Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power

by Richard J. Carwardine

  Thus, when Lincoln’s fighting men thought about their president, they conjured up more than a personally sympathetic figure. He became, too, the embodiment of the nation’s cause. Soldiers saw in the Union a set of political and moral principles, secured by the sacrifices of the revolutionary generation, which now made the republic what one described as “a beacon of hope to the nations of the world.” When the armies observed Washington’s birthday and listened on July 4 to the public reading of the Declaration of Independence, they affirmed their faith in republican liberty and “the best government ever organized by man.” At the same time, deep state, local, and personal allegiances reinforced this devotion to abstract principles: the Union’s power partly derived from its being, in one historian’s words, “the family writ large.”59 As its head and cogent expounder of its meaning, Lincoln was truly “Father Abraham.”

  The unified political purpose that Lincoln encouraged amongst his troops by arousing “their slumbering patriotism,” as one private put it, was challenged but not fundamentally compromised by his role as the Great Emancipator. The president recognized that the army was not a political monolith, that slavery was a divisive issue, and that an emancipation policy would alienate many serving men. The proclamations of September 22, 1862, and January 1, 1863, were indeed seen as an expression of “niggerism,” especially amongst volunteers from the lower North and the western states. “Ask any solder what he thinks of the war,” one reported. “He will answer, ‘I don’t like to fight for the damned nigger.’ It’s nothing but an abolition war, and I wish I was out of it.” A captain wrote bitterly, “Old Abe Lincoln is a god damned shit and if I had to choose between him and Jeff Davis, I don’t know who I’d vote for. I hope to sink in hell if I ever have to draw my sword to fight for the negroes.” But Lincoln calculated that, on balance, a policy of emancipation would do more good than harm within the ranks. According to James Stradling, a cavalry sergeant who visited the White House in March 1863, the president expected his troops to wake up to the military benefits of an assault on slavery and of the use of blacks in front-line service. Lincoln’s belief that the proclamation would serve to inspire, not alienate, the common soldier proved well founded. If an Indiana sergeant spoke with uncommon force when he said “he was in for emancipation subjugation extermination and hell and damnation” if they would bring the war to a speedy end, his underlying sentiment was common enough amongst ordinary soldiers. Pragmatic calculation fused with abolitionist idealism to create a swelling tide of pro-emancipation sentiment from the spring of 1863, drowning out the shrinking minority of antis who nursed a bitter sense of betrayal.60

  Union soldiers did not keep their views to themselves. The bonds between northern communities and “their” regiments—symbolized by the flag which each departing unit received in patriotic civic rituals and which it subsequently carried into battle as a potent emblem—remained extraordinarily powerful throughout the war. Even the developing emotional gap, described by the historian Gerald Linderman, between battle-scarred troops and the people back home could not destroy the mutually sustaining reciprocities of army camp and domestic community. For their part, home localities provided their volunteers with emotional and practical succor, bolstered their morale, articulated the meaning of war, and held hostage their soldiers’ reputations. In return soldiers actively encouraged a “fireside patriotism” on the home front. They worked directly, through private correspondence and letters to newspapers, and in public meetings, church services, sanitary fairs, and other fund-raising occasions. But they also effected an influence at a remove, through the patriotic army reports of journalists, agents of the sanitary and Christian commissions, and others whose wartime activity took them into the field. And through their deaths, and the community mourning that followed, Union troops prompted large questions about the political and religious meaning of the war. Thus it was that a New York captain could tell his wife, “It is the soldiers who have educated the people . . . to a just perception of their duties in this contest.”61

  From the pens and mouths of thousands of federal soldiers came a message of the justice of the Union cause, of the nation’s being on God’s side, and of the religious significance of the struggle for republican government. As an Ohio corporal explained late in the war, there was a “big Idea” at stake, namely “the principles of Liberty, of Justice, and of the Righteousness which exalteth a Nation.” One wrote to his wife, “Every day I have a more religious feeling, that this war is a crusade for the good of mankind.” Men wrote on stationery bearing printed verses that fused the religious and the patriotic: “For right is right, as God is God / And right will surely win; To doubt would be disloyalty— / To falter would be sin.” The federal army, then, functioned as a surrogate pulpit. Soldiers explained that Lincoln’s administration could “claim the divine blessing” because of its “manifest desire . . . to do what is right for the sake of right.” Echoing Lincoln and the jeremiads of Protestant preachers, they also presented the war as a punishment for the Union’s chronic sins of national pride, neglect of God, and black enslavement. But the cause itself was not wrong, and the army itself, not only in the words of its own men but in the potent images of the abolitionist writer Julia Ward Howe, became a symbol of Christian triumph. In the resounding “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the Union forces carried the unsheathed sword of the Lord; their watch fires in the “hundred circling camps” stood as altars; their “burnished rows of steel” announced the gospel; they, like Christ, died “to make men free.”62 Union soldiers—responding to the trumpet call of a wrathful, judgmental God—were engaged in a millennial struggle for both national and religious salvation.

  At the same time, the Union army exercised its enormous moral and political authority more prosaically, sustaining the administration by encouraging enlistments, invigorating the Union-Republican party, and demonizing the Peace Democrats. Soldiers broadcast in their home communities their contempt for the cowardly and selfish who sought to avoid service: “Are they afraid of a little danger of hardship?” asked one volunteer. “If they are, they are not fit to be called free Americans.” The 1863 Conscription Act won the warm support of serving men. “All men in the Army believe in the Draft,” declared a New York officer. “I think that some of them do not believe in much else beside the President and Drafting.” As well as encouraging recruits for the front line, many soldiers sought to beef up the administration party at home, by calling on wives, sisters, and other womenfolk to expand their notions of civic duty. “I know ladies are not usually interested in such matters [as politics],” wrote an army surgeon to his wife ahead of state elections in 1863, “but the time has come when they as well as the sterner sex must put a shoulder to the wheel.”63

  Extreme circumstances—treachery on the home front—seemed to demand extraordinary measures. Troops “choked with rage” at Copperhead opponents of the war. “I believe I hate them worse than the rebels themselves,” wrote one. Soldiers urged home front loyalists to control “every Fop Editor of a Penny Sheet” who warred against the administration’s emergency measures. Whenever they heard a “traitor letting loose his sympathizing slang, they should bust his crust.” Peace men “have no rights But to be hung.” At times, indeed, soldiers’ burning anger turned moral force into physical coercion. Southern and central Illinois in the early weeks of 1864 witnessed daily “affrays” between Peace Democrat residents and furloughed volunteers: “that the soldiers would take but little copperhead lip before proceeding to knock the tories down is hardly a matter of surprise,” a loyalist editor reflected. Soldiers helped divide local communities to a degree not seen since the revolutionary era, sure that, as a gathering of Iowans insisted, “in this crisis there can be but two classes of men ‘Patriots and Traitors.’ ”64

  The soldiers’ role as sustainers of the Union administration achieved its most practical expression at the polls. The experience of war served only to confirm the political loyalties of those who had been R
epublicans at the outset. “If people expect me to come home less a Republican than I went out they will be disappointed,” an Ohio private told his wife as the second year of war drew to a close. “I may not then support Abraham Lincoln as ardently as I did but Republicanism does not consist in the support of Abraham Lincoln.”65 At the same time, large numbers of the 40 percent or so of troops who in 1860 had cast Democratic ballots responded to the rise of Copperheadism and calls for a negotiated peace by cutting their traditional ties and actively sustaining the Union-Republican ticket in the watershed state elections of 1863. Troops tactically furloughed by Lincoln’s War Department lieutenants swept Andrew Curtin to power in Pennsylvania and John Brough in Ohio. As Lincoln looked ahead to the presidential election year of 1864, he could take much comfort from knowing that he had in his army not only a staunchly loyal political force but one which would play its part in energizing and mobilizing the wider Union public.

  THE ELECTION OF 1864: “THE SECOND BIRTH OF OUR NATION”

  Probably the greatest test of the ability of Lincoln’s administration to rally popular support came in the summer and fall of 1864. That year’s presidential election followed months of turbulence in public opinion. If by November the outcome appeared a foregone conclusion, that had certainly not been the case in the steamy days of summer, when Union hopes fell to one of their lowest points in the war. John Hay acknowledged those swirls of opinion when in June he reflected, “In the stress of this war politics have drifted out of the hands of politicians & are now more than ever subject to genuine popular currents.” Even so, Lincoln maintained his faith in the fundamental loyalty of the “honest . . . masses”: he was sure, he told the Congregationalist minister Edward N. Kirk, that they would never consent to disunion. But they could be misled into believing that reunion might be realized by means other than war. His administration’s task was to keep the hard reality before them. “Let them know the truth, and the country is safe.”66

  Following the etiquette of the day, Lincoln avoided brashly soliciting a return to office, but by the fall of 1863 his ambition had become clear enough. His desire for reelection was understandable in human terms: however oppressive the burdens and cares of office, he conceded that “it would be a very sweet satisfaction” to win the approval of his fellow citizens. But he could invoke a public interest, too: “swapping horses in the middle of the stream” would be risky and destabilizing, and the endorsement of his policies would put a large nail in the coffin of the Confederacy.67

  His hopes would depend to a large degree on factors beyond his direct control, for public confidence was intimately connected with battlefield success. Though Lincoln had real faith in Grant and Sherman, and in their plans for a broad-front spring offensive into the Confederate heartlands, he could not be sure how quickly they would press on to a signal victory; he could also reflect, as Nicolay put it, that “our Spring campaigns . . . have so generally been failures that people are beginning to feel superstitious about them.”68 But whatever the military contingencies, there was still much the president could do, and rather than allow inertia to stifle all action, Lincoln busied himself with the election throughout the year, working to ensure an efficient harnessing of the agencies of home front mobilization: party, churches, and army. Of these, the most problematic was his party, which was riven by factionalism in Washington and beyond.

  Lincoln had to address these party divisions well before the election campaign, for there would be no reelection without renomination. He knew he faced opposition from a minority within most of the state parties, mainly from radicals who doubted his commitment to the rights of freedmen in the postwar order, but also from those who thought that he was simply not up to the job. Chase—radical, ambitious, confident of his intellectual superiority, and enjoying an independent power base through his command of Treasury Department patronage—posed the chief threat. In February Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy called on the party to ditch Lincoln and adopt Chase, but his circular letter provoked a sharp backlash, not least since the war at last appeared to be going well. Many state Republican organizations came out strongly for Lincoln, and even Ohio (the treasury secretary’s home state) endorsed the president. Chase unpersuasively denied advance knowledge of the circular and shortly announced he was not a candidate for his party’s nomination.

  Republican intrigues against Lincoln did not end there. As Nicolay dyspeptically remarked, various other names were floated by a few malcontents who wanted to establish “the nucleus of a little faction in opposition to Lincoln, but there is not the remotest prospect that their eggs will hatch.”69 One of those named was Grant, who actually had no wish to challenge the incumbent and whom Lincoln brought to the capital to be ceremoniously promoted to general-in-chief. Another was Frémont, who was more open to overtures of this kind but who lacked any real power base outside the Missouri community of antislavery radicals and German-Americans. At Cleveland on the last day of May these westerners joined with a section of organized abolitionism, represented by Wendell Phillips, and a cluster of Democrats to nominate Frémont on an independent ticket designed to siphon off Republican votes. Few Lincolnites, and certainly not Lincoln himself, betrayed serious alarm at a movement—the Radical Democracy—lacking a broad base of public support.

  By the time the Republicans gathered at Baltimore in early June, Lincoln’s nomination was a foregone conclusion. His men dominated the party’s national executive and controlled the state delegations, largely made up of federal officeholders who owed their jobs to the president. For months Lincoln had exhausted himself in pursuit of Republican harmony, intervening as mediator in factional conflicts within several states, and much of the goodwill he enjoyed in the party at large derived from a belief that he was well suited to hold it together: even antislavery radicals acknowledged the benefits of his “patriotic policy” of uniting “men of varying shades of sentiment upon a policy radical enough to destroy slavery, conservative enough to save the nation.”70 At the same time, even those who disliked Lincoln saw that he enjoyed a warmth of support amongst ordinary voters and soldiers that exceeded his standing with his party’s leaders.

  The convention, meeting on Lincoln’s doorstep, pursued the president’s agenda. Following the Army of the Potomac’s horrendous recent losses in the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania, the mood was generally somber, darkening further as delegates began to learn of yet more slaughter, at Cold Harbor; but Grant’s bulldog grit, as Lincoln termed it, and remarkable determination to keep pushing forward to destroy the enemy and capture Richmond—at whatever cost—provided its own hope and grisly inspiration.71 Delegates unanimously renominated Lincoln and rallied behind a platform which, at Lincoln’s insistence, nailed its colors proudly to an emancipation amendment to the Constitution, endorsed the vigorous prosecution of the war, celebrated the fighting men, black as well as white, and demanded the Confederates’ unconditional surrender. To this explicit emphasis on liberty (a stunning riposte to the more tentative stance of Frémont’s Radical Democrats) the convention married an equal stress on the party’s nonpartisan and inclusive Unionism: they would campaign not as Republicans but as a broad-based National Union party. To reinforce their appeal to conservatives and to border-state men, delegates chose to nominate for vice president not the New England incumbent, Maine’s Hannibal Hamlin, but the Tennessee loyalist, military governor, and War Democrat Andrew Johnson. Lincoln refused to give even a private indication of his personal preference, but many of those who swept Johnson onto the ticket did so in the firm belief that they were following the president’s wishes.

  Developments in the short term served only to reinforce the sense of Lincoln’s firm control. After yet another episode in which Chase provoked a dispute with the president over patronage appointments, the secretary of the treasury proffered his resignation, now for the third time. It proved once too often. Lincoln, safely renominated and exasperated by Chase’s ill-judged attempt to assert his authority, accepted the resignatio
n, telling the secretary that they had “reached a point of mutual embarrassment” that threatened the public good. For a replacement Lincoln turned to William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, a sound party man, widely respected in Congress yet no threat to the president. Then, soon afterward, Lincoln pocket-vetoed the Wade-Davis Bill: to a measure which showed that some radicals continued to oppose his reelection, he gave a party leader’s unequivocal response, underscoring his authority and reassuring the moderates and conservatives of the National Union coalition that the administration would not be the prisoner of congressional radicals.

  Yet during the days of high summer, in July and August, the mood in the party grew darker, increasing the pressure on Lincoln to reconsider his position. The stalemate in Virginia continued, with Grant now besieging Petersburg after the unprecedented slaughter of May and June; Sherman, defeated at Kennesaw Mountain, continued at only a snail’s pace toward Atlanta; Jubal Early’s Confederate raids from the Shenandoah on Washington and other targets, though endangering few lives, inflicted humiliating political damage. With the Union’s coffers depleted and another draft imminent, opposition Democrats played on a deepening war-weariness to demand negotiations to end the conflict.

  Calls for peace extended well beyond the ranks of the usual Copperheads, who maintained that only the administration’s intransigence over emancipation prevented a settlement. Greeley, dreading a future stained by “new rivers of human blood,” learned that Confederate diplomats were at Niagara Falls on a peace mission. He urged the president to negotiate. Lincoln realized that this was not a serious overture from Jefferson Davis but a ploy to cause political mayhem and swing an election which gave the Confederacy its best hope of independence. Yet he knew, too, that the public mood would not excuse any missed opportunities for peace. Cunningly, he appointed the reluctant Greeley as his envoy to Niagara Falls, correctly believing that nothing would come of a meeting with men who, it unsurprisingly transpired, had been given no power to negotiate. He also set his political terms so high—in a letter “To Whom It May Concern”—that he knew they would be unacceptable: peace proposals, he insisted, must be based on reunion and “the abandonment of slavery.” But in setting conditions which appeared fiercer than the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln not only gave a political weapon to the opposition, but prompted howls from those National Union party conservatives, and especially War Democrats, committed to reunion alone as the war’s goal.72