Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (36 page)

Lincoln’s mail also brought tides of formal representations and recommendations, a few from constitutional bodies, including state legislatures and city councils, but mostly from the regular meetings of voluntary organizations, and a variety of ad hoc gatherings convened to press a particular cause. Resolutions from chambers of commerce, Union Defense Committees, Republican and Union party meetings, and college alumni streamed into the White House. But it was the religious-humanitarian organizations, dominated by the mainstream evangelical church families and their radical offspring, which on occasion turned the stream into a torrent. It is unlikely that Lincoln read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested every one of the resolutions that actually reached his desk (themselves only a sample of a daunting total), but he undoubtedly noted their general tenor and the pulse of public concern that they represented.

Many correspondents wrote as an alternative to paying the personal call on the president that the constraints of geography, time, and expense prevented. Yet the most remarkable feature of Lincoln’s tenure of office was the throngs of ordinary citizens who came to the capital to pour through the White House doors, intent on a private interview on one of the president’s regular public days. Lincoln never lost his determination to remain accessible—to be “the attorney of the people, not their ruler.” William Seward remarked that “there never was a man so accessible to all sorts of proper and improper persons”; the president himself described his office hours as “the Beggars’ Opera.” He never lost his keen sense of his own ordinariness and his kinship with common folk. He cherished republican simplicity, shunned the imperial style, and protested strongly when Henry Halleck detailed a cavalry detachment, clattering along with sabers and spurs, to guard the presidential carriage.
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In consequence of what Henry Raymond called Lincoln’s “utter unconsciousness of his position,” ordinary men and women regarded him more as a neighbor to be dropped in upon than as a remote head of state. “Mr. Lincoln is
always
approachable and this is greatly in his favor,” explained the Washington correspondent of the
New York Independent.
“The people can get at him and impress upon him their views without difficulty.” Though his visitors included, in the words of one observer, “loiterers, contract-hunters, garrulous parents on paltry errands, toadies without measure, and talkers without conscience,” Lincoln was adamantly opposed to restricting access. “I feel—though the tax on my time is heavy—that no hours of my day are better employed than those which bring me again within the direct contact and atmosphere of the average of our whole people.” Each meeting, he maintained, served “to renew in me a clearer and more vivid image of that great popular assemblage out of which I sprung . . . I call these receptions my ‘
public-opinion baths
’; for I have but little time to read the papers and gather public opinion that way.” Sometimes he felt himself bombarded and besieged, but, even so, these encounters with ordinary folk worked to invigorate his “perceptions of responsibility and duty” and undoubtedly gave him more pleasure than the wearying formal White House receptions and “levees” which custom demanded. Probably more than any other single agency, they provided the oxygen lacking in the rarefied political air of wartime Washington, and seemed if anything to strengthen Lincoln’s faith in the wisdom of the common people, rather than undermine it. John Hay discerned a mark of genius in the president’s “intuitive knowledge of the feeling and wish of the people.”
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But that intuition depended as much on perspiration as inspiration, and on a careful, even laborious, reading of the confusing multiplicity of signals of the public mood.

“EVERY INDISPENSABLE MEANS”: TOWARD THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION

Lincoln, at various times, before different audiences, repeated that his oath of office obliged him to use “every indispensable means” to preserve the Union. Means that under normal conditions would be deemed unnecessary, even extraconstitutional, might in extremis become “an indispensable necessity” to achieve a lawful end. He used the phrase first in July 1861, when—even as he sought to reassure conservatives—he left the door open for a changing power relationship between the federal government and the rebel states.
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The current of events during the first half of 1862 led Lincoln to decide to override the peacetime guarantees of slave property and declare Confederate slaves the subjects of military emancipation.

Well before 1861 was out, millions of Unionists had already concluded that crushing slavery had become “indispensable” to victory. Lincoln was not one of them, but their urgent voices left him in little doubt that abolition had ceased to be the preserve of moral zealots alone. Many anti-southern pragmatists, Democrat as well as Republican, joined the radicals in declaring their enthusiasm for Frémont’s proclamation and even Cameron’s plan for arming blacks. And when the conservative Henry Halleck, replacing Frémont, issued his General Order No. 3 excluding runaway slaves from Union lines, on the implausible grounds that they acted as spies for the Confederacy, the western commander faced broad-based censure.

Across the Union, including the conservative lower North and the border, even those who wanted “nothing to do with ‘abolition’ in the common sense of that term” bombarded Lincoln with calls for bold and decisive measures against “the monster” slavery, “the real cause of this war,” “the Groundwork of the Rebellion,” and the Confederates’ “weak point.” To protect the human property of treasonous slaveocrats, whose resistance consumed the blood and dollars of loyal citizens, defied wisdom as well as morality. A Delaware loyalist complained about the inconsistency of “fighting Slavery with one hand and sustaining it with the other.” To the same end, a Virginia-born Unionist told the president: “I myself . . . have no prejudices against Slavry, as a local institution but when the question, is narrowd down to the existance of the Govement or Slavry, who will hesitate to make a choice?” Slavery’s days were numbered. “You will be forced before long to proclaim universal liberty—the people are ripe for it and the politicians are coming to it.”
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Lincoln was properly unpersuaded when loyalists variously reported that Frémont’s bold stroke enjoyed the acclaim of “every Republican and nine tenths of the Democrats,” of “99 out of every 100.” But he still had no reason to doubt what one Wisconsin correspondent told him, that “in the midst of this war . . . I am only one of thousands who have changed views very much.” Lincoln knew that the times were out of joint, that the conservative Cameron, through his report, had become the unlikely hero of Congressman Thaddeus Stevens and the “brimstone radicals,” and that his own cautious leadership now placed him to the right of those who had once criticized him as a backwoods abolitionist. Before the war, moderates had ridiculed the idea of an “irrepressible conflict,” denied that slavery and freedom were incompatible, and rebuked Lincoln for the radicalism of his statement that the nation could not endure “half slave and half free.” Now the roles were reversed. Rooting out slavery, the Democrat George Bancroft told Lincoln, was “the universal expectation and hope of men of all parties.” John Hay watched in wry wonderment: “It is a most instructive sight to see the Illinois emancipationist converted into an earnest conservative, and resolutely resisting the solicitations to abolition persistently urged by those who so bitterly denounced his radicalism a few years ago.”
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Lincoln’s annual message to Congress in December 1861 thus trod cautiously and played to conservative sentiment in briefly discussing colonization as a means of expatriating freedmen “at some place, or places, in a climate congenial to them.” Yet it was not the document of a man insensitive to emancipationists’ promptings. He drew attention to his endorsement of the Confiscation Act of August 1861, by which some slaves had already been freed; he intimated that individual states might choose to adopt its principles; and he promised to consider any further emancipatory law that Congress might pass. Then he declared, in what would become a familiar formulation, that “all indispensable means must be employed” to secure the Union. True, he gave a reassurance that he would do all he could to prevent the conflict from degenerating “into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle,” and insisted that “we should not be in haste to determine that radical and extreme measures, which may reach the loyal as well as the disloyal, are indispensable.” But the implication was clear: if the Union’s survival depended on emancipation as a last resort, he would not rule it out. Significantly, Lincoln accompanied these remarks with the pregnant aside that he must keep “all questions . . . of vital military importance” in his own hands. Some months would elapse before Lincoln thoroughly sifted the arguments relating to the war powers of the president, but already there was a hint that military considerations might allow the commander-in-chief constitutionally to pursue emancipation.
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Even so, the overall tone of the president’s address did nothing to shake the confidence of Democrats and conservative Republicans that there was an old Whig under Lincoln’s skin and that, in McClellan’s words, “the Presdt is perfectly honest & is really sound on the nigger question.” For the same reason, it did nothing to inspire the congressional group of Republican radicals slowly cohering around Wade, Trumbull, and Zachariah Chandler—Hay’s “Jacobins”—who thought Lincoln unequal to the nation’s crisis, denounced his cautious pragmatism as unprincipled drift, and despaired of his refusal to attack the rebels’ most vital of interests. In a meeting between Lincoln and his Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War on the last day of 1861 Wade told him: “Mr. President, you are murdering your country by inches in consequence of the inactivity of the military and the want of a distinct policy in regard to slavery.”
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Lincoln’s oft-quoted remark that his policy was to have no policy might seem only to confirm Wade’s stern judgment, but the president’s words were as misleading as they were jocular. During the winter months of 1861–62 he continued his “southern strategy”: recognizing slavery’s constitutional protections, reassuring the border loyalists, and keeping the South divided. The radicals’ demands he judged an invitation to catastrophe, and their strategic ineptness could at times provoke even this most equable of presidents into bad temper. He shocked Edward Pierce, the young idealist responsible for the freedmen of the Sea Islands, with his irritable scorn for the “great itching to get negroes within our lines.” But, as his annual message implied, he needed to keep his options open. Radical demands for emancipation might be a dangerous irrelevance, but they might turn out to be simply premature. When, early in 1862, George Templeton Strong raised the issue of radical pressures, the president told the conservative lawyer a tale of itinerant Methodists in frontier Illinois who, as they journeyed, quarreled about how to get over an “ugly” river. Lincoln warmed to the “old brother” who said, “Brethren, this here talk ain’t no use. I never cross a river until I come to it.”
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The story was apposite. No crossing over from the old Union to radical new terrain would be required if, as seemed increasingly plausible, the armies’ spring offensive brought a prompt collapse of the rebellion. Lincoln’s despair and frustration at the military inaction of early January had slowly lifted. McClellan returned to vigor. Stanton brought his own distinctive energy to the War Department. The president himself, earnestly digesting manuals of military strategy, ordered a general advance of all forces on February 22. By then, indeed, western armies under George H. Thomas (at the battle of Mill Springs) and Grant (taking Forts Henry and Donelson) had swept Confederate forces from Kentucky and much of Tennessee. It seemed reasonable to hope that the imminent operations of the Army of the Potomac, whether by Lincoln’s preferred option, a frontal assault on the rebel army at Manassas, or by McClellan’s alternative, an advance on Richmond from the east, would snuff the life out of the Confederacy and restore the Union as it was.

Within the constitutional arrangements of the old Union, however, Lincoln saw a way of both reinforcing his “southern strategy” and yet also putting slavery into retreat. He urged with increasing vigor the merits of compensated emancipation, voluntarily entered into by the states, but funded by the federal government. He had suggested a prototype scheme to Delaware loyalists late in 1861; his preference was for a thirty-one-year process of gradual manumission, at a cost to the nation of $23,200 per annum.
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As the state with the smallest slave population, Delaware seemed the most favorable place to start, but to Lincoln’s great disappointment, his allies in the state legislature failed to win over a majority of the deeply suspicious representatives, and no bill was introduced. Undeterred, and perhaps influenced by reports of a weakening of pro-slavery and disunionist sentiment in the borderlands, he took a more dramatic, high-profile, and unprecedented initiative.

On March 6, 1862, he sent a special message to Congress, recommending that the Senate and House adopt a joint resolution promising congressional financial support to “any state which may adopt gradual abolishment of slavery.” Lincoln presented compensated emancipation as a means of shortening the war, not as an act of humanity to the slaves. If the loyal slave states would simply begin such a program, he argued, it would shatter the Confederacy’s hopes of the upper South’s defection—and this “substantially ends the rebellion.”
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There were financial considerations, too: the cost to the nation of compensating slaveholders would be modest compared with the spiraling expenditure on the war. Congress, he acknowledged, had no constitutional power to impose a compensatory scheme, but a commitment to practical assistance would help persuade the relevant state legislatures of the bona fides of the federal authorities.

No president had previously attached his name to an emancipationist proposal. Partly to reassure the states in question, but partly to cajole them into action, Lincoln addressed representatives of Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri at the White House on March 10. They had already read in his special message that they would have a “perfectly free choice,” but they could not have missed an implicit threat, too. Lincoln had rehearsed the need to use “all indispensable means” to secure the Union, noting that war itself was one such means, “and it is impossible to foresee all the incidents, which may attend and all the ruin which may follow it. Such as may seem indispensable, or may obviously promise great efficiency towards ending the struggle, must and will come.” Confronted now by sharp and anxious questioners, Lincoln offered an emollient response, telling the border men “he had no designs beyond the action of the States on this particular subject. He should lament their refusal to accept . . . [the proposal], but he had no designs beyond their refusal to accept it.” The status quo, he implied, was barely sustainable. The presence of the Union army worked to destabilize and erode slavery, as slaves of loyal masters fled into the camps, and became the source of “continual irritation” between the military and civilian authorities, plaguing him with “conflicting and antagonistic complaints.” It was quite possible “in the present aspect of affairs” that, financially at least, slaveholders had more to lose from holding onto their slaves than by accepting compensation.
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