Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power

by Richard J. Carwardine

  PATRIOTIC UNIONISM, 1861

  Typical of early wartime Union prints in its exaltation of the flag, this illustration formed the cover on sheet music for a patriotic song dedicated to Lincoln.

  Whatever apprehension he might feel about the struggle ahead, Lincoln could at least savor this consolidation of opinion. He would later reflect to Orville Browning, who in February had advised Lincoln to keep “the traitors . . . constantly and palpably in the wrong” and make them the aggressors, that this was the very approach he had followed in dealing with the South Carolinians. “The plan succeeded,” he purred. “They attacked Sumter—it fell, and thus, did more service than it otherwise could.” Similarly, he told Gustavus Fox that the attempt to relieve Sumter, though unsuccessful, had still advanced “the cause of the country.” Friend and foe endorsed his verdict. “The loss of Sumter,” the Bostonian Oliver Ellsworth told Lincoln, “was the greatest victory the people ever realized; it has done its work effectually.” In New York, where the Times and Tribune saw in the circumstances of surrender “a most brilliant success” that had tarred the Confederates with “the entire responsibility of commencing the war,” the southern-rights Evening Day-Book gloomily identified “a cunningly devised scheme” to achieve northern political unity. “And some Democrats,” it lamented, “have been just such dunderheads as to fall into this pit dug for their reception. Blind, deluded people!”57

  STRATEGIES FOR A “PEOPLE’S WAR”

  When, on Sunday, April 14, all Washington learned that Anderson had capitulated at Sumter, Lincoln’s immediate actions gave notice that he would himself take executive control of the war and devise its overall strategy. That afternoon he asked his cabinet to consider a proclamation in which he called on the states to raise seventy-five thousand militiamen to put down “combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceeding,” and to repossess the forts and other federal property then beyond Union control. Published in the next day’s press, the proclamation also summoned Congress into special session on July 4. The delay would allow the militia’s term of service to be extended to three months (by law it could serve for no more than thirty days after the opening of a congressional session), but just as important was the opportunity it gave Lincoln to establish his control unhindered. Before Independence Day he took further executive action, establishing a blockade of the ports of the rebel states, increasing the size of the regular army and navy, calling up over forty thousand three-year volunteers, and entrusting $2 million of Treasury funds to private individuals to buy arms. Most controversially, on April 27 he suspended the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus along the corridor between Washington and Philadelphia, to allow the summary military arrest, without trial, of those who threatened the passage of troops to the nation’s capital. In all this he enjoyed public and informal congressional support, and consulted political figures who mattered most, but left no doubt about who was in command.

  The steps that Lincoln took during the early stages of the war showed an impressive and instinctive grasp of strategic essentials. He had three main objectives. He must nourish and sustain northern political support beyond the narrow confines of the Republican party. He must do all in his power to strengthen the Unionist elements in the upper tier of slave states. And, while tightening a noose around the Confederacy, he had to prevent the war from becoming an international conflict. Policies or actions which undermined these goals would disable the Union cause and threaten defeat.

  THE SECEDED STATES AND THE BORDER REGION

  The secession of the seven states of the Deep South was followed, after the fall of Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for troops, by the secession of four more slave states. The remaining tier of slavery—the border states—became a political and military battle-ground. Farther north still, particularly in the southern counties of the midwestern states, Democratic and anti-administration sentiment remained potent throughout the war.

  Lincoln knew that no one would be more important to advancing the goal of cross-party, inclusive Unionism, and building on its tentative appearance in March, than the titan of the northern Democrats, Stephen Douglas. On the evening of April 14, Lincoln spent two hours at the White House alone with his old rival. Douglas pledged his unstinting support in bringing about the restoration of the Union, now possible only through the bloodshed that he had worked himself to near-exhaustion to prevent. In the next day’s papers Douglas delivered to an attentive country an account of this cordial meeting, and in effect instructed Democrats in their patriotic duty. The two men, he reported, had spoken “of the present & future, without reference to the past.” While remaining “unalterably opposed to the administration on all its political issues,” he would “sustain the President in the exercise of all his constitutional functions to preserve the Union, and maintain the government, and defend the Federal Capital.”58

  Douglas proved true to his word, heading back to Illinois by train and along the way delivering urgent speeches designed to stiffen the backbones of waverers. At the capitol in Springfield he delivered an electrifying address, bitter toward those southern leaders he felt had conspired to destroy the Union, and explained why party must now give way to country. In what would be the final speech of his life, a week later in Chicago, he hammered home the same message to an enormous and admiring cross-party audience: “There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots—or traitors.” As Republicans lionized Douglas, he met the deep skepticism of the Democrats’ peace wing, whose suspicions he tried to calm with a public letter. Denying that he was in Lincoln’s pocket, he insisted that Democratic ascendancy would come only by remembering “that a man cannot be a true Democrat unless he is a loyal patriot.”59

  Acting as the voluntary agent of the administration at a time when many people were ready for political guidance, Douglas exerted real influence. In consulting him so promptly, Lincoln had seemed to promise an informal Democratic influence over administration policy. Douglas would shackle “Black Republicanism” and guarantee “the integrity of the Union,” judged a friend from Maryland, confident that for this reason the state would not secede. In Illinois, Douglas played a part in the complex of forces that converted dissident-waverers to committed Unionism, including congressmen John A. Logan and William Richardson, and the editor of the Chicago Times, Cyrus McCormick. Across the North leading Democrats who looked to Douglas took a prominent part in Union rallies throughout April and May. When Douglas, physically spent, met his premature death in early June, it deprived his weakened and disunited party of their only figure of genuinely national authority. But the likely effect on the Union seemed just as damaging. Lincoln’s White House and William Henry Seward’s State Department were draped in mourning. Government offices closed. “The loss at this crisis,” wrote the most influential Republican editor, “must be regarded as a national tragedy.”60

  Douglas, however, had by no means been alone in urging that his party “drop politics.” The Lincoln administration could rely on several other well-placed, nonpartisan “War Democrats” to deliver the same message over the coming months. They included the New Yorkers John A. Dix, John Cochrane, and, most notably, Daniel Dickinson, who proved tireless at Union rallies; the westerners John A. McClernand and David Tod; and, from the border, Andrew Johnson. Several of these staunch advocates of war had been Breckinridge men in November, as, too, had Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts, Daniel E. Sickles of New York, and a clutch of western editors. Their bitterness took on a sharper edge when Breckinridge himself chose to “go South.”

  Even in the first flush of patriotic anger, however, many Democrats remained unpersuaded by Douglas’s strategy. The most hostile were Peace Democrats in the southern counties of the Old Northwest, in the border South, and in and around New York City. When Douglas reached Springfield at the end of April, he reported to Lincoln that he had “found the state of feeling here and in some parts of our State much less satisfactory than I could have desired or ex
pected”: he had particularly in mind the “Egyptians,” the inhabitants of southern Illinois. Such party leaders as James A. Bayard of Delaware and Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio were oppositionists from the start, and could rely on editors like Samuel Medary of the Columbus Crisis and Benjamin Wood of the New York Daily News to be trenchant in the cause of peace. Vallandigham promptly countered Douglas’s press release of April 15 with a polemic against Lincoln’s coercive war: “sober second thought,” he predicted, would calm the “surging sea of madness” and prevent “thirty millions . . . butchering each other.”61

  Even Democrats who saw the need for war, and blamed the South for its onset, were not easily persuaded to drop party politics for the duration of hostilities. A generation’s political competition between Democrats and their Whig/Republican opponents had left a legacy of deep ideological and emotional antipathy, and an inability to see politics in any other terms. One aspect of this “partisan imperative,” as the historian Joel Silbey has termed it, was the culturally programmed hostility of Democrats to the party of Lincoln. Many continued to dismiss Republicans as Yankee-Puritan fanatics, bigots, zealots, meddlers, and ideological imperialists. Without them there would have been no political breakdown of the Union and thus no war. What guarantee was there that the “violent and revolutionary” abolitionists in the Republican party would not crush its “conservative and patriotic” wing?62 How would Democrats keep their independence on issues beyond the common pursuit of reunion if they lined up behind the administration? James Bayard feared that through the folly of nonpartisanship Democrats would be “swallowed up by the Republicans.” Douglas, of course, had no intention of winding up his party, but Bayard’s anxiety was realistic enough. Republican strategists did indeed see the advantages to Lincoln and the administration of “no-partyism,” as they called it. To “sink the partisan in the patriot” did little or no harm to Republicans, for it meant the terms “nation” and “administration party” became more or less synonymous; but at the same time the strategy threatened to paralyze and neuter the Democrats.

  With the opposition party in some disarray, Lincoln maintained the pressure for cooperation by keeping or placing prominent Democrats in military command. During his first weeks in office he had followed convention, dismissing over a thousand of Buchanan’s political appointees and replacing them from the hordes of Republican loyalists hungry for a share of the patronage. Meanwhile cabinet secretaries and legislators were responsible for filling thousands of other federal government jobs. Sweeping away “corrupt” Democrats was no more than the party had promised when campaigning for the return of “honest Abe.” But it was also consistent with the custom of rewarding party activists, keeping them disciplined and loyal to the administration: this would take on particular significance as the 1864 election approached. More immediately, however, it did nothing to win the goodwill of Democrats: Irish-Americans felt hard done by, and Douglas himself thought Lincoln had “dealt hardly with me, in removing some of my friends from office.”63 But Lincoln had more freedom for cross-party bridge-building when it came to accepting regiments from Democratic strongholds, often largely Irish, and appointing generals, whose commissioning lay in the president’s hands.64 Democrats had been well represented amongst the officers of the regular army on the eve of secession, but during the subsequent crisis most of these went south. Their replacements came from the ranks of West Point professionals and from civilian life, and Lincoln acted to ensure an across-the-board political (as well as geographical and ethnic) representation. Many Democrats secured high-profile positions of command as a result, including Ben Butler, John Dix, John (“Black Jack”) Logan, John McClernand, Dan Sickles, and Lew Wallace: they in turn could open the door to fellow Democrats. The administration also signaled that the Democratic allegiance of those already in service would be no bar to advancement. Don Carlos Buell, Irvin McDowell, and Montgomery C. Meigs of the War Department staff, for example, all won promotion for preparing Washington against an expected attack.

  Lincoln was keen to judge the strength of Democratic Unionism and the quality of its leadership when the special session of Congress convened. Republicans comprised two out of every three senators and enjoyed a comfortable majority in the House, but the minority of Democrats and border-state Unionists were his special concern. Lincoln had already begun thinking hard about his message by early May, when he tested some ideas on his secretaries. He knew he had to provide a compelling rationale for the war and to show that the administration’s purposes were essentially conservative. He began with a summary of the events that produced the Sumter crisis, to show his own forbearance and to underscore the unwarranted aggression of the rebels. Their assault on the Union raised profound issues—of universal import—relating to the integrity of popular government and to the rights of man. The question, explained Lincoln, in phrases that he would polish at Gettysburg in 1863, was “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.” Were all republics inherently and fatally flawed? “Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”65

  The rebels had chosen to abandon a government based on the popular will and had adopted a constitution which, “unlike our good old one,” omitted the phrase “We, the People.” Their declaration of independence had excised Jefferson’s words “all men are created equal.” They had, then, in “pressing out of view, the rights of men, and the authority of the people,” provoked “a People’s contest” on behalf of a Union committed to “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.”66

  The war’s purpose was thus protective and conservative: to defend the values and political philosophy of Washington and the Founders in the face of national disintegration. For revolution, look south: secession was an illegal, insurrectionary act by rebellious individuals against a perpetual Union. And since that Union remained unbroken, there should be no “uneasiness in the minds of candid men, as to what is to be the course of the government, towards the Southern States, after the rebellion shall have been suppressed.” As president, Lincoln reassured conservatives, he would continue to be guided by constitutional law, and when peace returned “probably will have no different understanding of the powers, and duties of the Federal government, relatively to the rights of the States, and the people” than he had had on assuming office. That “probably” was a mark of his caution and intellectual honesty in the face of the imponderables of war, and perhaps a warning, too, but the essential message was clear: individuals might be punished for their rebellion, but the Constitution would continue to protect southern slaveholders in their property rights. The federal authorities would not instigate social revolution in the South.67

  As a further nod toward the concerns of conservatives, Lincoln sought to show that he had fully complied with his constitutional duty both before and after the fall of Sumter. In what was a high-wire act of persuasion, he said nothing that would compromise his determination as chief executive and commander-in-chief to keep control of the war’s prosecution, but at the same time he looked to Congress to endorse what he had done since April 15. Pressing the argument that he had made his various proclamations, “whether strictly legal or not,” in response to “a popular demand, and a public necessity,” he asked that Congress ratify them, and added an extraordinary statement, “It is believed that nothing has been done beyond the constitutional competency of Congress.” More delicate still was the issue of Lincoln’s limited suspension of habeas corpus, which by now had come under the hostile scrutiny of Roger Taney. Given the Constitution’s silence on where the power of suspension lay—with the president o
r with Congress?—Lincoln volleyed the argument back to the chief justice: the president had indeed, as Taney had noted, taken an oath to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” but “are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?”68

  Lincoln gave notice that as president he would mix Jacksonian executive energy with a Whiggish understanding of the lawmaking authority of the legislature. This was a recipe for rallying broad cross-party support, both within Congress and beyond. With the exception of the suspension of the writ, which would remain a chronic source of division, legislators overwhelmingly approved Lincoln’s emergency measures. And they more than met his request for men and money, by authorizing the raising of up to half a million troops, and providing an appropriation of $500 million through bond issues, increased protective duties, and direct taxation, including an income tax. The same broad-based Unionism found expression, too, in the welcome proffered to the resolutions which two slave-state Democrats, John J. Crittenden and Andrew Johnson, introduced on the eve of the war’s first large-scale military engagement. After the numbing, humiliating Union defeat at Bull Run, the two chambers of Congress, echoing the president’s message, resolved almost unanimously “that this war is not waged, on our part, in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions” of the states.