Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Earlier in 1864, Lincoln had expressed his irritation with the governor-general of a Canadian maritime province who winked at Confederate blockade runners using its ports. When that official sarcastically asked if he might vote in the impending presidential election, Lincoln, who was exasperated by the governor-general’s lax enforcement of neutrality rules, said he was reminded of a story about an Irishman who arrived in America one election day and was “perhaps, as eager as Your Excellency, to vote, and to vote early and late and often. So, upon his landing at Castle Garden, he hastened to the nearest voting place, and, as he approached, the judge, who received the ballots, inquired: ‘who do you want to vote for? on which side are you?’ Poor Pat was embarrassed, he did not know who were the candidates. He stopped, scratched his head, then, with the readiness of his countrymen, he said: ‘I am fornent the Government, anyhow. Tell me, if your Honor plases, which is the rebellion side, and I’ll tell you how I want to vote. In Ould Ireland, I was always on the rebellion side, and, by Saint Patrick, I’ll stick to that same in America.’ Your Excellency would, I should think, not be at all at a loss on which side to vote?”62

  Less conciliatory than Lincoln, General John A. Dix instructed his troops to pursue Confederate raiders into Canada. The president swiftly revoked the order but with the caveat that if Canadian authorities did not extradite miscreants like the St. Albans terrorists, he would authorize cross-border pursuit in the future. The Canadian prime minister took steps to appease outraged Americans: nine of the St. Albans raiders were arrested and tried in local courts; the government paid back $50 million of the $200 million stolen from Vermont banks; militia were instructed to patrol the border more conscientiously; and Confederate terrorist cells were uprooted. To show his appreciation, Lincoln rescinded the passport order. In England, government leaders spoke “in the highest terms of the manner in which Mr. Lincoln’s Administration had conducted its relations to foreign Powers.”63

  Relations with France became strained in 1864 when Louis Napoleon’s government installed the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian as emperor of Mexico. Three years earlier, the French had joined the British and Spanish in sending a military expedition to Mexico to collect debts. Spain and England withdrew their forces after the mission was accomplished, but French troops stayed on and overthrew the republican government of Benito Juarez, in open violation of the Monroe Doctrine.

  In the spring of 1864, in part to send a message to the French, Lincoln ordered Nathaniel Banks’s army in New Orleans to move into Texas. That expedition up the Red River floundered, and the administration assured France that it had no desire to threaten Maximilian’s regime. Led by the implacable Henry Winter Davis, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, congressional Republicans denounced Lincoln’s appeasement of the French. Davis persuaded the House to approve a resolution condemning France for establishing a puppet regime in Mexico. When Seward assured Louis Napoleon’s government that the United States had no intention of picking a fight over Mexico, the infuriated Davis asked Charles Sumner to bring his resolution to the floor of the senate. Sharing Lincoln’s “one war at a time” approach to foreign affairs, Sumner urged his fellow Radical to postpone the matter. “Our friends are very anxious to get into a war with France,” Lincoln observed, “using this Mexican business for that purpose. They don[’]t consider that England and France would surely be together in that event. France has the whip hand of England completely. England got out of the Mexican business into which she had been deceived by France, by virtue of our having nothing to do with it. They have since been kept apart by good management, and our people are laboring to unite them again by making war on France. Worse than that, instead of doing something effective, if we must fight, they are for making mouths and shaking fists at France warning & threatening and inducing her to prepare for our attack when it comes.”64

  In his 1864 annual message, Lincoln glossed over the Mexican problem, prompting Congressman Davis to introduce a resolution criticizing the administration for ignoring Congress’s power to shape foreign policy. It was tabled because, as a Washington correspondent noted, Republicans “are all in too good a humor with Mr. Lincoln to criticise or complain.” To be sure, they disliked Seward’s apologies for congressional action regarding the Monroe Doctrine, but they believed that Davis “is a very dangerous lion any way, needing to be kept under the most watchful restraint, lest he fall upon the administration party and rend it.”65 Shortly thereafter, the House reversed itself when Davis offered assurances that his resolution implied no criticism of Lincoln. Despite his denial, the New York Times condemned the action of the House as “a splenetic ebullition against the President, on the part of those who failed to prevent his re-election.”66

  In his annual message, Lincoln explained how he hoped to end the Civil War swiftly. He told Congress that upon “careful consideration of all the evidence accessible it seems to me that no attempt at negotiation with the insurgent leader [Jefferson Davis] could result in any good. He would accept nothing short of severance of the Union—precisely what we will not and cannot give. … Between him and us the issue is distinct, simple, and inflexible. It is an issue which can only be tried by war, and decided by victory.” While Davis could not bring about peace because of his mulish insistence on independence, the people of the Confederacy “can, at any moment, have peace simply by laying down their arms and submitting to the national authority under the Constitution. … If questions should remain, we would adjust them by the peaceful means of legislation, conference, courts, and votes, operating only in constitutional and lawful channels.” Here Lincoln was drawing a distinction between the end of bloodshed, which the people could bring about on their own, and ultimate peace terms, which must include not only the restoration of the Union but also the abolition of slavery: “In presenting the abandonment of armed resistance to the national authority on the part of the insurgents, as the only indispensable condition to ending the war on the part of the government, I retract nothing heretofore said as to slavery.” Emphatically he reiterated his commitment to emancipation: “I repeat the declaration made a year ago, that ‘while I remain in my present position I shall not attempt to retract or modify the emancipation proclamation, nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the Acts of Congress.’ If the people should, by whatever mode or means, make it an Executive duty to re-enslave such persons, another, and not I, must be their instrument to perform it.”67

  Congress applauded this last statement loud and long. Radicals hailed its “unblemished moral grandeur” and predicted that it would “have immortal life” and “go down as a heritage to future generations.”68 A colonel in the U.S. Colored Troops echoed that sentiment: “God bless you Abraham Lincoln for these noble words that bring joy to so many thousands of Colored Soldiers and so many hundreds of thousands of women and children; words that would of themselves had you no other claim endear you for all time to all who love Freedom and the Nation.”69 The editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard thanked Lincoln “for the noble words in your Message to Congress, which give assurance that nothing shall be wanting on your part to extirminate slavery, root and branch, from the American soil. … You have justified the confidence which the great body of Abolitionists, led by Wm. Lloyd Garrison, have placed in you.”70

  Congressmen also applauded Lincoln’s reference to the new Maryland constitution: “Maryland is secure to liberty and Union for all the future. The genius of rebellion will no more claim Maryland. Like another foul spirit, being driven out, it may seek to tear her, but it will woo her no more.”

  Lincoln’s statement that the people of the Confederacy “can, at any moment, have peace simply by laying down their arms and submitting to the national authority under the Constitution” may have represented an attempt to make an end-run around Jefferson Davis. Perhaps he was aiming his message at Robert E. Lee, whose power in the Confederacy waxed as Davis’s waned, or at
other war-weary Confederate leaders like Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell, Governor Joseph E. Brown of Georgia, Representatives William W. Boyce of South Carolina and Jehu A. Orr of Mississippi, and Senators William C. Rives of Virginia and William A. Graham of North Carolina. The Tarheel State had long been a hotbed of a powerful, if ill-organized, peace movement that gained strength below the Mason-Dixon line as one Confederate defeat followed another throughout the late summer and autumn of 1864.

  Lee did make overtures to Grant, suggesting that they meet to discuss peace terms. When Grant forwarded the proposal to Washington, he received a blunt response from Stanton: “The President directs me to say that he wishes you to have no conference with Gen Lee unless it be for the capitulation of Lee[’]s army, or on solely minor and purely military matters. He instructs me to say that you are not to decide, discuss, or confer upon any political questions: such questions the President holds in his own hands; and will submit them to no military conferences or conventions—mean-time you are to press to the utmost, your military advantages.”71

  In his annual message, Lincoln tactfully acknowledged that Congress had a role to play in setting peace terms. Some “questions are, and would be, beyond the Executive power to adjust; as, for instance, the admission of members into Congress, and whatever might require the appropriation of money.” Furthermore, he conceded that his power “would be greatly diminished by the cessation of actual war. Pardons and remission of forfeitures, however, would still be within Executive control.” He warned Southerners that the amnesty policy he had announced a year earlier might not remain in effect much longer, for “the time may come—probably will come—when public duty shall demand that it be closed; and that, in lieu, more rigorous measures than heretofore shall be adopted.”72 This may well have been a signal to Radicals that the president would move in their direction.

  As Elizabeth Cady Stanton noted, the message for the most part was a “dry, barren document,” consisting largely of a routine summary of his cabinet secretaries’ reports.73 But some praised it. A Massachusetts judge and former member of the U.S. senate called it an “honor to the country” and thought it was so “remarkably well written” that it “would not suffer in comparison with any message of any President.” Another judge, Samuel F. Miller of the U.S. Supreme Court, detected in Lincoln’s message “a vigor not usual to him.”74 Thaddeus Stevens declared “that it is the best message which has been sent to Congress in the past sixty years.” According to Noah Brooks, the “verdict of all men is that the message is immensely strengthening for the President, and that while it has all of the dignity and polish of a first-rate State paper, it has the strong common sense, the practical knowledge of details which will commend the document to the minds of ‘the simple people.’ ” Brooks told a friend that it was “interesting and curious to observe how the President has grown morally and intellectually since he has been at the White House; take his messages and read them through ad seriatim and you will see his advancement in ability, logic and rhetoric. … The last message is a model of compact, strong sense, practical knowledge and argument.” Brooks asserted that Lincoln “is the man for these times; I know him well—very well, and I do not hesitate to say that he is a far greater and better man than our own people think.” Prophetically Brooks speculated that the “time will come when people generally will concede his true merit and worth.”75

  Renewed Patronage Headaches

  As 1864 drew to a close, Lincoln was also busy dealing with importunate office seekers, for many would-be civil servants regarded the second term as a justification for “a new deal.”76 A congressman advised job applicants that the only way to get Lincoln to remove incumbent office holders was to harass him with delegation after delegation. In March 1865, the president told Colonel James Grant Wilson, who joined him at an opera performance, that he attended music dramas not so much for the singing but, as he explained, “for the rest. I am being hounded to death by office-seekers, who pursue me early and late, and it is simply to get two or three hours’ relief that I am here.”77 On March 22, Noah Brooks reported that Lincoln’s “health has been worn down by the constant pressure of office-seekers and legitimate business, so that for a few days he was obliged to deny himself to all comers.” He refused to see visitors after 3 P.M.78 He was so harried that he sometimes forgot promises he had made. To a senator who had extracted a patronage pledge, Lincoln said he would carry it out if he remembered to do so: “as a man said to his debtor, ‘I will see you tomorrow if I do not forget it.’ ”79

  Of all the clamorous horde, none dismayed Lincoln more than the eminent Shakespearean actor, James H. Hackett. After seeing Hackett play Falstaff, the president wrote him a fan letter, which the indiscreet actor released to the New York Herald. That paper ridiculed Lincoln’s taste in soliloquies, for he had told Hackett that Hamlet’s soliloquy “to be or not to be” was surpassed by Claudius’s speech, “oh my offense is rank.” Abashed, Hackett apologized to Lincoln, who replied: “Give yourself no uneasiness on the subject. … My note to you I certainly did not expect to see in print; yet I have not been much shocked by the newspaper comments upon it. Those comments constitute a fair specimen of what has occurred to me through life. I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it.”80 The friendly correspondence between them ended when Hackett asked to be named consul in London, a post that could not be given to him. John Hay recalled that a “hundred times this experience was repeated; a man would be introduced to the President whose disposition and talk were agreeable; he took pleasure in his conversation for two or three interviews and then this congenial person would ask some favor impossible to grant, and go away in bitterness of spirit.”81

  Another painful request came from Lincoln’s old friend Anson G. Henry, who wished to replace William P. Dole as head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The president was sympathetic but hesitated, saying that the “thing that troubles me most is, that I dislike the idea of removing Mr. Dole who has been a faithful and devoted personal and political friend.” Dr. Henry replied: “Well Mr. Lincoln, I will go home and remain where I am, not only, without a murmur, but entirely satisfied that you have done what you believe to be best calculated to promote the welfare and prosperity of the Government.” With emphasis the president said: “Henry—you must not understand me as having decided the matter.” He explained that there was fierce competition for Dole’s job: “The Delegation from Minnesota are pressing very strongly for that place for Ex-Senator Wilkinson, and the Delegation from Illinois headed by Yates and Trumbull are pressing their man judge Kellogg.” Henry replied: “our Pacific men are beginning to think that the old North West are getting the Lyons share of the offices.” Lincoln laughingly responded, “It does look a little that way.”82

  When pressed to remove officeholders who had not committed treason but were insufficiently loyal to the administration, Lincoln balked: “I have made up my mind to make very few changes in the offices in my gift for my second term. I think now that I will not remove a single man, except for delinquency. To remove a man is very easy, but when I go to fill his place, there are twenty applicants, and of these I must make nineteen enemies.”83 Earlier in the war, businessman John Murray Forbes remarked that Lincoln “is notoriously tender hearted about removing anybody. It is his weak point.”84 Another Massachusetts Republican, Congressman Samuel Hooper, predicted that Lincoln “will go along without many changes because of his aversion to do anything that he thinks would be unpleasant to anyone.”85 Hay noted that Lincoln was not predisposed to cashier civil servants for political treachery: “It seems utterly impossible for the President to conceive of the possibility of any good resulting from a rigorous and exemplary course of punishing political dereliction. His favorite expression is, ‘I am in favor of short statutes of limitations in politics.’ ”86

  In March, Chase’s successor as treasury secretary, Willia
m P. Fessenden, resigned in order to accept a seat in the U.S. senate. To replace him, Lincoln wanted Senator Edwin D. Morgan, who refused. So the president turned to Hugh McCulloch, an Indiana banker serving as comptroller of the currency. Suspecting that he might be offered the job, McCulloch told his wife that he would rather not have it, but if it were tendered to him, “I should be ambitious enough or rather foolish enough to accept it.”87 The president summoned McCulloch and said: “I have sent for you, Mr. McCulloch, to let you know that I want you to be Secretary of the Treasury, and if you do not object to it, I shall send your name to the Senate.” McCulloch later wrote that he was “taken all aback by this sudden and unexpected announcement,” for it “was an office that I had not aspired to, and did not desire.” He “knew how arduous and difficult the duties of the head of that department were,” and he had been offered a lucrative bank presidency in New York. He “hesitated for a moment, and then replied: ‘I thank you, Mr. President, heartily for this mark of your confidence, and I should be glad to comply with your wishes if I did not distrust my ability to do what will be required of the Secretary of the Treasury in the existing financial condition of the Government.’ ” Lincoln said: “I will be responsible for that.”88

  Intervening to Win Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment

  Lincoln’s chief legislative goal in the aftermath of the election was to secure passage of the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery throughout the country. In June it had failed to win the requisite two-thirds majority of the House and did not become a significant issue in the presidential campaign, for Republicans soft-pedaled it while Democrats focused on miscegenation, civil liberties, conscription, and Lincoln’s Niagara Manifesto. Voters assumed that Congress would not address the amendment again until the members elected in 1864 took their seats in December 1865, and so they did not consider it a pressing matter. Thus the president’s reelection could not legitimately be interpreted as a mandate for the amendment.