Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (40 page)

The radicals’ attempt to take control of the administration had failed. If Lincoln needed confirmation of the meaning of his triumph, it came by way of a reported remark made by Jefferson Davis during the crisis “that there would soon be a rupture in the Cabinet of Lincoln’s, and that the appointment of men who favored the emancipation scheme”—thus alienating Kentucky—“together with the late Democratic victories, would ensure the ultimate triumph of Southern Arms.” In fact, the radicals’ defeat did not, despite the fervent hopes of opposition Democrats and stolid border Unionists, mean Lincoln’s abandonment of the promises of September, though the memorials that bombarded him during the final days of the year, including a barrage of letters from the Republican presidential electors of 1860, indicated that antislavery loyalists too were anxious about a last-minute presidential stumble. On New Year’s Day 1863, steadying his arm after a morning of vigorous handshaking, Lincoln signed the final proclamation of emancipation.
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An authorized version of the Emancipation Proclamation, countersigned by Seward and Nicolay, designed to raise money for hospitals and the relief of soldiers, at the Philadelphia Great Central Sanitary Fair in June 1864.

Far from retreating from the radicalism of his September order, Lincoln advanced a step further. As well as declaring free all slaves in states and parts of states still in rebellion, he authorized the enlistment of blacks, admitting them into the Union armed services “to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts.” Even before the onset of hostilities, free blacks had expressed their readiness to risk their lives for the Union, and their repeated demands that they—and the multiplying contrabands—be allowed to enlist were taken up by white radicals, including Schurz, Tilton, and Beecher. By July 1862 Lincoln had begun to acknowledge the case for allowing commanders to arm freedmen in specific locations and signed the Confiscation Act that gave him discretion to receive blacks into service. Some generals took pathbreaking initiatives: Hunter and Rufus Saxton with contrabands in the Department of the South; Butler with the free black citizens of New Orleans. But, fearing the effect on public opinion, Lincoln was not prepared to move to a general arming of African-Americans. In August, Browning, acting as the president’s ears in Illinois, endorsed Lincoln’s stance. “The time may come for arming the negroes. It is not yet.” Men repeatedly said, “If [Lincoln] . . . will accept one black Regiment he will lose twenty white Regiments by it.” When, that same month, Indiana offered to raise two black regiments, the president refused them, just as he did the Sixth Colored Regiment earnestly proffered by Rhode Island’s Governor Sprague in September.
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The Emancipation Proclamation was quite enough to ask conservative Unionists to digest for the moment; with elections in the offing in the fall of 1862, he would not ask them to swallow black enlistments, too.

Still, arming blacks was a logical consequence of a proclamation justified as a military measure. Arguments that had begun to weigh in July tipped the scales by the close of the year, fusing opportunism and idealism. The Union army needed men. Heavy enlistments and drafts deprived the home front of its manpower. Putting freedmen in uniform would keep them off the northern labor market. It would also prepare them for the responsibilities of freedom and help remove “reasonless and unchristian prejudice against the African race.”
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If Lincoln shared the common anxiety that blacks were unequal to the task, it was assuaged by his reading the Boston antiquarian George Livermore’s recent pamphlet, a gift from Sumner, on their substantial role as soldiers during the Revolution. Addressing the fear that arming blacks might trigger slave insurrections, Lincoln enjoined those freed by the proclamation “to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence.”
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Lincoln’s low-key declaration prompted no immediate transformation of policy toward black enlistments, but it was the critical turning point. Conservatives like Edward Bates may have been uneasy, at best, and border Unionists alarmed, but it met with delight amongst African-American spokesmen and radical Republicans. One intimation of the new direction in policy was the dog that did not bark: colonization, brandished as a policy in September, received no mention. Lincoln had not lost all interest in voluntary deportation—the Île-à-Vache scheme was still afloat—and his commissioner of emigration, James Mitchell, believed that the arming of “a few thousand negroes” would not stand in the way of their being “subsequently removed.”
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But Lincoln’s present silence eloquently intimated that he saw the internal contradiction in asking blacks to leave the country on whose behalf he was inviting them to risk their lives.

Over sixteen months, by increments, Lincoln had moved. From firmly repudiating emancipation as a weapon of war, he had moved to declare the advancing Union forces the liberators of millions in bondage. From tolerating the return of fugitive slaves to rebel masters, he had moved to invite freedmen to take up arms against those who had shackled them. From defining the war’s purpose as the reestablishment of a Union committed to no more than a gradual melting away of the peculiar institution, he had moved to champion a nation energized by the prospect of slavery’s imminent and permanent removal. Whatever Lincoln would later say to Albert Hodges, this fundamental reformulating of objectives occurred not because the president was passively bobbing about on the tidal surges of events, powerful though these were, but because he took initiatives, bringing to bear a strong political will, a radar system acutely sensitive to public opinion, and a gift for timing. Not least, he thought so long and hard before taking a new position that, as Charles Sumner told Harriet Beecher Stowe, “it is hard to move him . . . once he has taken it.” This ratchet meant that the decision for emancipation, once presented to the cabinet on July 22, would not easily be retracted; it also explains why in November, two months after issuing the preliminary order, Lincoln said privately that “he would rather die than take back a word.”
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The ratchet was an expression both of Lincoln’s temperament and of his intellectual character. As such, it was also related to Lincoln’s understanding of his place within the workings of Providence, to which we must now turn.

FAITH AND PURPOSES

When Lincoln extended the means of war to embrace emancipation, he explained his actions—to his cabinet, to the Chicago clergy—in terms which intimated that he was listening to God’s will. We will never get to the bottom of Lincoln’s private religious thought, or definitively weigh the competing claims about his personal piety. But there are unmistakable signs that, from the time of his election, he attended to religion with growing seriousness, that his ideas about God’s role in the universe sustained a marked change, and that these notions informed how he thought about his administration’s purposes.

David Gilmour Blythe’s painting, here in print form, shows the president composing “the Proclamation of Freedom,” and taking inspiration from, inter alia, the Bible,
the Constitution, the scales of justice, a Quaker memorial, and a rail splitter’s maul.
A bust of Andrew Jackson, a staunch Unionist, sits on the mantelpiece (left); one of President Buchanan, the ineffectual incumbent when the southern Confederacy was formed, hangs by a rope (center).

The presidency transformed Lincoln’s life, and there need be no surprise that the changes he underwent made him more reflective about the claims of faith. Decades of campaigning for political power had been an inspiring joy: he thrived during his debates with Douglas, even putting on weight. He had relished the prospect of office and in conventional times he would probably have relished the reality of executive power. But the demands of a cruel presidency threatened to crush even one who was more physically tough, mentally focused, and emotionally self-sufficient than most. Bearing the responsibility and guilt for a war of unexpected savagery was burden enough. “Do you ever realize that the desolation, sorrow, grief, that pervades this country is owing to you?” a disconsolate Republican unnecessarily inquired. But beyond that Lincoln had to face the trials of personal loss. Friends and close colleagues—Elmer Ellsworth, Edward Baker, and others—spilled their blood. Then there was the death of his beloved eleven-year-old child, Willie, from typhoid fever in February 1862, leaving him brokenhearted, taking his wife to the brink of a nervous breakdown, and sending them both into months of deep mourning. Mary herself provided Lincoln with but modest emotional support. If historians have tended to overstate the degree of their domestic disharmony—one has judged the marriage a “fountain of misery”—it is still clear that the problem of Mary’s extravagance, insecurity, and social misjudgments gave Lincoln off-duty as much pain as balm. Occasionally his White House secretaries would help him relax. John Hay became something of an adopted son, to whom Lincoln would recite Scripture and dramatic poetry to help calm his mind. The theater brought him some escape, as did occasional exeats from Washington to visit the troops. But the physical drudgery and emotional rigors of the presidency were essentially unrelieved and inescapable. Less than two years into the war, Noah Brooks discovered that the “happy-faced lawyer” he had seen stumping for Frémont in 1856 was now a grizzled, stooped figure, with “a sunken deathly look about the large, cavernous eyes.” A little while later Lincoln “said quaintly that nothing could touch the tired spot within, which was all tired.” Racked by weariness “beyond description” (though suffering only rare bouts of illness), Lincoln entered his second term in 1865 old before his time.
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A cocktail of exhaustion, responsibility, and guilt need not of itself prompt an interest in religion, but it probably does help explain why in Washington Lincoln became a more habitual churchgoer than ever before. Attendance was expected of the president, of course. Lincoln, with a choice of churches, found congenial the familiar old-school doctrine of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, helpfully untainted by secession and southern Democracy. According to the government printer John DeFrees, the president had several conversations with its pastor, Phineas D. Gurley, “on the subject of religion, about the time of the death of his son Willie.” Equally, Lincoln’s Bible-reading became a greater source of comfort than ever. Friends noticed it. Joshua Speed thought that “he sought . . . to make the Bible a preceptor to his faith and a guide for his conduct” as president. Browning recalled their spending a Sunday afternoon in the White House library together, when “he was reading the bible a good deal.” Mary Lincoln implied that he studied the Scriptures more intently as the war proceeded. His habit attracted attention. On a steamboat trip down to Norfolk, he was observed in an out-of-the-way corner “reading a dog eared
pocket
copy of the New Testament all by himself.” It was not an affectation.
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