Abraham Lincoln Read online

  On January 31, 1865, the House adopted the present Thirteenth Amendment by just three votes more than the required two-thirds majority. At once a storm of cheers broke over House Republicans, who danced around, embraced one another, and waved their hats and canes. “It seemed to me I had been born into a new life,” recalled one advanced Republican, “and that the world was overflowing with beauty and joy.”

  Lincoln, too, pronounced the amendment “a great moral victory” and “a King’s cure” for the evils of slavery. When ratified by the states, the amendment would end human bondage everywhere in America.* Lincoln pointed across the Potomac. “If the people over the river had behaved themselves, I could not have done what I have.”

  Lincoln conceded, though, that he had not controlled the events of the war, but that events had controlled him instead, that God had controlled him. He thought about this a good deal, especially at night when he couldn’t sleep, trying to understand the meaning of the war, to understand why it had begun and grown into such a massive revolutionary struggle, consuming hundreds of thousands of lives (the final casualties would come to 620,000 on both sides). By his second inaugural, he had reached an apocalyptic conclusion about the nature of the war—had come to see it as divine punishment for the “great offense” of slavery, as a terrible retribution God had visited on a guilty people, in North as well as South. Lincoln’s vision was close to that of old John Brown, who had prophesied on the day he was hanged, on that balmy December day back in 1859, that the crime of slavery could not be purged from this guilty land except by blood. Lincoln’s vision was close to that of the deeply religious slaves, to the self-liberating forebears of historian Vincent Harding, who saw the hand of God in this terrible war and the inexorable approach of Judgment Day. Now, in his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln too contended that God perhaps had willed this “mighty scourge of War” on the United States, “until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn from the sword.”

  He had come a long distance from the harassed political candidate of 1858, opposed to emancipation lest his political career be jeopardized, convinced that only the distant future could remove slavery from his troubled land, certain that only colonization could solve the ensuing problem of racial adjustment. He had also come a long way in the matter of Negro social and political rights, as we shall see. The Proclamation had indeed liberated Abraham Lincoln, enabling him to act more consistently with his moral convictions.

  He had none of the racial prejudice that infected so many whites of that time, even advanced Republicans like Benjamin Wade. Frederick Douglass, who interviewed Lincoln in 1863, said he was “the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color.” Other blacks also testified that the President treated them as they wanted to be treated—as human beings with feelings. He did not tell dialect jokes in their presence, did not condescend to them, did not spell out his thoughts in imbecilic one-syllable language, as did many other whites when speaking to Negroes. He opened the White House doors to black visitors as no other President had ever done before and as few would do after. At his New Year’s reception in 1865, he shook hands with a parade of Negro men and women, some in their Sunday finest, others in patched overalls, who had come to pay their respects to the man who signed “the Freedom bill.”

  During his inaugural reception that March, the President learned that Frederick Douglass was at the front door of the executive mansion, but was having trouble getting past the police because he was a Negro. Lincoln had him shown in at once, hailed him as “my friend Douglass,” and asked what he thought of the Inaugural Address. “There is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours,” Lincoln said. Douglass replied that he was impressed, that he thought it “a sacred effort.” “I am glad you liked it!” Lincoln said. In truth, he strongly identified with this proud black man, referring to “the similarity with which I had fought my way up, we both starting off at the lowest round of the ladder.”

  Douglass, reflecting back on Lincoln’s presidency, recalled how in the first year and a half of the war, Lincoln “was ready and willing” to sacrifice black people for the benefit and welfare of whites. But since the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Douglass said, American blacks had taken Lincoln’s measure and had come to admire and some to love this complicated man. Though Lincoln had taxed Negroes to the limit, they had decided, in the roll and tumble of events, that “the how and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln.”

  4: NECESSITY KNOWS NO LAW

  Lincoln became a tough wartime President, flexing his executive muscles and expanding his war powers whenever necessity demanded. “Necessity,” he argued, “knows no law.” In the exigency of domestic insurrection, he would do whatever he thought imperative to save the country and all it represented. Yet he did not intend to establish a precedent for an “imperial presidency,” one that would allow subsequent chief executives to meddle in the internal affairs of other nations, under the pretext of saving the world. In short, we cannot blame Lincoln for Lyndon Johnson’s disastrous policy in Vietnam. Except for emancipation, Lincoln regarded all of his severe war measures as temporary necessities to end the rebellion and preserve the American experiment, the central idea of the war.

  Consider his emergency measures during the eighty days between the outbreak of war and the convening of Congress on Independence Day, 1861. Since rebel forces were threatening to occupy Washington and the nation was on the brink of disintegration, Lincoln met with his Cabinet, and they all decided that they must assume broad emergency powers or let the government fall. Accordingly, Lincoln directed that Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles empower several individuals—among them his own brother-in-law—to forward troops and supplies to embattled Washington. The President allowed his Secretary of War to authorize the governor of New York and one Alexander Cummings to transport troops and acquire supplies for the public defense. Since Lincoln believed that government departments brimmed with traitors, he himself chose private citizens known for “their ability, loyalty, and patriotism” to spend public money for arms and military preparations. Perhaps these emergency measures were “without authority of law,” Lincoln told Congress later, but he deemed them absolutely necessary to save popular government itself. And his Cabinet unanimously agreed.

  With Cabinet approval, Lincoln also declared a blockade of the southern coast, added 22,000 men to the regular army and 18,000 to the navy, called for 42,000 three-year volunteers, and put national armories into full production. As Lincoln subsequently informed Congress, “These measures, whether strictly legal or not, were ventured upon, under what appeared to be a popular demand, and public necessity; trusting, then as now, that Congress would readily ratify them.” When Congress convened in July, it did indeed ratify “all the acts, proclamations, and orders of the President” relating to the army and navy and the volunteers, “as if they had been issued and done under the previous express authority and direction of Congress.” In short, if Lincoln went beyond the letter of the law to save the government, Congress sanctioned his actions.

  Generally Congress did the same in the area of martial law and military arrests. From the outset, Lincoln dealt harshly with “the enemy in the rear”—with what he called “a most efficient corps of spies, informers, suppliers, and aiders and abettors” of the rebellion who took advantage of “Liberty of speech, Liberty of the press and Habeas corpus” to disrupt the Union war effort. Consequently, he suspended the writ of habeas corpus—which required that a citizen be told why he was being held—and authorized army commanders to declare martial law in various areas behind the lines and to try civilians in military courts without juries. Lincoln openly defended such an invasion of civil liberties, contending that strict me
asures were essential if the laws of the Union—and liberty itself—were to survive the war.

  Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus infuriated Roger B. Taney, Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, who accused the President of usurping power. Taney argued that only Congress could legally suspend the writ, and he admonished Lincoln not to violate the very laws he had sworn to defend. “Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted,” Lincoln asked Congress, in reference to habeas corpus, “and the government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated?” Moreover, the Constitution did not specify which branch of the government could suspend the writ, so that Lincoln did not think he had broken any laws or violated his oath of office.

  Still, he invoked his presidential powers in heretofore undreamed-of ways, as we have seen in the matter of emancipation. Recall, though, the novelty of the war. Nothing like this had ever occurred in America, and there were no guidelines in dealing with dissent and national security in the midst of a giant domestic insurrection that imperiled the nation itself. As in most war matters, Lincoln and his Cabinet found themselves in uncharted legal territory.

  In 1862 the President centralized jurisdiction over internal-security matters in the War Department. To deal with such matters, the department created a corps of civilian provost marshals, but allowed them too much independence in policing and jailing alleged disloyalists. Their zealous, far-ranging operations led to widespread criticism of the Lincoln administration. At the same time, Lincoln’s War Department empowered army officers to apprehend anybody who discouraged volunteering or otherwise helped the enemy. And the department got up dragnets in which state militia, home guards, police chiefs, and vigilantes all participated. In all, they seized and imprisoned at least 14,000 people—many of them antiwar Democrats—under Lincoln’s authority. The outcry against arbitrary arrests became so strident that Lincoln tried to restrain excessive use of power whenever he could. He speedily ordered the release of people unwarrantedly arrested, especially political prisoners. Also, when General Ambrose E. Burnside suspended the Chicago Times for virulent outbursts against the administration, Lincoln promptly revoked the order.

  The most controversial military arrest was that of Clement L. Vallandigham, an Ohio congressman and a leading antiwar Democrat. “Valiant Val,” as his friends called him, accused Lincoln of dishonoring the Constitution with his “tyrannical” measures, of abandoning the war for the Union in favor of a crusade for Negroes in which the white people were to be enslaved. “I see nothing before us,” he warned war-weary northerners, “but universal political and social revolution, anarchy and bloodshed, compared with which the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution was a merciful visitation.” For Vallandigham, the solution was clear: stop the fighting and negotiate a peace with the rebels that would somehow restore the old Union and the old certitudes. Stumping Ohio in the spring of 1863, he denounced abolition, the war, and the despotism of “King Lincoln” and demanded a truce with the Confederacy. During one of his orations, an officer in civilian dress, detailed from General Burnside’s headquarters, leaned against the platform taking notes. Three days later an infantry column broke into his Dayton home at midnight, found him in his underwear, gave him time to dress, and hauled him off to prison in Cincinnati. Dayton citizens rioted in protest, but to no avail. A military commission convicted Vallandigham of undermining government efforts “to suppress an unlawful rebellion” and sentenced him to imprisonment for the duration of the war.

  Across the North, Democrats demanded Vallandigham’s release and castigated Lincoln for exercising “arbitrary power” at the expense of liberty. In an open letter to them, Lincoln spoke bluntly in his own defense. Because he had “a reverence for the guaranteed rights of individuals,” Lincoln said, he had been “slow to adopt the strong measures, which by degrees I have been forced to regard as being within the exceptions of the constitution, and as indispensable to the public Safety.” He pointed out that military arrests of civilians had been made to prevent injury to the Union war effort; his government could not always wait for overt acts of treason before it moved. Had he promptly arrested traitors like Robert E. Lee, Lincoln said, it would almost certainly have weakened the rebellion and shortened the war. In truth, he argued, “the time [is] not unlikely to come when I shall be blamed for having made too few arrests rather than too many.”

  As for Vallandigham, the army had seized him because he was “laboring, with some effect, to prevent the raising of troops, to encourage desertions from the army, and to leave the rebellion without an adequate military force to suppress it.” In short, he was “warring upon the military,” on which the very life of the nation depended. Long experience, Lincoln went on, demonstrated that armies could not be maintained unless desertion was punished by the death penalty. “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts,” Lincoln asked, “while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert? This is none the less injurious when effected by getting a father, a brother, or friend, into a public meeting, and there working upon his feelings, till he is persuaded to write the soldier boy, that he is fighting in a bad cause, for a wicked administration of a contemptible government, too weak to arrest and punish him if he shall desert. I think that in such a case, to silence the agitator, and save the boy, is not only constitutional, but, withal, a great mercy.” Though he may actually have regretted Vallandigham’s arrest, Lincoln refused to pardon him, instead ordering Vallandigham banished to the Confederacy.

  Lincoln admitted that internal security in the midst of civil war was a complex problem and that errors and excesses had occurred. It pained him that government agents often confused antiwar rhetoric with disloyal designs and that innocent people suffered. That was why he tempered military arrests with generous pardons and refused to suppress popular assemblies and antiwar newspapers. Yet throughout the conflict he maintained a severe line on disloyalty; and most Republicans supported him. Without military law, they all feared, the rebellion would rage into the North and consume the government from within.

  Lincoln was a tough warrior in other ways, too. He fully endorsed military conscription—which Congress authorized in April, 1863—and saw to it that the War Department rigorously enforced the measure. No matter what some historians have claimed, the President also enforced the confiscation of enemy property, believing as he did that “the traitor against the general government” should forfeit his farms, plantations, and other property as just punishment for the crime of insurrection.

  Still, Lincoln was no dictator—the very idea appalled him, for it violated everything he held sacred in government. In fact, one of the major reasons he remains our best President is that he shunned a dictatorship, even when some Americans thought it the only way to save the country. But what kind of country would remain if popular government itself were sacrificed? Was it not for this that the war was being fought? Consider Lincoln’s stand on the presidential election of 1864. With Union fortunes still uncertain, some men urged Lincoln to cancel the contest lest it result in the victory of antiwar Democrats who would sell out the Union cause. Lincoln refused. “The election,” he said later, “was a necessity.” “We can not have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered us.” So he ran against George B. McClellan and the peace plank of the Democratic party, and he won in a fair and open contest.

  Later he told a group of White House serenaders what this meant to him. Above all, it meant that the American system still worked, that the people could still choose their leaders even in the middle of domestic rebellion. By holding the contest, Lincoln and the northern people had preserved their popular government and demonstrated how strong they were. And Lincoln was glad, he told the serenaders, that most voters had gone for him, the candidate most devoted to the Union and opposed to treason.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe, who interviewed Lincoln in 1864, thoug
ht him the most trusted leader the country could have in war. “Surrounded by all sorts of conflicting claims,” she wrote, “by traitors, by half-hearted, timid men, by Border States men, and Free States men, by radical Abolitionists and Conservatives, he has listened to all, weighed the words of all, waited, observed, yielded now here and now there, but in the main kept one inflexible, honest purpose, and drawn the national ship through.” Had he been “a reckless, bold, theorizing, dashing man of genius,” she said, he “might have wrecked our Constitution and ended us in a splendid military despotism.”

  5: THE WARRIOR

  He was, then, a warrior for the American dream, prepared to do whatever was necessary to save it short of abandoning the dream itself. This ends-justifies-the-means philosophy was blazingly clear in Lincoln’s approach to military strategy. Here he faced some perplexing questions: How could he utilize the Union’s vast superiority in manpower and war matériel to stamp out the rebellion? Should he battle only the armies of the insurrectionists, or their institutions and resources as well?

  At first, Lincoln elected to fight only the rebel military forces, a decision that would alter drastically as the war roared on and necessity demanded a harsher strategy. But almost from the start Lincoln had the whole military picture in mind, which was to be expected of a man who saw the struggle itself in a world dimension. Before any of his generals or advisers, Lincoln understood that the only way to whip the hard-fighting Confederates was to hit them with coordinated attacks in all theaters. Only that way could the Union bring to bear its tremendous advantage in manpower and war resources.

  Yet it took Lincoln a long time to translate his strategic insights into action. He made mistakes. He gave too many important commands to “political” generals or to incompetent professionals who impressed him simply because they were generals. Who was he, a mere civilian, to question their military expertise? When his chosen commanders failed to fight as he wanted, he could lose his temper and cry “damn” or “hell” and even throw his stovepipe hat on the floor, as he did on one battlefront visit in 1862. Too many of his early generals, as he put it himself, had the “slows” when it came to fighting. Yet it was Lincoln who had chosen them.