would carry out such views.”287 In the Tribune, Greeley conceded that Lincoln had merits but insisted “that they are not such as to eclipse and obscure those of all the statesmen and soldiers who have aided in the great work of saving the country from disruption and overthrow.”288

  Most Republicans resisted the appeal of Frémont, who “would rather split the party as he does his hair in the middle than see Lincoln elected,” David Davis quipped.289

  By the late spring, Lincoln believed that he had sewn up the nomination. When David Davis and Leonard Swett expressed anxiety about the convention, he assured them that there was no need to worry. But, he added, supposedly loyal delegates might not prove reliable. The situation reminded him of a story “about a man and a woman in the old days traveling up and down the country with a fiddle and a banjo making music for their living. And the man was proud of his wife’s virtue and was always saying that no man could get to her, and he would trust her with any man who wanted to try it on a bet. And he made a bet with a stranger one day and the stranger took the wife into a room while the husband stood outside the door and played his fiddle. For quite a while he stood there playing his fiddle, and at last sang a song to her asking her how she was coming along with the stranger.” She replied with a song of her own:

  He’s got me down,

  He’s clasped me round the middle;

  Kiss my ass and go to hell;

  Be off with your damned old fiddle.

  An angry Davis scolded Lincoln: “if the country knew you were telling those stories, you could never be elected and you know it.” In reply, the president just laughed.290

  Lincoln’s opponents might not be able to stop his renomination, but they could launch a third party and run Frémont as their standard-bearer. Even if the general was unable to win outright, some Radicals hoped his candidacy would throw the election into the House of Representatives and thus deny Lincoln a second term. The feminist leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton favored dumping Lincoln because he “has proved his incapacity for the great responsibilities of his position.” Dismissively, she declared, “I say Butler or Fremont or some man on their platform for the next President & let Abe finish up his jokes in Springfield. We have had enough of ‘Nero fiddling in Rome’ in times like these, when the nation groans in sorrow, & mothers mourn for their first born.”291 She objected to Lincoln’s appearance as well as his sense of humor.

  Other feminist-abolitionists agreed. One of them, the young Quaker orator Anna E. Dickinson, had publicly called for the president’s reelection during a speech that he attended in January 1864, but she later denounced Lincoln for being “not so far from … a slave-catcher after all,” and privately called him “an Ass … for the Slave Power to ride” as well as “the wisest scoundrel in the country.” She announced that “I would rather lose all the reputation I possess & sell apples & peanuts on the street than say aught—that would gain a vote for him.”292 In the early spring of that year, she visited the White House to urge a more vigorous enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation. She later told an audience in Boston that Lincoln tried to divert her with a story, which she saucily interrupted, saying: “I didn’t come to hear stories. I can read better ones in the papers any day than you can tell me.” The president then showed her some letters about events in Louisiana. When asked her opinion of the administration’s Reconstruction policy, she declared it “all wrong; as radically bad as can be.” She alleged that Lincoln replied to this criticism with some compliments for his attractive young caller and closed with a piece of advice: “If the radicals want me to lead, let them get out of the way and let me lead.” Indignantly she told a friend, “I have spoken my last word to President Lincoln.” As she related this tale in Boston, she belittled Lincoln’s appearance, particularly “his old coat, out at the elbows[,] which look[ed] as if he had worn it three years and used it as a pen wiper.” She also had unkind words for his “stocking limp and soiled.”293 At least one member of the audience thought her comments about the president were “in the worst possible taste.”294

  The abolitionist J. Miller McKim, who had been a mentor to Dickinson and who thought her “desire to do what is right is strong, but her desire for distinction is enormous,” heard a different version of this interview from Congressman William D. Kelley. According to Kelley, who was present during the conversation, she said very little, being “more a witness” than a participant. “What she did say was ‘fool’ish according to her own acknowledgment at the time. She burst into tears—struck an attitude and begged Mr. L. to excuse her for coming there to make a fool of herself.” Lincoln “was paternally kind and considerate in what he said to her.” In discussing affairs in Louisiana, Kelley objected to General Banks’s decision to hold a constitutional convention after rather than before the election of state officers. That approach, Kelley thought, was less likely to promote the cause of black citizenship rights. Lincoln acknowledged that others agreed with the congressman’s views and “that a powerful argument could be made in favor” of them. But as things stood, he thought Banks’s plan preferable. As for black citizenship rights, Lincoln predicted: “That must come soon. It must come pretty soon, and will.” Kelley told McKim: “It pleased me to know that the President had firmly stipulated for a free state and that he saw the coming of Negro suffrage in Louisiana.”295

  In April, Dickinson’s friend, journalist Whitelaw Reid, urged her to temper her criticism of the president: “It can do no good now for you to get tangled in the strifes of personal politics, & it may do much harm. Mr. Lincoln’s popularity with the masses is established,—by what means it no longer does good to inquire,—& attacks on him only serve to inflame the ardor of his friends.” Radical denunciation of the president, Reid warned, might backfire “by driving him to the Democratic & Blair parties for support.”296

  Some Radicals objected to Frémont. Summarizing their case, Wendell Phillips’s son-in-law, George W. Smalley, argued that while the general might be “able & personally as honest as most public men,” yet he was also “vain & selfish,” the “worst judge of men in America,” “surrounded by swindlers,” a “weak man, sure to be a tool in others’ hands,” and “habitually a libertine” who had “seduced a governess in his own family.”297

  On May 4, a self-styled “people’s provisional committee” issued a call for a national convention to meet in Cleveland at the end of the month, one week before the Republicans gathered at Baltimore. Endorsing the movement were several abolitionists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, William Goodell, Susan B. Anthony, George and Henry Cheever, and Wendell Phillips. Phillips complained that “Old Abe is more cunning & slow than ever” and “evidently wishes to save slaveholders as much loss & trouble as he can.” The celebrated orator thought that most voters “would take Lincoln if he’d announce a policy, still more if he’d change his cabinet,” for such moves “would indicate a man. But he is I think no believer in the negro as a citizen—is indeed a colonizationist yet—use the negro & be rid of him.” The president “wishes to benefit the negro as much as he can & yet let the white race down gently—do them as little harm or ch
ange as possible. This is his first care—the negro his second.”298 (When Phillips charged that the truth of Chase’s “Anti-Slavery life was tested and proved base metal,” the treasury secretary’s defenders aptly called him “the Boston Thersites” and a “common scold” with whom “the world has been all wrong from the beginning” and who “aspires to the unenviable distinction of scolding it into good behavior.”)299 Signatories for the Cleveland meeting also included Missouri Senator B. Gratz Brown and some German Radicals, among them Caspar Butz, who deemed Lincoln “the weakest and worst man that ever filled the Presidential chair.”300 Privately, influential Republicans like David Dudley Field, Andrew G. Curtin, and John A. Andrew supported Frémont. Governor Andrew maintained that “the administration lacks coherence, method, purpose, and consistency.”301

  In signing the Cleveland call, Frederick Douglass explained that he supported “the complete abolition of every vestige, form and modification of Slavery in every part of the United States, perfect equality for the black man in every State before the law, in the jury box, at the ballot-box and on the battle-field: ample and salutary retaliation for every instance of enslavement or slaughter of prisoners of color.” He also insisted “that in the distribution of offices and honors under this Government no discrimination shall be made in favor or against any class of citizens, whether black or white, of native or foreign birth.”302 Not all black abolitionists agreed with Douglass. Just before the Cleveland Convention, John Mercer Langston of Oberlin, Ohio, said Lincoln was “cautious and for that reason he was the man of the hour. His head and his heart were right.” Langston thanked God for the president’s leadership.303

  Few attended the Cleveland Convention to launch the new “Radical Democratic Party.” When informed that the total number of delegates was no more than 400, Lincoln was reminded of an Old Testament passage describing the supporters of David at the cave of Adullam: “And every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him, and he became a captain over them, and there were with him about four hundred men.”304

  Wendell Phillips was not among the 400, but he wrote a letter that was read to the wildly approving assemblage. In it he excoriated the Lincoln administration, calling it “a civil and military failure” and predicting that if the incumbent were reelected, “I do not expect to see the Union reconstructed in my day, unless on terms more disastrous to liberty than even disunion would be.” The president’s approach to Reconstruction, Phillips charged, “puts all power into the hands of the unchanged white race, soured by defeat, hating the laboring classes, plotting constantly for aristocratic institutions.” Lincoln’s scheme “makes the freedom of the negro a sham, and perpetuates slavery under a softer name.” The convention should “demand a reconstruction of States as speedily as possible on the basis of every loyal man, white or black, sharing the land and the ballot.” In stark contrast to Lincoln, Phillips asserted, stood Frémont, “whose first act was to use the freedom of the negro as his weapon … whose thorough loyalty to democratic institutions, without regard to race, whose earnest and decisive character, whose clear-sighted statesmanship and rare military ability justify my confidence that in his hands all will be done to save the State that foresight, skill, decision, and statesmanship can do.”305

  The delegates shared Phillips’s enthusiasm for Frémont, who won the nomination handily, but they ignored his advice regarding the platform; they glossed over both black suffrage and land redistribution to freedmen, using nebulous language about “equality before the law.” The convention did, however, endorse a proposal to amend the Constitution to abolish slavery nationwide. That measure had been vigorously debated in Congress over the preceding months, easily passing the senate in April but failing to gain the necessary two-thirds vote in the House.

  Some Radicals found the convention’s proceedings unsatisfactory. The Detroit abolitionist Giles B. Stebbins reported that “the resolve of the Cleveland Convention for ‘equal rights for all’ is looked upon as vague, and of no meaning. That Convention has no moral power.”306 The nomination of John Cochrane as Frémont’s running mate was especially disturbing, for Cochrane had regularly voted for Democratic presidential candidates and was, according to the National Anti-Slavery Standard, a man “without a drop of anti-slavery blood in his veins” and “whose life has been one long chapter of intrigue.”307 (Commenting on the many officeholders attending the Cleveland Convention, Lincoln said of Cochrane that he had been awarded his general’s stars “not for his merits but his brass.”)308 Also disturbing was a platform plank condemning the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, for that smacked too much of Copperheadism. The editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, Oliver Johnson, denounced the Cleveland movement as “an ally of Jeff. Davis” and called Fremont “a scoundrel, in alliance with the corrupt leaders of the Copperhead Democracy to divide the loyal voters of the country in the Presidential election.” Johnson added that the feeble antislavery plank of the Cleveland platform was “Homeopathic,” while its “Copperheadism” was “conspicuous and emphatic.” He wondered what “delusion” had overcome such radical abolitionists as William Goodell, George B. Cheever, and Cheever’s brother Henry.309 William Lloyd Garrison’s close ally, Henry C. Wright, deplored “the spirit of bitterness” that was “entering into & controlling the whole being of some of our old Abolitionists.”310

  Lydia Maria Child regarded Frémont as “a selfish unprincipled adventurer.”311 His acceptance letter seemed like a bid for the Democratic nomination, for it emphasized standard Copperhead charges about “the abuses of a military dictation,” rejected the platform’s call for confiscation of Rebel property, and said nothing about citizenship rights for blacks.312 That document “killed him dead,” according to a Chase partisan, and it angered George William Curtis, who exclaimed: “Poor Frémont! What a shadow and a sham he is!”313 Franklin B. Sanborn thought the candidate’s letter “has taken ground much worse than Lincoln’s.” In Sanborn’s view, the general had “committed fello de se.”314 When Samuel May learned that Stephen Foster praised the letter as “just what we want,” he exclaimed in disgust: “Well, it is certainly instructive, to find out at last, after the throes and travails of so many years on the part of our friend Stephen & his special associates, ‘just what he wants.’ What a dizzy height of moral grandeur!”315

  Some Democrats did hope to ally with the Radical Republicans. Such disparate elements could, according to a party leader in New York, unite both in “opposition to the enormous frauds” tolerated by the Lincoln administration “and to the gross infringements upon the constitutional rights of Citizens & of the press at the North.”316

  William Lloyd Garrison, who had repeatedly denounced Lincoln throughout the war, now disagreed with the president’s critics and opposed the Frémont movement. While Phillips scorned the incumbent as “a half-converted, honest Western Whig, trying to be an abolitionist,” Garrison insisted that Lincoln must be judged on the basis “of his possibilities, rather than by our wishes, or by the highest abstract moral standard.”317 Phillips retorted that “the Administration has never yet acknowledged the manhood of the negro.”318 At a meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in January, Phillips succeeded in having a bitter anti-Lincoln resolution adopted over Garrison’s protest: “the Government, in its haste, is ready to sacrifice the interest and honor of the North to secure a sham peace … leaving the freedmen and the Southern States under the control of the late slaveholders.” In support of this claim, Phillips acknowledged that Lincoln deserved credit for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation but insisted that blacks needed more than the administration was willing to give. “There stands the black man, naked, homeless; he does not own a handful of dust; he has no education; he has no roof to shelter him.” The president, Phillips charged, has “no desire, no purpose, no thought, to lift the freed negro to a higher status, social or political, than that of a mere labourer, s
uperintended by others.” The present administration “was knowingly preparing for a peace in disregard of the negro.” Its unwillingness to treat black troops as the equal of whites proved “that the Government is ready for terms which ignore the rights of the negro.” The Emancipation Proclamation merely provided “technical liberty,” which was “no better than apprenticeship. Equality is our claim, but it is not within the intention of the Government to grant it to the freedmen.” Therefore, Phillips concluded, “I cannot trust the Government.”319 Abolitionists, he complained, got nothing from Lincoln “except by pressure. We have constantly to be pushing him from behind.”320