Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (25 page)

Across Illinois and the wider North, Republicans significantly extended their influence within Protestant churches. Unlike Frémont in 1856, Lincoln ran impressively amongst German Reformed and other German Protestant voters. Even more telling were the evangelical accessions from the American party. Lincoln also made converts amongst long-standing evangelical Democrats, though these were probably less instrumental in his victory than the accession of first-time voters into what William Seward described as “a party chiefly of young men.” Leonard Smith, at twenty-two, was voting in his first presidential election. So, too, was John Wanamaker, secretary of the Philadelphia YMCA and a Lincoln enthusiast after the joint debates with Douglas in 1858.
⁹²

Although Lincoln’s Republican party did not fashion a monolithic evangelical vote, its achievement was extraordinary: regimenting the moral energies of evangelical churches more effectively than ever before in the cause of political antislavery and civic purification. It was, after all, the Republican party which most successfully focused the moral energy of millennialist Protestants and exploited the public discourse they had elaborated over three decades. In part theirs was a negative discourse of anxiety and paranoia, which played on fears of Freemasons and Catholics as conspirators against the Christian republic, and which contributed to Free-Soilers’ and Republicans’ elaboration of a hated slave power. But evangelical perceptions also brought into politics a more positive stress on conscience, Calvinistic duty, and social responsibility—a creed which reached its apogee in the early Republican party. For some this meant securing the slaves’ liberty above all else; but many others linked this to emancipating white freemen from the despotism of the slave power. These pious Republicans went further than previous American evangelicals in identifying the arrival of God’s kingdom with the success of a particular political party. Ministers who in the campaigns of 1856 and 1860 took part alternately in revival meetings and Republican rallies gave notice that religion and politics had fused more completely than ever before in the American republic.

Of course, Lincoln’s Republican party was not simply or even principally an instrument of the reforming, optimistic evangelicalism unleashed by the Second Great Awakening. Economic interest and bitter anti-southern feeling were important elements of the Republican mix. But Carl Schurz was not alone in insisting that selfish materialism had taken second place to “the purely moral motive” in the hearts of mainstream Republicans.
⁹³
And Lincoln’s candidacy, far from being in tension with the party’s Protestant morality, served its purposes well. The party was both more and less than “the Christian party in politics,” but in the eyes of northern antislavery moralists it deserved that name more than any other political force they had known. In Lincoln, with his mix of lawyerly, constitutional conservatism and unyielding, earnest moralism, they had a standard-bearer admirably suited to their combined needs as pragmatic coalition-builders and high-minded crusaders.

CHAPTER 4

The Limits of Power: From President-Elect to War President, 1860–61

L
incoln slept fitfully on the night of November 6, 1860. His election victory, the climax of a career in democratic politics, brought only modest personal satisfaction and left him feeling, “as I never had before, the responsibility that was upon me.” His indeterminate forebodings would soon give way to hard decision-making, as threats of secession and pre-dictions of civil war proved to be more than tactical scaremongering. Indeed, within little more than a year of his electoral triumph the pres-ident had succumbed to a mood of dark despair. Restoring harmony to a Union that faced a well-armed and hostile Confederacy of eleven states, nine million inhabitants, several hundred thousand square miles, and substantial economic resources—a preposterous ambition, as it seemed to many foreign observers—was daunting enough. It was barely credible at a time when the Union’s finances lay in tatters, its massive volunteer army remained characteristically stalled, and its stubbornly cautious general-in-chief lay seriously ill with typhoid fever. Small wonder that since taking office Lincoln had discernibly aged, his face lined and his hair now flecked with gray. In the early days of January 1862 he lamented to the quartermaster-general: “The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?”
¹

Lincoln’s feelings of near-impotence were understandable in the circumstances and marked only an intensifying of the strong sense he had had since his election of being swept along by events whose momentum and direction he could barely control. The turbulence of these fourteen months would have tested the mettle of even the most seasoned states-man. It seems hardly surprising that Lincoln, an absentee from Washington politics for over a decade and lacking firsthand experience of executive power, should have evinced signs of uncertainty and anxiety, and made mistakes.

Yet, whatever Lincoln’s personal limitations and the circumstantial constraints on his power during this period, what is striking is the clarity and even boldness with which he provided answers to the chief strategic questions that he faced. In each of the three phases into which this period can be divided, Lincoln identified and responded to the most urgent challenges with notable single-mindedness. First, during the four months of Buchanan’s lame-duck presidency, as the states of the Deep South moved from threatening secession to realizing it, Lincoln resisted all calls for compromise over the heart of the Chicago platform on which he had been elected. The president-in-waiting was prepared to run the risk of a de facto breakup of the Union rather than relinquish the Republicans’ high ground of nonextension: to yield on that would be to invite the disintegration of his party, the only political force capable of implementing the egalitarian principles of the Declaration of Independence.

During the second phase, the weeks of uneasy peace between the eve of Lincoln’s inauguration and the outbreak of hostilities at Fort Sumter, the new president’s political focus shifted from the rightness or wrongness of slavery to the constitutional integrity of the Union. He set himself the goal of preventing any further erosion of the Union by defending the remaining federally held forts in the seceded states, while at the same time sticking to his inaugural pledge not to be the first to shed blood—so ensuring that, if and when hostilities broke out, the North would remain united in cross-party patriotism. Throughout the third phase, the early months of what Lincoln came to see would be a long and grim struggle, the president showed his unbending determination conservatively to restore the Union “as it was,” to ensure that the April coalition of support, including loyalists within the upper tier of slave states, was sustained and maximized. Equally, he remained resolute in representing the conflict as an internal rebellion to be resolved without the intervention of foreign powers.

In sum, Lincoln during these uncertain months would not seek to provoke war, but he would resist the course of “peace at any price” and do more than any other single individual to shape the circumstances of the war’s imminent outbreak. Most significant of all, he would lay the only strategic foundations on which the Union could hope eventually to succeed. Throughout it all he maintained an attentive but not subservient engagement with public sentiment which would provide the essential basis both of his power as president and commander-in-chief, and of Union victory.

IN THE ANTECHAMBER TO POWER: HOLDING THE PARTY LINE

For four months after the November election formal power remained in the hands of Buchanan’s outgoing administration, and for most of that time Lincoln, the private citizen, stayed in Springfield. It was the hapless Buchanan who had the responsibility of dealing with the erupting secession movement in the lower South, earning derision for his feeble argument that it was wrong but beyond his power to stop. South Carolina and six other states took their initial steps toward separation believing, mistakenly, that Lincoln was diabolic abolitionism personified, but rightly seeing his election as a historical watershed, the moment when a political party with no ideological kinship or organizational ties with the South would take the levers of federal power for the first time. National attention anxiously turned to the outgoing Congress, controlled by the Republicans, and to the party’s new leader, the president-elect.

A lack of formal authority did not mean an absence of responsibility or of informal influence. Hordes of politicians, journalists, artists, and friends descended on the statehouse in Springfield, where Lincoln received them in the governor’s office. Some were supplicants for office, some well-wishers. All were eager to know how the new leader would respond to the mounting crisis. Hungry for information, he himself assiduously read the newspapers and the daunting torrent of mail that poured in, much of it proffering conflicting advice. “He reads letters constantly—at home—in the street—among his friends. I believe he is sorely tempted in church,” reported the youthful John Hay, whom Lincoln had appointed to assist John Nicolay, his private secretary. The besieged leader’s sense of standing at a watershed in his own and the country’s life took symbolic shape in his choosing to grow a beard. The psychological significance of this is unclear. It was not affectation (or, as punsters suggested, “putting on ’airs”). It may have reflected a degree of insecurity. His secretaries later insisted that “he easily and naturally assumed the leadership of his party” in these months, evincing confidence and geniality in his personal interviews.
²
But he would not have been human had he not felt real anxiety over what lay ahead.

Lincoln with his trusted and devoted private secretaries, John G. Nicolay (seated, left) and John Hay (standin
g
). Beyond their routine tasks, Nicolay and Hay carried out political errands for the president, screened his visitors, wrote letters and articles for him, and kept their ears close to the ground. Their loyal ten-volume
Abraham Lincoln: A History
(1890) remains an essential historical source.

Before his election Lincoln had faced calls to signal to the alarmed South the essential moderation of his own position. These now grew ever louder. From southern Unionists came requests that he pay a reassuring visit to a slave state, or publish a selection of his speeches to trumpet his constitutional conservatism on fugitive slaves and other litmus-test issues. Northerners of various political stripes, including conservative members of his own party, like Henry J. Raymond of the
New York Times,
urged the value of a speech or public letter to correct southern misconceptions and restore confidence to business and financial markets. Lincoln, however, in tune with most Republican leaders and those radical correspondents who urged him to ignore “the tremors of conservatives or the howlings of traitors,” was disinclined to add to what was already in the public domain. Reassured by some correspondents that most southerners were reconciled to his administration and that “the madmen” were in a minority, Lincoln made no accredited and substantive public statement for three months after his election. He stayed silent, he told unsympathetic border-state editors, not “merely on
punctilio
”—to speak out as a mere private citizen would be a breach of etiquette—but because he feared it would do positive harm, laying himself open to further distortion of his position and to the accusation of timidity, even cowardice. “For the good men of the South . . . I have no objection to repeat seventy and seven times. But I have
bad
men also to deal with, both North and South—men who are eager for something new upon which to base new misrepresentations”; “The secessionists,
per se
believing they had alarmed me, would clamor all the louder.” As for those “
respectable scoundrels,
” who had encouraged the unjust fears underlying the commercial uncertainty, they should “repair the mischief of their own making; and then perhaps they will be less greedy to do the like again.”
³

Lincoln judged his course vindicated when, two weeks after his election, he used a rally at Springfield to speak by proxy. Providing a short passage to be incorporated into Lyman Trumbull’s speech, Lincoln sat alongside the senator as he sought to reassure southerners of the Republicans’ conservative intentions. The outcome was no more than Lincoln had expected, despite Trumbull’s making Lincoln’s text more emollient still. The president-elect took no comfort in telling Henry Raymond that hostile southerners considered the speech “an open declaration of war against them,” at the same time that some Republicans thought it intimated the abandonment of their party’s principles. “This is just . . . what would happen with any declaration I could make. These political fiends are not half sick enough yet. ‘Party malice’ and not ‘public good’ possesses them entirely. ‘They seek a sign, and no sign shall be given them.’” He had earlier told a clamant Tennesseean, for whom he had an equally pertinent scriptural text, “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.”
⁴

In private, however, Lincoln was readier to signal his likely course and to offer reassurances. When Alexander Stephens, a congressional colleague in the late 1840s, delivered a stunning anti-secession speech in the Georgia legislature, Lincoln opened a hopeful correspondence. If southerners really did fear that his administration would “
directly,
or
indirectly,
interfere with their slaves, or with them, about their slaves,” then Lincoln sought to reassure him “as once a friend, and still, I hope, not an enemy,” that the fears were groundless: “The South would be in no more danger in this respect, than it was in the days of Washington.” In response, Stephens called on Lincoln to speak out “to save our common country. A word fitly spoken by you now would be like ‘apples of gold in pictures of silver.’”
⁵
The request was unavailing and there the correspondence closed.

At the same time Lincoln entertained the idea put to him by David Davis and other party leaders that he appoint a loyal and able, but non-Republican, southerner to his cabinet as a signal of friendship to the South. Lincoln was not optimistic: who were these “white crows,” he asked Weed. Still, he made an approach to an elderly Kentucky Democrat and Unionist, James Guthrie, who declined on account of infirmity, and then to John A. Gilmer, a Whig Unionist of North Carolina, who eventually declined, too. Lincoln was not especially disturbed: he feared the effect of such an appointment both on cabinet unity and on “the confidence of our own friends.” Besides, well before Gilmer’s refusal, it had been made public that Lincoln’s attorney general would be the conservative Edward Bates. As a resident of a slave state (Missouri) and “a representative man,” Bates would, Lincoln believed, reassure southerners. He was sadly mistaken. A man who had been a serious candidate for the Republican nomination would hardly dispel slaveholders’ apprehensions.
⁶

This was but one instance of Lincoln’s larger misreading of the southern surge toward secession. Throughout the winter he, along with the Republican leadership more generally, remained at least one step behind the organizers of southern withdrawal. Talk of secession they treated at first as little more than the hot-air threats of unrepresentative fire-eaters, whose proposed secession ordinances would surely fail. When South Carolina finally declared its exit from the Union on December 20, it seemed the act of an unrepresentative and foolish community (“too small for a republic, too large for a lunatic asylum,” in the acerbic judgment of one of its residents).
⁷
When six other states of the lower South followed in short order, it appeared that they were assuming no more than a temporary bargaining position. Lincoln consistently—and perhaps understandably—misjudged the meaning of much southern Unionism and overestimated its tenacity. As a Kentuckian with many continuing border-state connections, he well understood the depth of commitment to the Union in the upper South, particularly amongst its Clayite Whigs, but he mistakenly projected its loyalty onto the slaveholding states as a whole. His overtures to Alexander Stephens falsely supposed that the Georgian’s arguments were a repudiation of the principle of secession, rather than a prudential calculation of how Georgia could best protect slavery.