Lincoln

N >> Nathaniel Wright Stephenson >> Lincoln


McClellan never forgave this mutilation of his army and in time fixed
upon it as the prime cause of his eventual failure on the Peninsula. It
is doubtful whether relations between him and Lincoln were ever again
really cordial.

In their rather full correspondence during the tense days of April, May
and June, the steady deterioration of McClellan's judgment bore him
down into amazing depths of fatuousness. In his own way he was as much
appalled by the growth of his responsibility as ever Lincoln had been.
He moved with incredible caution.*

*Commenting on one of his moments of hesitation, J.S.
Johnston wrote to Lee: "No one but McClellan could have
hesitated to attack." 14 O. R., 416.

His despatches were a continual wailing for more men. Whatever went
wrong was at once blamed on Washington. His ill-usage had made him
bitter. And he could not escape the fact that his actual performance did
not come up to expectation; that he was constantly out-generaled. His
prevailing temper during these days is shown in a letter to his wife.
"I have raised an awful row about McDowell's corps. The President very
coolly telegraphed me yesterday that he thought I ought to break the
enemy's lines at once. I was much tempted to reply that he had better
come and do it himself." A despatch to Stanton, in a moment of disaster,
has become notorious: "If I save this army now, I tell you plainly I owe
no thanks to you or to any other persons in Washington. You have done
your best to sacrifice this army."(27)

Throughout this preposterous correspondence, Lincoln maintained the
even tenor of his usual patient stoicism, "his sad lucidity of soul."
He explained; he reasoned; he promised, over and over, assistance to the
limit of his power; he never scolded; when complaint became too absurd
to be reasoned with, he passed it over in silence. Again, he was
the selfless man, his sensibilities lost in the purpose he sought to
establish.

Once during this period, he acted suddenly, on the spur of the moment,
in a swift upflaring of his unconquerable fear for the safety of
Washington. Previously, he had consented to push the detained corps,
McDowell's, southward by land to cooperate with McClellan, who adapted
his plans to this arrangement. Scarcely had he done so, than
Lincoln threw his plans into confusion by ordering McDowell back to
Washington.(28) Jackson, who had begun his famous campaign of menace,
was sweeping like a whirlwind down the Shenandoah Valley, and in the
eyes of panic-struck Washington appeared to be a reincarnation of
Southey's Napoleon,--

"And the great Few-Faw-Fum, would presently come,
With a hop, skip and jump"

into Pennsylvania Avenue. As Jackson's object was to bring McDowell back
to Washington and enable Johnston to deal with McClellan unreinforced,
Lincoln had fallen into a trap. But he had much company. Stanton was
well-nigh out of his head. Though Jackson's army was less than fifteen
thousand and the Union forces in front of him upward of sixty thousand,
Stanton telegraphed to Northern governors imploring them to hasten
forward militia because "the enemy in great force are marching on
Washington."(29)

The moment Jackson had accomplished his purpose, having drawn a great
army northwestward away from McClellan, most of which should have been
marching southeastward to join McClellan, he slipped away, rushed his
own army across the whole width of Virginia, and joined Lee in the
terrible fighting of the Seven Days before Richmond.

In the midst of this furious confusion, the men surrounding Lincoln may
be excused for not observing a change in him. They have recorded his
appearance of indecision, his solicitude over McClellan, his worn and
haggard look. The changing light in those smoldering fires of his
deeply sunken eyes escaped their notice. Gradually, through profound
unhappiness, and as always in silence, Lincoln was working out of
his last eclipse. No certain record of his inner life during this
transition, the most important of his life, has survived. We can judge
of it only by the results. The outstanding fact with regard to it is a
certain change of attitude, an access of determination, late in June.
What desperate wrestling with the angel had taken place in the months of
agony since his son's death, even his private secretaries have not felt
able to say. Neither, apparently, did they perceive, until it flashed
upon them full-blown, the change that was coming over his resolution.
Nor did the Cabinet have any warning that the President was turning
a corner, developing a new phase of himself, something sterner, more
powerful than anything they had suspected. This was ever his way. His
instinctive reticence stood firm until the moment of the new birth. Not
only the Cabinet but the country was amazed and startled, when, late in
June, the President suddenly left Washington. He made a flying trip to
West Point where Scott was living in virtual retirement.(30) What passed
between the two, those few hours they spent together, that twenty-fourth
of June, 1862, has never been divulged. Did they have any eyes, that
day, for the wonderful prospect from the high terrace of the parade
ground; for the river so far below, flooring the valley with silver;
for the mountains pearl and blue? Did they talk of Stanton, of his
waywardness, his furies? Of the terrible Committee? Of the way Lincoln
had tied his own hands, brought his will to stalemate, through his
recognition of the unofficial councils? Who knows?

Lincoln was back in Washington the next day. Another day, and by a
sweeping order he created a new army for the protection of Washington,
and placed in command of it, a western general who was credited with
a brilliant stroke on the Mississippi.(31) No one will now defend the
military genius of John Pope. But when Lincoln sent for him, all the
evidence to date appeared to be in his favor. His follies were yet to
appear. And it is more than likely that in the development of Lincoln's
character, his appointment has a deep significance. It appears to mark
the moment when Lincoln broke out of the cocoon of advisement he had
spun unintentionally around his will. In the sorrows of the grim year,
new forces had been generated. New spiritual powers were coming to his
assistance. At last, relatively, he had found peace. Worn and torn as
he was, after his long inward struggle, few bore so calmly as he did
the distracting news from the front in the closing days of June and the
opening days of July, when Lee was driving his whole strength like
a superhuman battering-ram, straight at the heart of the wavering
McClellan. A visitor at the White House, in the midst of the terrible
strain of the Seven Days, found Lincoln "thin and haggard, but cheerful
. . . quite as placid as usual . . . his manner was so kindly and so
free from the ordinary cocksureness of the politician, and the vanity
and self-importance of official position that nothing but good will was
inspired by his presence."(32)

His serenity was all the more remarkable as his relations with
Congress and the Committee were fast approaching a crisis. If McClellan
failed-and by the showing of his own despatches, there was every reason
to expect him to fail, so besotted was he upon the idea that no one
could prevail with the force allowed him--the Committee who were leaders
of the congressional party against the presidential party might be
expected promptly to measure strength with the Administration. And
McClellan failed. At that moment Chandler, with the consent of the
Committee, was making use of its records preparing a Philippic against
the government. Lincoln, acting on his own initiative, without asking
the Secretary of War to accompany him, went immediately to the front.
He passed two days questioning McClellan and his generals.(33) But there
was no council of war. It was a different Lincoln from that other who,
just four months previous, had called together the general officers and
promised them to abide by their decisions. He returned to Washington
without telling them what he meant to do.

The next day closed a chapter and opened a chapter in the history of
the Federal army. Stanton's brief and inglorious career as head of the
national forces came to an end. He fell back into his rightful
position, the President's executive officer in military affairs. Lincoln
telegraphed another Western general, Halleck, ordering him to Washington
as General-in-Chief.(34) He then, for a season, turned his whole
attention from the army to politics. Five days after the telegram to
Halleck, Chandler in the Senate, loosed his insatiable temper in what
ostensibly was a denunciation of McClellan, what in point of fact was a
sweeping arraignment of the military efficiency of the government.(35)




XXII. LINCOLN EMERGES

While Lincoln was slowly struggling out of his last eclipse, giving
most of his attention to the army, the Congressional Cabal was laboring
assiduously to force the issue upon slavery. The keen politicians who
composed it saw with unerring vision where, for the moment, lay their
opportunity. They could not beat the President on any one issue then
before the country. No one faction was strong enough to be their
stand-by. Only by a combination of issues and a coalition of
factions could they build up an anti-Lincoln party, check-mate the
Administration, and get control of the government. They were greatly
assisted by the fatuousness of the Democrats. That party was in a
peculiar situation. Its most positive characters, naturally, had taken
sides for or against the government. The powerful Southerners who had
been its chief leaders were mainly in the Confederacy. Such Northerners
as Douglas and Stanton, and many more, had gone over to the Republicans.
Suddenly the control of the party organization had fallen into the hands
of second-rate men. As by the stroke of an enchanter's wand, men of
small caliber who, had the old conditions remained, would have lived
and died of little consequence saw opening before them the role of
leadership. It was too much for their mental poise. Again the subjective
element in politics! The Democratic party for the duration of the war
became the organization of Little Men. Had they possessed any great
leaders, could they have refused to play politics and responded to
Lincoln's all-parties policy, history might have been different. But
they were not that sort. Neither did they have the courage to go to the
other extreme and become a resolute opposition party, wholeheartedly and
intelligently against the war. They equivocated, they obstructed, they
professed loyalty and they practised-it would be hard to say what! So
short-sighted was their political game that its effect continually
was to play into the hands of their most relentless enemies, the grim
Jacobins.

Though, for a brief time while the enthusiasm after Sumter was still at
its height they appeared to go along with the all-parties program, they
soon revealed their true course. In the autumn of 1861, Lincoln still
had sufficient hold upon all factions to make it seem likely that his
all-parties program would be given a chance. The Republicans generally
made overtures to the Democratic managers, offering to combine in a
coalition party with no platform but the support of the war and the
restoration of the Union. Here was the test of the organization of
the Little Men. The insignificant new managers, intoxicated by
the suddenness of their opportunity, rang false. They rejected the
all-parties program and insisted on maintaining their separate party
formation.(1) This was a turning point in Lincoln's career. Though
nearly two years were to pass before he admitted his defeat, the
all-parties program was doomed from that hour. Throughout the winter,
the Democrats in Congress, though steadily ambiguous in their statements
of principle, were as steadily hostile to Lincoln. If they had any
settled policy, it was no more than an attempt to hold the balance of
power among the warring factions of the Republicans. By springtime the
game they were playing was obvious; also its results. They had prevented
the President from building up a strong Administration group wherewith
he might have counterbalanced the Jacobins. Thus they had released the
Jacobins from the one possible restraint that might have kept them from
pursuing their own devices.

The spring of 1862 saw a general realignment of factions. It was
then that the Congressional Cabal won its first significant triumph.
Hitherto, all the Republican platforms had been programs of denial.
A brilliant new member of the Senate, john Sherman, bluntly told his
colleagues that the Republican party had always stood on the defensive.
That was its weakness. "I do not know any measure on which it has taken
an aggressive position."(2) The clue to the psychology of the moment
was in the raging demand of the masses for a program of assertion, for
aggressive measures. The President was trying to meet this demand with
his all-parties program, with his policy of nationalism, exclusive of
everything else. And recently he had added that other assertion, his
insistence that the executive in certain respects was independent of the
legislative. Of his three assertions, one, the all-parties program,
was already on the way to defeat Another, nationalism, as the President
interpreted it, had alienated the Abolitionists. The third, his argument
for himself as tribune, was just what your crafty politician might
twist, pervert, load with false meanings to his heart's content. Men
less astute than Chandler and Wade could not have failed to see where
fortune pointed. Their opportunity lay in a combination of the two
issues. Abolition and the resistance to executive "usurpation." Their
problem was to create an anti-Lincoln party that should also be a
war party. Their coalition of aggressive forces must accept the
Abolitionists as its backbone, but it must also include all violent
elements of whatever persuasion, and especially all those that could be
wrought into fury on the theme of the President as a despot. Above all,
their coalition must absorb and then express the furious temper so dear
to their own hearts which they fondly believed-mistakenly, they were
destined to discover-was the temper of the country.

It can not be said that this was the Republican program. The
President's program, fully as positive as that of the Cabal, had as good
a right to appropriate the party label--as events were to show, a better
right. But the power of the Cabal was very great, and the following it
was able to command in the country reached almost the proportions of the
terrible. A factional name is needed. For the Jacobins, their allies in
Congress, their followers in the country, from the time they acquired a
positive program, an accurate label is the Vindictives.

During the remainder of the session, Congress may be thought of as
having--what Congress seldom has--three definite groups, Right, Left and
Center. The Right was the Vindictives; the Left, the irreconcilable
Democrats; the Center was composed chiefly of liberal Republicans but
included a few Democrats, those who rebelled against the political
chicanery of the Little Men.

The policy of the Vindictives was to force upon the Administration the
double issue of emancipation and the supremacy of Congress. Therefore,
their aim was to pass a bill freeing the slaves on the sole authority of
a congressional act. Many resolutions, many bills, all having this end
in view, were introduced. Some were buried in committees; some were
remade in committees and subjected to long debate by the Houses; now
and then one was passed upon. But the spring wore through and the
summer came, and still the Vindictives were not certainly in control
of Congress. No bill to free slaves by congressional action secured a
majority vote. At the same time it was plain that the strength of the
Vindictives was slowly, steadily, growing.

Outside Congress, the Abolitionists took new hope. They had organized a
systematic propaganda. At Washington, weekly meetings were held in
the Smithsonian Institute, where all their most conspicuous leaders,
Phillips, Emerson, Brownson, Garret Smith, made addresses. Every Sunday
a service was held in the chamber of the House of Representatives and
the sermon was almost always a "terrific arrangement of slavery."
Their watch-word was "A Free Union or Disintegration." The treatment of
fugitive slaves by commanders in the field produced a clamor. Lincoln
insisted on strict obedience to the two laws, the Fugitive Slave Act and
the First Confiscation Act. Abolitionists sneered at "all this gabble
about the sacredness of the Constitution."(3) But Lincoln was not to
be moved. When General Hunter, taking a leaf from the book of Fremont,
tried to force his hand, he did not hesitate. Hunter had issued a
proclamation by which the slaves in the region where he commanded were
"declared forever free."

This was in May when Lincoln's difficulties with McClellan were at their
height; when the Committee was zealously watching to catch him in any
sort of mistake; when the House was within four votes of a majority for
emancipation by act of Congress;(4) when there was no certainty whether
the country was with him or with the Vindictives. Perhaps that new
courage which definitely revealed itself the next month, may be first
glimpsed in the proclamation overruling Hunter:

"I further make known that whether it be competent for me, as
Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, to declare the slaves of any
State or States free, and whether at any time, in any case, it shall
have become a necessity indispensable to the maintenance of the
government to exercise such supposed power, are questions which,
under my responsibility, I reserve to myself, and which I can not feel
justified in leaving to the decision of commanders in the field."(5)

The revocation of Hunter's order infuriated the Abolitionists. It deeply
disappointed the growing number who, careless about slavery, wanted
emancipation as a war measure, as a blow at the South. Few of either of
these groups noticed the implied hint that emancipation might come by
executive action. Here was the matter of the war powers in a surprising
form. However, it was not unknown to Congress. Attempts had been made to
induce Congress to concede the war powers to the President and to ask,
not command, him to use them for the liberation of slaves in the Seceded
States. Long before, in a strangely different connection, such vehement
Abolitionists as Giddings and J. Q. Adams had pictured the freeing of
slaves as a natural incident of military occupation.

What induced Lincoln to throw out this hint of a possible surrender on
the subject of emancipation? Again, as so often, the silence as to his
motives is unbroken. However, there can be no doubt that his thinking
on the subject passed through several successive stages. But all his
thinking was ruled by one idea. Any policy he might accept, or any
refusal of policy, would be judged in his own mind by the degree to
which it helped, or hindered, the national cause. Nothing was more
absurd than the sneer of the Abolitionists that he was "tender" of
slavery. Browning spoke for him faithfully, "If slavery can survive the
shock of war and secession, be it so. If in the conflict for liberty,
the Constitution and the Union, it must necessarily perish, then let it
perish." Browning refused to predict which alternative would develop.
His point was that slaves must be treated like other property. But, if
need be, he would sacrifice slavery as he would sacrifice anything else,
to save the Union. He had no intention to "protect" slavery.(6)

In the first stage of Lincoln's thinking on this thorny subject, his
chief anxiety was to avoid scaring off from the national cause those
Southern Unionists who were not prepared to abandon slavery. This was
the motive behind his prompt suppression of Fremont. It was this that
inspired the Abolitionist sneer about his relative attitude toward
God and Kentucky. As a compromise, to cut the ground from under the
Vindictives, he had urged the loyal Slave States to endorse a program
of compensated emancipation. But these States were as unable to see the
handwriting on the wall as were the Little Men. In the same proclamation
that overruled Hunter, while hinting at what the Administration might
feel driven to do, Lincoln appealed again to the loyal Slave States to
accept compensated emancipation. "I do not argue," said he, "I beseech
you to make the argument for yourselves. You can not, if you would, be
blind to the signs of the times. . . . This proposal makes common cause
for a common object, casting no reproaches upon any. It acts not the
Pharisee. The change it contemplates would come gently as the dews of
heaven, not rending or wrecking anything."(7)

Though Lincoln, at this moment, was anxiously watching the movement
in Congress to force his hand, he was not apparently cast down. He was
emerging from his eclipse. June was approaching and with it the final
dawn. Furthermore, when he issued this proclamation on May nineteenth,
he had not lost faith in McClellan. He was still hoping for news of a
crushing victory; of McClellan's triumphal entry into Richmond. The
next two months embraced both those transformations which together
revolutionized his position. He emerged from his last eclipse; and
McClellan failed him.

When Lincoln returned to Washington after his two days at the front, he
knew that the fortunes of his Administration were at a low ebb.
Never had he been derided in Congress with more brazen injustice. The
Committee, waiting only for McClellan's failure, would now unmask their
guns-as Chandler did, seven days later. The line of Vindictive criticism
could easily be foreshadowed: the government had failed; it was
responsible for a colossal military catastrophe; but what could you
expect of an Administration that would not strike its enemies through
emancipation; what a shattering demonstration that the Executive was not
a safe repository of the war powers.

Was there any way to forestall or disarm the Vindictives? His silence
gives us no clue when or how the answer occurred to him--by separating
the two issues; by carrying out the hint in the May proclamation; by
yielding on emancipation while, in the very act, pushing the war powers
of the President to their limit, declaring slaves free by an executive
order.

The importance of preserving the war power of the President had become
a fixed condition of Lincoln's thought. Already, he was looking forward
not only to victory but to the great task that should come after
victory. He was determined, if it were humanly possible, to keep that
task in the hands of the President, and out of the hands of Congress.
A first step had already been taken. In portions of occupied territory,
military governors had been appointed. Simple as this seemed to the
careless observer, it focussed the whole issue. The powerful, legal mind
of Sumner at once perceived its significance. He denied in the Senate
the right of the President to make such appointments; he besought the
Senate to demand the cancellation of such appointment. He reasserted the
absolute sovereignty of Congress.(8) It would be a far-reaching stroke
if Lincoln, in any way, could extort from Congress acquiescence in his
use of the war powers on a vast scale. Freeing the slaves by executive
order would be such a use.

Another train of thought also pointed to the same result. Lincoln's
desire to further the cause of "the Liberal party throughout the world,"
that desire which dated back to his early life as a politician, had
suffered a disappointment. European Liberals, whose political vision
was less analytical than his, had failed to understand his policy. The
Confederate authorities had been quick to publish in Europe his official
pronouncements that the war had been undertaken not to abolish slavery
but to preserve the Union. As far back as September, 1861, Carl Schurz
wrote from Spain to Seward that the Liberals abroad were disappointed,
that "the impression gained ground that the war as waged by the Federal
government, far from being a war of principle, was merely a war of
policy," and "that from this point of view much might be said for the
South."(9) In fact, these hasty Europeans had found a definite ground
for complaining that the American war was a reactionary influence. The
concentration of American cruisers in the Southern blockade gave the
African slave trade its last lease of life. With no American war-ship
among the West Indies, the American flag became the safeguard of the
slaver. Englishmen complained that "the swift ships crammed with their
human cargoes" had only to "hoist the Stars and Stripes and pass under
the bows of our cruisers."(10) Though Seward scored a point by his
treaty giving British cruisers the right to search any ships carrying
the American flag, the distrust of the foreign Liberals was not removed.
They inclined to stand aside and to allow the commercial classes of
France and England to dictate policy toward the United States. The
blockade, by shutting off the European supply of raw cotton, on both
sides the channel, was the cause of measureless unemployment, of
intolerable misery. There was talk in both countries of intervention.
Napoleon, especially, loomed large on the horizon as a possible ally of
the Confederacy. And yet, all this while, Lincoln had it in his power at
any minute to lay the specter of foreign intervention. A pledge to the
"Liberal party throughout the world" that the war would bring about the
destruction of slavery, and great political powers both in England and
in France would at once cross the paths of their governments should they
move toward intervention. Weighty as were all these reasons for a change
of policy--turning the flank of the Vindictives on the war powers,
committing the Abolitionists to the Administration, winning over the
European Liberals--there was a fourth reason which, very probably,
weighed upon Lincoln most powerfully of them all. Profound gloom had
settled upon the country. There was no enthusiasm for military
service. And Stanton, who lacked entirely the psychologic vision of the
statesman, had recently committed an astounding blunder. After a few
months in power he had concluded that the government had enough soldiers
and had closed the recruiting offices.(11) Why Lincoln permitted this
singular proceeding has never been satisfactorily explained.* Now he was
reaping the fruits. A defeated army, a hopeless country, and no
prospect of swift reinforcement! If a shift of ground on the question
of emancipation would arouse new enthusiasm, bring in a new stream of
recruits, Lincoln was prepared to shift.