Lincoln dejectedly remarked that the only Republican congressman “in whose personal and political friendship he could be absolutely confide” was Isaac N. Arnold.117 (In March, Arnold had praised Lincoln extravagantly in a House speech that was widely distributed in pamphlet form.) Wendell Phillips alleged that only five senators and proportionally even fewer congressmen supported Lincoln for reelection. One of the discontented congressmen, James Ashley of Ohio, tried to enlist War Democrats and skittish Republicans in an attempt to nominate Butler and force Lincoln to step aside. After consulting with Thurlow Weed, Thomas Corwin, Pennsylvania Congressman John Hickman, and others, Ashley assured Butler that there was strong support for his candidacy, and issued a call for a meeting at Cooper Union on August 17. But that document was so radical that it attracted few adherents. Still, Ashley plugged away, making common cause with New Yorkers like George Opdyke, Horace Greeley, George Wilkes, David Dudley Field, George B. Cheever, and Butler’s principal aide, John W. Shaffer. Meanwhile, John A. Andrew, Henry Winter Davis and others banded together for the same end. At a meeting on August 19 at the New York home of Opdyke, it was decided to issue a call for a new Republican convention to meet at Cincinnati on September 28. Boston Radicals, led by George Luther Stearns, wrote Frémont a public letter endorsing the idea and urged both him and the president to withdraw. On August 25, the Pathfinder replied that he would quit if Lincoln did also. (His equivocal letter did not please Stearns: “What an abortion Fremont[’]s letter is, cold as winter,” he told Wendell Phillips. “I wonder the thermometer has not fall[en] to 40°. Well, we have done all we could for the good honest man, but he is constitutionally unable to do his part.”)118
But Lincoln would not cooperate. As he told Carl Schurz: “They urge me with almost violent language to withdraw from the contest, although I have been unanimously nominated, in order to make room for a better man. I wish I could. Perhaps some other man might do this business better than I. That is possible. I do not deny it. But I am here, and that better man is not here. And if I should step aside to make room for him, it is not at all sure—perhaps not even probable—that he would get here. It is much more likely that the factions opposed to me would fall to fighting among themselves, and that those who want me to make room for a better man would get a man whom most of them would not want in at all. My withdrawal, therefore, might, and probably would, bring on a confusion worse confounded. God knows, I have at least tried very hard to do my duty—to do right to everybody and wrong to nobody. And now to have it said by men who have been my friends and who ought to know me better, that I have been seduced by what they call the lust of power, and that I have been doing this and that unscrupulous thing hurtful to the common cause, only to keep myself in office! Have they thought of that common cause when trying to break me down? I hope they have.”119
In July, while discussing the clamor for peace, Lincoln told a visitor: “I have faith in the people. They will not consent to disunion. The danger is, they are misled. Let them know the truth, and the country is safe.” Looking exhausted, he was asked if he worked too hard. “I can’t work less, but it isn’t that—work never troubled me. Things look badly, and I can’t avoid anxiety. Personally I care nothing about a re-election; but if our divisions defeat us, I fear for the country.”120
The lowest point in Lincoln’s presidency arrived in August, when he and many party leaders became convinced that he would lose. His 1860 campaign manager, David Davis, noted that the public was “getting tired of the war.” If the North did “not have military successes soon, & the democrats at Chicago act with wisdom, we are in danger of losing the Presidential election,” he warned.121 “Lincoln has done every thing that a man could do to deserve to be beaten,” growled a pessimistic New York attorney.122 On Long Island, a Republican paper praised Lincoln’s honesty but concluded that “he is not a man for the times—too easy, forbearing, and shortsighted. We need a man of sterner stuff, and possessed of deeper penetration.”123 The people were “coming to think that something more than good intentions are demanded of a national leader in such a crisis,” observed the Concord, New Hampshire, Monitor.124 Thurlow Weed told Lincoln that his reelection “was an impossibility.”125 In early August, the New York boss reportedly said that “Lincoln can be prevailed upon to draw off,” and told a friend that he would support a Democratic nominee for president if that party would declare that it was for reunion and against emancipation and subjugation of the South.126 At that same time, several Republican leaders met in Boston and concluded that something must be done to appease those demanding peace. Treasury Secretary Fessenden feared that otherwise he would be unable to carry out his duties and would have to resign. Senator Henry Wilson conveyed their message to Lincoln.
Leonard Swett, who shared Weed’s view of Lincoln’s reelection prospects, wrote home to Illinois saying: “Unless material changes can be wrought, Lincoln’s election is beyond any possible hope. It is probably clean gone now.” Swett was alarmed to find New Yorkers inert and demoralized, especially Republican national chairman Henry J. Raymond. The New York Times editor, whom Lincoln called “my lieutenant general in politics,” had just published a long campaign biography of the president. Goaded by Swett, Raymond decided to call a meeting of the party’s national committee in Washington with the understanding that Swett would prepare the way by visiting the president to see if he “understood his danger and would help to set things in motion.”127
When Swett asked Lincoln if he expected to win reelection, the president responded gloomily: “Well, I don[’]t think I ever heard of any man being elected to an office unless some one was for him.”128 To his old friend William Bross, lieutenant governor of Illinois, Lincoln sadly remarked that he understood why Westerners were anxious: “Well, they want success and they haven’t got it; but we are all doing the best we can. For my part I shall stay right here and do my duty. Traitors will find me at my table.” Pointing to a tall maple on the White House grounds, he added: “They can come and hang me to that tree if they like.”129 When the private secretary of a cabinet member told him of the widespread pessimism in New York, Lincoln paced the floor and “with grim earnestness of tone and manner” said: “Well, I cannot run the political machine; I have enough on my hands without that. It is the people’s business,—the election is in their hands. If they turn their backs to the fire, and get scorched in the rear, they’ll find they have got to ‘sit’ on the ‘blister’!”130 In mid-August, when Governor Francis Pierpont of loyal Virginia told Lincoln that the Copperheads were waging “a very unfair campaign and it needed attention,” he replied: “Yes, but we need military success more—and without it I doubt the result. If the election had come off two weeks after I was nominated at Baltimore, I think I should have carried every state that will vote this fall, but if it should come off tomorrow I hardly feel certain of what state I should carry. The people seem despondent, and our opponents are pressing the howl that the war is a failure and it has had its effect in the army and among the people. We must have military success.”131 Some faint-hearted Republicans argued that it might be wise to abandon the war effort on the assumption that it would better to have two countries, one of which was free, than one country with slavery.
Intensifying Lincoln’s gloom was an August 22 letter from Henry J. Raymond offering a dismal forecast: “I am in active correspondence with your staunchest friends in every State and from them all I hear but one report. The tide is setting strongly against us. Hon. E. B. Washburne writes that ‘were an election to be held now in Illinois we should be beaten’. Mr. Cameron writes that Pennsylvania is against us. Gov. Morton writes that nothing but the most strenuous efforts can carry Indiana.” New York “would go 50.000 against us to-morrow. And so of the rest. Nothing but the most resolute and decided action, on the part of the Government and its friends, can save the country from falling into hostile hands. Two special causes are assigned for this great reaction in public sentiment,—the want of military success
es, and the impression in some minds, the fear and suspicion in others, that we are not to have peace in any event under this Administration until Slavery is abandoned. In some way or other the suspicion is widely diffused that we can have peace with Union if we would. It is idle to reason with this belief—still more idle to denounce it. It can only be expelled by some authoritative act, at once bold enough to fix attention and distinct enough to defy incredulity & challenge respect.”132 Even such a stout supporter of the administration as John W. Forney’s Washington Chronicle declared that it “would be glad to see Mr. Lincoln out of the canvass, with all our attachment to his person and his sense of his prescience, if by such a surrender we could save the country from the election of a dishonorable peace on the basis of separation.”133
The Niagara Manifesto
“The people [of the North]” Thurlow Weed warned, “are wild for Peace. They are told that the President will only listen to terms of Peace on condition Slavery be ‘abandoned.’ ”134 The despairing public had good reason to believe that Lincoln would not end the war before slavery was extirpated. In the summer of 1864, Confederate leaders, aiming to capitalize on Northern war weariness and to fuel the growing demand for a negotiated peace, floated bogus peace overtures that the gullible Horace Greeley took seriously. The Tribune editor alerted Lincoln that he had received word from one William C. “Colorado” Jewett that two emissaries from Jefferson Davis were in Canada, fully authorized to negotiate for peace. (Jewett, described by Edward Bates as “a crack-brained simpleton” and reportedly a notorious Lothario known for stiffing creditors and committing fraud, had sent abusive letters to Lincoln, prompting John Hay to write a crushing response: “In the exercise of my duties [as] secretary in charge of the President’s correspondence, it is necessary for me to use a certain discretion in the choice of letters to be submitted to the personal inspection of the President. In order to avoid a further waste of time on your part, I have to inform you that your letters are never so submitted. My proceeding in this matter has the sanction of the President.”)135
In forwarding this information, Greeley patronizingly told Lincoln: “I venture to remind you that our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country also longs for peace—shudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood. And a wide-spread conviction that the Government and its prominent supporters are not anxious for Peace, and do not improve proffered opportunities to achieve it, is doing great harm now, and is morally certain, unless removed, to do far greater in the approaching Elections. It is not enough that we anxiously desire a true and lasting peace; we ought to demonstrate and establish the truth beyond cavil.”136 The rivers of blood ran especially deep that spring. Four days prior to the Republican convention, Grant lost 7,000 men in a frontal attack against entrenched Confederates at Cold Harbor. “I regret this assault more than any one I have ever ordered,” the general said that evening.137
Though Lincoln rightly assumed that Jefferson Davis had given no authority to the emissaries in Canada, he knew that Greeley was accurate in stating that the administration could not afford to seem indifferent to peace feelers, even if made by agents whose goal, he correctly noted, “was to inflame the peace sentiment of the North, to embarrass the administration, and to demoralize the army.”138 Because he personally was unwilling to treat the peace negotiators as representatives of a legitimate government, Lincoln shrewdly asked Greeley to act as an unofficial mediator to deal with them. On July 9, he authorized the Tribune editor to bring to Washington for consultation “any person anywhere professing to have any proposition of Jefferson Davis in writing, for peace, embracing the restoration of the Union and abandonment of slavery.” Six days later the president told Greeley, who had written that the Confederate agents seemed serious: “I not only intend a sincere effort for peace, but I intend that you shall be a personal witness that it is made.”139 When James Ashley protested Greeley’s mission, Lincoln said: “Don’t worry; nothing will come of it.”140 The Tribune editor, said Lincoln, “means right” but “makes me almost as much trouble as the whole Southern Confederacy.”141
When John Hay presented Lincoln’s letter to Greeley, the editor protested that he was “the worst man that could be taken for the purpose” and predicted that “as soon as he arrived there, the newspapers would be full of it” and that “he would be abused & blackguarded.”142 Nonetheless, he accepted the mission and at Niagara Falls met with the Confederate spokesmen James P. Holcombe, George N. Sanders, Clement C. Clay, and Jacob Thompson. He grievously misled them by failing to make clear that Lincoln insisted on “the restoration of the Union and abandonment of slavery,” for he thought the president should not propose terms but instead let Jefferson Davis do so. When the Confederates told Greeley that they were not in fact officially accredited to negotiate, the editor requested further instructions from Washington. In reply, the president sent John Hay with a document that was to shock Northern peace advocates: “To whom it may concern: Any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery, and which comes by and with an authority that can control the armies now at war against the United States, will be received and considered by the Executive Government of the United States, and will be met by liberal terms on other substantial and collateral points; and the bearer or bearers thereof shall have safe conduct both ways.”143 Democrats called this “the Niagara Manifesto.”
Because Greeley had not informed them initially of the president’s conditions for negotiations, the Confederate agents were surprised by this document. Erroneously concluding that Lincoln had shifted his stance, they accused him of acting in bad faith. The New York Daily News declared that the Manifesto “is in such marked contrast with the previous spirit of the correspondence that it resembles the caprice of a foolish girl trifling with her submissive lover.”144
Resenting the false position in which Greeley had put him, Lincoln asked the editor to publish their correspondence, with minor omissions. Greeley refused to run anything but the entire text, with its melodramatic analysis of the state of the country. Lincoln decided to drop the matter rather than have the demoralizing parts of Greeley’s letters appear in print and thus dampen Northern spirits any further. Vexed by the editor’s intransigence, Lincoln compared him to an old shoe. “In early life,” he told the cabinet, “and with few mechanics and but little means in the West, we used to make our shoes last a great while with much mending, and sometimes, when far gone, we found the leather so rotten the stitches would not hold. Greeley is so rotten that nothing can be done with him. He is not truthful—the stitches all tear out.”145 Several months later, speaking of Greeley’s unwillingness to allow the publication of a lightly redacted version of their correspondence, Lincoln offered a less harsh judgment: “In some respects Mr. Greeley is a great man, but in many others he is wanting in common sense.”146
When some of the correspondence nonetheless appeared in newspapers, Greeley was made to look foolish as he deceitfully tried to blame Lincoln for the misunderstanding. Radicals praised the Niagara Manifesto as “one of the most dignified and appropriate acts in the records of the war.”147 A Congregational minister told his Boston flock that the president “exactly struck the pulse-beat of the nation in his note ‘to whom it may concern’ which so effectually demolished some would-be negotiators.”148 The Philadelphia Bulletin praised Lincoln for showing “wisdom, humanity, and genuine patriotism.”149 From Kansas, Mark W. Delahay reported to Lincoln that the document “was a fortunate thing; it has disarmed a class of Democrats of one important weapin, all who preached up, that you would not be for, or yield your assent to an honorable peace.”150
Conservatives renewed their charge that Lincoln was transforming what was originally a war to preserve the Union into an abolitionist crusade. The Democratic Cincinnati Enquirer called the Niagara Manifesto “a finality, which … will preclude any conference for a settlement
. Every soldier … that is killed, will lose his life not for the Union, the Stars and Stripes, but for the negro.”151 To the Detroit Free Press, it was proof positive that Lincoln was “bound hand and foot to the dogmas of the extreme abolitionists.”152 George Templeton Strong deemed it a “blunder” that “may cost him his election. By declaring that abandonment of slavery is a fundamental article in any negotiation for peace and settlement, he has given the disaffected and discontented a weapon that doubles their power of mischief.”153 One of the discontented, Maryland Senator Reverdy Johnson, asked rhetorically of the Niagara Manifesto: “could there be a refusal so insane, so reckless, so inhuman, so barbarous?”154 In Pennsylvania, Democratic newspapers jeered that “our flippant, cunning undignified despot” was prosecuting the war to “liberate the negro and rivet their chains upon white freemen.”155 Some conservative Republican papers were also critical. In Illinois, Democrats predicted that the Manifesto would add 50,000 votes to their total in the fall.
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2 Page 120
