Lincoln Part 32

Lincoln's first State of the Union message, which a clerk read to Congress on December 3, 1861, was a perfunctory doc.u.ment. Cobbling together reports from the various heads of departments, the President made a few interesting recommendations, such as creating a Department of Agriculture (which Congress established the next year). He also urged the recognition of the two black republics of Haiti and Liberia-something inconceivable under previous pro-Southern administrations. It closed with an oddly incongruous disquisition on the relationship between capital and labor in a free society and with the a.s.surance that the struggle in which the Union was engaged was "not altogether for today-it is for a vast future also."

One reason the message was so uncommunicative was that the United States was nearing a diplomatic crisis with Great Britain over the Trent affair, which could not be discussed publicly. The President could have summarized the facts succinctly. In October, James M. Mason of Virginia and John Slidell of Louisiana, named ministers plenipotentiary to represent the Confederacy in Great Britain and France, escaped through the blockade to Cuba. There they boarded the British mail packet Trent. Without orders from Washington, Captain Charles Wilkes, who commanded the USS San Jacinto, stopped and searched the vessel and removed the Confederate envoys, who were eventually imprisoned in Fort Warren in Boston harbor. Overwhelming jubilation greeted Wilkes's act in the North, but abroad it was viewed as a blatant violation of international law and an insult to the British flag. Lincoln had no advance knowledge of Wilkes's act.

In general, the President had little to do with foreign affairs. With no knowledge of diplomacy and no personal acquaintances or correspondents abroad, he willingly entrusted foreign policy to his Secretary of State. The only interest he showed in selecting American diplomatic representatives was to make sure that various claims for patronage were honored. He rewarded Judd's services by making him minister to Prussia and showed his grat.i.tude to Carl Schurz by naming him to the court at Madrid, where the German-born former revolutionary met with a chilly reception. Ca.s.sius M. Clay was appointed minister to Russia, less perhaps as a reward than as a means for getting a troublemaker out of the country. But generally Lincoln accepted Seward's recommendations without question. When Charles Francis Adams, Seward's choice for minister to the Court of St. James's, came to the White House, Lincoln received his thanks for the appointment coolly: "Very kind of you to say so Mr Adams but you are not my choice. You are Seward's man." Then, turning to the Secretary of State, the President said in almost the same breath: "Well Seward, I have settled the Chicago Post Office."

Seward's bellicose memorandum of April 1, 1861, forced the President to take a more active interest in foreign policy, which increased when he read a warlike dispatch Seward proposed to send to Adams in May. Angered by the decision of the European powers to recognize the Confederates as belligerents-an entirely proper step and one in conformity with the actions of the Lincoln administration in blockading, rather than closing, Southern ports-Seward bl.u.s.tered that British intervention in the American conflict would mean that "we, from that hour, shall cease to be friends and become once more, as we have twice before been forced to be, enemies of Great Britain." Troubled, the President called on Charles Sumner, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for advice. With Sumner's enthusiastic approval he excised the more offensive statements in Seward's dispatch and then directed that the revised doc.u.ment was for Adams's information only, not to be read or presented at the British Foreign Office.

From that time Lincoln consulted Sumner on all major questions relating to foreign policy. The two men formed an odd couple. Good-looking, Harvard-trained, and world-traveled, Sumner was the exact opposite of the homely self-educated President. With a decade's experience in the Senate, Sumner regarded the untried Lincoln as "honest but inexperienced." A compulsive worker, proud of his prompt and efficient attention to his official duties, the senator thought Lincoln's "habits of business... irregular" and felt that the President "did not see at once the just proportions of things, and allowed himself to be too much occupied by details." Sumner was proud of the purity of his diction, and he was pained when the President called secession "rebellion sugar-coated" or said that the Confederates "turned tail and ran." Lacking a sense of humor, he found conversation with Lincoln "a constant puzzle," even though the President tried to be solemn and took his feet down from the desk when Sumner entered his office. But these two radically different men came to respect and ultimately to like each other. Lincoln knew the senator was incorruptible, if often irritating; Sumner found that the President wanted "to do right and to save the country." Lincoln turned so frequently to the senator for advice on foreign policy that Seward grumbled that there were now too many secretaries of state in Washington.

In the Trent affair Lincoln needed all the advice he could get. His initial reaction to the capture of Mason and Slidell was one of pleasure. At a time when Union victories were few, here at last was a success. Every member of the cabinet shared this view except Montgomery Blair, who immediately warned that the captives must be released. After the initial applause for Wilkes's bold act died down, thoughtful public opinion came around to Blair's a.s.sessment. To remove the Confederate diplomats from a neutral vessel was a clear violation of international law, and it contradicted the long-established American opposition to search and seizure on the high seas. Apart from legalities, Wilkes's boarding and search of the British mail packet had to be disavowed because it was an insult that no government in London could tolerate.

Greatly preoccupied with other matters, Lincoln did not recognize the seriousness of the Trent crisis until Sumner returned to Washington in late November. A regular correspondent of John Bright and Richard Cobden, the great British Liberal leaders, Sumner brought news of the immense anti-American excitement in Great Britain because of Mason and Slidell, and he had a letter from the d.u.c.h.ess of Argyll, whose husband was in Lord Palmerston's cabinet, calling the seizure of the two envoys "the maddest act that ever was done, and, unless the [United States] government intend to force us to war, utterly inconceivable." Moved and astonished by these reports, Lincoln began to meet almost daily with the senator to a.s.sess the latest news and consider the danger that this disagreement with the British might drift into conflict.

"There will be no war unless England is bent upon having one," the President a.s.sured the senator. Vexed that European governments misunderstood the pacific temper of his foreign policy, he offered to ignore bureaucratic protocol and talk face-to-face with Lord Lyons, the British minister. "If I could see Lord Lyons," he told Sumner rather wistfully, "I could show him in five minutes that I am heartily for peace." Sumner warned of the impropriety of such a step but, encouraged by John Bright, asked the President to think of submitting the issue with Great Britain to arbitration, either by the King of Prussia or by a group of learned publicists. Seizing upon Sumner's idea, Lincoln began drafting such a proposal. He was convinced, he told Browning, "that the question was easily susceptible of a peaceful solution if England was at all disposed to act justly with us."

But from all sides the President received warnings that there was no time for arbitration. Thurlow Weed, who was working in behalf of the Union cause abroad, told of steps the British government was taking toward war. Eight thousand soldiers were being sent to protect Canada, and an embargo on the shipment of saltpeter and other war materials to the United States was in place. From France, Minister Dayton reported that the government of Napoleon III would stand by the British in this crisis. When Lord Lyons on December 23 presented the formal British demands for the release of Mason and Slidell and for an apology from the United States government, they were hardly a surprise. Informally the British minister also let Seward know that unless a satisfactory answer was received within seven days he had instructions to close the legation and leave Washington.

With that deadline in mind Lincoln summoned a cabinet meeting on Christmas Day, to which Sumner was invited in order to read the most recent letters he had received from Bright and Cobden urging the release of the Confederate diplomats. All realized that the decision they made on this historic occasion would determine "probably the existance [sic], of the nation." It was essential, everybody agreed, to avoid war with Great Britain, and the President said he had to avoid the folly of having "two wars on his hands at a time." Seward, who had finally awakened to the gravity of the crisis, read a paper he was preparing that would explain how Captain Wilkes had violated international law and why therefore Mason and Slidell must be released. The argument was hard for the other cabinet members, except Blair, to swallow. Chase said that it was "gall and wormwood" to him. Even the President resisted giving up the envoys, though he realized that they had become white elephants. The meeting ended without agreement on anything more than that they must meet again the next day.

After the others left, the President said: "Governor Seward, you will go on, of course, preparing your answer, which ... will state the reasons why they ought to be given up. Now I have a mind to try my hand at stating the reasons why they ought not to be given up. We will compare the points on each side."

By evening the President gave up on his self-appointed task, and he told Browning that there would be no war with England. The next day when the cabinet rea.s.sembled, Seward read his final version of the reply he intended to give to Lord Lyons and it was endorsed with some expressions of regret but without dissent. After the meeting adjourned, the Secretary reminded the President, "You thought you might frame an argument for the other side?"

"I found I could not make an argument that would satisfy my own mind," Lincoln replied with a smile, "and that proved to me your ground was the right one."

With that decision the gravest threat that the American Civil War would become an international conflict was removed.

IX

Lincoln's domestic crises in the winter of 18611862 were almost as severe. Frustrated over the failure of Union armies to advance and angry over mounting expenses, Congress moved rapidly to take charge. On the day the session opened, even before the President's message was heard, Trumbull gave notice that he would introduce a bill for the confiscation of the land and slaves of all persons who were in arms against the United States or who aided or abetted the rebellion. The Illinois senator, once Lincoln's close political ally, was convinced that the President lacked "the will necessary in this great emergency" and believed that Congress must take steps to bring the war to a quick end.

Other congressmen tried to move the stalled war effort along through investigating committees, a device that had proved very effective to Republicans in undermining the Buchanan administration. A House committee headed by John F. Potter of Wisconsin had been working all summer to ferret out rebel sympathizers still holding jobs in the government departments, and it performed a needed service in bringing about dismissals and resignations.

The House Judiciary Committee, in its eagerness to investigate alleged "telegraphic censorship of the press," came perilously close to investigating the White House itself. Despite precautions for security, the New York Herald received an advance copy of the President's State of the Union message and published excerpts before members of Congress heard it. The Herald's source proved to be Henry Wikoff, an unsavory adventurer whom the paper had planted in Washington as its secret reporter. Cosmopolitan and flashy, Wikoff had made a great impression on Mary Lincoln, and he became an intimate in the White House. When the rival New York Tribune charged that Mrs. Lincoln had given Wikoff access to her husband's message, the House Judiciary Committee decided to investigate.

The decision was an easy one because almost n.o.body in the capital liked Mary Lincoln. Thinking her a renegade to the Southern cause, the dowagers who dominated Washington society condemned everything that she did. The smaller contingent of Northern women in the national capital, knowing that Mary Lincoln came from a Southern state and that some of her brothers had joined the Confederate army, suspected her loyalty to the Union. Murat Halstead of the Cincinnati Commercial sneered that she was "a fool-the laughing stock of the town, her vulgarity only the more conspicuous in consequence of her fine carriage and horses and servants in livery and fine dresses, and her d.a.m.nable airs." The New York sophisticate John Bigelow ridiculed her pretensions to speak French and claimed that when asked if she could use the language she replied "Tres poo." Consequently there was much lip-smacking in Washington over the t.i.tillating possibilities of this gossip about Mrs. Lincoln and "Chevalier" Wikoff.

There was, it proved, less to the story than met the eye. Wikoff, subpoenaed by the committee, refused to disclose his source and was incarcerated overnight. The next day he agreed to testify, and as the committee members listened avidly, he revealed that he had received a copy of the President's message not from Mrs. Lincoln but from John Watt, the head White House gardener. The committee chewed over this information for several days before it decided to drop the investigation.

More significant were the activities of a special committee named in July to look into allegations of fraud and mismanagement in government contracts. Headed by Charles H. Van Wyck of New York, this committee was instrumental in exposing some of the scandals of the Fremont regime in Missouri. Much of its work justifiably centered on the War Department, a model of maladministration and waste. There was, of course, no question of the President's being involved in any of the shady deals that were making fortunes for manufacturers of shoddy goods. Lincoln was so punctilious that he refused to permit the army butcher to supply the White House with the choicest cuts of steak when he slaughtered cattle on the grounds of the Washington Monument. Told that this was a matter of little importance, he replied, "My observation is that frequently the most insignificant matter is the foundation for the worst scandal." Nor was Simon Cameron believed to be personally venal, but he was the head of a corrupt department and was responsible for its actions.

Lincoln did not need a congressional investigation to tell him that the War Department was badly run. Cameron, he remarked confidentially to Nicolay, was "utterly ignorant... Selfish and openly discourteous to the President[,] Obnoxious to the country [and] Incapable of either organizing details or conceiving and advising general plans." If he had any doubts, his mail offered a chorus of objections to the Secretary of War. "Cameron ought to resign," Gustave Koerner had warned Senator Trumbull as early as July 24. "The People have no confidence in him at all.... He is suspected of every sort of peculation. Lincoln must... have an honest man as war minister." "It is universally believed that Cameron is a thief," a New Yorker wrote the President, detailing how the War Department sold to the soldiers half-cotton blankets weighing less than five pounds for the same price as regulation all-wool blankets weighing ten or eleven pounds. The cautious Browning alerted Lincoln that his Secretary of War, "whether justly or not, has lost, or rather failed to secure the confidence of the country" and should be removed. A New York banker, James A. Hamilton, told the President that if he replaced Cameron the hard-pressed Treasury Department could immediately raise the $100,000,000 it needed to borrow.

Even though Lincoln had not wanted Cameron in his cabinet initially, he hesitated to fire him and tried to get rid of the Secretary by dropping hints. It might be unfair to replace Cameron now, he whispered to Schuyler Colfax, a friend of the Secretary-but he added "if it were an open question and to be settled de novo" he could see many advantages in having another-person in the War Department. He let it be known that he had a great desire to turn the War Department over to Joseph Holt, who had capably served as Secretary of War in the last days of the Buchanan administration. But Cameron was impervious to suggestion and stayed on.

As pressure for his resignation grew, the Secretary took a daring gamble. Asked, as were the other members of the cabinet, to prepare a report on the activities of his department to be submitted to Congress along with the President's annual State of the Union message, he remembered how enthusiastically antislavery men had greeted Fremont's edict of emanc.i.p.ation in Missouri and decided to include in his report an announcement that "it is ... clearly a right of the Government to arm slaves ... and employ their service against the rebels." He then sent the doc.u.ment out to newspapers in the princ.i.p.al cities without informing the President. Lincoln immediately ordered the report recalled and Cameron's remarks concerning slaves expurgated. After that it was simply a matter of time before Cameron left the cabinet. The President could put up with incapacity and sloth in his administration, but he would not allow Fremont or Cameron to set government policy on slavery.

On January 11, 1862, Lincoln curtly notified Cameron that he could now gratify his "desire for a change of position" by nominating him as minister to Russia. Cameron had no such desire, and he broke into tears when Secretary Chase gave him Lincoln's letter, which he said was a personal affront which "meant personal as well as political destruction." To save Cameron's feelings the President withdrew his letter so that Cameron could submit his resignation. Lincoln then wrote another letter, this time expressing his "affectionate esteem" and praising Cameron's "ability, patriotism, and fidelity to public trust."

Lincoln's troubles with Cameron did not end with his resignation. To the considerable discomfort of the President, the House committee on contracts continued to investigate malfeasance in the War Department with such vigor that Lincoln accused one of the most prominent members, Representative Henry L. Dawes, of having "done more to break down the administration than any other man in the country." Acting on the committee's recommendation, the full House in April voted to censure the former Secretary for actions "highly injurious to the public service." At this point Lincoln had to intervene. a.s.suring the Congress that letting contracts without bids, disbursing public moneys without authorization, and other irregularities were actions taken of necessity in the early days of the war, he explained that Cameron, "although he fully approved the proceedings," was not primarily to blame for them; "not only the President but all the other heads of departments were at least equally responsible." Not wishing to bring down the entire government, the investigators let the subject die.

Investigations of military affairs fell to the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, set up at the beginning of this session of Congress, and they continued throughout the conflict. The original purpose of the committee was to look into the disaster at Ball's Bluff, but its scope was soon expanded to cover military operations throughout the country. It concentrated mainly on the activities-or the lack of activities-of the Army of the Potomac. Benjamin F. Wade, a severe critic of both Lincoln and McClellan, was chairman, and he had the enthusiastic collaboration of Zachariah Chandler. The three House Republicans on the committee, George W. Julian of Indiana, John Covode of Pennsylvania, and Daniel Gooch of Ma.s.sachusetts, also sought to prod the general and the President into prosecuting the war more vigorously. The two Democratic members-Andrew Johnson, the sole senator from the Southern states who remained in Congress, and Moses Odell, a New Yorker-played lesser roles.

Lincoln viewed the creation of the Committee on the Conduct of the War with some anxiety, fearing that it might turn into an engine of agitation against the administration. When Wade and Chandler learned of his objections, they rushed to the White House to a.s.sure the President that their purpose was to aid, not to embarra.s.s, the Chief Executive. Probably neither party believed the promise, but a surface harmony was maintained. Lincoln had his first meeting with the committee on December 31 and was relieved to find the congressmen "in a perfectly good mood."

Both the committee and the President were eager to learn McClellan's plans. The general was reticent even with Lincoln. He declined to outline the campaign he proposed but dropped a cryptic hint that he no longer thought of advancing against the Confederate army at Mana.s.sas and had his "mind actively turned towards another plan of campaign ... not... at all antic.i.p.ated by the enemy nor by many of our own people." The committee did not get even this much from him. He was called to testify, but shortly before Christmas he fell ill with typhoid fever. For three weeks he was unable to do any serious work, much less to appear before the committee. He had no second in command, no council of officers to whom he had entrusted his plan for the coming campaign. As frustrated as the President, the committee began taking testimony from anti-McClellan witnesses, and it became a powerful engine of criticism not merely of the general but of his commander-in-chief.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Bottom Is Out of the Tub

"The Prest. is an excellent man, and, in the main wise," Attorney General Bates recorded in his final diary entry of 1861; "but he lacks will and purpose, and, I greatly fear he, has not the power to command." That judgment by one of the most cautious and conservative members of the Lincoln administration represented a widely held opinion. Nearly everybody thought the President was honest and well meaning, and almost everyone who met him liked him. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for instance, who visited the White House with Senator Sumner in January 1862, was not put off by Lincoln's homely appearance and his awkward movements and gestures; he found the President a "frank, sincere, well-meaning man, with a lawyer's habit of mind,... correct enough, not vulgar, as described, but with a sort of boyish cheerfulness." But few thought he was up to his job.

He seemed unable to make things go right. With the surrender of Mason and Slidell the United States suffered a humiliating, if necessary, reverse in foreign affairs. Huge armies, raised at immense expense, lay idle in winter quarters. As the costs of the war mounted, the Treasury lived on credit, and banks throughout the country had to suspend specie payments. In the Northwest farmers were suffering as laborers went off to the army, and there was no market for farm produce because the Mississippi River was closed. "The people are being bled and as they believe to no purpose and will not long submit to it," warned one Illinois Ca.s.sandra.

So desperate did things look in early January that Lincoln for the first time thought that the Confederates might be successful, and he spoke "of the bare possibility of our being two nations."

I

At the heart of the problems was the failure of the armies to advance and win victories. Lincoln's general-in-chief was still recovering from typhoid fever and unable to work. When the Committee on the Conduct of the War met with the President on January 6, its members were appalled to learn that neither he nor anybody else knew McClellan's plans. Lincoln told the congressmen that he "did not think he had any right to know, but that, as he was not a military man, it was his duty to defer to General McClellan."

As pressure grew for action and McClellan was still incapacitated, the President tried to exercise the functions of the general-in-chief himself. He knew that McClellan had talked of a joint movement on the part of the armies west of the Appalachians, to be coordinated with an advance by the Army of the Potomac, and he wired Buell and Halleck to go ahead-only to learn that they knew nothing about the plan. Directing the two generals to get "in communication and concert at once," he urged Halleck to make a real or feigned attack on Columbus, in western Kentucky, while Buell advanced on Bowling Green, in the south central part of that state. Lincoln hoped that Buell would eventually push into eastern Tennessee, where the Union army could cut the major east-west rail line of the Confederacy, the "great artery of the enemies' communication." More important, it could liberate the thousands of strongly Unionist inhabitants of eastern Tennessee, whom the President considered "the most valuable stake we have in the South."

Both generals failed him. Lincoln was still too insecure to play the role of military commander. He offered "views" he hoped would be "respectfully considered" rather than orders, and the generals felt free to dispute or ignore them. Since the roads into eastern Tennessee were very bad in winter, Buell told the President he would prefer to go to Nashville-which, as Lincoln had pointed out, had no strategic value. Halleck responded that Buell's plans did not make much military sense; anyway, he could not spare troops from his widely scattered command for an attack on Columbus. Sadly the President sent the correspondence over to the War Department with the endors.e.m.e.nt: "It is exceedingly discouraging. As everywhere else, nothing can be done."

With a growing sense of desperation Lincoln began to think of leading one of the armies into battle himself. After all, the Const.i.tution made him commander-in-chief. He borrowed from the Library of Congress Henry W. Halleck's Elements of Military Art and Science, a standard text, and several other books on military strategy and began studying them. He conferred frequently with military commanders in the vicinity of Washington, and he a.s.siduously read the reports from others who were in the field. At times he convinced himself that he could do a better job.

But he knew he was no military man and that this was all fantasy that helped him escape his real problems. On January 10, visiting Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs, he summed up the difficulties he faced: "The people are impatient; Chase has no money and he tells me he can raise no more; the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub." "What shall I do?" he asked.

Meigs advised him to call on some of the senior division commanders of the Army of the Potomac for advice. That evening Lincoln invited General McDowell and General William B. Franklin to the White House, where they met with him, Seward, Chase, and a.s.sistant Secretary of War Peter Watson. To this informal council of war the President poured out his problems. He must talk to somebody, he said, because something had to be done. If General McClellan was not going to use the Army of the Potomac, the President continued, "he would like to borrow it, provided he could see how it could be made to do something." The generals gave different advice. McDowell urged another forward movement against Mana.s.sas, the scene of his defeat, while Franklin, who knew something of McClellan's wishes, talked of moving the army down the Potomac to the York River, so as to advance on Richmond from the east. The President asked the two generals to learn more about the actual state of the army and to come back the next day.

When the informal council of war rea.s.sembled, the commanders agreed that a move on Mana.s.sas was the best operation at this time, but Meigs and Montgomery Blair, who had joined the group, vigorously opposed this strategy because it would certainly lead to another Bull Run. Unsure how to resolve the conflict, Lincoln again adjourned the meeting.