Lincoln in the World (30 page)

The president made one final effort to woo border-state representatives. On July 12 he invited them to the White House. Lincoln insisted that the war would have virtually ended if they had voted for his proposal. “How much better for you, as seller, and the nation as buyer, to sell out, and buy out, that without which the war could never have been, than to sink both the thing to be sold, and the price of it, in cutting one another’s throats,” the president said. Lincoln, noting Hunter’s recent proclamation, argued that public agitation for abolition was actually intensifying. “The pressure, in this direction, is still upon me, and is increasing,” he said. Ultimately, however, the border-state representatives concluded that Lincoln’s plan would be too expensive. Nothing came of the president’s proposal.
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Finally, on July 13, Lincoln resolved to take even more drastic measures. In a carriage on the way to the funeral of the son of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the president told Seward and Naval Secretary Gideon Welles that he was considering issuing a more
ambitious proclamation. Lincoln said it was the first time he had mentioned the matter to anyone. As the carriage rolled through the streets of Georgetown, the president explained that he considered it a “military necessity” that “we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.” Seward said he needed more time to mull over the “vast and momentous” proposal. But Lincoln kept returning to the issue. Before the men parted ways, Lincoln told Seward and Welles to give the matter “special and deliberate attention.”
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The dramatic new policy proposal had important implications for foreign affairs. “By framing a proclamation rather than allowing events to take their course, [Lincoln] could appeal specifically to the antislavery feeling of foreign nations,” notes the scholar Hans Trefousse. Still, European opinion remained immensely diverse; courting it was maddeningly complex. If the timing was wrong, the strategy had the potential to backfire spectacularly, stoking British fears of disorder and ultimately damaging the Union cause.
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News of Lincoln’s change of heart seems to have slowly filtered through the White House. On July 20, John Hay wrote to a friend insisting that Lincoln would not preserve the peculiar institution for long. For a year, Hay wrote, the president had acted as “the bulwark of the institution he abhors.” Next time Lincoln mentions the subject, the president’s secretary predicted, “it will be with no uncertain sound.” Two days later, Lincoln alerted the full cabinet to his decision. The president gathered his inner circle in the oval-shaped library of the White House residence. Lincoln read the men his proclamation, which he had copied out onto two oversize sheets of paper.
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When the president had finished, Seward complained that the order might have the opposite of its intended effect in Europe. The move, he cautioned, could well prompt the powers to intervene. Emancipation would “break up our relations with foreign nations … for sixty years,” Seward insisted. At the least, the secretary of state argued, Europeans would see the move as a sign of
weakness. The North’s military efforts had been stalled for weeks. General George B. McClellan, Lincoln’s commander of the Army of the Potomac, had conceived a plan to march his troops—more than a hundred thousand—up the Virginia Peninsula, hoping to capture Richmond. Yet by midsummer his forces had bogged down near the outskirts of the city. During the Seven Days’ Campaign in late June and early July, troops commanded by Confederate general Robert E. Lee audaciously attacked McClellan’s forces, charging across the Chickahominy River. Although the Union army ultimately stopped the Confederate assault, McClellan was forced to withdraw his forces. Lee and his men had dramatically shifted the war’s momentum.

A proclamation freeing the slaves now, Seward argued, “may be viewed as the last measure of an exhausted government, a cry for help.” The secretary of state feared that Europeans would consider the measure the North’s “last
shriek
, on the retreat.” The New Yorker advised Lincoln to hold off until the army scored more decisive victories on the battlefield. Seward’s arguments, the president later recalled, “struck me with very great force.”
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The secretary of state did not seem sanguine about the proclamation, no matter when it would be issued. “Proclamations are
paper
without the support of armies,” Seward complained to his wife a week after the cabinet meeting. “It is mournful to see that a great nation shrinks from a war it has accepted, and insists on adopting proclamations, when it is asked for force. The Chinese do it without success.”
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Lincoln felt that his Federals had already demonstrated their prowess on the battlefield and was nonplussed by the lack of faith in Europe. In late July the Frenchman Agénor-Étienne de Gasparin wrote to Lincoln from Europe uging the president to avoid “revolutionary measures” like “precipitate emancipation.” The administration should remain neither “indifferent to abolition” nor “carried away by the extreme abolitionists,” he said. Either position might
inspire European powers to meddle in the war. Gasparin asserted instead that clear battlefield victories would be the key to avoiding intervention. “You are quite right,” Lincoln shot back, “as to the importance to us, for its bearing upon Europe, that we should achieve military successes.… Yet it seems unreasonable that a series of successes, extending through half-a-year, and clearing more than a hundred thousand square miles of country, should help us so little, while a single half-defeat should hurt us so much. But let us be patient.”
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Still, there was truth in Gasparin’s missive. Henry P. Tappan, the president of the University of Michigan, had been traveling through France in the summer of 1862. “To the minds of Frenchmen,” Tappan wrote Lincoln, “our government has shown only weakness and irresolution. To them, we have exhibited no military ability. They regard our conduct of the war as a grand failure.” The situation was much the same in Britain. “It is too late now to change these sentiments by diplomacy,” the educator told Lincoln. “We can reestablish ourselves abroad only by manful and successful doing at home.… The thunder of victorious cannon on the Potomac is the only diplomatic agency that can prevail on the Seine and the Thames.” Another American, William T. Dahlgren, wrote to Lincoln from London that summer emphasizing that the U.S. “must sooner or later establish their status by force of arms. It is all very well talking—or rather dreaming—of ‘fraternity’ etc., but
might
more than ever rules the day, and the sooner we make ourselves understood, the better.”
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At home, public opinion was approaching a tipping point. The rising swell of abolitionist sentiment emboldened Horace Greeley. “Do you remember that old theological book containing this: ‘Chapter One: Hell; Chapter Two: Hell Continued’?” Greeley asked Charles Sumner in early August. “That gives a hint of the way Old Abe
ought to be
talked to in this crisis.” The abolitionist Wendell Phillips, like Marx, lamented that the president “is not fighting vigorously and heartily enough.” If the government were only true to its ideals, he
argued, the Northern states alone might form “the strongest nation on the face of the globe.” In Lincoln, however, the Union was led by “a first-rate
second-rate
man.” The only way to get movement from the president, Phillips complained, was by applying intense pressure. “We have constantly to be pushing him from behind,” he said. The abolitionist later quipped that if Lincoln grew in office, it was only “because we have watered him.”
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Marx believed the conflict had reached a critical moment. Until now, Lincoln’s regard for the border states had “blunted the Civil War’s points of principle,” Marx wrote in August, and “deprived it of its soul.” Slavery, he argued, had been “transformed from the Achilles’ heel of the South into its invulnerable horny hide.” Observing the North’s faltering military efforts, Marx took the opposite lesson from Seward. “The long and the short of the story seems to me to be that a war of this kind must be conducted in a revolutionary way,” he wrote Engels in August, “whereas the Yankees have been trying so far to conduct it constitutionally.” Engels went even further, arguing that the South had virtually won the war. Marx disagreed, but he took his collaborator’s criticisms in stride. “In regard to the North’s conduct of the war,” he wrote Engels, “nothing else could be expected from a
bourgeois
republic, where swindle has been enthroned for such a long time.”

Still, Marx viewed public opinion as a potential savior of the North. The president could be bullied into adopting what Marx called “the great radical remedy.” The war was about to take “a revolutionary turn,” Marx predicted. He noted the public pressure from abolitionists like Wendell Phillips that was building in the American press. The Northwest and New England would push Lincoln to abandon his “diplomatic methods of waging war,” Marx wrote Engels. The philosopher predicted that there would be a new American revolution if Lincoln did not cave in to the abolitionists. “Up to now we have witnessed only the first act of the Civil War—the
constitutional
waging of war,” he wrote. “The second act, the
revolutionary
waging of war, is at hand.”
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A Masterpiece of Art

Marx rightly perceived the shift in American public opinion. Yet he underestimated Lincoln’s media savvy. Marx had always considered the American president something of a backwoods dunce, thrust into power by the vagaries of demographics and buffeted by the unpredictable winds of democratic politics. Lincoln himself sometimes felt as if he had lost control. Once, when the president was asked to describe his policy, Lincoln replied, “I have none. I pass my life in preventing the storm from blowing down the tent, and I drive in the pegs as fast as they are pulled up.” In the case of abolition, however, Lincoln was actually shrewdly and quietly preparing the public for a major transformation of the war aims.
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On August 20, Greeley published an editorial in the
Tribune
titled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions.” The newspaper editor complained that Lincoln was acting too slowly on the slavery issue. Greeley griped that the president was “unduly influenced” by “certain fossil politicians hailing from the border slave states.” The men, the editor insisted, were providing Lincoln with only “timid counsels.” The North’s preservation of slavery was causing its war efforts to founder. “On the face of this wide earth, Mr. President, there is not one disinterested, determined, intelligent champion of the Union cause who does not feel that all attempts to put down the rebellion and at the same time uphold its inciting cause are preposterous and futile,” Greeley wrote.

Lincoln responded two days later, writing a letter to Greeley—and then leaking it to a rival newspaper. The president began magnanimously. If Greeley’s letter displayed “an impatient and dictatorial tone,” Lincoln wrote, he would ignore it “in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.” Then the president offered a defense of his cautious position on slavery. “My paramount object in this struggle
is
to save the Union, and is
not
either to save or to destroy slavery,” Lincoln wrote. “If I could save the Union without freeing
any
slave I would do it, and if I could save it
by freeing
all
the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do
not
believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do
more
whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause.”
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On the surface, Lincoln’s response to Greeley appears to be a defense of the president’s original, limited war aims. Actually, as Lincoln’s conversations with his cabinet earlier that summer reveal, the president had already determined on a policy of emancipation more than a month before Greeley’s “Prayer.” Why, then, would the president seem to resist the editor’s plea? First, despite Lincoln’s assurances, he must have been miffed by Greeley’s impetuosity. That the president printed his response in a rival newspaper offers one clue to his true feelings. Second, Lincoln wanted to prepare border-state holdouts for the inevitability of emancipation. By defining abolition as a tool of national salvation, he tried to address their fears that the shift would degenerate into a slave revolt. Finally, Lincoln still needed to temporize. The president may have convinced himself of the necessity of emancipation, but he saw the logic in Seward’s pleas to await military success.
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Yet the victories remained elusive. In late August, with a small force of only thirty-two thousand men, Union general John Pope attacked a unit of Stonewall Jackson’s rebel troops dug in around Manassas, Virginia. Reinforcements eventually arrived, but by the time the battles were finished, the Federals had taken more than sixteen thousand casualties. Rain poured down on Lincoln’s defeated troops as they streamed back toward Washington. The battle, later known as Second Bull Run, was one more blow to Lincoln’s plans. When one radical Republican complained to the president on August 31 about the slow pace of the emancipation effort, Lincoln shot back: “You would not have it done now, would you? Must we not wait for something like a victory?”
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The battle disheartened Lincoln and his men. “You could scarcely find a gloomier city than Washington is today,” John Hay wrote on August 31. The whole capital was depressed and despondent. Even the sky was gray. The summer rain soaked clothes and dampened moods. Lincoln brooded around the Executive Mansion. “Well, John,” he told Hay, “we are whipped again, I am afraid.” The president, according to one of his cabinet secretaries, “seemed wrung by the bitterest anguish.” Lincoln complained that he felt like hanging himself.
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