Lincoln Part 42

IV

Seymour's speech killed hopes of a political realignment that would have created a centrist party consisting of most Republicans and War Democrats. Talk of such a realignment had been in the air for months. Indeed, in the fall elections of 1862 in several states Republicans, aware that they had been a minority party in 1860, and Democrats, self-conscious because they had in the past been aligned with the South, joined in putting forward "Union" tickets. The fusion was incomplete and unsuccessful, but the idea of a reordering of the parties persisted.

One version of realignment was promoted by the Francis Preston Blair family, which was powerful in the border states. Pushed primarily by Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, this scheme called for the President to reorganize his cabinet, eliminating both Seward and Stanton, and to restore McClellan to command of the armies. Francis Preston Blair, Sr., was to become "the private counsellor-not to say dictator-of the President" because, Montgomery Blair said, his father was "beyond all question, the ablest and best informed politician in America." The plan went nowhere; as Attorney General Bates sourly noted, the Blairs believed "fully in trick and contrivance" and mistook cunning for wisdom.

The schemes of conservative New York Republicans like Thurlow Weed made more sense. Continuing to blame their defeat in the 1862 election on Horace Greeley and the abolitionists, one of Weed's a.s.sociates developed plans for "a speedy sloughing off of the secession sympathizers from the Dem[ocratic] party, of the ultras from the Republicans] and a new organization for 1864." Many thought the best scenario was for Seward to step forward as the voice of moderation, the spokesman of Conservative Republicans and loyal Democrats, making himself available as a candidate in the next presidential election. But Seward would have no part in the plan. To be sure, he had differences with the President, for he had not favored emanc.i.p.ation and regarded Lincoln's proclamations as "unfortunate" and "pernicious," but he was loyal. When approached, he eulogized Lincoln "without limitation" and let it be known that he thought the President "the best and wisest man he has ever known."

Another way of bringing about a realignment would be to have the conservative Republicans and border-state men who supported Lincoln join forces with the Democrats who backed Horatio Seymour. After all, Seymour, though a vigorous critic of the administration, was no Copperhead. So attractive was this idea that, in January, Thurlow Weed, much to Lincoln's surprise, gave up the editorship of the influential Albany Evening Journal in order to promote it. Free from obligations to his party, he could resist what he called the "Fanaticism" of Greeley and the abolitionists, which, if unchecked, was bound to "end our Union and Government." Weed's alienation was so public that Vice President Hamlin predicted that he was joining the Democrats.

Lincoln himself was not above giving a slight nudge to this plan to build a party of the center. In January he attempted to enlist Governor Seymour's support for the measures of the administration. Reminding the governor's brother, John, that he and Seymour had the same stake in the preservation of the Union, he observed that if the Union was broken, there would be no "next President" of the United States, whether Republican or Democratic. He listened sympathetically to John Seymour's complaints against "some of the Republican party who claimed to have a patent right for all the patriotism." Because Lincoln understood Seymour's importance as "the head of the greatest State" in the nation, he also initiated a direct correspondence with the governor, "chiefly," as he said, "that we may become better acquainted." Cleverly a.s.suming that he and the governor agreed on the importance of "maintaining the nation's life, and integrity," he sought to minimize differences and to eliminate "unjust suspicions on one side or the other." Though Seymour, fearing a trap, cagily delayed a reply for more than three weeks, he eventually responded, in his ponderous way, that he intended "to show to those charged with the administration of public affairs a due deference and respect and to yield them a just and generous support in all measures.. .within the scope of their const.i.tutional powers." Lincoln refused to be put off, and in the following months took great care to see that even the governor's minor requests for patronage were promptly and courteously attended to.

Out of this stately mating dance emerged the story that the President, using Weed as intermediary, promised to support the governor for the Union nomination as his successor in 1864 if Seymour backed the administration's efforts to suppress the rebellion. As is usually the case with such rumors, the story was greatly exaggerated. After all, it was not within Lincoln's power to give Seymour the succession even in the unlikely event that he decided not to run for a second term. Neither Lincoln nor Seymour made any record of this offer, if one was ever extended, and Weed's own words did not substantiate the usual story. "Governor Seymour... can wheel the Democratic party into line, put down rebellion, and preserve the government," was what the editor later remembered the President as saying. "Tell him for me, that if he will render this service to his country, I shall cheerfully make way for him as my successor." This was not an offer on Lincoln's part to withdraw from the presidential race in Seymour's favor. It was, instead, simply a prediction, as Lincoln told Weed, that if the governor used his power "against the Rebellion and for his Country, he would be our next President."

But all hope of enlisting Seymour as an ally, or as a confederate in a realignment of parties, was shattered by the Vallandigham case. War Democrats fell into disarray, and leadership in the party fell into the hands of leaders who were strongly opposed to Lincoln.

V

Simultaneously opposition to the President was mounting within his own party. Notwithstanding Lincoln's success in handling the cabinet crisis of December 1862, some Republicans continued to believe that the administration needed thorough reorganization and new leadership.

Congress, which had a.s.sembled in December 1862, was a center of anti-Lincoln agitation. It was a lame-duck session, and many of the Republican representatives, serving their final terms, felt embittered toward an administration they considered responsible for their defeat in the fall elections. Conservative Congressmen from the border states and from the southern parts of the Northwest blamed Republican losses on the President's emanc.i.p.ation policy; Radicals from New England, parts of the mid-Atlantic states, and the northern districts of the Old Northwest attributed defeat to Lincoln's slowness to move against slavery. Neither faction trusted the President. Visiting Washington in January, former Supreme Court Justice Benjamin R. Curtis reported general agreement on "the utter incompetence of the Pres[iden]t," adding: "He is shattered, dazed and utterly foolish. It would not surprise me if he were to destroy himself." Conservative Republicans thought that he had unnecessarily converted a war for the Union into a crusade against slavery, and they objected to the suppression of free speech, the censorship of the press, and the arbitrary arrest of political dissidents. Radicals, on the other hand, blamed Lincoln for moving too slowly against slavery and his failure to understand that the entire social system of the South must be reorganized before the disloyal states could be readmitted to the Union. In the heated debates of this session of Congress, Republicans, when not attacking each other, now openly turned their guns on the White House. Thaddeus Stevens, the unquestioned leader of the Radical Republicans in the House of Representatives, dismissed all Lincoln's actions since the beginning of the war as "flagrant usurpations, deserving the condemnation of the community" and insisted that the President adopt his theory that the South should be treated like a conquered province.

Despite these bitter intraparty quarrels, Republicans in the Thirty-seventh Congress managed to enact an impressive body of legislation. In this third session (18621863) they pa.s.sed a conscription law-one with teeth. Unlike the 1862 act allocating military quotas to the states, it took the recruiting of soldiers out of the hands of state officials and made able-bodied males between the ages of twenty and forty-five subject to call into the national service. They also enacted, at Chase's strong urging and with Lincoln's quiet pressure, the National Banking Act, which for the first time established a national currency and permitted the creation of a network of national banks. In previous sessions this Congress had pa.s.sed the Homestead Act, enacted an internal revenue law that permanently altered the tax structure of the nation, adopted tariff legislation that offered genuine protection to American industry, chartered a transcontinental railroad, established a system of land-grant colleges, and created the Department of Agriculture-all at the same time it dealt with weighty issues concerning the raising of armies and fighting a great civil war. To some this record of substantial achievement, brought about by the cooperation of all factions of the Republicans acting with the President, was surprising, but Joseph Medill, the editor of the Chicago Tribune, succinctly explained Republican thinking: "An awful responsibility rests upon our party. If it carries the war to a successful close, the people will continue it in power. If it fails, all is lost, Union, party, cause, freedom, and abolition of slavery. Hence we sustain Chase and his National Bank scheme, Stanton and his impulsiveness, Welles and his senility, and Lincoln and his slowness. Let us first get the ship out of the breakers; then court-martial the officers if they deserve it."

That many Republicans of all factions were ready to court-martial the President at the first safe opportunity was evident in the early months of 1863. When Richard Henry Dana, Jr., the Ma.s.sachusetts author and lawyer, went to Washington in March, he found "the most striking thing is the absence of personal loyalty to the President. It does not exist." Conservatives like Murat Halstead, editor of the influential Cincinnati Commercial, thought the President "an awful, woeful a.s.s," and protested, "If Lincoln was not a d.a.m.n fool, we could get along yet." Radicals were equally censorious. One Michigan resident thought the President "so vacillating, so week [sic] ... so fearful... and so ignorant... that I can now see scarcely a ray of hope left." Another predicted that "the administration of Abraham Lincoln will stand even worse ... with posterity than that of James Buchanan."

While Moderate Republicans sought to make Seward or the Blairs the dominant force in Lincoln's cabinet, Radical Republicans pressed for the elimination of Conservatives from the administration. The chief object of their attack continued to be Secretary of State Seward, whose "perverse, unfaithful and insidious policy" Radicals blamed for the failures of the Union armies. Zachariah Chandler, the outraged Radical senator from Michigan, was almost convinced that Seward was "a traitor out and out." James W. White, a zealous anti-Seward judge in New York, launched a pet.i.tion drive for the removal of the Secretary, and it received the endors.e.m.e.nt of Radicals like Trumbull and Thaddeus Stevens, though Sumner, who hoped to succeed Seward in the State Department, declined to sign it. At one point in January, Stevens contemplated introducing a resolution expressing a lack of confidence in the Lincoln administration, and the Republican congressional caucus considered sending another delegation to the White House demanding the removal of Seward.

When the Radicals found they could not revolutionize the administration, they tried to reform it. One of their targets was military leadership. They charged that the princ.i.p.al officers in the army were, or had been, Democrats, who were suspected of lacking enthusiasm for the Union cause and, more particularly, of sabotaging emanc.i.p.ation. Just as Moderates kept pressing the President to reinstate McClellan, so Radicals insisted that he give another command to General Benjamin F. Butler. This paunchy, cross-eyed Ma.s.sachusetts politician, a staunch Democrat before the war, was a recent ardent convert to Radicalism. During his command of captured New Orleans he had vigorously suppressed pro-Confederate sentiment in that rebellious city, helped to emanc.i.p.ate the slaves, and enlisted freedmen in the Union army. But he had also tolerated-and perhaps partic.i.p.ated in-fraud and peculation, and Lincoln had felt compelled to replace him. Now, pressed by Sumner, whom he needed to appease, Lincoln considered sending Butler back to the lower Mississippi Valley to help recruit black troops, but the appointment was not prestigious enough for the ambitious general, who preferred to be near the center of power in Washington. Butler had to be content with an invitation to an informal dinner at the White House.

Radicals did not fare much better in promoting the elevation of Fremont, who was dear to them because of his early attempts to emanc.i.p.ate the slaves in Missouri. But Fremont carried much baggage with him. His administration of the Department of the West was scandal-ridden, and he had there made mortal enemies of the powerful Blair family. Subsequently he had served without distinction in the Shenandoah Valley but had resigned in a huff. Under Radical pressure Lincoln conferred with the general during the winter of 18621863 and planned to authorize him to recruit a great Negro army, which he hoped would soon be 10,000 strong, but, probably because of the opposition of Halleck, who favored West Pointers, the appointment was never made. Disgruntled, Fremont retreated to New York.

Increasingly, Radical Republicans came to feel that it was the President, and not just his cabinet members or his generals, who ought to be replaced. Early in the year a group of Radicals met with Vice President Hamlin to offer their support if he declared himself a presidential candidate for 1864. Privately believing that Lincoln was "a good man if there ever was one-But G.o.d did not make him of such stuff as these times demand," Hamlin rebuffed the offer, saying, "I am loyal to Lincoln, and it is our duty now to lay aside our personal feelings and stand by the President."

Though some Radicals hoped to bring General Butler, "who is always equal to the emergency (which Mr. Lincoln and the Cabinet never is)," into the administration and give him "almost dictatorial powers," most came to think that the logical successor to the unsuccessful President was his Secretary of the Treasury. Chase had lost credibility with some senators during the cabinet crisis, but he still had a reputation for being a dynamic leader, a strong administrator, and, above all, an ardent antislavery man. He would be, the veteran abolitionist Joshua R. Giddings predicted, "the only Republican Candidate" in the next election, and there could "be no serious opposition" to him. Chase did nothing to discourage such speculation. Even before the December cabinet crisis he had been writing sympathizers about the need for "a new organization of parties," which should be "really democratic and really republican," whose leader would be a former Democrat who was now an earnest Republican. The description exactly fit Chase himself.

VI

Battered from all sides, Lincoln grew deeply despondent. In February a close observer, noting that "his hand trembled... and he looked worn and haggard," felt that the President was "growing feeble." Admiral John A. Dahlgren, a frequent visitor to the White House, recorded in his diary on February 6, "I observe that the President never tells a joke now." When the Ma.s.sachusetts abolitionist Wendell Phillips spoke of Lincoln's chances for a second term, the President replied, "Oh, Mr. Phillips, I have ceased to have any personal feeling or expectation in that matter,-I do not say I never had any,-so abused and borne upon as I have been."

Constantly surrounded by bureaucrats, civilian and military, job applicants, and sightseers, he was the loneliest man in Washington. After Browning was defeated for reelection to the Senate, Lincoln had no personal friends in the Congress. Of the cabinet members he most enjoyed Seward, with whom he liked to exchange stories, but these two men, who first met when they were both adults and prominent politicians, never confided their deepest feelings to each other.

From Mary he no longer received much emotional support. Still dressed in mourning, she grieved for Willie, and on the anniversary of his death in February, she again felt brokenhearted. "Only those, who have pa.s.sed through such bereavements, can realise, how the heart bleeds at the return, of these anniversaries," she wrote Mrs. Gideon Welles. Refusing to let Willie's memory go, she consorted with spiritualists, notably one Nettie Colburn, who she thought put her in communication with her son's spirit. Perhaps as many as eight seances were held in the White House itself. Lincoln attended one, but he was not convinced. Presently Mary began to feel that she herself, without the intercession of a medium, could lift the veil that separates the living and the dead and conjure up the spirits of both her dead sons. "Willie lives," she told her half sister. "He comes to me every night and stands at the foot of the bed with the same sweet adorable smile he always has had.... Little Eddie is sometimes with him."

With Mary moving like a cloud of doom, the White House was a depressing place these days. She no longer took much interest in the expensive furnishings and elaborate ornamentation with which she had redecorated the Executive Mansion. The formal receptions, once a source of great pleasure, she now considered a trial, especially when vandals snipped off pieces of the lace curtains or damask draperies as souvenirs or even, as the newspaper correspondent Noah Brooks reported, cut out "small bits of the gorgeous carpet, leaving scars on the floor as large as a man's hand." Mary managed to bring herself to attend the huge New Year's Day reception, but her heart was clearly not in it, and she greeted her guests mechanically.

There were few entertainments or diversions at the White House now. An exception was a hastily arranged reception for "General Tom Thumb" (Charles Sherwood Stratton) and his bride, who had just been married on February 10 in New York. Mary apparently staged the affair out of a sense of duty, but the President thoroughly enjoyed it, bending down from his six-foot-four-inch height to talk gravely with his three-foot-four-inch guest.

In her distraught state Mary seemed unaware that her husband needed relief from the ordeal he was undergoing, and Lincoln, protective of his wife's fragile mental health, did not burden her with his problems. In any event, it was doubtful that she could have been much help. Her sensitive political antennae, which had served them both so well in Springfield, functioned badly in the nation's capital. Cla.s.sifying politicians as friends or foes, Mary hated anyone who might be considered a rival to her husband. From the beginning she distrusted Seward and wanted him to resign. She became aware of Chase's presidential aspirations perhaps earlier than Lincoln himself. From her point of view her husband mishandled the cabinet crisis, because he ought to have used it as an excuse to purge every member except Montgomery Blair, whom she thought loyal to Lincoln. Her eccentric judgment troubled Lincoln less than her habit of making her views public in conversation or in letters. She never understood that every action of a President's wife is judged in political terms. Thus she did not see that she was making a political statement when she chose Rhoda White as one of her closest friends; Mrs. White was an unexceptionable lady, but her husband, Judge James W. White, was leading the pet.i.tion drive to oust Seward from the cabinet. In the circ.u.mstances, Lincoln found it best not to confide much in his wife.

Lincoln drew much comfort from Tad, to whom he became even more attached after the death of Willie. He spent much time playing with the boy, and he helped him raise his kitten and train his dog, "a very cunning little fellow," according to Leonard Swett, who "runs about the house,... Barks and stands straight up on his hind feet-holds his fore feet up." Bright and affectionate, Tad was also wholly undisciplined. The nine-year-old boy could still not dress himself, and, despite the efforts of a series of tutors, he could neither read nor write. Lincoln refused to worry over his slowness in such matters. "Let him run," said his father; "there's time enough yet for him to learn his letters and get pokey." Because of his speech defect most people could not understand Tad, but his father always could-and he knew how frustrated the child became when he could not express himself. Consequently even when Tad burst in on cabinet meetings, jabbering something to "Papa-day," as he called his father (perhaps he meant to say something like "Papa dear"), the President interrupted everything to give the lad his full attention. In turn, Tad adored his father, and he would often hang around the President's office until late at night, sometimes falling asleep on one of the couches or chairs. When Lincoln got ready to retire, he would pick the boy up and carry him off to his big bed, where Tad now mostly slept.

For more mature companionship Lincoln did not look to his oldest son, Robert, who was off studying at Harvard College most of the year. In his own way he was proud of Robert and he bragged to visitors that his son was getting "the best of educations," even if "it was hard for him to afford it." But in an obscure way he viewed his eldest as a compet.i.tor. "Bob was brighter than himself, he had never had but one year of education," he remarked, "but he guessed Bob would not do better than he had." When Robert spent his holidays in the White House, Washingtonians thought him a good-looking young man with excellent manners and, in private conversation, a good sense of humor. But he felt stiff and awkward around his father, and the two never seemed to find anything to say to each other. It was rather a relief to everybody when Robert had to go back to Cambridge.

In his two secretaries Lincoln found the sons that Robert could never be. Working side by side for long hours with John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Lincoln came to know these young men extremely well and to enjoy their company. Because they lived right in the White House, he got in the habit of dropping in on them at night to chat and review the day's news. Once at midnight he came in, laughing, to read them an amusing poem by Thomas Hood, "seemingly utterly unconscious," Hay noted in his diary, "that he with his short shirt hanging above his long legs and setting out behind like the tail feathers of an enormous ostrich was infinitely funnier than anything in the book he was laughing at."

He valued their absolute loyalty. They, in turn, watched him grow into the presidency, and admired the skill with which he operated the levers of power. They revered him as "a backwoods Jupiter" who wielded "the bolts of war and the machinery of government with a hand equally steady and equally firm." His secretaries were among the first to recognize Lincoln's mastery of the English language. As a graduate of Brown University, Hay felt he had to deplore "some hideously bad rhetoric-some indecorums that are infamous" in Lincoln's public papers, yet he recognized these doc.u.ments would take their "solid place in history, as a great utterance of a great man." Bonding to the President, they resented anyone else who tried to get close to him. A fierce rivalry developed between the two secretaries and Mrs. Lincoln. Ostensibly their clashes had to do with the management and refurbishing of the White House, but at base they stemmed from jealousy over the President's affections.

VII

Aware of his unpopularity during these early months of 1863, Lincoln thought he understood the cause. When a group of New England abolitionists descended on the White House to complain that the Northern people believed the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation was not being honestly carried out by the generals and soldiers in the field, the President replied: "My own impression... is that the ma.s.ses of the country generally are only dissatisfied at our lack of military successes. Defeat and failure in the field make everything seem wrong."

During this time, when his generals and admirals were concerting plans for a new a.s.sault upon the Confederacy, he did what he could to ensure success. It was his job to see that the commanders had everything they required in the way of men and weapons. Manpower now posed a real problem. There had been severe losses in a contest that had now lasted nearly two years. The terms for which many regiments had enlisted were about to expire, and soldiers wanted to go home. Thousands were absent without leave, and Lincoln's offer of amnesty to those who returned to their regiments had only limited success. There were almost no new volunteers. It would be months before the new conscription act could bring in recruits.

Reluctantly, and after great hesitation, Lincoln turned to the one source of manpower he had vowed he could never use: African-Americans. It was a move that many abolitionists and black leaders had been urging since the beginning of the war. Frederick Dougla.s.s demanded, "Let the slaves and free colored people be called into service, and formed into a liberating army, to march into the South and raise the banner of emanc.i.p.ation among the slaves." But powerful conservative voices opposed the idea. Some maintained that Negroes would never fight, so that arms given to them would simply be seized by the Confederates; others predicted that armed blacks would rise against their masters and make of the South another Santo Domingo. Though the Confiscation Act of July 1862 specifically authorized Negro enlistments, the President was averse to pursuing so revolutionary a policy. When General David Hunter, in the Department of the South, attempted to raise black regiments in South Carolina, the President overruled him, stating that he "would employ all colored men as laborers, but would not promise to make soldiers of them."

Lincoln's resistance to using Negro troops persisted even after he issued his preliminary Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation. That proclamation was designed to persuade Confederates to return to the Union within one hundred days or else lose their slaves; it would have been illogical and counterproductive at the same time to announce that those slaves who were successful in escaping from their masters would be organized into regiments of the Union army. From Lincoln's point of view it made more sense to talk of colonizing the blacks out of the country than to plan on making them soldiers. But the movement to enlist black troops had become irresistible. Even before the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation was issued, Stanton, without Lincoln's knowledge, but also without his disapproval, authorized General Rufus Saxton to enlist blacks in South Carolina; General Benjamin F. Butler began mustering in free men of color in Louisiana; and in Kansas, James H. Lane's Jayhawkers welcomed recruits of any race.

Under continuous pressure, especially from Sumner, whose support, or at least neutrality, was needed during the cabinet crisis, Lincoln began to shift his position on Negro troops. Perhaps he was influenced by several talks with Vice President Hamlin, who brought to the White House a delegation of young army officers, including one of his sons, to volunteer for command of colored troops. Surprised and moved that these promising young men were willing to risk their careers in a cause that aroused strong racial prejudice, Lincoln told them, "I suppose the time has come." Recognizing that the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation had "in certain quarters" worked against recruitment for the Union armies, he concluded he ought to "take some benefit from it, if practicable" by enrolling black soldiers.

In his final Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation he announced that former slaves would be received into the armed forces-though as yet he limited their role "to garrison and defend forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts." An unstated corollary of the President's new position was that plans to colonize blacks outside the United States were abandoned. Henceforth Lincoln recognized that blacks were to make their future as citizens of the United States.

Once converted, Lincoln began actively urging his commanders to employ black troops. For instance, he asked General John A. Dix, in command of Yorktown and Fort Monroe in Virginia, whether these posts "could not, in whole or in part, be garrisoned by colored troops, leaving the white forces now necessary at those places, to be employed elsewhere."