1861

by Adam Goodheart

  Here was the difference between the American colonies’ revolution and the Southern states’ rebellion. The colonists had been subjects, not citizens; they were parties to no formal political compact with the mother country; they were not voters in parliamentary elections even to the limited extent allowed to their English cousins, suffering taxation without representation among other tyrannies of government without consent of the governed. Their withdrawal from the British Empire may have hurt that empire economically, but it did not threaten it existentially. Lincoln directly refuted the Southerners’ claim to be Jefferson’s legitimate heirs. Referring to the various state ordinances of secession, he wrote:

  Our adversaries have adopted some Declarations of Independence; in which, unlike the good old one, penned by Jefferson, they omit the words “all men are created equal.” Why? They have adopted a temporary national constitution, in the preamble of which, unlike our good old one, signed by Washington, they omit “We, the People,” and substitute “We, the deputies of the sovereign and independent States.” Why? Why this deliberate pressing out of view, the rights of men, and the authority of the people?

  Lincoln returned again and again to the idea of “the people.” He was determined to prove that the Union was not fighting against the cause of freedom, as the Confederates maintained, but actively for it—and according to a very different understanding of the word. To the secessionists, freedom meant the ability to elude authority. To Lincoln, freedom was in itself a form of authority—indeed, the only legitimate form of authority, as the only alternative was authoritarianism. “And this issue embraces more than the fate of these United States,” he wrote.

  It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes. It presents the question, whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration, according to organic law, in any case, can always, upon the pretences made in this case, or on any other pretences, or arbitrarily, without any pretence, break up their Government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. It forces us to ask: “Is there, in all republics, this inherent, and fatal weakness?” “Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”

  Here Lincoln was not merely echoing, more eloquently, what he had told the regent captains of San Marino two months earlier. He was also foreshadowing what he would tell a crowd of Americans at Gettysburg two years hence. A government of the people, by the same people. That superfluous word same, like a lead weight, tethers the phrase to earth, keeping Lincoln’s prose from rising into poetry; the reader longs to cut it loose. But Lincoln’s thought is the same, and would remain a lodestar for him throughout the stormy years to come. Although he might not have scribbled his 1863 address on the back of an envelope, as legend would have it, it should be no surprise that he wrote it fairly quickly. Lincoln had already done the hard work of the Gettysburg Address, the heavy intellectual lifting, in 1861. The two intervening years would go to pare away the nonessentials, to sculpt 6,256 words of prose into 246 words of poetry.

  When people like Emerson had criticized Lincoln for spending so long toiling over the Independence Day message, they did not understand that the president, in doing so, had in a very real sense been fighting the war. Through his lonely Emersonian struggle, all those torturous hours alone with his thoughts and his half-filled pages, he had been arming himself for the terrible conflict ahead.

  Again and again over the next four years, those who knew Lincoln would express their amazement at his lack of self-doubt, his tenacity in staying the course—so different from the early weeks of his presidency. But once he had written his address to Congress, Lincoln never again needed to ask himself whether he should be fighting or what he was fighting for. With these large questions settled, the smaller ones of how to fight often answered themselves. The proper resolution of the Sumter crisis, which had tortured Lincoln in March and early April, seemed almost obvious in retrospect. Reasoning backward from the principles he articulated on July Fourth, he could not possibly have behaved any differently. Reasoning forward, much of his course ahead was clear.

  This is not to say by any means that Lincoln’s thinking remained static after 1861—far from it. The difference between the July Fourth message and the Gettysburg Address is not simply a matter of elegance or conciseness; it also reflects what had happened in the meantime. The story that Lincoln would tell America in 1863, like his earlier one, began in 1776: four score and seven years ago. But the importance of the additional time accounts perhaps for his chronological precision. The later document is suffused with a sense of national tragedy, understandably enough—hundreds of thousands of Americans had died in the war by that point—and is deeply informed by a tragic understanding of world history, as well as by very ancient ideas about redemption through sacrifice. The political compact that Lincoln had described earlier had now been sanctified by death. The other immense fact of the last two years, along with all the deaths, was the Emancipation Proclamation. Thus the soaring final line of the Gettysburg Address contains not just a rearticulation of the 1861 idea, government of the people, by the people, for the people, but also something wholly novel: a new birth of freedom.

  Yet were these two things entirely missing from the earlier document? By July 4, 1861, Lincoln, along with millions of other Americans, had already caught a glimpse of emancipation: those bold contrabands escaping slavery, hailing Lincoln and his armies as liberators. He had also felt the terrible stab of loss with Ellsworth’s sacrificial death. And in fact, his message to Congress carries in itself hints of the inevitable sacrifices ahead—both the price to be paid by ordinary Americans and what they would gain by paying it:

  This is essentially a People’s contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life. Yielding to partial, and temporary departures, from necessity, this is the leading object of the government for whose existence we contend.

  After publication, Lincoln’s message would be roundly criticized by abolitionists, who accused him of skirting—in fact, entirely omitting—the very issue that had sparked the war. “Any one reading that document, with no previous knowledge of the United States, would never dream from any thing there written that we have a slaveholders war waged upon the Government,” Frederick Douglass lamented.20

  But it may have been the proslavery forces, this time, who inferred a subtler understanding of Lincoln’s words. The editors of the Baltimore Sun, unbending in its defense of slaveholders’ rights, described the document as “strikingly at variance with all our preconceived ideas of the principles of [American] government.” They pointed specifically to the “People’s contest” passage:

  This paragraph has been understood to signify, in somewhat ambiguous terms, the amplest doctrines of the abolitionists. “To elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders,” &c., is scarcely susceptible of any other practical application than to the colored race, slave and free. It seems to mean the abolition of slavery, and the social, civil, and political equality of the Ethiopian, Mongolian, Caucasian, and all other races.

  Lincoln, the newspaper complained, was claiming to find ideas and intentions embodied in the Constitution that its framers had never intended to put there: “The President might [as well] assert that it is one particular design of the Union to regulate the tail of the comet, the cut of a coat, or the size of a lady’s hoops.”21

  The Sun was right: when Lincoln wrote of “an unfettered start,” he chose his words deliberately. An earlier draft had
used the phrase “an even start,” an image that fit much more neatly with the “race of life” metaphor.22 But when the president crossed out the word even and wrote unfettered above it, he sacrificed metaphorical coherence for an unmistakable evocation of the plight of the slaves. The Sun was also correct in discerning another new idea: the government as guarantor of “a fair chance, in the race of life,” something that might well have left the nation’s founders scratching their heads. Lincoln was speaking not in the voice of the eighteenth century but that of the nineteenth, a voice informed by new ideas in science—the race of Life—as well as in politics.

  This came as no small shock to some of Lincoln’s longtime doubters: those members of the nation’s intellectual establishment who had seen him as a half-educated Midwestern rube, a man unequal to the times. George W. Curtis, the journalist and Republican activist, had originally dismissed him as a cipher, believing that William Seward was the man who must save the Union. But now, still reeling from the death of his friend Winthrop at Big Bethel, Curtis wrote privately:

  I envy no other age. I believe with all my heart in the cause, and in Abe Lincoln. His message is the most truly American message ever delivered. Think upon what a millennial year we have fallen when the President of the United States declares officially that this government is founded upon the rights of man!… I can forgive the jokes and the big hands, and the inability to make bows. Some of us who doubted were wrong.23

  Indeed, Lincoln’s 1861 message to Congress stands as a milestone not just in the development of his thought but also in the evolution of his reputation. The Rail-Splitter had crafted a subtle and brilliant work of political science, and at the same time had succeeded, as one man present at the Capitol wrote, in narrating “the whole story of our troubles so that every man woman & child who can read it can understand.” Henceforth he might be—would be—reviled, but he would never be underestimated. Some would denounce him as a tyrant, but after July 4, fewer and fewer would mock him as an “ape” or a rube. His eloquence and intellect were in themselves powerful arguments for why all Americans, even an unschooled backwoodsman from Kentucky, even a slave, deserved a fair chance in the race of life.

  “In this hour of its trial,” one Philadelphian wrote, “the country seems to have found in Mr. Lincoln a great man.”24

  NOT LONG BEFORE JULY 4, the author Nathaniel Parker Willis visited the nation’s capital. While there, he crossed the Potomac to the Virginia side in order to see Arlington House, the splendid mansion recently evacuated by Robert E. Lee and his wife, Mary Custis Lee, great-granddaughter of Martha Washington. Federal troops had occupied the property, setting up a telegraph station in the dining room and digging entrenchments in the surrounding fields. Exploring the garden behind the house, the writer came upon an elderly Negro hard at work weeding a bed of strawberries, as if all the military commotion around him did not exist, and as if his master and mistress might return at any moment to check on their plantings. “Well, uncle, what do you think of the war?” Willis asked him.

  The old man hesitated for a moment. “Well, massa,” he said, “it’s all about things we’ve been so long a puttin up with.” And then, Willis wrote, he went diligently back to work.25

  Other visitors’ accounts from the summer of 1861 describe curious encounters with a white-haired Negro at Arlington House whom they came upon faithfully tending the grounds—he must have been the same man. (One report gives his name as Daniel.) John Nicolay and Robert Lincoln had a conversation with him one afternoon when they took a ride on horseback into Union-occupied Virginia. On that occasion, the philosophical old man—who was delighted to meet the president’s son—shared a piece of information that none of the other accounts mention: he had been born at Mount Vernon, back before the turn of the century. He had been Mrs. Washington’s slave.26

  This particular kind of Revolutionary connection was not much on people’s minds as the nation’s capital celebrated the first Independence Day of the war. At dawn’s first light, the deep boom of a columbiad sounded from the Arsenal grounds, and before its echoes could fade they were answered by other cannons among the far-flung encampments, the fields of tents whose occupants were just stirring themselves to dress and shave. Soon, a witness reported, “for ten miles along the whole line of entrenchments on the Virginia side, there was a continuous sheet of flame, volumes of smoke, and thunders of artillery that must have shaken the earth even under the feet of the rebels at Manassas Junction.” In the streets of the federal city itself, schoolboys by the thousand, roused from their beds with greater alacrity than on any other morning of the year, applied themselves gravely to the task of setting squibs alight at every curbside, adding their small detonations to the overall din.27

  Flags lined the thoroughfares, of course. The most conscientious patriots had stitched on one extra star before raising them: as of that day, the national banner officially bore thirty-four, the final acknowledgment of Kansas’s entry into the Union.28

  By eight o’clock, a crowd was gathering on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, where a reviewing stand had been set up for the president and other dignitaries to watch the military parade from beneath a large canopy. They were fortunate; the broiling sun soon began taking its toll on the waiting soldiers, buttoned up smartly in their woolen dress uniforms. “That was the hardest Fourth I ever saw,” an infantryman in the Thirty-second New York wrote to his brother afterward. “All N. York regiments were reviewed that day by Old Abe and Gen Scott. The day was very warm and some of the boys dropped down, overcome by the heat and fatigue.”29

  Old Abe and the general, accompanied by Seward and the other cabinet secretaries, emerged together from the White House a moment before nine and took their places just as a brass band strode up the avenue playing “Hail to the Chief,” and struggling a bit to manage the tune as the throngs pressed in from all sides. But then the way was cleared, and the parade began to pass. At its head strode the First German Rifles under Colonel Max Blenker, an old Forty-Eighter from Bavaria turned prosperous Manhattan merchant. Next was the Twelfth New York, from out near Elmira, with a fine regimental band. The Cameron Highlanders made a colorful impression with their skirling bagpipes and kilted officers; as a peacetime militia regiment, they had made a similarly jaunty showing the year before, parading for the Japanese ambassadors and the Prince of Wales.

  The day’s great sensation was the Thirty-ninth New York, a regiment known as the Garibaldi Guard. Its ranks included not just Italians but Germans, Frenchmen, Hungarians, Spaniards, and Swiss, along with a smattering of Russian Cossacks and Indian Sepoys. The men wore green-plumed bersaglieri hats and red shirts, just like their namesakes, and marched behind three different flags: the Stars and Stripes, the Hungarian ensign, and, most honored of all, the very same red, green, and white tricolor that General Garibaldi had planted on Rome’s Capitoline Hill in 1848, a gift to the New York regiment from an emigré Italian officer. (Garibaldi fever would reach its climax in America later that month, when William Seward tried unsuccessfully to entice the “distinguished Soldier of Freedom” to leave his Mediterranean homeland and accept a major-generalship in the Union army.) The soldiers had already delighted Washington with their habit of singing “La Marseillaise” as they marched along with baguettes speared on their bayonets, the way French troops were supposed to carry their field rations. Now each of the dashing warriors sported a sprig of evergreen or a small bouquet of flowers tucked into his hatband. As they passed, the men flung these botanical offerings onto the reviewing stand with Continental panache. Most seemed aimed at Winfield Scott—whether in tribute to him as head of the army or because he presented such a large target—and before long, the nonplussed general-in-chief resembled nothing so much as a mountainside in springtime.30

  But then came the drabber, blue-uniformed ranks of plain American soldiers: Manhattan shop clerks, upstate farm boys, Buffalo flatboatmen. They had no storied tricolors to wave, no bouquets to throw, so that the ne
xt day’s newspapers simply listed their regimental numbers, one after another, with very little comment.

  One regiment, the Twenty-sixth New York, was apparently so ordinary that the journalists could report only one distinctive thing: as it swung up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House, a young Negro contraband marched alongside. He saluted Lincoln smartly as he passed.31

  EVENTUALLY, ASTRONOMERS WOULD LEARN a good deal about the mysterious comet—still known today as the Great Comet of 1861—which happened to arrive at a moment in history when scientists’ ability to gauge, measure, and predict the natural world was improving at an astonishing rate. They quickly ascertained its size, velocity, trajectory, and distance from Earth. Comparing their measurements to historical data, they decided initially that it was the same comet that had last passed by in 1556, alarming Charles V to the point of abdicating the throne of the Holy Roman Empire; upon further consideration, however, they decided that the new comet was in fact previously unknown, an uncharted traveler of the heavens. It turned out to have been first spotted on May 13 by a sheep farmer and amateur stargazer in New South Wales. Not long after this, it appeared in the skies above Cape Town, and Dr. Livingstone, the explorer, saw it from his campsite in deepest Africa.

  Telegraphic communications in the Southern Hemisphere were still a few years away from the point when scientists there would have been able to alert their colleagues in London, Berlin, and Washington. So by the time the comet blazed into view of the top half of the globe, in late June, it was already extremely close by the standards of astronomy—about twelve million miles away. One reason it had been so hard to spot at first is that it was headed almost straight for Earth (but, luckily, not quite). Astronomers calculated—correctly, it seems—that on the comet’s closest approach, Earth actually passed through its tail, which was believed to explain why certain vicars in rural England reported a strange greenish haze in the air that night, requiring them to light their altar candles unusually early.