Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  In late November, Lincoln informed the cabinet that there was “a tremendous pressure just now for Evarts of New York, who, I suppose, is a good lawyer.”29 Chase acknowledged that Evarts clearly outshone him as an attorney. When Richard Henry Dana and Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar pressed Evarts’s case and denigrated Chase, Lincoln replied: “Chase is a very able man” who happened to be “a little insane” on the presidency and who “has not always behaved very well lately.” Still, when people recommended that “now is the time to crush him out,” Lincoln replied: “Well I’m not in favor of crushing anybody out! If there is anything a man can do and do it well, I say let him do it. Give him a chance.”30 Hoar had hoped that Stanton and Chase would cancel each other out, leaving Evarts as the obvious compromise candidate.

  Lincoln told Colfax that he wanted to name Evarts, but “in deference to what he supposed to be public sentiment” he instead appointed Chase, who, he said, “occupies the largest place in the public mind in connection with the office.”31 The nation, he explained, “needed assurances in regard to two great questions,” emancipation and the legal tender act. Many eminent attorneys were sound on those issues, but Chase had been so identified with them that he would never overturn them.32 Lincoln could not be certain of others. “We cannot ask a man what he will do,” he explained to George Boutwell; “if we should, and he should answer us, we should despise him for it.” But it was unnecessary to quiz Chase, for his views were well known.33

  Lincoln had evidently decided to appoint Chase as early as the spring of 1864, when he told Charles Sumner that he intended to name the former treasury secretary to fill Taney’s place. At the end of June, he repeated this intention to Samuel Hooper and William P. Fessenden. Upon accepting Chase’s resignation, Lincoln had said that the Ohioan should “go home without making any fight and wait for a good thing hereafter, such as a vacancy on the Supreme Bench.”34 A week after Taney’s death, the president informed Senator Fessenden that he planned to appoint Chase, “but as things were going on well, he thought it best not to make any appointment or say anything about it until the election was over.”35 He did not want to antagonize Conservatives during the campaign.

  Radicals bemoaned the delay, calling Lincoln a “very Sphynx,” but on December 6, when he finally submitted Chase’s name to the senate, his belief that doing so would please the Radicals was confirmed.36 “I will now excuse many foolish things in the President, for this one ‘big’ thing,” said one.37 “It is equal to a military victory” and shows “that Mr. Lincoln is in sympathy with the spirit of those who supported him at the last election,” declared a colonel in the U.S. Colored Troops.38 But the editor of the Cincinnati Gazette erred in maintaining that Chase’s appointment “preserves the Administration party, and heals up any real or imaginary breach that may have existed in it.”39 While applauding Lincoln’s Supreme Court selection, some Radicals continued their fierce opposition to his Reconstruction plans.

  “Probably no other man than Lincoln,” Nicolay wrote to his fiancée, “would have had, in this age of the world, the degree of magnanimity to thus forgive and exalt a rival who had so deeply and so unjustifiably intrigued against him. It is however only another most marked illustration of the greatness of the President, in this age of little men.”40 Lincoln was magnanimous indeed, for Chase had deeply angered him. The president said that personally he would rather “have swallowed his buckhorn chair” or “eat[en] flat irons” than appoint Chase.41 Montgomery Blair speculated plausibly that Chase “was the only human being that I believe Lincoln actually hated,” and Charles A. Dana thought the “appointment was not made by the President with entire willingness. He is a man who keeps a grudge as faithfully as any other living Christian, and consented to Mr. Chase’s elevation, only when the pressure became very general and very urgent.”42 Although Dana overestimated Lincoln’s capacity for nursing grudges and underestimated his political savvy and commitment to freedom, there is some truth in his analysis; appointing Chase taxed the president’s legendary powers of forgiveness to the utmost.

  Upon receiving word of his appointment, Chase promptly expressed his gratitude to Lincoln: “I cannot sleep before I thank you for this mark of your confidence, and especially for the manner in which the nomination was made. I shall never forget either and trust that you will never regret either. Be assured that I prize your confidence and good will more than nomination or office.”43 On the bench, Chase confirmed Lincoln’s fears that he would continue scheming to win the presidency. Ironically, his appointment proved unnecessary either for protecting emancipation (the Thirteenth Amendment took care of that) or upholding the legal tender act (he voted with the majority to declare it unconstitutional).

  The Bixby Letter

  In the immediate aftermath of the election, Lincoln was unusually preoccupied. When Charles S. Spencer, head of the Lincoln and Johnson Campaign Club of New York City, asked the president to provide a banquet toast, Lincoln wished to compose the text himself rather than have John Hay do it. But, as Hay told Spencer on November 25, Lincoln “was literally crowded out of the opportunity to writing a note” because “the crush here just now is beyond endurance.”44

  Nor did Lincoln have time to write a suitable reply when Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew requested a presidential acknowledgment of the heroic sacrifice made by one of his constituents, a widow named Lydia Bixby, who (falsely) claimed that she had lost five sons in the war. For the president’s signature Hay wrote a letter of condolence: “Dear Madam,—I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts, that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.”45

  The Bixby letter, as Lincoln biographer James G. Randall noted, “has taken a pre-eminent place as a Lincoln gem and a classic in the language.”46 Carl Sandburg deemed it “a piece of the American Bible. ‘The cherished memory of the loved and lost’—these were blood-color syllables of a sacred music.” Comparing the Bixby letter to the Gettysburg Address, Sandburg added: “More darkly than the Gettysburg speech the letter wove its awful implication that human freedom so often was paid for with agony.”47 Another biographer asserted that “Lincoln’s three greatest writings”—the Gettysburg address, the Bixby letter, and the second inaugural—are the compositions “upon which assessment of his literary reputation must ultimately be based.”48 Those documents, according to a pair of literary scholars, are “great prose-poems” that “were the direct outgrowth of his whole life, of all those mysterious qualities of heredity and environment that went into the making of his genius.”49 The author of a monograph on the development of Lincoln’s prose style pictured him writing to Mrs. Bixby: “we can imagine how that great heart throbbed and that strong, beautiful right hand rapidly traversed the paper while he was bringing comfort to a bereaved patriot mother. There was as true lyrical inspiration at work in the plain office of the White House that twenty-first day of November, 1864 as that which impelled Wordsworth to compose the ‘Ode on Intimations of Immortality.’ ”50

  The Bixby letter is beautiful indeed, but it was written by John Hay, not Lincoln; nor was its recipient the mother of five sons killed in the war. She lost two of her boys and tried to cheat the government out of money by claiming the others had been killed. Of the three survivors, one had deserted to the enemy, another may have done so, and the third was honorably discharged. Mrs. Bixby was born in Virginia, sympathized with the Confederacy, and disliked Lincoln so much that she apparently destroyed the letter in a
nger. Evidence suggests that she ran a whorehouse in Boston and was “perfectly untrustworthy.”51 (Though he did not compose the famous communication to Mrs. Bixby, Lincoln on occasion wrote exceptionally moving letters of condolence, like those he sent to the parents of Elmer Ellsworth in 1861 and to Fanny McCullough the following year.)

  The adjutant general of Massachusetts, after hand-delivering the letter to Mrs. Bixby, provided copies to newspapers, which gave it wide distribution. One partisan Democratic journal sneeringly asked why “Mr. Lincoln’s sons should be kept from the dangers of the field, while the sons of the laboring men are to be hurried into the harvest of death at the front? Are the sons of the rail-splitter, porcelain, and these other common clay?”52 Of course, Tad was far too young to serve, but not 21-year-old Robert. Actually, Robert was eager to drop out of Harvard and enlist, but his mother adamantly objected. “We have lost one son, and his loss is as much as I can bear, without being called upon to make another sacrifice,” she insisted to the president.

  Lincoln replied: “But many a poor mother has given up all her sons, and our son is not more dear to us than the sons of other people are to their mothers.”

  “That may be; but I cannot bear to have Robert exposed to danger. His services are not required in the field, and the sacrifice would be a needless one.”

  “The services of every man who loves his country are required in this war. You should take a liberal instead of a selfish view of the question, mother.”53

  “Don’t I know that only too well?” she cried; “before this war is ended I may be like that poor mother, my poor mother in Kentucky, with not a prop left in her old age.”

  On another occasion, she remarked to her husband: “I know that Robert’s plea to go into the Army is manly and noble and I want him to go, but oh! I am so frightened he may never come back to us!”

  When New York Senator Ira Harris bluntly asked her why Robert was not in uniform, Mary Lincoln replied that her son was “making his preparations now to enter the Army,” and was “not a shirker as you seem to imply for he has been anxious to go for a long time. If fault there be, it is mine. I have insisted that he should stay in college a little longer as I think an educated man can serve his country with more intelligent purpose than an ignoramus.”54

  In January 1865, when the First Lady finally yielded, Lincoln wrote Grant asking that Robert be placed on his staff: “Please read and answer this letter as though I was not President, but only a friend. My son, now in his twenty second year, having graduated at Harvard, wishes to see something of the war before it ends. I do not wish to put him in the ranks, nor yet to give him a commission, to which those who have already served long, are better entitled, and better qualified to hold. Could he, without embarrassment to you, or detriment to the service, go into your Military family with some nominal rank, I, and not the public, furnishing his necessary means? If no, say so without the least hesitation, because I am as anxious, and as deeply interested, that you shall not be encumbered as you can be yourself.”55

  Grant replied graciously: “I will be most happy to have him in my Military family in the manner you propose. The nominal rank given him is immaterial but I would suggest that of Capt. as I have three staff officers now, of conciderable service, in no higher grade. Indeed I have one officer with only the rank of Lieut. who has been in the service from the begining of the war. This however will make no difference and I would still say give the rank of Capt.”56 On February 11, Robert entered the army as a captain and served creditably on Grant’s staff until he resigned five months later.

  Last Annual Message to Congress

  In late November, Lincoln was busy drafting his annual message. On November 14, he told Orville H. Browning that he “had not yet written a word of his message, and thought he would close [the] doors tomorrow and go to work at it.”57 As he did so, he jotted his thoughts on slips of paste board or box board, then revised them before having a printer set them up in widely spaced lines. On this document he made further changes before the final version was set in type.

  The message dealt at length with foreign relations, especially developments in the country’s immediate neighbors, Canada and Mexico. Confederates operating in Ontario laid various schemes to undermine the Union war effort. Jacob Thompson, secretary of war in Buchanan’s administration, helped to foment armed uprisings by the Sons of Liberty in the Northwest. One was scheduled to coincide with the Democratic convention at Chicago in late August. Among other things, the plan called for the liberation of Camp Douglas, a 60-acre prison facility near the city, housing thousands of Rebel POWs who were guarded by only 800 troops. The conspirators lost their nerve, but others quickly hatched another scheme targeting Camp Douglas for election day in November. It was squelched when detectives got wind of it and arrested the leaders, including John B. Castleman, a captain in John Hunt Morgan’s guerrilla band. Lincoln mercifully ordered that he be banished rather than tried as a spy.

  The president was not so merciful with John Yates Beall of the Confederate Navy, ringleader of the “Lake Erie Conspiracy” aimed at liberating Rebel prisoners held at Johnson’s Island off Sandusky, Ohio. Beall and his co-conspirators operated out of Windsor, Canada. In September, their plan to commandeer a Union gunboat on Lake Erie fell through. Beall escaped but three months later was captured while plotting to derail trains in upstate New York. Tried as a spy and guerrilla, he was sentenced to death. Lincoln resisted numerous appeals for clemency from eminent sources, including Thaddeus Stevens and eighty-nine other members of the U.S. House. To an Illinois friend, the president said Beall’s case, like that of the slave trader Nathaniel Gordon, was one “where there must be an example.” The young man’s supporters “tried me every way. They wouldn’t give up; but I had to stand firm on that, and I even had to turn away his poor sister when she came and begged for his life, and let him be executed. I can’t get the distress out of my mind.”58 Lincoln was evidently convinced by the argument of General John A. Dix, who presided at Beall’s court martial. On February 14, 1865, Dix wrote him that the “testimony seemed to me very clear and conclusive; and, in view of the transactions, in which Beall bore so important a part, as well as in consideration of the intelligence daily reaching me that new outrages on our frontier are meditated by rebel emissaries in Canada, I deemed it my duty to order the sentence pronounced upon him to be promptly executed.”59 Joseph Holt sternly endorsed Dix’s recommendation, and Beall was hanged on February 24.

  Lincoln was equally stern with another terrorist, Captain Robert C. Kennedy, one of eight conspirators operating out of Canada who attempted to torch several buildings in New York City on election day. The fires were quickly extinguished and did little harm. Kennedy was apprehended shortly afterward and tried before another court-martial, which found the arsonist guilty and condemned him to death. No intercessors pleaded for mercy, and he went to the gallows on March 25.

  American anger at the British for allowing Confederates to use Canada as a staging area for sabotage, terrorism, and sedition grew stronger when twenty Rebel raiders plundered St. Albans, Vermont. After robbing banks, killing one man, and unsuccessfully trying to burn the town, they retreated to Canada, where authorities released them rather than extradite them to the United States. The American public was understandably outraged and cried for revenge against Great Britain, whose policies throughout the war had seemed to favor the Confederacy. On December 16, the New York Times talked darkly of war: “if it must come, let it come. Not ours the guilt; it will belong only to English malignity and lawlessness. We were never in better condition for a war with England.”60

  Ten days earlier, Lincoln in his annual message urged a less confrontational policy but one that would signal American displeasure with the “recent assaults and depredations committed by inimical and desperate persons, who are harbored there.” He threatened that the United States might expand its navy on the Great Lakes, require Canadians to have passports to enter the United States, and
abrogate the reciprocity treaty of 1854, thus hindering trade between the two countries. But he hoped that such steps would be unnecessary, for “there is every reason to expect that, with the approval of the imperial government,” Canadian authorities “will take the necessary measures to prevent new incursions across the border.”61