Rise to Greatness (36 page)

Nor was there much good news from the recruiting offices. On the theory that a speedy infusion of soldiers on the peninsula might yet embolden McClellan to capture Richmond, Lincoln cajoled the Union governors who had agreed to a new levy: “The quicker you send [troops], the fewer you will have to send.” But the governors weren’t getting the rousing results they had enjoyed in 1861. Volunteers were no longer springing up in multitudes just because a brass band played in a town square. Men needed time, after Gaines’ Mill and Shiloh, to decide whether to join. At the very moment when the president needed an immediate boost, enlistments slowed.

Frustrated, Lincoln began to mull the complicated math of McClellan’s army. He had long felt that one reason Little Mac was so hungry for new troops was that the Army of the Potomac leaked deserters like sand through a sieve. He asked the War Department to tell him the total number of men assigned to the general, and when the records were checked the answer came back: more than 160,000. By the end of his visit to Harrison’s Landing, Lincoln had determined that McClellan’s current strength on the peninsula was 86,500, “leaving 73,500 to be accounted for.” Allowing for death by disease and casualties of battle, Lincoln reduced that number to about “45,000 of [the] Army still alive, and not with it.” Further, he wrote, “I believe half, or two thirds of them are fit for duty.” In other words, between 20,000 and 30,000 men were unaccounted for while their general insisted on reinforcements.

Once again the president chose to challenge McClellan. In a tough cable, he shared his calculations with the general and put two blunt questions to him: “If I am right, and you had these men with you, you could go into Richmond in the next three days. How can they be got to you? And how can they be prevented from getting away in such numbers in the future?” After some introductory bluster, the general grudgingly replied that he was probably short by some 20,000 deserters.

*   *   *

The tightrope was wearing thin. When Charles Sumner suggested that Lincoln make the Fourth of July “more sacred and historic than ever” by issuing “an edict of Emancipation,” Lincoln revealed that his old concerns still gnawed at him. “I would do it if I were not afraid that half the officers would fling down their arms and three more states would rise” in rebellion, he said. But the pressure from the abolitionists remained relentless. In a message to Adams in London, Seward wrote that they seemed just as determined as the Rebels to stir up the worst possible result: a murderous insurrection by the slaves.

Searching for the middle, Lincoln decided to try one last time to talk the border states into voluntary, gradual emancipation, with payment for slave owners. On July 12, he again invited the delegations from the loyal slave states to the White House, and this time he read aloud from a carefully written appeal. “I intend no reproach or complaint when I assure you that in my opinion, if you all had voted for the resolution in the gradual emancipation message of last March, the war would now be substantially ended,” he began. Once the rebellious states knew for sure that the border states would never join the Confederacy, they would almost certainly give up. Meanwhile, the luxury of wishing change away was over, for “if the war continue long, as it must, [slavery] in your states will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion—by the mere incident of the war. It will be gone,” he warned, “and you will have nothing valuable in lieu of it.”

The step would be gradual, Lincoln repeated, and a suitable place in South America would be found for colonizing the freed slaves. His voice was pleading—until he turned to the threat. “I am pressed with a difficulty not yet mentioned,” he said. General David Hunter’s emancipation proclamation had more support than border staters might realize, and the Union needed Hunter’s supporters just as much as the Union needed the conservatives. Lincoln had dared to offend the abolitionists by repudiating Hunter’s order because he believed so strongly in the gradual approach. But if this way failed, he hinted, a military order would be the only option left. “The pressure, in this direction, is still upon me, and is increasing.”

He closed with a flourish that went past poetry into desperation. He told the congressmen that they had the power to save the nation. Accept his offer, he said, and the country’s “form of government is saved to the world; its beloved history, and cherished memories, are vindicated; and its happy future fully assured, and rendered inconceivably grand.” To the men before him now, “more than to any others, the privilege is given.”

Privilege or no, the offer was refused. Two days after the meeting, by a vote of twenty to eight, the delegations rejected Lincoln’s emancipation plan. They gave a host of reasons. The government couldn’t afford it; the Rebels would be outraged; loyal slaveholders would resist; the abolitionists would not be appeased. Lincoln tried to answer the first point by asking Congress to authorize bonds to cover the cost of his plan, but it was too late.

One objection from the border state delegations struck Lincoln with force and seemed to provide a narrow opening. Loyal slaveholders rejected the compensated-emancipation plan, he was told, because it would cause them to lose their slaves while Rebels kept theirs. “They felt it would be unjust,” Lincoln recalled, because “the blow must fall first and foremost on” the Confederacy. Yet buried in this complaint was the suggestion that public opinion was shifting—that loyal slave owners were becoming reconciled to the idea that “slavery was doomed.” They could not be “induced to lead” the way to emancipation, but they might be willing to accept it when it came.

*   *   *

On July 13, the morning after the meeting, while Lincoln was still waiting for a formal reply to his appeal, he recounted his conversation with the border state delegations to Seward and Welles. The men were riding in the presidential carriage on a sad mission to the summer residence of Edwin Stanton, in the wooded uplands north of Georgetown. Stanton’s infant son had died after receiving a failed vaccination, and the family was holding a private funeral. The carriage had not gone far when Lincoln stunned his colleagues by announcing that he had “about come to the conclusion” that emancipation “was a military necessity absolutely essential for the salvation of the Union.… We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.”

Up to this point, Lincoln had always been “prompt and emphatic,” as Welles put it, in cutting off discussion of compelled emancipation. Now he had clearly changed his mind: “It was forced on him by the rebels themselves,” Welles later wrote. “He saw no escape.” The enemy had proved surprisingly resilient, but behind one army was another. Slaves were building fortifications, hauling supplies, feeding troops, raising crops—all tasks that freed whites to kill Yankees. The president now believed that only force would return the Rebels to the Union, and that meant stripping them of their war-making resources, slaves included.

The conversation that morning was unleavened by jokes or snatches of poetry. “He dwelt earnestly on the gravity, importance, and delicacy” of this step, Welles reported. Convinced that public opinion in the North was hardening, the president felt that a majority of the people were ready to “strike more vigorous blows,” and that they were finally “prepared for” emancipation.

Lincoln asked for reactions from his traveling partners. Seward seemed “startled,” Welles thought, and said that such a big step, involving “consequences so vast and momentous,” deserved something better than a hasty judgment. Seward wanted to reflect before he gave his answer, but his initial thought was that emancipation was “expedient and necessary.” Welles agreed. As the men parted later that day, Lincoln assured them that he was serious: “Something must be done.”

But would it work? What if McClellan was correct, and the army “disintegrated” over emancipation? What if Lincoln lost Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri to the Rebels? The next morning, July 14—the same day the border states representatives formally refused Lincoln’s last overture—the Senate passed Trumbull’s Confiscation Act. Orville Browning rushed to the White House in distress. The senator minced no words in telling Lincoln that the bill “was a violation of the Constitution and ought to be vetoed.” Browning promised that a veto would produce “a storm of enthusiasm in support of the Administration in the border states” and that Democrats everywhere would swarm to Lincoln. But if he signed it, “the [D]emocratic party would again rally, and reorganize an opposition.” Lincoln promised to give the matter “his profound consideration.”

He apparently slept little that night as he worked through his next step. When Browning called at the cottage after breakfast the next day, the president was busy writing in the library. He had asked not to be interrupted, but made a brief exception for his friend. Browning was alarmed by Lincoln’s appearance. “He looked weary, care-worn and troubled. I shook hands with him and asked how he was. He said, ‘tolerably well.’” Worried, Browning reminded Lincoln of all that was riding on his shoulders, and urged his friend to take care of himself. Lincoln’s huge right hand was still wrapped around Browning’s as he replied “in a very tender and touching tone—‘Browning, I must die sometime.’ … He looked very sad, and there was a cadence of deep sadness in his voice. We parted … both of us with tears in our eyes.”

*   *   *

The British public was appalled by the latest news from the American battlefields. Their own nation’s recent bloodlettings in Crimea and India had temporarily fostered an antiwar spirit in the country, so the butchery at Shiloh and on the peninsula filled them with revulsion. The North appeared to be madly pursuing an impossible goal: the South could not be beaten and dragged back into the Union. What lay ahead was nothing but barbaric, fruitless struggle. A large segment of the public believed that it was time for the most powerful nation on earth, Great Britain, to step in and separate the fighters.

This tide of opinion washed into the House of Commons on July 18, when debate began on a proposal to call for intervention by the British government. Sympathy for the South appeared strong. Supporters of the Rebels spoke of states’ rights, the need for cotton, and the strength of Southern armies. They charged Lincoln with foot-dragging hypocrisy on the subject of slavery, going so far as to suggest that the institution would die out faster in an independent Confederacy than in a reconstructed Union. William Lindsay, the sponsor of the mediation proposal, boasted to Lord Russell that Parliament would force Her Majesty’s government to act within two weeks. The British press was full of sensational and exaggerated reports of the Seven Days battles. “The de facto independence of the Confederate States was regarded by most Englishmen … as unchallengeable,” according to one historian, and the influential
Times
of London called on the British cabinet to consider formal recognition of the Southern nation if McClellan’s army failed to advance.

Ambassador Adams counseled Washington to prepare for a “possible emergency” from the direction of Europe. Disgust at the war and sympathy for the South “is showing itself strongly in private circles here as well as in the newspapers,” he wrote, adding that it was “impossible” to counter those sentiments as long as the administration continued its confusing policy on slavery. Unaware that Lincoln had moved so far toward emancipation, Adams warned that Europeans found Lincoln’s position baffling, especially since he appeared to be standing on legal niceties. A clear abolition stance would turn the tables by showing that the North was fighting “for the fuller establishment of free principles,” not “dominion of one part of the people over the other,” Adams argued.

Currents were also running against the Union inside the British cabinet, but they followed a more complicated course. Palmerston and Russell agreed that the North’s cause was hopeless and that the sooner the conflict ended, the better for England. But the shocking scale of the war, which incensed the public, had the opposite effect on these experienced statesmen. They understood that armies engaged in such savagery would not be easy to pry apart; how could anyone expect “a successful offer of mediation” in the midst of this extreme conflict? “The Thirty Years’ War in Germany was a joke” compared with what was happening in America, the prime minister said. Lincoln and Seward did what they could to encourage this cautious response; in a strongly worded message, Seward urged Adams to explain to Russell that an effort to intercede on the side of the Rebels could turn “this civil war, without our fault [into] a war of continents—a war of the world.”

For the time being, the British cabinet’s careful approach prevailed, and Parliament adjourned for the summer without passing Lindsay’s mediation proposal. But Palmerston’s government would not stand idly by; once it found a safe way to take action, it intended to do so. To act alone would be dangerous; to act with the other great powers might be less so. That, however, would mean doing something quite unnatural: England would have to cooperate with France.

*   *   *

As it happened, Louis-Napoleon was thinking along the same lines. On July 16, while the sickly emperor was taking the water cure in the mineral baths of Vichy, he met with the Confederate emissary John Slidell. Since arriving in Paris some six months earlier, Slidell had been angling for such a meeting; McClellan’s retreat had at last made it possible. The emperor, who fancied himself a military genius like his uncle, wanted to talk about Lee’s triumphs outside Richmond, which had been reported in the French newspapers the previous evening. Slidell knew no more than what he had read in those same papers, but he was delighted to hear Napoleon expound on the French sympathy for underdogs and his own belief that the South could not be conquered. Like Ambassador Dayton, Slidell was struck by the emperor’s candor. It was true, Napoleon told him, that France had always seen a strong United States as a necessary counterweight to British power, but now that the Union was breaking up, he preferred to side with the South.

Pressing his advantage, Slidell suggested that France, with its ironclad battleships, could easily break the Union blockade, which would open the flow of money and guns that the Confederacy needed for victory. Napoleon rejected the idea; like Palmerston, he had no interest in a war with the North. What he would like to do, he told Slidell, was join Great Britain in an effort to mediate the conflict. Alas, the emperor added, his overtures to England had thus far been rebuffed.