“WHAT SHALL I DO? THE PEOPLE ARE IMPATIENT . . .”
Throughout these tumultuous months from his election to the end of 1861, Lincoln was constantly engaged in what came naturally to him: judging public sentiment. The habits and democratic sensitivities of Lincoln the peacetime politician would become essential elements of his wartime leadership. Never the prisoner of opinion, he nonetheless took his major decisions with at least one eye on popular feeling. Thus Lincoln’s public silence after his election was a calculated response to his reading of southern opinion and the needs of the Republican majority. Convinced that determined Unionism ran broad and strong, he took an unyielding stand over the forts in March and April. He was ready to defy the broad-based support for Frémont’s proclamation, not out of disdain for public sentiment, but because he attached greater strategic importance to local opinion in the pivotal border regions. During the Trent affair he was as concerned to resolve the crisis as to avoid, in Bates’s words, “the displeasure of our own people—lest they should accuse us of timidly truckling to the power of England.”96
In the event, the Trent crisis inflicted only limited popular damage, but, given the broader picture, Lincoln’s anxiety was well justified. By the end of 1861 the Union public had had little to cheer. Apart from some successful incursions at the margins of the Confederacy—notably Hatteras Inlet and Port Royal Sound—Union forces had as yet made little discernible progress by land or sea. July’s traumatic rout at Bull Run had prompted what Greeley described to Lincoln as “sullen, scowling, black despair” and a sober realization that this was to be no easy or short-lived conflict. It brought changes in the high command, a flood of new recruits, the spur to an antiwar party, and a gradual revival of hope as the new leader of the Army of the Potomac, George B. McClellan, brought his remarkable energy and managerial skills to constructing a disciplined, powerful force from the three-year volunteers. Yet six months later the few martial landmarks in the public memory were moments of disappointment, such as Grant’s inconclusive engagement at Belmont, or occasions of sickening ineptness, notably at Ball’s Bluff.97
But inglorious defeat at least intimated some sort of energy. What was more troubling to the Union’s loyal citizenry was the sense that, for all the signs of preparation for war, their political and military leaders lacked either the appetite or the capacity for purposeful action. Under Simon Cameron, the War Department appeared to be proficient in venality but little else. As the tiny War Department of early 1861 ballooned to face the demands of equipping and organizing an army of half a million men, instances of unbusinesslike contracts and profiteering multiplied. If the secretary was not himself guilty of corruption—the weight of opinion is in his favor—he was widely perceived as such. He was certainly, as the president came to recognize, ignorant, lax, and incompetent. Lincoln faced earnest demands for his removal and suggestions that Joseph Holt, a staunch pro-war Democrat, replace him.98 Of course, the enormous challenge Cameron faced was in part structural: it was no easy matter to bring centralized federal order to an operation in which proud states kept control over raising troops and commissioning regimental officers, where the administration lacked systematic, comprehensive information, and where private recruiters further complicated matters. But a secretary of war with the same vision, system, and grasp of detail that Welles brought to the Navy Department could have shored up public confidence and would not have swollen Lincoln’s mailbag with demands that he be replaced. Lincoln, however, continued uneasily to tolerate Cameron’s incompetence. Only in mid-January 1862 did he replace Cameron—not with Holt, but with another backboned Democrat, the formidable Edwin M. Stanton.
Dishonest contracting, fraud, and ineptness also characterized military administration in the West. Frémont, as commander of that department, could fairly accuse Washington of a myopic preoccupation with the eastern arena and of starving him of the equipment and funds he needed to subdue Missouri and move down the Mississippi. But he was also the author of many of his own difficulties, for he lacked both administrative method and the political shrewdness needed for the chessboard of western intrigue. He lost the confidence of many officers and foolishly fell out with his patrons, the Blairs, who badgered Lincoln for his removal. By mid-October the president was in possession of a clutch of adverse firsthand reports on the western commander from the secretary of war and a pack of watchdog generals. One of them, Samuel R. Curtis, advised Lincoln that the only real question was the timing and manner of Frémont’s departure, to be judged with special regard to public opinion, “an element of war which must not be neglected.”99
From this lesson in the obvious Lincoln might have drawn the opposite conclusion, namely that he should leave Frémont in place. As rumors spread of the commander’s likely removal, he was deluged with the fiercest torrent of mail of his first year in office. “I do Beg of you for Gods Sake for Humanitys Sake for our Western Countrys Sake Keep John C. Frémont in his present Position,” pleaded a fellow Illinoisan. Writer after writer represented the West, excepting only extreme Negrophobes and “rabid democrats,” as united in its faith in Frémont as the man destined to “sweep rebellion from the Valley of the Mississippi.” His removal would be “a catastrophe,” “bad business,” and “a suicidal policy”: it would, Lincoln learned, paralyze the army; alienate the German and Irish population, from whom a high proportion of his troops were drawn; freeze voluntary enlistments; and prompt desertion or even mutiny. If the more extreme predictions of “a fire in the rear,” a political coup, and making Frémont a military dictator cut little ice in Washington, Lincoln could be in little doubt of the damage that his dismissal would do to popular morale and to the standing of the administration. As John Hay noted, it was not easy to act when it was widely believed, East and West, that all opposition to Frémont arose from his emancipation proclamation and “thus assumes the form of a persecution for righteousness sake.” Frémont himself, by reissuing his proclamation and working successfully to cultivate the western press, hoped—so Frank Blair believed—to “make public opinion . . . overawe the President and his Administration.”100
In the event, Lincoln followed the advice of Blair, Curtis, and others who insisted that retaining Frémont would prove militarily disastrous and risk losing Missouri, but who also advised delay. “The time may come when it would be safe to . . . [act],” one wrote in early October: “It may be in a few weeks. But it is not now!” A little over three weeks later, on November 2, Lincoln grasped the nettle and removed his western commander. Wails of public outrage followed—from St. Louis, to which Frémont returned as a hero and antislavery martyr, to New England. According to the Cincinnati Gazette, sober loyalists “of all political parties” could be seen “pulling from their walls and trampling underfoot the portrait of the President.”101
In part this anger derived from a sense that the administration had moved against the wrong commander. East of the mountains, the summer’s tributes to McClellan for creating a well-drilled army and fortifying the capital gave way as autumn advanced to mounting public impatience over battlefield inactivity; once he had engineered the removal of the ailing Scott and, on November 1, been appointed general-in-chief, he became personally more exposed to criticism. Incredulous editors and congressmen were perplexed to see an army of some 200,000 men standing immobile during the fine weather of late fall. Hearing the rumblings of public disquiet and prodded by those radicals whom Hay called “the Jacobin club,” the new session of Congress established the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War to ginger up military operations. In view of McClellan’s studied deafness to popular clamor and his deep-rooted caution, it is bizarre and ironic that some blamed Lincoln and cabinet conservatives for holding him back.102
George Brinton McClellan (1826–85) succeeded Scott as general-in-chief of the Union armies in November 1861. Lincoln became increasingly exasperated by McClellan’s reluctance to fight and questioned his strategy, but recognized his strengths as an organizer and the de
votion he won from his troops. Out-generaled in the Peninsula campaign, McClennan secured a timely victory at Antietam. Lincoln finally removed him from military command after the fall elections of 1862.
Had the public been privy to McClellan’s near-contempt for his commander-in-chief, they would have been even more deeply concerned. McClellan came to an early view that Lincoln was “an idiot,” a restrained judgment compared with his later scathing allusions to the president as “a well meaning baboon” and “the original gorilla.” He found the president’s efforts to master strategy and the technicalities of war to be as ridiculous as they were exasperating; and as a natural Democrat he had little respect for “the imbeciles” who comprised the rest of the administration. Only Blair, who shared the general’s Negrophobia and conservative view of war aims, earned his good opinion. Driven by a mix of self-esteem and a Calvinistic conviction of his preordained role as the nation’s deliverer, McClellan had no qualms about snubbing the president and on at least one occasion treated him with such insolence that John Hay accurately read it as “a portent of evil to come.”103
Characteristically, Lincoln resisted the temptation to stand on his dignity, and continued for longer than was prudent to reassure the cautious McClellan that he would shield him from impetuous critics: “You shall,” he said in mid-October, “have your own way in the matter.” The Bull Run episode, with its bloody retreat to Washington, had left Lincoln emotionally raw and declaring that, in its aftermath, “hell . . . has no terror for me”; he took on his own shoulders the blame for what Winfield Scott judged a premature fight, brought on by the urgent demands of press and public to move “forward to Richmond.” This experience went some way toward explaining Lincoln’s tolerant response to McClellan’s planning and operations, yet he also knew it was unwise to lose sight of public morale. McClellan complained when Benjamin F. Wade, soon to become the first chairman of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, opined that defeat was no worse than delay and “could easily be repaired, by the swarming recruits.” But Lincoln’s response was revealingly ambivalent. He “deprecated this new manifestation of popular impatience but . . . said it was a reality and should be taken into the account. At the same time General you must not fight till you are ready.” Eventually, in early 1862, he began to exert his authority in an attempt to prod McClellan into action.104
The shortcomings in military operations cast doubt on Lincoln’s own leadership. A chorus of Unionist voices, moderate as well as radical, questioned the competence of the president and his administration’s resolve. The loyalist press sadly identified drift, inefficiency, and ignorance. “They are blundering, cowardly, and inefficient,” Wade complained. “You could not inspire Old Abe, Seward, Chase, or Bates with courage, decision, and enterprise with a galvanic battery.” Lincoln’s first annual message to Congress on December 3 disappointed those who looked for a forceful expression of government purpose to lift the country’s mood. As a calm synthesis of administrative reports, it won two cheers for showing the “business-as-usual” strength of the Union, but only its closing discussion of the merits of free labor and republican government went any way toward stirring a public increasingly desperate for a signal of governmental energy. When Lincoln acted to demand that Cameron withdraw his well-publicized proposal to arm the slaves, it only confirmed that the president was an “old fogy.” “Old Abe is now unmasked, and we are sold out,” grieved the Chicago Tribune. Doubts marked the cabinet itself. Chase had no great faith in the president, and Bates ended the year confiding that Lincoln, though “an excellent man,” lacked “will and purpose, and . . . the power to command.”105
Lincoln felt understandably desperate as 1862 dawned. With McClellan bedridden, military operations were frozen. No one, not even the president, knew his plans. The western forces under Henry W. Halleck and Don C. Buell stood paralyzed. The costs of raising and maintaining 700,000 Union men in arms were bleeding the Treasury dry. Banks suspended specie payments. The president spoke of “borrowing” McClellan’s army and even taking the field himself. On January 10, the day that he would hold the first of four meetings of an ad hoc war council, he starkly summed up his predicament in conversation with Montgomery C. Meigs: “General, what shall I do? The people are impatient; Chase has no money and he tells me he can raise no more; the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub.”106
The people were indeed impatient, but they were scarcely defeatist. Whatever their disappointment and frustrations, Union loyalists felt no irremediable sense of alienation. Lincoln could draw on reservoirs of goodwill and on feelings of patriotic obligation directed less at himself personally than at his office and the associated institutions of government. Republican editors counseled patience. The New York Independent defended Lincoln against the charge of promise-breaking: “He has simply found out how much faster one can speak than act—how much easier it is to criticize administrations, than to administer.” A prominent spokesman for northwestern antislavery, Thomas M. Eddy, coupled expressions of concern over the Union’s confused policy toward rebels’ slaves with 24-carat loyalty to the administration: “We will sustain the government with the last dollar, and to the last extremity; we will not doubt the honest intent of its officers.”107
Here, within this ethically driven patriotism, lay the most potent long-term resource of the Union in what was now becoming a protracted war. If Lincoln were to prevent a permanent division of the nation—and he began to contemplate such a sundering during these stressful days108—his task was to nurture and exploit these sources of patriotism. The war to date, during 1861, had demanded a strategy that maximized Union support. Lincoln’s keen insight into the overriding importance of the border had determined his policy since April. But the conservatism that suited the men and women of the border would provide inadequate inspiration in the longer term for the Union as a whole. Over the course of the conflict Lincoln would have to reshape and rearticulate the war’s stated purposes, and thereby seek to inspire the devotion of the mass of instinctive Unionists in the face of setbacks, suffering, and loss. He came to see that his power ultimately depended on harnessing the freely offered energies of loyal citizens who were driven more by “Yankee” religious imperatives than by the pragmatic conservatism of the lower North.
CHAPTER 5
The Purposes of Power: Evolving Objectives, 1861–65
The president who five months into the war told Jessie Benton Frémont that the African-American had “nothing to do with” the conflict and should not be “dragged” into it would eventually, of course, enter the American pantheon as the Great Emancipator. A year after rescinding his western commander’s proclamation of freedom, the president issued his own ultimatum to rebel slaveholders. The landmark Emancipation Proclamation that followed was succeeded by state-level political action against slavery in various parts of the loyal and reconquered South. Urged on by the president, Congress eventually approved an antislavery amendment to the federal Constitution. A war that had begun as an effort to save the Union evolved under Lincoln’s leadership into an agency of the slaves’ freedom.
Thirty months after his crisp words to Mrs. Frémont, Lincoln reflected in a letter to a Kentucky editor, Albert G. Hodges, that unexpected and unplanned “events,” not he, had controlled his policy toward emancipation.1 In tandem, these two sets of remarks seem to invite the conclusion that the “Great Emancipator” was no more than the accidental beneficiary of haphazard wartime developments. Indeed, in the judgment of the most polemical of modern critics, Lincoln was a foot-dragging liberator, “forced into glory” against his conservative, white-supremacist instincts.2 A more substantial and subtle assault on the mythic Lincoln derives from the argument that it was above all through the African-Americans’ own actions that the slaves won their freedom. The tens of thousands of blacks who streamed into Union camps from both loyal and rebel regions of the South forced an issue on federal authorities that they could not duck. Well befor
e Lincoln acted, colluding military officers and congressmen moved to treat these runaways as confiscated property, or contraband, to be sheltered and employed in the northern armies. At the same time, well away from the military arena, a change took place in the balance of racial authority on southern farms and plantations, weakening slavery from within, as enlisted white overseers and owners left increasingly assertive slaves under the control of women and old men.
To argue, as some have done, that the slaves freed themselves and that Lincoln’s role was hesitantly to catch up with events is, however, to oversimplify a complex historical process. Final, irreversible freedom required the defeat of the Confederates and a new constitutional settlement. Slaves certainly played a role in weakening the Confederacy from within, while from without the 200,000 African-Americans who served as federal soldiers, sailors, servants, teamsters, and laborers may well have tipped the advantage toward the Union. But there was more to northern victory than that. Of paramount importance was the leadership of a president and commander-in-chief who understood that there could be no certain freedom without a restored Union and that prematurely making emancipation the formal goal of war would shatter the broad-based coalition on which that very restoration depended.
In reality, Lincoln was not a passive figure buffeted by forces beyond his control. His administration is the story of a president who kept his focus on strategic essentials; who chose not to pursue diversions, however worthy (as with reform of the corrupt Indian service); who was capable of pulling surprises; and who was quite capable, when the time came, “of laying strong hand upon the colored element.”3 Though ready to leave important tracts of the policy domain—notably foreign affairs and the national finances—largely to the direction of trusted ministers, Lincoln resolutely kept in his own hands all decisions bearing upon slavery, emancipation, and race. He achieved a mastery over his cabinet, occasionally soliciting opinions but mostly informing his ministers of decisions already reached. Jealous of the constitutional powers of the executive, as he understood them, he resisted legislative encroachment and took advantage of the long intervals between congressional sessions to keep the initiative. John W. Forney watched in admiration as Lincoln grew in political office to become “that great, wonderful mysterious inexplicable man: who holds in his single hands the reins of the republic: who keeps his own counsels: who does his own purpose in his own way no matter what temporizing minister in his cabinet sets himself up in opposition to the progress of the age.”4
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