This was more than slightly melodramatic. Still, as the Congress of 1861 prepared to convene, no cosmic portents—with the possible exception of the comet—were yet evident, and no one visiting Washington would have mistaken it for Bethlehem. The charms of the capital in summertime, an acquired taste in the best of circumstances, had not been enhanced much by the presence of a hundred thousand troops, unless one’s tastes ran to ladies of pleasure. “Beauty and sin done up in silk, with the accompaniment of lustrous eyes and luxurious hair, on every thoroughfare offer themselves for Treasury notes,” a Union officer wrote in his diary. Sin did not come in such uniformly luxurious guise, though: just after the national holiday, Private Thomas Curry of the Fire Zouaves was found knifed to death in front of one particularly “low” brothel.
And prostitutes were not the only ones making heavy use of L’Enfant’s stately boulevards; the constant passage of army wagons had deepened Pennsylvania Avenue’s ruts and morasses to the point that unwary pedestrians almost risked sinking out of sight, never to reemerge, while Second Street had gotten so bad that one poor gentleman’s carriage toppled off the eroding curbside and into the adjacent Tiber Creek canal, drowning him in the miasmal waters. (The capital’s sanitation system, if the term can be applied to a crude network of drainage ditches, was so overtaxed that official government reports used phrases like accumulated filth … hotbed of putrefaction … immense mass of fetid and corrupt matter.)6
Things had improved considerably at the Capitol itself, however. Arriving regiments were now shunted off to less stately campsites, as workmen readied the building for the legislators’ return, expunging every visible trace of the Fire Zouaves and their comrades-in-arms. Furniture was refinished; carpets replaced; graffiti scrubbed from the frescoes. The Senate chamber was painstakingly deloused. The paneling in the House chamber, formerly blazing red, was repainted a quiet “dove color,” perhaps in a belated attempt to tranquilize the distinguished members, perhaps to address the aesthetic concerns of critics like Theodore Winthrop, whose posthumously published essay in the July Atlantic suggested that the Capitol’s décor had “a slight flavor of the Southwestern steamboat saloon.” A less pleasant job was scooping up and hauling off what the building’s shell-shocked chief architect described to his wife as “cart loads of ---- in the dark corners,” apparently deposited there by certain members of the soldiery. (To be fair, one might argue that this particular commodity, then as now, was even more abundantly produced by Congress itself.) President Buchanan’s portrait had been removed to a private office to protect it “from threatened indignity,” while Tyler’s was exiled to deep storage. (It now hangs in the Blue Room of the White House.)7
In another respect, too, the Capitol was returning to normal, not counting a few important absences. On the morning of July 4, the two chambers began filling up again with senators and congressmen—mostly the same men who “dressed like parsons, said Sir, and chewed tobacco” whom Winthrop had mocked as belonging to a bygone epoch. Clearly their epoch was not wholly bygone just yet. But they were lonelier, and it did not take an especially sharp eye to discern that their desks and chairs had been artfully rearranged, a bit more widely spaced than before, to conceal the thinning of ranks. One significant absence was not the result of secession—or at least not quite as directly as the others. Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s old rival, the man whose popular sovereignty doctrine had promised Americans the freedom to commit a state to slavery, had died a month earlier, after a grueling lecture tour on which he rallied Northern Democrats “to protect this government and [our] flag from every assailant.”8
For form’s sake, the clerk of the House called on each of the seceded states’ delegations when he took roll, pausing just a moment as if by some remote possibility they would come creeping back, all past sins forgiven and troubles forgotten. Before this, however—perhaps more fruitfully, perhaps not—a Methodist chaplain addressed the Almighty at considerable length, in terms that made it clear he thought God was a Republican.9
Lincoln’s summons to Congress had coincided with his demand for seventy-five thousand troops, on April 15, perhaps suggesting his belief that the decision for war would have to be ratified first by the people themselves, in the form of the volunteer militia, even before their elected representatives considered it. In the same vein, he had resisted calls to convene the national legislature immediately, deferring the special session almost three months. There were good political reasons for him to do this. The president feared, justly, that Congress would try to take the conduct of the war into its own hands—or worse, that it might try to broker a dishonorable peace, offering terms that coddled slavery even more than the Crittenden, Corwin, and Peace Conference plans had done. Clearly he intended to make his own decisions first and seek congressional blessing later.10
But the unusual timing of July 4 for the special session’s opening day also signaled that in Lincoln’s mind, the business before the nation’s representatives in 1861 was somehow related to the business of their predecessors in 1776. The president made it known that he would issue a written communiqué to Congress on the session’s first day. Perhaps it would clarify the connection more fully.
Almost from the moment of the April announcement, Lincoln threw himself tirelessly into drafting his message. This in itself was remarkable, even astonishing. Most chief executives, faced with the war’s multitudinous and urgent demands, would probably have let military undertakings trump literary ones. In fact, Lincoln’s Confederate counterpart, Jefferson Davis, had not even begun work on his own unmemorable inaugural address until the day before the ceremony.11
As early as May 7, however, John Hay recorded in his diary that Lincoln was “engaged in constant thought upon his Message: It will be an exhaustive review of the questions of the hour & of the future.” That was the same day that the Tycoon had made his intriguing statements to Hay about the philosophical underpinnings of the Union cause, while dropping a hint about the future of slavery; he was clearly rehearsing the ideas he planned to air publicly on the Fourth of July.12 (Elmer Ellsworth and John Nicolay had both been at the White House that morning, too; Nicolay was definitely present during Lincoln’s conversation with Hay and Ellsworth may well have been also.)
Curiously, Lincoln tried his ideas on a second audience on that same day in May, a most unlikely one: the “regent captains” of the minuscule European nation of San Marino. He had recently received by letter a conferral of honorary citizenship from them, and it was now his duty to acknowledge their gracious gesture. He could easily have asked one of his secretaries to dash off a pro forma response. But the president knew that San Marino was more than just a five-mile-wide enclave of Italian-speaking sheep farmers. It was also the longest-lived constitutional republic in the world, claiming origins in the fourth century a.d. So, when Lincoln picked up his pen and addressed the regent captains, he did so as the leader of a young and immense democratic nation speaking to the leaders of an old and tiny one:
Although your dominion is small, your State is nevertheless one of the most honored, in all history. It has by its experience demonstrated the truth, so full of encouragement to the friends of Humanity, that Government founded on Republican principles is capable of being so administered as to be secure and enduring.
You have kindly adverted to the trial through which this Republic is now passing. It is one of deep import. It involves the question whether a Representative republic, extended and aggrandized so much as to be safe against foreign enemies can save itself from the dangers of domestic faction. I have faith in a good result.13
In choosing to share these ideas with the Sammarinesi rather than with political associates closer at hand, Lincoln was being characteristically discreet; he was not yet ready to address the American public, and the regent captains were unlikely to be in regular communication with James Gordon Bennett or Horace Greeley. Yet he also revealed a deep belief that the conflict in America was one of critical significance to the
rest of the world, and that in his July Fourth message he needed to speak not only to Congress, not only to the American people, but perhaps, in a sense, to all of humanity. Perhaps posterity, too. In 1861, republics were still rarities: tiny San Marino was one of only two in Europe. Since they were so few, the American Civil War would matter not so much in terms of preserving existing democracies (clearly the Sammarinesi were doing just fine) as in stimulating or inhibiting the birth of future ones. Like the Forty-Eighters in St. Louis, Lincoln was well aware of the impact that the Union’s ultimate victory or defeat might have among the restless nations of Europe and even beyond.
By mid-June, Lincoln was “engaged almost constantly in writing his message,” Nicolay recorded. On the 19th, with two weeks left, the president took the extraordinary step of announcing publicly that he would receive no visitors until after submitting it to Congress.14 (Indeed, Lincoln worked far harder on his July Fourth document than Jefferson had done on his own, more famous one; the Declaration of Independence was written and revised over the course of seventeen days at most.) By this point, Lincoln had developed a keener appreciation of the potential damage of ill-considered remarks. “Nobody hurt,” a quotation from one of Lincoln’s ill-considered speeches during his train trip through Ohio, was still a national catchphrase, a barbed joke that grew sharper-edged with each fresh report of war casualties. He would not allow himself a second such rhetorical disaster.
Even so, many Americans shook their heads in disbelief at how much time the president was spending on his message. Would this end up like the last presidential epistle to Congress, Buchanan’s fourteen thousand words of ineffectual wind? No less a literary craftsman than Emerson himself wrote reproachfully in his journal that Lincoln “writes his own message instead of borrowing the largest understanding as he so easily might.” The apostle of self-reliance was arguing in favor of crowdsourcing, or at least the time-honored American habit of plagiarism.15
As the momentous date grew near, Lincoln shared a rough draft with a few select counselors. One, predictably, was Seward, who did not stint in offering suggestions, although he would play a far smaller role than he had in drafting the inaugural address: the secretary of state prevailed upon the president to tone down several passages, substituting more tactful language in places. But the president’s other sources of advice were somewhat surprising. Among them was Charles Sumner, to whom he read his draft aloud in late June; the two men were hardly close, and in fact their few face-to-face encounters had left each somewhat put off by the other. Another of Lincoln’s chosen confidants was a man he had never even met before, the eminent historian John Lothrop Motley, who was visiting the capital and dropped by the White House to call on the president; Lincoln not only broke his vow of seclusion but impulsively scooped up the scattered sheets of manuscript on his desk and read Motley nearly the entire draft. Finally, the night before sending off the message, still engrossed in last-minute revisions, he shared it with Orville H. Browning, the old Illinois friend who had written him that fierce letter about emancipating the slaves.16
One cannot help looking to Lincoln’s choices to find clues to his thoughts and preoccupations at the time. Sumner and Browning, of course, were both ardent antislavery men. Sumner and Lothrop, meanwhile, shared an expertise in European affairs, an area of weakness for Lincoln: the former had recently become chairman of the Senate’s committee on foreign relations, while the latter had spent much of his adult life on the Continent and was best known for his widely acclaimed history of the defunct Dutch Republic. Yet none of Lincoln’s various drafts of the July Fourth message mentioned slavery directly at all, nor did any address foreign relations in anything but the most brief and perfunctory fashion. (Sumner, for this reason, was disappointed by the document; Lothrop was impressed by the “untaught grace and power” of Lincoln’s writing; Browning did not record his own response.) Could it be, however, that by selecting these three men, Lincoln was sounding out—more for himself than for them—the unspoken but implicit parts of what he wanted to communicate to Congress, the nation, and the world?
At last the document was complete, and Lincoln put it into Nicolay’s hands to deliver it to the Capitol. In keeping with the tradition of that time, it would be read aloud not by the president himself but rather by the clerks of the respective chambers. (The Senate clerk performed his duty in a nearly inaudible monotone.)17
In a sense, Nicolay’s simple trip down Pennsylvania Avenue was an eloquent statement of its own. This ritual of the democracy reaffirmed the chief executive’s accountability to Congress and to the American people. And the grueling labor that Lincoln had put into his message attested to his faith in the power and necessity of words, of arguments, of explanations, in a democratic system. By contrast, the lackluster, shopworn rhetoric of the new Southern republic’s leading statesmen was not merely a failure of aesthetics, but proof of the intellectual poverty and moral laziness undergirding their entire enterprise. The Confederacy was never truly much of a cause—lost or otherwise. In fact, it might better be called an effect; a reactive stratagem tarted up with ex post facto justifications. This was borne out in the practices of the two national legislatures. Over the next four years, the Confederate Congress would transact nearly all its important business in secret, and even some of the most fervent secessionists would decry its lack of true accountability to the Southern public. (Indeed, Robert Barnwell Rhett, a leading fire-eater in 1860 and 1861, ultimately blamed the South’s loss on the absence of any informed public debate within the Confederacy that might have held the Davis administration’s policies up to scrutiny.) By contrast, the Congress of the United States—notwithstanding all the bitter infighting that lay ahead—would never once go into closed session during the course of the war.18 President Davis opened his executive messages (like his inaugural address) with the words “Gentlemen of the Congress of the Confederate States of America.” President Lincoln began his with “Fellow-citizens.”
The first half of the July Fourth message was a historical narrative. Lincoln recapitulated the events that had transpired since the start of his presidency, exactly four months earlier. He made clear, to begin with, that he had held firm to the pledge of his inaugural address: not to fire the war’s first shot. Indeed, he deftly turned the Union’s relative military unpreparedness into evidence of its honorable intentions: while the rebels had been arming for war, the North’s citizens had continued striving for peace, keeping faith in the instruments of democracy—“time, discussion, and the ballot-box”—to resolve the national crisis. Lincoln described the letter from Major Anderson that had arrived on his first full day in office, presenting him with the stark choice of surrendering the fort or trying to supply it with fresh provisions. (In a very early draft, the president had even mentioned General Scott’s support for evacuating Sumter, heedless, it seems, of how this revelation would publicly humiliate the general-in-chief; clearly he was still working through the last remnants of his political naïveté.)19 He spoke of Captain Fox’s relief expedition and the advance notice he had given the rebels, casting their bombardment of Sumter as an act of deadly aggression provoked merely by “the [attempted] giving of bread to the few brave and hungry men of the garrison.”
As conciliatory as Lincoln made his military policies sound, he was unwilling to concede a single inch of rhetorical ground to the enemy. From his experience as a lawyer, he knew the fatal effect of allowing one’s opponent to define the terms of an argument. Whereas the Northern press and public had more or less automatically begun referring to “the Confederate States,” Lincoln pointedly referred to “this illegal organization in the character of confederate States.” The lowercase spelling and lack of a definite article made clear that he was using the word confederate as it might apply to a member of a gang of highway robbers.
In fact, this idea lay at the core of Lincoln’s argument: that the very existence of the Southern Confederacy (or confederacy) was not merely a threat but a crime. And n
ot a victimless crime, either—not, as the rebel leaders would have it, a benign act of withdrawal from a voluntary political compact. It was a crime against their fellow citizens, collectively and individually. It was an act of theft: the rebels had appropriated federal property paid for by loyal taxpayers, while defaulting on their own share of the federal debt and leaving their former countrymen holding the bag. More important, though, secession was an act of vandalism—terrorism even—against the very foundation of democratic government: the concept of obedience to majority rule. “If we now recognize this doctrine, by allowing the seceders to go in peace,” Lincoln wrote, “it is difficult to see what we can do, if others choose to go, or to extort terms upon which they will promise to remain.” (Such an act of extortion, this Congress knew well, had come quite close to success.)
Indeed, secession would render democracy’s survival impossible, not just in the Northern states but, ironically, in the Southern ones, too: what besides force could keep Virginia or Louisiana in the Confederacy as soon as they found themselves in the minority on some important national issue?
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