Rise to Greatness (61 page)

A year ago, the military had been a mystery to Lincoln, and Congress was seeking to control his conduct of the war. Now George McClellan, the general who had dominated the Union army, was gone, and with him the threat of a military dictatorship. Pope had been given his chance; he, too, had been relieved of his command. Burnside would soon be cashiered, and though the Union’s mortifying loss at Chancellorsville lay ahead, just beyond it was the great victory at Gettysburg. Lincoln was well on his way to solving the managerial riddles posed by the Union’s overnight armies, and he had established his clear leadership over his administration, his party, and the government.

And what of the man himself: did the president’s visitors know him any better on that New Year’s Day than they had a year earlier? Later generations have had the privilege of looking back on Lincoln through hundreds of pairs of eyes and thousands of pages of letters and diaries. But his contemporaries could see him only in glimpses, and they were thus still capable of misjudging him badly even after the extraordinary events of 1862.

An early biographer, J. G. Holland, interviewed dozens of Lincoln’s associates and intimates in the months after the president’s death and was struck by the fact that “there are not two who agree in their estimate of him.” One would say “he was a very ambitious man”; another would assert “that he was without a particle of ambition.” People who knew Lincoln, Holland wrote, said that

he was one of the saddest men that ever lived, and that he was one of the jolliest men that ever lived; that he was very religious, but that he was not a Christian;… that he was the most cunning man in America, and that he had not a particle of cunning in him; that he had the strongest personal attachments, and that he had no personal attachments at all;… that he was a tyrant, and that he was the softest-hearted, most brotherly man that ever lived;… that he was a leader of the people, and that he was always led by the people; that he was cool and impassive, and that he was susceptible of the strongest passions.

Ultimately, Holland came to the conclusion that those who knew the president “caught only separate aspects of his character” and that the seemingly contradictory images of Lincoln in fact added up to his essence.

All of these aspects of the president’s character had flickered or shone through the ordeal of that year, for Lincoln was very much a work under revision, a man feeling his way among obstacles unlike any navigated by his predecessors. He did not know from one day to the next what would be required of him, nor did he know which tools he would employ to meet each day’s challenges. He began the year possessing the raw material of greatness; those who looked into his workshop could see him fashioning one element one day and a different element the next. But when the first day of January came around again, Lincoln’s greatness was no longer raw. Even as he had redefined American society, he had invented the modern presidency. He had steered himself and the nation from its darkest New Year’s Day to its proudest, and in the process Lincoln had become the towering leader who forever looms over the rebirth of the American experiment.

*   *   *

The White House doors closed and the last of the crowd grasped Lincoln’s gloved hand at about two
P.M.
Exhausted, the president climbed the stairs to his office, where he soon received a visit from William Seward and his son Frederick. They brought with them the perfected Emancipation Proclamation, ready for his signature. The fifth and last page was placed on his desk. Lincoln dipped a pen that he had already promised to Charles Sumner, in recognition of the senator’s leadership in the cause of liberty. But when he tightened his fingers to sign, Lincoln felt his hand cramp and begin to tremble. As he later recounted the experience: “I could not for a moment, control my arm, and a superstitious feeling came over me which made me hesitate.” In fact his grip was spent after hours of vigorous hand-shaking.

Worried that others might draw the wrong conclusion, the president said to those who witnessed his signature: “I never in my life felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper. But I have been receiving calls and shaking hands … until my arm is stiff and numb. Now, this signature is one that will be closely examined, and if they find my hand trembled, they will say, ‘he had some compunctions.’ But, anyway, it is going to be done.”

Lincoln took up the pen again and carefully inscribed his name—which emerged a bit shakily at first, but gained strength. Describing the moment later that day, the president said to a guest: “The signature looks a little tremulous, for my hand was tired, but my resolution was firm.”

A leaked copy of the proclamation was published that afternoon in the Washington
Evening Star,
and as word of the signing spread by telegraph to mass rallies throughout the North, thousands of Americans erupted in cheers. At Tremont Temple in Boston, the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass thanked God that he had lived to see the death blow dealt to slavery. Cannon thundered salutes from Chicago to Pittsburgh to New York. Lincoln spent the rest of the day fretting over scraps of information from Rosecrans in Tennessee, until, after supper, the White House lawn filled with a cheering throng of citizens, white and black together, calling for a speech. The president went to a window and waved to the crowd, but said nothing. His signature spoke for itself.

News of the proclamation sped to England, where leading citizens across the country convened rallies and town meetings to pass resolutions in favor of Lincoln’s leadership; they also called on the British government to refrain from doing anything to help the Confederacy. Charles Francis Adams filled diplomatic pouches with dozens of these expressions of support, documenting a groundswell of public opinion that proved once and for all that the industrial heart of England was now emphatically pro-Union, despite the misery of the unemployed workers at cotton-starved mills. Later that month, the U.S. consul in London, Freeman Morse, reported to Seward that “Emancipation Meetings continue to be held in London every week, sometimes four or five a week at which two and three thousand people have been present and in a majority of cases unanimously with the North.” The offices of the American legation noticed a sharp increase in the number of British subjects volunteering for the Union army; the legation secretary, Benjamin Moran, reported that the vicar at his church had begun praying for the North, and that the prayers were always answered by loud amens.

Lincoln was buoyed by this outpouring. “The workingmen of Europe have been subjected to a severe trial,” he allowed in a letter replying to a resolution from the factory workers of Manchester. Acknowledging the suffering caused by the Southern cotton embargo and subsequent Northern blockade, Lincoln declared: “I cannot but regard your decisive utterance” against slavery and in favor of the Union “as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country. It is, indeed, an energetic and reinspiring assurance of the inherent power of truth and of the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity, and freedom.”

The president was also subjected to intense criticism, of course. The new governor of New York, Horatio Seymour, called the proclamation a “bloody, barbarous, revolutionary, and unconstitutional scheme.” Negative reaction to the decree invigorated the antiwar Democrats, known derisively as Copperheads. Especially in the West, where farmers and merchants were badly hurt by the loss of Mississippi River commerce, Lincoln’s hard line against the South jeopardized his control of the Union. “The people of the West demand peace,” roared the Copperhead leader Clement Vallandigham of Ohio. “They begin to more than suspect that New England is in the way.” Another Ohio congressman, Samuel Cox, warned that many in the heartland were discussing the possibility of breaking away from abolitionist New England to forge a separate peace with the South. Meanwhile, desertions spiked in some Union army units as conservative soldiers went home in disgust. “It is nothing uncommon for a Capt[ain] to get up in the morning and find half his company gone,” wrote one infantryman from Vermont.

But a delicate balance had tilted during 1862 in favor of eradicating what Lincoln would call “the original disturbing cause” that had brought on this terrible war. The nation’s center of gravity had shifted, and Horace Greeley correctly described this change when he wrote in his
New-York Tribune
that “the people of 1860 have become, in 1862, a people of a totally different and new intellectual and moral life. Whereas in 1860 we bowed before, while we devoutly believed in, the safety and the wisdom of Human Slavery, in 1862 we know it is our curse and our danger.”

Though the road to Union victory remained long and the journey violent, the Federal armies—in spite of frequent complaints and chronic desertion, troubles that also plagued the South—were now pointed clearly and irresistibly toward the end. The army under Grant in the West was one campaign away from opening the Mississippi; the army under Rosecrans, which Grant and Sherman would inherit, was launched on its eventual course to Chattanooga, Atlanta, and Savannah; and the Army of the Potomac had become the hard, unbreakable force that would soon win the greatest battle ever fought in the Americas, and then grind Lee’s stubborn host down to a remnant.

Confederate armies, by contrast, had passed their apex and were beginning to erode. Though about a quarter of a million Rebel troops were present for duty on the last day of 1862, the count would never be that high again. They were now outnumbered almost three to one; in two more years it would be five to one. “In all the elements of strength, power, and stability, the Union is stronger … today than it was … a year ago,” Seward aptly informed his envoys in Europe toward the end of 1862. “In all the same elements the insurrection is weaker.”

Some critics of the Emancipation Proclamation considered the decree insufficient because it failed to address slavery in loyal territory. As the London political weekly
The Spectator
put it: “The principle is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.” Within a short time, however, and with Lincoln’s unflagging support, the decree would lead to a constitutional amendment outlawing slavery altogether, followed by another recognizing freed men and women as equal citizens of the United States. A milestone on the arduous path toward justice and liberty, Lincoln’s signature on the proclamation was the crucial step that brought the end of slavery into view. “I can see that time coming,” Lincoln declared. “Whoever can wait for it will see it; whoever stands in its way will be run over by it.”

*   *   *

Now the outcome of the Civil War was a matter of time—but not
simply
a matter of time, because the passage of each remaining day was costly, and painful to the limits of human endurance. The South’s best hopes of victory were behind it. The lever of cotton had failed to move Europe. The huge armies raised by the first and most severe military draft in American history had begun to wither. The high cost of the war was crushing the South’s economy even as it galvanized the North’s; indeed, at the end of 1862 U.S. government bonds were selling at half the yield they commanded when Lincoln took office, a measure of the confidence investors placed in the credit of the Northern government. The bravery and ferocity of Confederate resistance had not broken the fighting spirit of Union soldiers, nor had the Rebel advance into the border states rallied secession spirit. The morale of the North had proved as resilient as a young tree, bending and sagging under impossible weight, but always springing back.

For Abraham Lincoln, the toll was severe. “He certainly is growing feeble,” one associate observed shortly after the president’s fifty-fourth birthday in February 1863. “He wrote a note while I was present, and his hand trembled as I never saw it before, and he looked worn & haggard. I remarked that I should think he would feel glad when he could get some rest. He replied that it was a pretty hard life for him.” Despite the multitude of challenges, however, Lincoln was sustained not only by his own will and the passion of his supporters, but by the bedrock of American patriotism, which he never failed to trust. Through the darkest days of 1862, when talk of disunion and dictatorship tore through the North like wildfire, no national leader took a meaningful step in those dangerous directions. The catastrophe caused by secession led to neither anarchy nor tyranny, though such disasters had seemed so likely a year before.

This unshakable loyalty to the Union, despite bitter differences of opinion, was not just a triumph of Lincoln’s painstaking moderation, nor was it the result of his temporary crackdown on dissent. Credit also belongs to Lincoln’s critics. Though numerous and unrelenting, when it counted they were not traitors. Men like McClellan and Seymour broke repeatedly with Lincoln’s policies—and with the policies of abolitionist leaders in Congress—but when pressed to the wall they stood by the Constitution. Lincoln was wise enough not to back them into corners, but their patriotism was their own and it played an instrumental role in saving the United States from ruin.

The twelve tumultuous months of 1862 were the hinge of American history, the decisive moment at which the unsustainable compromises of the founding generations were ripped up in favor of a blueprint for a much stronger nation. In the process, millions of lives were transformed: the lives of the slaves who were to be freed, and of the slave owners who would be impoverished; the lives of the soldiers and their families who bore the suffering of the first all-out war of the Industrial Age; the lives of those who would profit from new inventions, longer railroads, and modern finance; the lives of students who would be educated in great public universities. The road taken in 1862 ultimately led to greater prosperity than anyone had ever imagined. For the first time—but certainly not the last—the United States flexed its muscle to turn back an existential threat. Despite the cataclysmic destruction caused by the Civil War, the reunited states, North and South, would be far richer in 1870 than in 1860. During the same period, the nation’s population would rise by more than 20 percent, and its gross domestic product would nearly double.