Lincoln

N >> Nathaniel Wright Stephenson >> Lincoln


For all these reasons, the government at Washington appeared to be
tottering. Desperate remedies seemed imperative. Lincoln decided to make
every concession he could make without letting go his central purpose.
First, he threw over Cameron; he compelled him to resign though he saved
his face by appointing him minister to Russia. But who was to take his
place? At this critical moment, the choice of a new Secretary of War
was a political problem of exacting difficulty. Just why Lincoln chose
a sullen, dictatorial lawyer whose experience in no way prepared him for
the office, has never been disclosed. Two facts appear to explain it.
Edwin M. Stanton was temperamentally just the man to become a good
brother to Chandler and Wade. Both of them urged him upon Lincoln
as successor to Cameron.(9) Furthermore, Stanton hitherto had been a
Democrat. His services in Buchanan's Cabinet as Attorney-General had
made him a national figure. Who else linked the Democrats and the
Jacobins?

However, for almost any one but Lincoln, there was an objection that it
would have been hard to overcome. No one has ever charged Stanton with
politeness. A gloomy excitable man, of uncertain health, temperamentally
an over-worker, chronically apprehensive, utterly without the saving
grace of humor, he was capable of insufferable rudeness--one reason,
perhaps, why Chandler liked him. He and Lincoln had met but once. As
associate council in a case at Cincinnati, three years before, Lincoln
had been treated so contemptuously by Stanton that he had returned home
in pained humiliation. Since his inauguration, Stanton had been one of
his most vituperative critics. Was this insolent scold to be invited
into the Cabinet? Had not Lincoln at this juncture been in the full tide
of selflessness, surely some compromise would have been made with the
Committee, a secretary found less offensive personally to the President.
Lincoln disregarded the personal consideration. The candidate of
Chandler and Wade became secretary. It was the beginning of an intimate
alliance between the Committee and the War Office. Lincoln had laid up
for himself much trouble that he did not foresee.

The day the new Secretary took office, he received from the Committee a
report upon General Stone:(10) Subsequently, in the Senate, Wade denied
that the Committee had advised the arrest of Stone.(11) Doubtless the
statement was technically correct. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt
that the inquisitors were wholly in sympathy with the Secretary when,
shortly afterward, Stone was seized upon Stanton's order, conveyed to a
fortress and imprisoned without trial.

This was the Dreyfus case of the Civil War. Stone was never tried and
never vindicated. He was eventually released upon parole and after many
tantalizing disappointments permitted to rejoin the army. What gives the
event significance is its evidence of the power, at that moment, of
the Committee, and of the relative weakness of the President. Lincoln's
eagerness to protect condemned soldiers survives in many anecdotes. Hay
confides to his diary that he was sometimes "amused at the eagerness
with which the President caught at any fact which would justify"
clemency. And yet, when Stanton informed him of the arrest of Stone,
he gloomily acquiesced. "I hope you have good reasons for it," he said.
Later he admitted that he knew very little about the case. But he did
not order Stone's release.

Lincoln had his own form of ruthlessness. The selfless man, by dealing
with others in the same extraordinary way in which he deals with
himself, may easily under the pressure of extreme conditions become
impersonal in his thinking upon duty. The morality of such a state
of mind is a question for the philosopher. The historian must content
himself with pointing out the only condition that redeems it--if
anything redeems it The leader who thinks impersonally about others
and personally about himself-what need among civilized people to
characterize him? Borgia, Louis XIV, Napoleon. If we are ever to pardon
impersonal thinking it is only in the cases of men who begin by effacing
themselves. The Lincoln who accepted Stanton as a Cabinet officer, who
was always more or less overshadowed by the belief that in saving the
government he was himself to perish, is explicable, at least, when
individual men became for him, as at times they did, impersonal factors
in a terrible dream.

There are other considerations in the attempt to give a moral value to
his failure to interfere in behalf of Stone. The first four months of
1862 are not only his feeblest period as a ruler, the period when he
was barely able to hold his own, but also the period when he was least
definite as a personality, when his courage and his vitality seemed
ebbing tides. Again, his spirit was in eclipse. Singularly enough, this
was the darkness before the dawn. June of 1862 saw the emergence, with a
suddenness difficult to explain, of the historic Lincoln. But in
January of that year he was facing downward into the mystery of his last
eclipse. All the dark places of his heredity must be searched for clues
to this strange experience. There are moments, especially under strain
of a personal bereavement that fell upon him in February, when his will
seemed scarcely a reality; when, as a directing force he may be said
momentarily to have vanished; when he is hardly more than a ghost among
his advisers. The far-off existence of weak old Thomas cast its parting
shadow across his son's career.

However, even our Dreyfus case drew from Lincoln another display of that
settled conviction of his that part of his function was to be scapegoat.
"I serve," which in a way might be taken as his motto always, was
peculiarly his motto, and likewise his redemption, in this period of his
weakness. The enemies of the Committee in Congress took the matter up
and denounced Stanton. Thereupon, Wade flamed forth, criticizing Lincoln
for his leniency, venting his fury on all those who were tender of their
enemies, storming that "mercy to traitors is cruelty to loyal men."(12)
Lincoln replied neither to Wade nor to his antagonists; but, without
explaining the case, without a word upon the relation to it of the
Secretary and the Committee, he informed the Senate that the President
was alone responsible for the arrest and imprisonment of General
Stone.(13)




XX. IS CONGRESS THE PRESIDENT'S MASTER?

The period of Lincoln's last eclipse is a period of relative silence.
But his mind was not inactive. He did not cease thinking upon the deep
theoretical distinctions that were separating him by a steadily widening
chasm from the most powerful faction in Congress. In fact, his mental
powers were, if anything, more keen than ever before. Probably, it was
the very clearness of the mental vision that enfeebled him when it came
to action. He saw his difficulties with such crushing certainty. During
this trying period there is in him something of Hamlet.

The reaction to his ideas, to what is either expressed or implied, in
the first and second messages, was prompt to appear. The Jacobins did
not confine their activities within the scope of the terrible Committee.
Wade and Chandler worked assiduously undermining his strength in
Congress. Trumbull, though always less extreme than they, was still the
victim of his delusion that Lincoln was a poor creature, that the only
way to save the country was to go along with those grim men of strength
who dominated the Committee. In January, a formidable addition appeared
in the ranks of Lincoln's opponents. Thaddeus Stevens made a speech in
the House that marks a chapter. It brought to a head a cloud of floating
opposition and dearly defined an issue involving the central proposition
in Lincoln's theory of the government. The Constitution of the United
States, in its detailed provisions, is designed chiefly to meet the
exigencies of peace. With regard to the abnormal conditions of war,
it is relatively silent. Certain "war powers" are recognized but not
clearly defined; nor is it made perfectly plain what branch of the
government possesses them. The machinery for their execution is assumed
but not described--as when the Constitution provides that the privileges
of the writ of habeas corpus are to be suspended only in time of war,
but does not specify by whom, or in what way, the suspension is to be
effected. Are those undefined "war powers," which are the most sovereign
functions of our government, vested in Congress or in the President?
Lincoln, from the moment he defined his policy, held tenaciously to the
theory that all these extraordinary powers are vested in the President.
By implication, at least, this idea is in the first message. Throughout
the latter part of 1861, he put the theory into practice. Whatever
seemed to him necessary in a state of war, he did, even to the arresting
of suspected persons, refusing them the privilege-of the habeas corpus,
and retaining them in prison without trial. During 1861, he left the
exercise of this sovereign authority to the discretion of the two
Secretaries of War and of State.

Naturally, the Abolitionists, the Jacobins, the Democratic machine,
conscientious believers in the congressional theory of the government,
every one who for any reason, wanted to hit the Administration, united
in a chorus of wrath over arbitrary arrests. The greatest orator of
the time, Wendell Phillips, the final voice of Abolition, flayed the
government in public speeches for reducing America to an absolute
despotism. Trumbull introduced into the Senate a resolution calling upon
the President for a statement of the facts as to what he had actually
done.(1)

But the subject of arrests was but the prelude to the play. The real
issue was the theory of the government. Where in last analysis does the
Constitution place the ultimate powers of sovereignty, the war powers?
In Congress or in the President? Therefore, in concrete terms, is
Congress the President's master, or is it only one branch of the
government with a definite but united activity of its own, without that
sweeping sovereign authority which in course of time has been acquired
by its parent body, the Parliament of Great Britain?

On this point Lincoln never wavered. From first to last, he was
determined not to admit that Congress had the powers of Parliament. No
sooner had the politicians made out this attitude than their attack
on it began. It did not cease until Lincoln's death. It added a second
constitutional question to the issues of the war. Not only the issue
whether a State had a right to secede, but also the issue of the
President's possession of the war powers of the Constitution. Time and
again the leaders of disaffection in his own party, to say nothing of
the violent Democrats, exhausted their rhetoric denouncing Lincoln's
position. They did not deny themselves the delights of the sneer.
Senator Grimes spoke of a call on the President as an attempt "to
approach the footstool of power enthroned at the other end of the
Avenue."(2) Wade expanded the idea: "We ought to have a committee to
wait on him whenever we send him a bill, to know what his royal pleasure
is with regard to it. . . . We are told that some gentlemen . . . have
been to see the President. Some gentlemen are very fortunate in that
respect. Nobody can see him, it seems, except some privileged gentlemen
who are charged with his constitutional conscience."(3) As Lincoln kept
his doors open to all the world, as no one came and went with greater
freedom than the Chairman of the Committee, the sneer was-what one might
expect of the Committee. Sumner said: "I claim for Congress all that
belongs to any government in the exercise of the rights of war."
Disagreement with him, he treated with unspeakable disdain: "Born in
ignorance and pernicious in consequence, it ought to be received with
hissings of contempt, and just in proportion as it obtains acceptance,
with execration."(4) Henry Wilson declared that, come what might, the
policy of the Administration would be shaped by the two Houses. "I had
rather give a policy to the President of the United States than take a
policy from the President of the United States."(5) Trumbull thundered
against the President's theory as the last word in despotism.(6)

Such is the mental perspective in which to regard the speech of Stevens
of January 22, 1862. With masterly clearness, he put his finger on the
heart of the matter: the exceptional problems of a time of war, problems
that can not be foreseen and prepared for by anticipatory legislation,
may be solved in but one way, by the temporary creation of the dictator;
this is as true of modern America as of ancient Rome; so far, most
people are agreed; but this extraordinary function must not be vested
in the Executive; on the contrary, it must be, it is, vested in the
Legislature. Stevens did not hesitate to push his theory to its
limit. He was not afraid of making the Legislature in time of war the
irresponsible judge of its own acts. Congress, said he, has all possible
powers of government, even the dictator's power; it could declare itself
a dictator; under certain circumstances he was willing that it should do
so.(7)

The intellectual boldness of Lincoln was matched by an equal boldness.
Between them, he and Stevens had perfectly defined their issue. Granted
that a dictator was needed, which should it be--the President or
Congress?

In the hesitancy at the White House during the last eclipse, in the
public distress and the personal grief, Lincoln withheld himself
from this debate. No great utterances break the gloom of this period.
Nevertheless, what may be considered his reply to Stevens is to be
found. Buried in the forgotten portions of the Congressional Globe is a
speech that surely was inspired-or, if not directly inspired, so close
a reflection of the President's thinking that it comes to the same thing
at the end.

Its author, or apparent author, was one of the few serene figures in
that Thirty-Seventh Congress which was swept so pitilessly by epidemics
of passion. When Douglas, after coming out valiantly for the Union and
holding up Lincoln's hands at the hour of crisis, suddenly died, the
Illinois Legislature named as his successor in the Senate, Orville Henry
Browning. The new Senator was Lincoln's intimate friend. Their points
of view, their temperaments were similar. Browning shared Lincoln's
magnanimity, his hatred of extremes, his eagerness not to allow the
war to degenerate into revolution. In the early part of 1862 he was
Lincoln's spokesman in the Senate. Now that the temper of Wade and
Chandler, the ruthlessness that dominated the Committee, had drawn unto
itself such a cohort of allies; now that all their thinking had been
organized by a fearless mind; there was urgent need for a masterly
reply. Did Lincoln feel unequal, at the moment, to this great task? Very
probably he did. Anyhow, it was Browning who made the reply,(8) a reply
so exactly in his friend's vein, that--there you are!

His aim was to explain the nature of those war powers of the government
"which lie dormant during time of peace," and therefore he frankly put
the question, "Is Congress the government?" Senator Fessenden, echoing
Stevens had said, "There is no limit on the powers of Congress;
everything must yield to the force of martial law as resolved by
Congress." "There, sir," said Browning, "is as broad and deep a
foundation for absolute despotism as was ever laid." He rang the changes
on the need to "protect minorities from the oppression and tyranny of
excited majorities."

He went on to lay the basis of all Lincoln's subsequent defense of
the presidential theory as opposed to the congressional theory, by
formulating two propositions which reappear in some of Lincoln's most
famous papers. Congress is not a safe vessel for extraordinary powers,
because in our system we have difficulty in bringing it definitely to an
account under any sort of plebiscite. On the other hand the President,
if he abuses the war powers "when peace returns, is answerable to the
civil power for that abuse."

But Browning was not content to reason on generalities. Asserting that
Congress could no more command the army than it could adjudicate a case,
he further asserted that the Supreme Court had settled the matter and
had lodged the war powers in the President. He cited a decision called
forth by the legal question, "Can a Circuit Court of the United States
inquire whether a President had acted rightly in calling out the militia
of a State to suppress an insurrection?" "The elevated office of the
President," said the Court, "chosen as he is by the People of the United
States, and the high responsibility he could not fail to feel when
acting in a case of such moment, appear to furnish as strong safeguards
against the wilful abuse of power as human prudence and foresight could
well devise. At all events, it is conferred upon him by the Constitution
and the laws of the United States, and therefore, must be respected and
enforced in its judicial tribunals."(9)

Whether or not constitutional lawyers would agree with Browning in the
conclusion he drew from this decision, it was plainly the bed rock
of his thought. He believed that the President--whatever your mere
historian might have to say--was in point of fact the exponent of the
people as a whole, and therefore the proper vessel for the ultimate
rights of a sovereign, rights that only the people possess, that
only the people can delegate. And this was Lincoln's theory. Roughly
speaking, he-conceived of the presidential office about as if it were
the office of Tribune of the People.

There was still another reason why both Lincoln and Browning feared
to yield anything to the theory of congressional supremacy. It was,
in their minds, not only the general question of all Congresses but
immediately of this particular Congress. An assembly in which the temper
of Wade and Chandler, of Stevens and Sumner, was entering the ascendent,
was an assembly to be feared; its supremacy was to be denied, its power
was to be fought.

Browning did not close without a startling passage flung square in
the teeth of the apostles of fury. He summed up the opposite temper,
Lincoln's temper, in his description of "Our brethren of the South--for
I am willing to call them brethren; my heart yet yearns toward them with
a fervency of love which even their treason has not all extinguished,
which tempts me constantly to say in their behalf, 'Father, forgive
them, for they know not what they do.'" He pleaded with the Senate not
to consider them "as public enemies but as insurgent citizens only," and
advocated an Act of Amnesty restoring all political and property
rights "instantly upon their return to allegiance and submission to the
authority of the government."

Had this narrowly constitutional issue arisen in quiet times, who can
say how slight might have been its significance? But Fate had decreed
that it should arise in the stormiest moment of our history. Millions
of men and women who cared nothing for constitutional theories, who were
governed by that passion to see immediate results which the thoughtless
ever confuse with achievement, these were becoming hysterical over
delay. Why did not the government do something? Everywhere voices were
raised accusing the President of cowardice. The mania of suspicion
was not confined to the Committee. The thoughts of a multitude were
expressed by Congressman Hickman in his foolish words, "These are days
of irresponsibility and imbecility, and we are required to perform two
offices--the office of legislator and the office of President." The
better part of a year had passed since the day of Sumter, and still the
government had no military success to its credit. An impetuous people
that lacked experience of war, that had been accustomed in unusual
measure to have its wishes speedily gratified, must somehow be
marshalled behind the government, unless the alternative was the
capture of power by the Congressional Cabal that was forming against the
President.

Entering upon the dark days of the first half of 1862, Lincoln had no
delusions about the task immediately before him. He must win battles;
otherwise, he saw no way of building up that popular support which alone
would enable him to keep the direction of policy in the hands of the
Executive, to keep it out of the hands of Congress. In a word, the
standing or falling of his power appeared to have been committed to the
keeping of the army. What the army would do with it, save his policy or
wreck his policy, was to no small degree a question of the character and
the abilities of the Commanding General.




XXI. THE STRUGGLE TO CONTROL THE ARMY

George Brinton McClellan, when at the age of thirty-four he was raised
suddenly to a dizzying height of fame and power, was generally looked
upon as a prodigy. Though he was not that, he had a real claim to
distinction. Had destiny been considerate, permitting him to rise
gradually and to mature as he rose, he might have earned a stable
reputation high among those who are not quite great. He had done well
at West Point, and as a very young officer in the Mexican War; he had
represented his country as a military observer with the allies in the
Crimea; he was a good engineer, and a capable man of business. His
winning personality, until he went wrong in the terrible days of 1862,
inspired "a remarkable affection and regard in every one from the
President to the humblest orderly that waited at his door."(1) He was
at home among books; he could write to his wife that Prince Napoleon
"speaks English very much as the Frenchmen do in the old English
comedies";(2) he was able to converse in "French, Spanish, Italian,
German, in two Indian dialects and he knew a little Russian and
Turkish." Men like Wade and Chandler probably thought of him as a
"highbrow," and doubtless he irritated them by invariably addressing
the President as "Your Excellency." He had the impulses as well as the
traditions of an elder day. But he had three insidious defects. At the
back of his mind there was a vein of theatricality, hitherto unrevealed,
that might, under sufficient stimulus, transform him into a poseur.
Though physically brave, he had in his heart, unsuspected by himself
or others, the dread of responsibility. He was void of humor. These
damaging qualities, brought out and exaggerated by too swift a rise to
apparent greatness, eventually worked his ruin. As an organizer he was
unquestionably efficient. His great achievement which secures him a
creditable place in American history was the conversion in the autumn of
1861 of a defeated rabble and a multitude of raw militia into a splendid
fighting machine. The very excellence of this achievement was part of
his undoing. It was so near to magical that it imposed on himself, gave
him a false estimate of himself, hid from him his own limitation. It
imposed also on his enemies. Crude, fierce men like the Vindictive
leaders of Congress, seeing this miracle take place so astoundingly
soon, leaped at once to the conclusion that he could, if he would,
follow it by another miracle. Having forged the thunderbolt, why could
he not, if he chose, instantly smite and destroy? All these hasty
inexperienced zealots labored that winter under the delusion that one
great battle might end the war. When McClellan, instead of rushing to
the front, entered his second phase--the one which he did not understand
himself, which his enemies never understood--when he entered upon his
long course of procrastination, the Jacobins, startled, dumfounded,
casting about for reasons, could find in their unanalytical vision, but
one. When Jove did not strike, it must be because Jove did not wish to
strike. McClellan was delaying for a purpose. Almost instantaneous
was the whisper, followed quickly by the outcry among the Jacobins,
"Treachery! We are betrayed. He is in league with the enemy."

Their distrust was not allayed by the manner in which he conducted
himself. His views of life and of the office of commanding general were
not those of frontier America. He believed in pomp, in display, in an
ordered routine. The fine weather of the autumn of 1861 was utilized
at Washington for frequent reviews. The flutter of flags, the glint of
marching bayonets, the perfectly ordered rhythm of marching feet, the
blare of trumpets, the silvery notes of the bugles, the stormily rolling
drums, all these filled with martial splendor the golden autumn air when
the woods were falling brown. And everywhere, it seemed, look where one
might, a sumptuously uniformed Commanding General, and a numerous and
sumptuous staff, were galloping past, mounted on beautiful horses.
Plain, blunt men like the Jacobins, caring nothing for this ritual of
command, sneered. They exchanged stories of the elaborate dinners he
was said to give daily, the several courses, the abundance of wine, the
numerous guests; and after these dinners, he and his gorgeous staff,
"clattering up and down the public streets" merely to show themselves
off. All this sneering was wildly exaggerated. The mania of
exaggeration, the mania of suspicion, saturated the mental air breathed
by every politician at Washington, that desperate winter, except the
great and lonely President and the cynical Secretary of State.