Lincoln Part 50

At any rate, Lincoln was pleased by the outcome of the convention. When a committee of delegates came to the White House on June 9 to give him official notification of his renomination, he replied: "I will neither conceal my gratification, nor restrain the expression of my grat.i.tude, that the Union people, through their convention ... have deemed me not unworthy to remain in my present position." Voicing strong approval of the call for a const.i.tutional amendment ending slavery, he nevertheless cautiously declared that he should not definitely accept the nomination "before reading and considering what is called the Platform." The same day he met with a delegation from the national Union League, which had endorsed the Baltimore nominations, and he expressed satisfaction that the group found him "not entirely unworthy" of a second term. In this connection he was reminded of "a story of an old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion once that 'it was not best to swap horses when crossing streams.'"

IV

Lincoln's renomination put him in a better position to a.s.sert his leadership both in his administration and in his party. Chase was the first to feel the President's new strength. His department faced formidable problems in meeting the vast expenditures caused by the war. Despite his urging, the Congress failed to levy taxes adequate to meet minimal needs of the Treasury. He had great difficulty in disposing of a new bond issue after he was not allowed to reappoint Jay Cooke, the banker who had been so successful in promoting earlier bonds. The currency was depreciating, and the premium on gold skyrocketed. At Chase's demand, Congress pa.s.sed a law designed to outlaw speculation in gold, but it only hampered honest businessmen while gamblers continued to profit by the constantly climbing premium.

Worn ragged by these pressures, Chase became more p.r.i.c.kly in his relations with the President. The two men felt uncomfortable when they were in the same room, and Chase only occasionally attended cabinet meetings. Lincoln no longer needed to keep Chase in his cabinet. He tried to pa.s.s along a message to the Secretary through Representative Samuel Hooper of Ma.s.sachusetts, that he continued to hold Chase in high esteem and intended to appoint him Chief Justice when a vacancy occurred-and with the subtext that his departure from the cabinet would relieve strain. Not fully understanding what he was told, Hooper failed to give the word to Chase.

But toward the end of June, the Secretary precipitated a crisis. The respected John J. Cisco resigned as a.s.sistant treasurer of the United States in New York City-a post that was next only to the Secretary of the Treasury in importance. Unaware that anything had changed in his relationship to the President, Chase proposed to replace Cisco with one of his cronies, Maunsell B. Field. It was a politically disastrous move, because Senator E. D. Morgan, former governor of New York and retiring chairman of the National Union Executive Committee, favored other candidates for the job, as did Senator Ira Harris. Lincoln refused to nominate Field and asked the Secretary to reconsider.

When Chase replied by asking for a personal conference with the President, Lincoln declined. "The difficulty does not... lie within the range of a conversation between you and me," he told the Secretary. "As the proverb goes, no man knows so well where the shoe pinches as he who wears it." The whole question of the New York patronage was a source of "much embarra.s.sment" to him; he reminded Chase that retaining Barney in the New York Customs House had been "a great burden" and that the appointment of Judge Hogeboom had brought New York Republicans-he did not mention Thurlow Weed by name-to "the verge of open revolt."

Rather than defy the President, Chase successfully entreated Cisco to withdraw his nomination, and he forwarded that news to Lincoln, adding self-righteously that in suggesting appointments he took no consideration of politics and simply tried "to get the best men for the places." Cisco's decision ended the present difficulty, he thought, but the stiff tone of Lincoln's letter made him think that his continued service in the cabinet was "not altogether agreeable" to the President. Once again he submitted his resignation.

Lincoln read Chase's letter as saying: "You have been acting very badly. Unless you say you are sorry, and ask me to stay and agree that I shall be absolute and that you shall have nothing, no matter how you beg for it, I will go." In the circ.u.mstances he felt he had no choice but to accept Chase's resignation. "Of all I have said in commendation of your ability and fidelity," he wrote the Secretary, "I have nothing to unsay; and yet you and I have reached a point of mutual embarra.s.sment in our official relation which it seems can not be overcome, or longer sustained, consistently with the public service."

Chase was dumbfounded by the failure of tactics that repeatedly worked in the past. It never occurred to him that the Baltimore convention had changed the political landscape. He professed to be unable to understand Lincoln's letter. "I had found a good deal of embarra.s.sment from him," he confided to his journal, "but what he had found from me I could not imagine, unless it has been created by my unwillingness to have offices distributed as spoils... with more regard to the claims of divisions, factions, cliques and individuals, than to fitness of selection."

Chase's friends rallied to his defense, but Lincoln refused to reconsider his decision. When Governor John Brough of Ohio, who happened to be in Washington, offered to mediate the dispute, Lincoln told him: "This is the third time he [Chase] has thrown this [resignation] at me, and I do not think I am called on to continue to beg him to take it back, especially when the country would not go to destruction in consequence.... On the whole, Brough, I reckon you had better let it alone this time."

In order to avoid political and financial damage, Lincoln moved swiftly to name a replacement. Without consulting anyone else, he nominated another Ohioan, former Governor David Tod. It was an unfortunate choice, for Tod, as the New York Herald unkindly put it, knew "no more of finances than a post." He was a hard-money man, opposed to the paper money with which the administration had been conducting the war. Vastly upset, the Senate Finance Committee, headed by William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, came to the White House to urge that Tod's name be withdrawn, but the President refused. A crisis was avoided when Tod telegraphed his declination, on the grounds of poor health.

The next morning Lincoln nominated Fessenden, who was confirmed in an executive session lasting not more than two minutes. The President had not consulted the senator, who was horrified when he heard the news. Fessenden did not want to leave the Senate, did not want an executive office, and felt physically unable to perform the duties of the job, and he wrote Lincoln a letter declining the appointment. The President refused to receive it. Appealing to Fessenden's sense of duty, reminding him that "the crisis was such as demanded any sacrifice, even life itself," he persuaded the senator to reconsider. When Fessenden turned to Stanton for advice, saying that he thought the job would kill him, the Secretary of War responded bluntly, "Very well, you cannot die better than in trying to save your country." Then telegrams and letters began to pour in, from boards of trade, chambers of commerce, bankers, and public officials, warning Fessenden that he must serve to prevent a financial crisis.

Unhappily he accepted, but not without taking to heart the advice of his close friend, Senator Grimes of Iowa, that he must "make such terms as would prevent you from being slandered and backbitten out of the Cabinet in a few weeks by your a.s.sociates." On July 4, Fessenden and the President came to an agreement, which Lincoln put in writing, that the Secretary was to have "complete control of the [Treasury] department." "I will keep no person in office in his department, against his express will," the President promised; and Fessenden agreed that in appointing subordinates he would "strive to give his willing consent to my wishes in cases when I may let him know that I have such wishes."

With his cabinet reconst.i.tuted, Lincoln turned to a.s.serting his leadership of the Republican party in the Congress. By the end of June 1864 the first session of the Thirty-eighth Congress was drawing to an end, a session marked more by rancorous squabbling than by constructive legislation. Congressional Republicans were now more sharply divided into Radical and Conservative factions, both of which were critical of the President. Congressmen found many grounds of complaint, and most shared a sense that the executive branch had aggrandized itself during the war at the expense of the legislative branch. On no issue was there more hostility to the President than on reconstruction. Support of Lincoln's 10 percent plan dropped sharply after Banks permitted the reconstructed government of Louisiana to preserve that state's antebellum const.i.tution, which failed to protect the rights of blacks. To show their disapproval, majorities in both houses of Congress refused to seat persons claiming to represent Louisiana and Arkansas. United in opposing the President's wishes, the Republican majority in Congress was slow to agree on alternative positive actions. They failed to establish a much needed Freedmen's Bureau, intended to oversee the transition of African-Americans from slavery to freedom, and they could not muster a sufficient majority to adopt the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, which the President and the National Union Convention had strongly urged.

In the final days of the session, when many members were absent, Republican leaders suddenly realized that they were about to adjourn without having pa.s.sed any significant legislation concerning slavery, the freedmen, or reconstruction. Hastily they turned to a bill that Henry Winter Davis called "the only practical measure of emanc.i.p.ation proposed in this Congress." Called the Wade-Davis bill, after the chairmen of the House and Senate committees that sponsored it, the measure a.s.serted congressional, rather than executive control over the reconstruction process. It required, as a first step in the reorganization of any Southern state, the complete abolition of slavery. The bill specified that 50 percent, rather than 10 percent, of the 1860 voters must partic.i.p.ate in elections to reconst.i.tute these governments. Further, it imposed on electors of const.i.tutional conventions in the seceded states what was called an "iron-clad" oath of loyalty, requiring them to swear that they had never voluntarily borne arms against the United States or aided the rebellion, rather than the oath of prospective loyalty in Lincoln's plan of amnesty.

Pa.s.sed by Congress on July 2, the bill reflected Davis's personal hostility toward Lincoln for siding with the Blairs, the leaders of the rival Republican faction in Maryland. It also demonstrated the continuing opposition on the part of some Radical Republicans to Lincoln's reelection, despite his renomination by the Baltimore convention. Looking toward an alternative or third-party candidacy for the presidency, they feared that Lincoln might win reelection through the electoral votes of states under military control, like Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee, which were in effect pocket boroughs.

Faced with a revolt on the part of Republican congressional leadership, Lincoln decided to rea.s.sert his authority. Indeed, he had to do so if he hoped to keep together the tenuous coalition of War Democrats and Republicans on which his reelection campaign rested. Rumors spread that he was not going to sign the bill. Two days before adjournment, Representatives Thaddeus Stevens, E. B. Washburne, and John L. Dawson of Pennsylvania descended on the White House officially to ask if the Chief Executive had any further messages to transmit to the Congress but actually to urge Lincoln to approve the Wade-Davis bill. After greeting his visitors, Lincoln sat down at his desk, turned his back on them, and resumed his work, merely tilting his head a little as Stevens read the official message. Dawson thought the President looked "as if he was ashamed of himself, out of place," and the representatives returned to Capitol Hill suspecting that Lincoln would veto the reconstruction bill. Hearing their news, Representative Jesse O. Norton, a Radical from Illinois and an old friend of the President, rushed to the White House, and he too got the impression that Lincoln would not sign. Lincoln was about to make a great mistake, Norton reported, but there was "no use trying to prevent it."

As Congress tried to complete its business by noon on July 4, the President was in his room at the Capitol examining and signing numerous measures that had been pa.s.sed during the final hours of the session. Intensely anxious about the fate of the Wade-Davis bill, Republican senators and representatives gathered about him and watched him push that measure aside. When Zachariah Chandler, the Radical senator from Michigan, came in, he asked the President whether he was going to sign, and Lincoln replied with some impatience, "Mr Chandler, this bill was placed before me a few minutes before Congress adjourns. It is a matter of too much importance to be swallowed in that way."

Warned by Chandler that the veto "will damage us fearfully in the Northwest," Lincoln defended his action on the ground that Congress had no authority to abolish slavery in the reconstructed states. When Chandler reminded him that this was no more than what he himself had done, the President testily replied, "I conceive that I may in an emergency do things on military grounds which cannot be done const.i.tutionally by Congress." He further objected to the bill because he believed incorrectly that it implied that the rebellious states were no longer in the Union. "Now we cannot survive that admission, I am convinced," he told the little group around him, and he reminded them that the whole war was fought on the a.s.sumption that it was not possible for a state to secede. "If that be true, I am not President, these gentlemen are not Congress."

As he left the Capitol, he was warned that offending the Radicals might hurt his chances in the November election, and he responded with controlled anger: "If they choose to make a point upon this I do not doubt that they can do harm. They have never been friendly to me and I don't know that this will make any special difference as to that. At all events, I must keep some consciousness of being somewhere near right: I must keep some standard of principle fixed within myself."

After he had cooled off a little, Lincoln decided to pocket-veto the Wade-Davis bill-that is, to decline to sign it, so that, with the adjournment of Congress, it would fail to become law. He took his case to the people by issuing a proclamation explaining his decision. He was not prepared "to be inflexibly committed to any single plan of restoration," he wrote; nor was he prepared "to declare, that the free-state const.i.tutions and governments, already adopted and installed in Arkansas and Louisiana, shall be set aside and held for nought, thereby repelling and discouraging the loyal citizens who have set up the same, as to further effort." He was unwilling to acknowledge "a const.i.tutional competency in Congress to abolish slavery in States." Then, attempting to paper over differences with the Congress, he declared that he was "fully satisfied with the system for restoration contained in the Bill, as one very proper plan for the loyal people of any State choosing to adopt it," and he offered a.s.sistance to any state that decided to do so. The a.s.surance was virtually meaningless, however, since the terms imposed by Congress were so much harsher than those required under the presidential plan of reconstruction.

Radicals reacted angrily to the defeat of the Wade-Davis bill. The President seemed to be toying with them: first he used a pocket veto, a rare procedure up to this time; then he issued what was in effect a veto message, which was not required for a pocket veto; and finally he suggested that some Southern states might want to accept the conditions laid down in the bill he had just killed. According to a newspaperman, Davis, "pale with wrath, his bushy hair tousled, and wildly brandishing his arms, denounced the President in good set terms." "I am inconsolable," Charles Sumner grieved. But other congressmen, who perhaps had not paid careful attention to the debates on the measure, "began to wish that it had never gone to the President." Resentment continued to smolder against Lincoln, but he remained in control of the field, clearly in charge both of his cabinet and of the reconstruction process.

V

How long he would remain in charge depended on the outcome of military operations, and the prospects were gloomy. By July it seemed that Grant's campaign-which followed Lincoln's grand strategy-was a failure. In the West, Banks's army was demoralized after the failed Red River expedition, and it was months before General Edward R. S. Canby, who superseded Banks, was able to take to the field in a drive against Mobile. In Georgia, Sherman pushed the Confederates under Joseph E. Johnston back toward Atlanta, but the Southerners repeatedly escaped the traps he set for them. Eventually Sherman grew so exasperated that he ordered a direct attack on the entrenched Confederates at Kennesaw Mountain, where on June 27 he met a b.l.o.o.d.y defeat.

In the East, Butler allowed his Army of the James to be hemmed in on a peninsula between the James and the Appomattox rivers, and there, as Grant remarked acidly, his army was as useless "as if it had been in a bottle strongly corked." In the Shenandoah Valley, Franz Sigel suffered a serious defeat at New Market on May 15 and had to be removed from command. His successor, David Hunter, began a campaign of devastation in the Valley, but when Lee sent in troops under Jubal A. Early, Hunter retreated into the Kanawha Valley, leaving the Shenandoah an open corridor for the Confederates.

Most serious of all were the reverses of the Army of the Potomac, over which Grant personally presided. Failing to overwhelm Lee's army either in the Wilderness or at Spotsylvania, Grant ordered the senseless and doomed charge at Cold Harbor. After this defeat he no longer talked about fighting it out on this line, because he had learned a lesson: "Without a greater sacrifice of human life than I am willing to make, all cannot be accomplished that I had designed."

In a shift of strategy, on June 14 he began moving the Army of the Potomac through the swamps of the Chickahominy River, where McClellan's troops had fought in 1862, to the south side of the James River. There the Army of the Potomac, joining with Butler's army, could be supplied by sea, and there-in a return to Grant's original strategic plan-it could cut the rail lines that connected Richmond to the South. Grant's change of base was brilliantly executed, so that Lee had no certain idea of his whereabouts. Once his army had crossed the James, Grant launched an immediate a.s.sault on the heavily fortified city of Petersburg, through which three of the key railroads ran. Repulsed, he settled down for a siege. Now, for the first time, he contemplated a campaign of attrition; he would pin Lee's army down so that no reinforcements could be sent to fight against Sherman.

In six weeks of incessant fighting the Union armies lost in killed and wounded nearly 100,000 men-more than the total number in Lee's army at the beginning of the campaign. The people of the North, who had been overly optimistic when Grant a.s.sumed command of the armies, were slow to realize what was happening. Their newspapers, controlled by War Department censorship, told them that Grant had "won a great victory," that the Army of the Potomac "again is victorious," that the troops had been "skillfully, and bravely handled," and that Grant had "succeeded, if not in defeating Lee, certainly in turning his strong position and forcing him to retreat step by step to the very confines of Richmond." But then the daily black-bordered newspaper columns listing the dead brought home the enormity of war. So did the stories from newspaper correspondents and the letters from soldiers describing the suffering of the maimed and wounded. As thousands of the injured poured into the hospitals around Washington, it was no longer possible to conceal the costs of the campaign. The country shuddered with a sickening revulsion at the slaughter. Grieving for "our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country," Horace Greeley wrote the President of the widespread dread of "the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood."

Lincoln himself was sensitive to the suffering. His friend Isaac N. Arnold recorded that during these days he was "grave and anxious, and he looked like one who had lost the dearest member of his own family." One evening, after riding past a long line of ambulances carrying the wounded to the hospital, he turned to Arnold in deep sadness and said: "Look yonder at those poor fellows. I cannot bear it. This suffering, this loss of life is dreadful."

The Lincolns did what they could to mitigate the hardships. Mary Lincoln regularly visited army hospitals, bringing the wounded flowers from the White House conservatory and comforting words. For his part the President set aside a morning of nearly every week to review the court-martial sentences of soldiers who had found the stress of battle more than they could bear. One week he examined the records in sixty-seven cases; in another, seventy-two cases; in yet another, thirty-six cases. Whenever possible he found excuses to release the prisoners and allowed them to return to duty. He was, he explained, "trying to evade the butchering business lately." But all his exertions could not erase the knowledge that in the final a.n.a.lysis he was responsible for all this suffering.

Increasingly he brooded over the war and his role in it. "Doesn't it seem strange to you that I should be here?" he once asked Representative Daniel Voorhees of Indiana. "Doesn't it strike you as queer that I, who couldn't cut the head off of a chicken, and who was sick at the sight of blood, should be cast into the middle of a great war, with blood flowing all about me?" Often, when he could spare the time from his duties, he sought an answer to his questions in the well-thumbed pages of his Bible, reading most often the Old Testament prophets and the Psalms.

He found comfort and rea.s.surance in the Bible. He was not a member of any Christian church, for he was put off by their forms and dogmas, and consequently he remained, as Mary Lincoln later said, "not a technical Christian." But he drew from the Scriptures such solace that he was prepared to forget his earlier religious doubts. One evening during this dreadful summer of 1864, his old friend Joshua Speed found him intently reading the Bible. "I am glad to see you so profitably engaged," said Speed.

"Yes," replied the President, "I am profitably engaged."

"Well," commented the visitor, "if you have recovered from your skepticism, I am sorry to say that I have not."

Looking his old comrade in the face, Lincoln said, "You are wrong, Speed, take all of this book upon reason that you can, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier and better man." He had come to feel, as he told a delegation of Baltimore African-Americans who presented him a magnificently bound Bible in appreciation of his work for the Negro, that "this Great Book... is the best gift G.o.d has given to man."

Reading the Bible reinforced Lincoln's long-held belief in the doctrine of necessity, a belief that admirably fitted the needs of his essentially pa.s.sive personality. The idea that the actions of any individual were predetermined and shaped by the unknowable wishes of some Higher Power was not a new one for him, but with the burden of a never-ending war weighing ever more heavily on his shoulders, he reverted to it more and more frequently. In April he wrote a long letter to Albert G. Hodges, editor of the Frankfort (Kentucky) Commonwealth, explaining why he had felt compelled to shift from his inaugural pledge not to interfere with slavery to the policy of emanc.i.p.ation. It contained his most explicit view of individual responsibility: "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me." "Now," he continued, "at the end of three years struggle the nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. G.o.d alone can claim it."

Again and again he reverted to the idea that behind all the struggles and losses of the war a Divine purpose was at work. Never did he express this view more eloquently than in a letter he wrote in September to Mrs. Eliza P. Gurney, who extended the sympathy and prayers of the Society of Friends: "The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance. We hoped for a happy termination of this terrible war long before this; but G.o.d knows best, and has ruled otherwise... . we must work earnestly in the best light He gives us, trusting that so working still conduces to the great ends He ordains. Surely He intends some great good to follow this mighty convulsion, which no mortal could make, and no mortal could stay." This comforting doctrine allowed the President to live with himself by shifting some of the responsibility for all the suffering.

VI

As Grant and Sherman grappled with the enemy, Lincoln did what he could to sustain the army and to boost civilian morale. On every possible occasion-even on such an unlikely one as the resumption of White House concerts by the Marine Band-he asked his listeners to give three cheers for "Grant and all the armies under his command." Again and again, he expressed grat.i.tude to the soldiers, to the officers, and especially to "that brave and loyal man," the "modest General at the head of our armies." After his renomination, when the Ohio delegation serenaded him with a bra.s.s band, he responded: "What we want, still more than Baltimore conventions or presidential elections, is success under Gen. Grant," and he urged his hearers to bend all their energies to support "the brave officers and soldiers in the field."

He continued to have great faith in Grant, but he was conscious of the swelling chorus of criticism of the general. Many doubted Grant's strategic ability and pointed out that in shifting his base to the James River he was simply repeating what McClellan had done-with far fewer casualties. "Why did he not take his army south of the James at once, and thus save seventy-five thousand men?" asked Senator Grimes, who p.r.o.nounced Grant's campaign a failure. Even in the President's own household there was distrust of the general. "He is a butcher," Mary Lincoln often said, "and is not fit to be at the head of an army."