A Just and Generous Nation

by Harold Holzer

  There is a lingering debate among historians as to whether or not Lincoln’s increasing emphasis on the conflict as God’s war reflected the conversion of this rationalist thinker into a devout religious believer. While this debate remains unresolved, it is clear that Lincoln’s new description provided a successful basis for maintaining the support of the majority of Americans in the North who were increasingly war weary but had never wavered in their belief in a just God.

  Increasingly, and especially in his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln referred to his own actions as fulfilling God’s will. And he found new language to explain why a just God was willing to allow the death and destruction to go on as long as it did. What evil was so monstrous as to justify that outcome? And how could Lincoln explain the justice of the war to the American people?

  By inauguration day, March 4, 1865, the voters, civilians and soldiers alike (the latter by a four-to-one margin), had validated their faith in the war by reelecting their president. Ulysses S. Grant was closing in on Robert E. Lee and his starving, depleted army; peace would almost certainly come soon. Here was an opportunity that a lesser orator—a lesser man—might have used for chest-thumping triumphalism. Instead, Lincoln reached out to accept not the laurels of war for the North but to share some of the blame for four score and nine years of the hypocrisy that made slavery acceptable in the South and its products welcome in the North. If not the best speech of Lincoln’s life, the Second Inaugural Address was unequivocally the noblest and the most passionate in its distaste for forced labor.

  One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh!” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?

  When it came to choosing his own favorite among his immortal presidential orations, the best evidence we have—Lincoln’s own comments on the matter—indicate that he believed his Second Inaugural Address was the best he ever delivered. It was also his bravest. Lincoln went out of his way to blame all Americans for too long tolerating the sin of slavery, which meant, implicitly, that they had prevented the American nation from fulfilling its promise of a successful democratic middle-class economy and society.

  But Lincoln ended his Second Inaugural Address with an almost apocalyptic warning of potential retribution for the greatest American sin, that of slavery, warning in a breathtakingly long sentence quoting scripture, that Americans North as well as South might now be compelled to pay further for their inhumanity with even greater sacrifice of life to atone for God’s displeasure over the wicked institution of slavery.

  Lincoln stands on the East Portico of the US Capitol to deliver perhaps his greatest speech, the Second Inaugural Address. Some forty thousand black and white onlookers gathered to hear the brief 703-word address under gray skies that suddenly parted when Lincoln appeared. “It made my heart jump,” Lincoln admitted. But a few days later he confided of the speech, “I believe it is not immediately popular.” Photograph by Alexander Gardner, March 4, 1865.

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  Listening to the “wonderful address” from the Capitol Plaza on that chilly March afternoon, abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass at first thought it “very short.” But when he heard the president invoke that harsh biblical warning out of Matthew, Luke, and Psalm 19, Douglass declared appreciatively, “He answered all the objections raised to his prolonging the war in one sentence . . . a remarkable sentence.”

  Douglass would not have been alone in recognizing that Lincoln had just provided a stirring new rationale for justifying the long and bloody struggle. Before, Lincoln had argued that “the cause” that justified fighting the Civil War was to sustain the unique and exceptional American middle-class society envisioned by the founders in the Declaration of Independence. But now, Lincoln was using biblical and moral language to make a powerful case that the abolition of slavery was just as important. Indeed, liberty, freedom for slaves, and economic opportunity for all Americans were now inseparable.

  Lincoln had originally made this connection a year earlier in a speech at Baltimore. Now, however, he was doing so with less ambivalence, greater urgency, and to a much larger audience. But we can see the roots of the Second Inaugural in his speech at the opening of the Maryland Sanitory Fair on April 20, 1864:

  The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name—liberty.

  Here was Lincoln’s final acknowledgment that Southerners had launched their 1861 revolution because they believed the “holy” liberty of states more important than the liberty of slaves and economic opportunity for all Americans—indeed, they saw nothing incompatible in the founding vision of the country, even if it had excluded from that vision millions of people imported specifically to perform unpaid labor for life. By the time he stepped onto the portico of the US Capitol to take the oath of office for a second presidential term, Lincoln was unwilling to extend the benefit of the doubt to Southerners; he had also lost patience with Northerners who for too long believed they could fight for union without freedom for the slaves. The voters had endorsed Lincoln’s vision of liberty, and now had come the day of reckoning.

  At the onset of the Civil War, Lincoln expected there would be a just result without enormous negative consequences. He thought his limited war aims—preventing the extension of slavery to the western territories and bringing the South back into the Union without the immediate abolition of slavery in the seceding states—were reasonable and could legitimately be described as consistent with God’s will.

  But the war had continued with no clear end in sight. As early as 1862, Lincoln was aware that his chosen commander of the Union armies, George B. McClellan, was at best a reluctant warrior. Lincoln appointed McClellan after the Union disaster at the First Battle of Bull Run to organize untrained and untested soldiers from state militias into an army capable of fighting a successful Civil War. McClellan was an excellent trainer of soldiers but an unwilling warrior against the South for both personal and political reasons. His continuing emphasis on “strategic advantage” wore thin when he did not pursue tactical opportunities, repeatedly arguing that his opponents outnumbered his troops. Whil
e Lincoln was reluctant to replace McClellan because of his success in training and securing the loyalty of the new Union armies, he came to understand McClellan’s limitations. In a letter to McClellan on October 13, 1862, Lincoln said: “Are you not over-cautious when you assume that you can not do what the enemy is constantly doing? Should you not claim to be at least his equal in prowess, and act upon the claim?” When McClellan sent a telegram suggesting that his inaction was due in part to horses in his cavalry that were “unable to leave the camp,” Lincoln replied on October 25, 1862: “I have just read your dispatch about sore tongued and fatiegued [sic] horses. Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigue anything?”

  In a memorandum to his generals in November 1862, Lincoln complained about McClellan’s tactics: “The Army and the nation has been demoralized by the idea that the war is to be ended, the nation united, and the peace restored by strategy and not by hard, desperate fighting.” Some historians have attributed Lincoln’s desire to engage in “hard, desperate fighting” to his personal history of wrestling matches that could be won only by such means.

  Lincoln became an engaged military commander in chief early in 1862. Encouraged by his intensive study of military strategy and tactics, he developed a clearer sense of direction than his generals, who seemed to be ever unwilling to take the offensive, constantly complaining they were outnumbered by their Confederate opponents. The greatest weakness of the Union armies was their lack of an overall strategy, with four separate armies under four separate generals, operating in four different parts of the country, engaged in intermittent battles against better-managed Confederate forces.

  At one point, Lincoln wrote to Generals Henry Halleck and Don Carlos Buell in charge of the Union armies in Kentucky and Tennessee:

  . . . I state my general idea of this war to be that we have the greater numbers, and the enemy has the greater facility of concentrating forces upon points of collision; that we must fail, unless we can find some way of making our advantage an over-match for his; and that this can only be done by menacing him with superior forces at different points, at the same time; so that we can safely attack, one, or both, if he makes no change; and if he weakens one to strengthen the other, forbear to attack the strengthened one, but seize, and hold the weakened one, gaining so much.

  In the campaign leading up to Gettysburg, Lincoln wired Union army commander General Joseph Hooker: “Lee’s Army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point. . . . Fight him when oppertunity [sic] offers.” Hooker’s unsatisfactory response led Lincoln to replace him with General George G. Meade, who won the victory at Gettysburg but failed to pursue Lee’s dispirited army. Lincoln drafted a letter to Meade: “I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape. . . . Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasureably because of it.” In the end, Lincoln decided it would serve no purpose to send the letter, but he continued to remind his generals that the war could be won only by defeating Lee’s army. Outstanding Civil War military historian James McPherson aptly described Lincoln’s contribution as commander in chief: “A self-taught strategist with no combat experience, Abraham Lincoln saw the path to victory more clearly than his generals.”

  Lincoln the impatient but imposing commander in chief confers with his pathologically hesitant general, George B. McClellan, at Army of the Potomac headquarters, near Antietam, Maryland, October 3, 1862. The conference took place just a few weeks after McClellan’s battlefield victory here enabled the president to announce the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation—which McClellan and most Democrats opposed. With no formal military training, and only brief military experience, Lincoln became an extraordinarily astute strategist and motivator. Photograph by Alexander Gardner.

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  Lincoln was not willing to face a continuing stalemate year after year. He came to realize that the natural advantages of the North were not being utilized effectively in the war. The Union army’s aggressive task required many more troops than the Confederate army’s defensive task—the Union armies had to conquer and occupy thousands of miles of enemy territory. The white population of the North was four times as great as the white population of the South. Yet in the first years of the war, the size of the volunteer armies of the North and South did not reflect this advantage.

  In 1863 and 1864, Lincoln acted directly by instituting the first involuntary draft in modern times. The new policy was unpopular, producing major public outcries—most notably the 1863 draft riots in New York. But the size of the Union armies increased substantially. Their numbers were increased by young male immigrants from Europe who were encouraged to join the Union armies. At the same time, Lincoln encouraged his generals to make increasing use of freed slaves for the Union armies—first as support troops and later as armed battalions of soldiers. By the end of 1864, the federal armies greatly outnumbered the Southern armies in manpower.

  In the early months of 1864, it was also clear that the Union armies were still bogged down in a continuing series of battles with no clear end in sight. Lincoln was uncertain about the outcome of the election of 1864 and fearful that a new president would repudiate the Emancipation Proclamation as unconstitutional. The Northern public was losing patience, and it seemed Lincoln might lose his bid for reelection unless a new rationale for the war and a new battle plan produced a different pattern of military success.

  It was in 1864 that Lincoln provided a new rationale for the war that relieved him of personal responsibility for deciding to undertake what seemed to be an almost unending and increasingly bloody war. He found value in the idea that God, rather than the president, could be described as the principal actor in the conflict. Lincoln shifted the burden of guilt to the Southern slaveholders pursuing an immoral economic “interest” and the burden of action in the continuing war to a righteous God when he declared: “[T]he judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether” if “God wills that it continue.”

  Even as he invoked God’s will and the immorality of the Southern slave economy to justify continuing the war, Lincoln also used this rhetoric to validate a substantial change in the military strategy of the North. This new strategy was characterized by a scorched-earth approach to the Southern economy.

  In March 1864 Lincoln chose his most determined military leader, Ulysses S. Grant, to take command of all the Union armies. With Lincoln’s approval, Grant initiated critical new approaches to winning the war. Instead of pitched battles with few clear results other than enormous loss of life on both sides, Grant mandated that all Union armies should move together to attack their opponents at the same time on all fronts. This forced the Confederate forces, already stretched thin, to fight more than one battle at a time. It also deprived the Southern generals of their previously successful strategy of moving all available troops to the fronts where major battles were about to occur.

  (Top) This 1864 pro-Lincoln campaign poster favorably compared the pro­freedom, prolabor Republican platform (and candidate) to the procapitulation, proslavery platform of Democratic presidential nominee George McClellan. Republicans put most of their hopes in Union battlefield results, advocating newly promoted commander Ulysses S. Grant (bottom) as a “Bull Dog” determined to take Richmond if it took all summer.

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  Perhaps more importantly, Lincoln encouraged his most aggressive generals, Grant, William T. Sherman, and Philip H. Sheridan, to fight a hard war, supporting a scorched-earth economic strategy that could bring victory to the Northern armies. While Lincoln stressed that the least possible harm should come to civilians, anything that underpinned the economy of the Confederacy—farmlands, factories, roads, and railroads—was fair game. Rather than a continuing frontal assault on Lee’s army, Grant laid siege to Petersburg, just south of Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. Petersburg was the commercial and railroad center that provided food and sup
plies to the Confederate capital and to General Robert E. Lee’s army defending it.

  Even with this new strategy, however, not everything went well at first for Union troops. While the Army of the Potomac was focused on the siege of Petersburg, the Confederate Army marched up the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with little opposition early in July 1864. Confederate forces got as far as six miles from the White House before being turned back. This military setback and public relations disaster increased Lincoln’s fear of losing the November presidential election and strengthened his resolve to energize his generals to end the military stalemate. On July 15, General Grant signed an order that the Shenandoah Valley should be made into a “desert” and that “all provisions and stock should be removed, and the people notified to move out.”

  On August 7, 1864, Grant appointed Sheridan commander of the Army of the Shenandoah, putting him in charge of carrying out the scorched-earth strategy in the region. He directed Sheridan to deny the productive agricultural products of Virginia to Confederate troops. Grant told Sheridan, “Give the enemy no rest. . . . Do all the damage to railroads and crops you can. Carry off stock of all description, and Negroes, so as to prevent planting. If the war is to last another year, we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.”

  Sheridan began the punitive economic operations of his mission in late September 1864, sending his cavalry ranging wide over four hundred miles to destroy livestock and provisions and to burn barns, mills, factories, and railroads. Sheridan’s cavalry and troops performed their assigned tasks relentlessly and thoroughly—denying the Southern army a base and bringing the war home to the Southern civilian population of the Shenandoah Valley. At the same time, Sheridan remained mindful of Lincoln’s mandate to do no bodily harm to the civilian population. Lincoln congratulated Sheridan in a letter on October 22, 1864: “With great pleasure I tender to you and your brave army, the thanks of the nation, and my own personal admiration and gratitude, for the month’s operation in the Shenandoah Valley.”