Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (47 page)

Mathew Brady captured an assured and confident Lincoln in this photograph of January 8, 1864.

Such language was tendentious, but it harbored a kernel of truth. The Whig-Republicans’ wartime program of railroad construction, high tariffs on imported manufactures, homestead and land-grant laws, scientific agriculture, progressive taxation, and a national banking structure did indeed draw a line under the republic of Jefferson and Jackson, and announced the arrival of a national government pledged to a liberated commercial order. The “slave power,” with its states’ rights phobia of federal energy, was dead. The Republicans’ cast of mind—by inclination interventionist, statist, and centralizing—embraced far more easily than did their Democratic opponents’ the vigorous and coercive use of civil and military authority to suppress disloyalty and sustain the war effort.

POPULAR MOBILIZATION: THE “POWER OF THE RIGHT WORD” AND THE AGENCY OF PARTY

Not coercion, but the citizen’s voluntary exercise of reason, Lincoln believed, would provide the bedrock of support for the Union and ensure its armies’ ultimate victory. Certain that public sentiment was “everything,” he declared from the outset that he would prosecute the war “relying upon Providence and the loyalty of the people to the government they have established.”
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Americans had “a fundamental idea, going down about as deep as anything”—the survival of constitutional government—“to rally and unite” them. And they had rational faculties with which to assess events. “Our people are easily influenced by reason,” he told a group of visiting Baltimoreans early in the conflict. Later, in the dark days of 1864, he professed his continuing faith in the people: “Let them know the truth, and the country is safe.” He understood, of course, the depths to which loyalists were cast down by the trials of war, but he also saw the strength of patriotic ardor, whether measured in the oceans of blood spilled or, more prosaically, in the buoyant sales of war bonds and the torrents of charitable giving. He knew “the power of the right word from the right man to develop the latent fire and enthusiasm of the masses.”
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The “right man” was self-evidently the one man—the president—with the platform from which to reach the whole Union.

Articulating the aims and rationale of war was essential to Union victory. Lincoln’s authority as a democratic politician in antebellum America had derived very largely from his campaign oratory. Yet after his nomination for the presidency he never again took to the stump, and, once in the White House, he made only very limited use of a weapon that had done so much to win him the high regard of Republicans nationally. As president, he spoke in public nearly one hundred times. Mostly he made not full-blown speeches but modest remarks, often unscripted. They included short addresses to troops passing through Washington, impromptu responses to well-wishers who came to “serenade” him with music and speeches, and statements to visiting delegations—of clergymen, border-state representatives, free blacks, and others. Almost all these remarks were made in the capital. His two inaugural addresses and his speech at Gettysburg were rare, set-piece exceptions to this general practice.

We may wonder about Lincoln’s reluctance to speak in public, given his proven record as a rhetorician, his confidence in the power of language, and his reiterated certainty that Americans responded well to the truth when logically and clearly presented. The explanation lies partly in his conventional attitude that it was not quite proper for a president to make speeches at all, and certainly not during election campaigns, when stump-speaking would smack of partisanship, not statesmanship. No less influential was the pressure of presidential business, whose schedule gave Lincoln few opportunities to prepare lengthy speeches. Almost all his great addresses, as at Springfield in June 1858 and at Cooper Union in New York in February 1860, followed careful deliberation, even sustained research. Protracted, meticulous preparation and several drafts preceded his First Inaugural. Once the war began, competing demands squeezed out time for writing speeches or traveling to speak outside Washington. Since, unlike modern presidents, he used no ghostwriter (though the secretary of state prepared what Lincoln should say when foreign ministers were presented), and since he feared he might be led into careless, offhand remarks (which explains why he fretted at the approach of serenaders, who always expected a few words), we should not be surprised that he spoke so little in public and that the two most celebrated speeches of his presidency, the Gettysburg address and the Second Inaugural, were his pithiest.