The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (22 page)

During the next week Lincoln grappled with the problem he had so long been avoiding. Until this time he would have been content to let slavery exist within its own well-established boundaries, hoping that natural evolutionary processes would some day bring it to an end. Now he realized that in order to win the War he had to eradicate the basic cause of the conflict. His chief difficulty was that he still did not want to alienate the people in the border states who were loyal to the Union. He had to find a device that would permit him to free the slaves of the enemies of the Union and at the same time allow its friends to retain their property. He was a politician and he could not afford to antagonize his allies, no matter what their internal policies might be.

On July 22, he entered a Cabinet meeting with his plan completely worked out. He was ready to present it to his advisers, but he was not asking for their approval; he told them
frankly that the question was already settled in his own mind and that he would take full responsibility for it. He then read the draft of his proclamation. It declared that on the first of January, 1863, “all persons held as slaves within any state or states wherein the constitutional authority of the United States shall not then have been practically recognized … shall then, thenceforward and forever be free.”

This carefully phrased wording covered the device needed to hold the border slave states in the Union. The emancipation provision was directed only at the Confederate states—the states that were in rebellion against the Union. Men in those states were to lose their slaves; men in states that had remained loyal were to be permitted to keep their slave property. The proclamation of emancipation was not a philanthropic gesture to benefit the enslaved Negroes—it was a wartime measure intended to weaken the insurgent states.

Lincoln’s obviously determined manner overcame any possible opposition on the part of his Cabinet. Seward, however, astutely pointed out that if the proclamation were made public at this moment of disaster when the Richmond campaign had just failed, it would sound like a despairing cry from a bewildered administration. Why not wait for a victory before releasing it?

This suggestion seemed sensible. Lincoln decided to withhold his proclamation until the Northern armies made a sufficient show of success to provide a favorable psychological reception for it. During the time he had to wait for a victory, the abolitionists, not knowing what was in his mind, kept up pressure for emancipation. On August 19, Greeley published his famous letter entitled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions” in which he appealed to the President to make an end of slavery. Lincoln replied to him three days later: “My paramount object is to save the Union, and not either to save or to destroy slavery,” he said. “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.” This was his declaration of official policy for the moment. He tempered it in closing by saying: “I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men could everywhere be free.”

A few weeks later (September 13), a committee of religious denominations waited on the President to supplement Greeley’s plea. In view of the date on which this incident took place and the events that were to happen hardly more than a week later, it is curious to see Lincoln still steadfastly defending the policy that he was ready to abandon as soon as any kind of victory would permit him to do so. It is almost as though he were trying to present the other side of the argument. He gives all the practical reasons for not issuing a proclamation of emancipation. He admits candidly that no words of his would have any effect in the South. But his final words give the clue to what was passing in his own mind:

Do not misunderstand me because I have mentioned these objections. They indicate the difficulties that have thus far prevented my action.… I have not decided against a proclamation of liberty to the slaves, but hold the matter under advisement; and I can assure you that the subject is on my mind, by day and night, more than any other. Whatever shall appear to be God’s will, I will do.

The military maneuvers that were so intimately tied up with emancipation were progressing rapidly. A victory was in the offing, although events leading up to it hardly seemed propitious. Pope had made a miserable fizzle of his command of the Army of Virginia. On August 29–30, he had been attacked by the Confederates on the old battlefield of Manassas and had seen his forces routed there almost as badly as the green troops of McDowell had been in the first major encounter of the War. Lee had driven on around him, heading north toward
Maryland. McClellan, who had returned from the Peninsula with his troops, was hastily put in charge of the counter-offensive against Lee. The two armies met in Maryland on September 17, just beyond Harper’s Ferry, facing each other across an obscure country creek named Antietam that became famous that day. The battle that was fought on its banks was the bloodiest single day of the War, but it ended in Lee’s being driven southward into Virginia.

Antietam was no great and decisive victory, but it would have to do. On September 22, 1862, the President read the final wording of his Proclamation of Emancipation to the Cabinet; two days later it was released to the press. The immediate reaction in the North was rather disappointing. After waiting a few days to determine public opinion, Lincoln wrote to the Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin, on September 28, saying that “while commendation in newspapers and by distinguished individuals is all that a vain man could wish, stocks have declined, and troops come forward more slowly than ever.… The North responds to the proclamation sufficiently in breath; but breath alone kills no rebels.”

Lack of great enthusiasm over this first movement toward freeing the slaves was not the only burden Lincoln had to bear at this time. He was having trouble with McClellan again. McClellan had forced Lee to withdraw across the Potomac, but he did nothing about going in pursuit of him. On October 1, Lincoln visited his procrastinating commander. He reviewed the troops in and around Harper’s Ferry and then went to McClellan’s headquarters at Antietam.
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Evidently the President
considered the troops to be in better condition and better supplied than McClellan did. The Western army had just won the battle of Corinth; the Eastern army was completely inactive while its commander complained to Washington about his cavalry mounts and his lack of supplies. On October 13, Lincoln wrote to McClellan criticizing him for his over-cautiousness. McClellan replied, saying that his horses were in no condition to move. Then Lincoln’s patience gave way. He telegraphed sharply: “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigues anything?”

This was the beginning of the end. On October 26, McClellan reluctantly started out after Lee, but he was not quick enough to prevent him from crossing the Blue Ridge Mountains and reaching Central Virginia. Lincoln had already made up his mind that if McClellan permitted this to happen he would remove him from his command. On November 5, the fatal order went out, and McClellan’s troubled career as the head of the Union army was finished forever.

Burnside was placed in charge of McClellan’s army. Under his command it moved down slowly into Virginia to Fredericksburg, where it fought a hopeless battle in the middle of December, charging against Confederates solidly entrenched on the heights beyond that city until the loss of life was so great that the whole North was appalled. The end of 1862 was a period of the deepest gloom and depression throughout the Northern states. The year that had begun so favorably was petering out in defeat, and the Government was in a quandary as to what to do about its military failures. Lincoln was the object of bitter attack, and he must have felt his position keenly. The November elections had gone against the administration; Congress was bitterly critical; a Cabinet crisis threatened
as Seward and Chase offered to resign because of the disputes over the responsibility for what had happened at Fredericksburg. The public debt had risen enormously; currency inflation had begun, and, worst of all, the troops had not been paid for five months. The Proclamation of Emancipation, which had been issued after a Northern victory, took effect on January 1, 1863, in the lowest ebb of Northern defeat.

When Lincoln addressed his message to Congress on December 1, 1862, he asked that the war measure of emancipation be implemented by the adoption of an amendment to the Constitution embodying his plan for compensation. Two years passed before this was finally accomplished, on January 31, 1865,
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and then no provision for compensation was made. When the next amendment (the Fourteenth) was ratified in 1868, it specifically forbade compensation of any kind.

As a military measure, the Proclamation of Emancipation was easily justified, although there was some doubt about its constitutionality. It accomplished several purposes: It acted as a thorn in the side of the Confederacy; it helped win liberal opinion in Europe to the Northern side; and it increased the strength of the Northern armies by adding Negro soldiers to their ranks. Several colored regiments were formed immediately; by the end of the War, 186,000 Negroes had enrolled on the Union side.

At the end of his message to Congress on December 1, 1862, a large part of which is devoted to a discussion of the then forthcoming Proclamation of Emancipation and the supporting legislation required for it, Lincoln gives an indication of what his own inner feelings were in the matter of freeing the slaves. He concludes with the moving words:

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves.
No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We—even we here—hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.

Lincoln was keenly conscious of the tides of opinion throughout the world. He was in full sympathy with liberal thought and he was eager to have the real nature of the cause for which his country was fighting understood by people everywhere. In England a remarkable division of attitude had occurred. The aristocracy, as has already been indicated, was in almost complete sympathy with the South, but the British working people were in hearty accord with the aims of the North. Even the operators in the Lancashire mills, who were being starved as a result of the cotton shortage caused by the blockade, steadfastly supported the Union cause. The working-men of Manchester addressed a letter to the President at the beginning of the new year 1863, enclosing a resolution of sympathy with the aims of the Northern Government. On January 19, Lincoln answered them, saying that the example set by the Lancashire mill operators was “an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country.” The people of the Northern states, moved by the plight of the English factory hands, subscribed large sums of money for relief and sent shiploads of wheat to Liverpool.

The horizon of the Illinois lawyer who had become President was expanding. He had been occupied successively with
town, county, state and national problems. Now his mind had to take in those vast and subtly interconnected relationships which tie together all the peoples of the world. He realized that he was playing a role in history; he knew that what he did would be commented on for generations to come; he knew that what he said would be recorded for all time. A man who is conscious of his historic destiny thinks and acts in terms of long-range conduct. Nevertheless, the Lincoln of the White House was still the Lincoln of New Salem hill and Speed’s store and the circuit-towns of the prairies. He had not forgotten his origins or his training. He was now applying to greater problems the simple universal things he had learned during his youth.

Stories of his humanity and his sympathy multiply during the war years until they merge into a legend that is half truth and half fiction. Yet however unsubstantiated some of the incidents may be there is no doubt of the underlying truth. And Abraham Lincoln is remembered by the mass of people, not for his politician’s skill or his historical importance, but for the way he acted in little personal relationships with the common people who came to see him for all sorts of reasons. The entrance hall to the White House was always filled with them. Indians, Tennessee mountaineers, Negroes, immigrants, religious men of all denominations, wives and widows, old friends and neighbors—and just plain citizens—came in an endless stream. He saw them all. Even lunatics came to him in droves, with all sorts of wild schemes to which he listened gravely. By treating the insane as though they were sane he found that he could deal with them easily. Actually, to the tired and aging man who sat in the White House day after day listening to the pleas and criticism and curses of his people, they must eventually all have come to seem alike, sane and insane.

However, the time he spent with his visitors was by no means wasted. It enabled him to take a public-opinion poll
of his own. His secretaries were often surprised to find that the President, who read so little, knew so much about what was going on in the country. Nothing of what he heard was lost on him. He listened and he remembered. When the time came he acted accordingly.

Familiar as it is, no part of the Lincoln legend is more worthy of serious respect than that which has to do with his pardoning of soldiers. No record was ever kept of the actual number of cases that passed through his hands, but it must, by all accounts, have been large. And, contrary to popular belief, he did not pardon every case that was brought to his attention. He went out of his way to see that justice was done, and he was earnestly averse to permitting a man to be executed for anything except a clear-cut criminal cause. He sought desperately for excuses to pardon, often delaying a case until he could think of a good reason for granting amnesty. He admitted to his more sternly minded colleagues that he was pigeon-hearted. He agreed cheerfully with Stanton and Bates that he was demoralizing the army. But he went right on granting pardons.