Authors: Stephen B. Oates
In Springfield, President-elect Lincoln admitted that there were “some loud threats and much muttering in the cotton states,” but insisted that the best way to avoid disaster was through calmness and forbearance. What reason did southerners have to be so incensed? What had the Republicans done to them? What southern rights had they violated? Did not southerners still have the fugitive slave law? Did they not have the same Constitution they had lived under for seventy-odd years? “Why all this excitement?” Lincoln asked. “Why all these complaints?”
With the border states also threatening to secede, Lincoln seemed confused, incredulous, at what was happening to his country. He seemed not to understand how he appeared in southern eyes. He kept telling himself that his advisers were right, that southern Unionism would somehow bring the errant states back. He could not accept the possibility that
his
election to the presi
dency might cause the collapse of the very system which had enabled him to get there. The irony of that was too distressing to contemplate.
In his Inaugural Address of March 4,1861, Lincoln pleaded for southern whites to understand the Republican position on slavery. He assured them once again that he would not molest slavery in Dixie, that he had no legal right to molest it there. He even approved the original Thirteenth Amendment, just passed by Congress, that would have explicitly guaranteed slavery in the southern states. Lincoln endorsed the amendment because he deemed it consistent with Republican ideology. And in his conclusion he spoke personally to the southern people, as he had done so often since 1854: “In
your
hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in
mine
, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail
you
. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors.
You
have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while
I
shall have the most solemn one to âpreserve, protect and defend' it.”
“I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
In Dixie, excitement was so great that men read in Lincoln's words, not conciliation, but provocation. The feverish Charleston
Mercury
even blasted it as a declaration of war. At that very moment, in fact, war threatened to break out in Charleston harbor, where hostile rebel cannon ringed Fort Sumter and its lonely Union flag. The Confederates had already seized every U.S. fort in Dixie except for Sumter and one other in the Florida Gulf. Now Sumter became a symbol for both sides, as the rebels demanded that Lincoln surrender it and angry Union men exhorted him to hold.
In the ensuing crisis, Lincoln clung to the belief that the southern people would overthrow the secessionists and restore the southern states to the Union. But he had little time to wait, for the Sumter garrison was rapidly running out of provisions. Should he send a relief expedition? But what if that betrayed southern Unionists and detonated a civil war? In “great anxiety” about what to do, Lincoln consulted repeatedly with his Cabinet and with high-ranking officers of the army and navy, but they gave him conflicting advice. Far from being an aggressive tyrant who forced the innocent South to start the war, the historical Lincoln vacillated over Sumter, postponed a decision, suffered terribly. He told an old Illinois friend that “all the troubles and anxieties” of his life could not equal those that beset him during the Sumter nightmare. They were so great, Lincoln said, that he did not think it possible to survive them.
Then a report from an emissary he had sent to Charleston smashed his hope that the crisis could be peacefully resolved. The emissary reported that South Carolinians had “no attachment to the Union,” and that some wanted a clash with Washington to unite the Confederacy. Moreover, Unionism was equally dead everywhere else in Dixie, and the seceded states were “irrevocably gone.” There was no conceivable way that Lincoln could avoid an armed collision with southern rebels: if he did not hold Sumter, he would have to stand somewhere else or see the government collapse.
It was a rude awakening for Lincoln, who had placed great faith in the potency of southern Unionism, who had always thought that southern white people loved the country as much as he and shared his faith in the American promise. Well, he had been wrong. Out of that sobering realization, out of everything he held dear about the Union, out of all his suffering, came a decision to stand firm. After all, he had won the presidency in a fair and legal contest. He would not compromise his election mandate. He would preserve the Union and the principle of self-government on which the Union was based: the right of a free people to choose
their leaders and expect the losers to acquiesce in that decision. If southerners disliked him, they could try to vote him out of office in 1864. But he was not going to let them separate from the Union, because that would set a catastrophic precedent that any unhappy state could leave the Union at any time. For Lincoln, the philosophy of secession was “an ingenious sophism” southerners had contrived to vindicate their rebellion. This sophism held that each state possessed “some omnipotent, and sacred supremacy,” and that any state could lawfully and peacefully leave the Union without its consent. “With rebellion thus sugar coated,” Lincoln complained, southern leaders “have been drugging the public mind of their section for more than thirty years.” Yet it was a preposterous argument. The Constitution specifically stated that the Constitution and the national laws made under it were the supreme law of the land. Therefore the states could not be supreme as the secessionists claimed; the Union was paramount and permanent, and could not be legally wrecked by a disaffected minority. The principle of secession was disintegration, Lincoln said. And no government based on that principle could possibly endure.
Yes, he would hold Fort Sumter. In that imperiled little garrison in Charleston Harbor, surrounded by rebel batteries and a hostile population, Lincoln saw the fate of popular government hanging in the balance. He would send a relief expedition to Sumter, and if the Confederates opened fire, the momentous issue of civil war was indeed in their hands.
And so the fateful events raced by: the firing on the fort, Lincoln's call for 75,000 troops, the secession of four border states, and the beginning of war. Deeply embittered, Lincoln grumbled about all the “
professed
Union men” in Dixie who had gone over to the rebellion. And he looked on in distress as one supposedly loyal southerner after another resigned from the United States Army and headed south to enlist in the rebel forces. It depressed him immeasurably. He referred to Robert E. Lee, Joseph E. Johnston, John Bankhead Magruder, and all like them as traitors.
And in his public utterances he never again addressed the southern people as though they were in his audiences. Instead he spoke of them in the third person, calling them rebels and insurrectionariesâa domestic enemy engaged in treason against his government.
And so the Civil War had comeâa war that no reasonable man in North or South had wanted. What began as a ninety-day skirmish on both sides swelled instead into a vast inferno of destruction with consequences beyond calculation for those swept up in its flames. For Lincoln, the country was out of control, threatening to annihilate everyone and everything, all promise and all hope, and he did not think he could bear the pain he felt. His election had provoked this madness, and he took it personally. Falling into a depression that would plague him throughout his embattled presidency, he remarked that the war was the supreme irony of his life: that he who sickened at the sight of blood, who abhorred stridency and physical violence, who dreamed that “mind, all conquering
mind
,” would rule the world someday, was caught in a national holocaust, a tornado of blood and wreckage with Lincoln himself whirling in its center.
We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth
.
A
BRAHAM
L
INCOLN
In the flames of civil war, Lincoln underwent seemingly endless crises that might have shattered a weaker man. Here he wasâa President who lacked administrative experience, suffered from chronic depression, hated to fire inept subordinates and bungling generals (he had never liked personal confrontations anyway)âthrust into the center of a fratricidal conflict. Here he was, forced to make awesome decisions in a war that had no precedent in all American history, a war without constitutional or political guidelines for him to follow. At the same time, Lincoln had to live with the knowledge that he was the most unpopular President the Republic had known up to that time. His hate mail from the public was voluminous and grotesque, as for instance the letter that came to him in 1861: “You are nothing but a goddamned Black nigger.” On his desk, too, fell a southern newspaper clipping that offered $100,000 for his “miserable traitorous head.” Some Man of the People, this Lincoln of history! Through that first year of the war, Lincoln was a deeply troubled President, caught in a vortex of problems and pressures. One can picture him standing as he often did at a White House window, a haunted, harried man who did not know whether he could quell this “clear, flagrant, gigantic case of Rebellion” against him and his government.
When an old friend visited him early in the war, Lincoln confessed that he was depressed and “not at all hopeful” about his or his country's future. And the ravages of warâthe wrecked
homes, broken families, mounting casualtiesâtook a terrible toll on one who was obsessed with death anyway, who had written lugubrious verse about it and still recited the mournful refrains of the poem “Mortality.”
Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud
, when so many already lay dead and gone: Elmer Ellsworth, a close friend of the Lincoln family, shot in Alexandria after taking down a rebel flagâ¦460 Union soldiers slain and 2,430 wounded or missing in the swamps and woods of Bull Run (a distraught Lincoln watching from the White House as the remnants of the Union army staggered into Washington, moving like phantoms in the fog and rain)â¦Edward Baker, Lincoln's old friend from Whig days in Sangamon County, blown to eternity at Ball's Bluff. And who knew how many more would follow.
And the country! From all directions came cries that Lincoln was unfit to be President, that he was too inexperienced, too inept, too stupid and imbecilic, to reunite the country. Even some of his Cabinet secretaries, even some of his friends, feared that the war was too much for him.
Melancholy and inexperienced though he was, unsure of himself and savagely criticized though he was, Lincoln managed nevertheless to see this huge and confusing conflict in a world dimension. He defined and fought it according to his core of unshakable convictions about America's experiment and historic mission in the progress of human liberty. The central issue of the war, he told Congress on Independence Day, 1861, was whether a constitutional republicâa system of popular governmentâcould preserve itself. There were Europeans who argued that anarchy and rebellion were inherent weaknesses of a republic and that a monarchy was the more stable form of government. Now, in the Civil War, popular government was going through a fiery trial for its very survival. If it failed in America, if it succumbed to the forces of reaction represented by the slave-based Confederacy, it might indeed perish from the earth. The beacon of hope for oppressed humanity the world over would be destroyed.
To prevent that, Lincoln said, the government must meet force
with force. It must teach southern dissidents “the folly of being the beginners of a war.” It must show the world “that those who can fairly carry an election, can also suppress a rebellion,” and that popular government was a viable system. “This is essentially a People's contest,” the President said. “On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of menâto lift artificial weights from all shouldersâto clear the paths of laudable pursuit for allâto afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”
Yes, this was the central idea of the war. This was what Lincoln had in mind when he said, “I shall do nothing in malice. What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.” And in various ways he repeated that central idea in the difficult days ahead. They were fighting, he told crowds and visitors at the White House, to preserve something that lay at the heart of the American promise, something he had cherished and defended almost all his political life. “I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House,” he said to an Ohio regiment. “I am a living witness that one of your children may look to come here as my father's child has. It is in order that each of you may have through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence; that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations. It is for this the struggle should be maintained, that we may not lose our birthright.”
Fighting for that idea, keeping it uppermost in his mind, Lincoln found the inner strength to surmount his multitude of woesâthe vituperation he suffered throughout his presidency, the devastating loss of his cherished son Willie, the ensuing breakdown of his wife Mary, and above all the endless, endless war. The war consumed him, demanding almost all his energy from dawn until late into the night. He had almost no time for his family, for recreation beyond a daily carriage ride, for meals and leisurely jokes and laughter with old friends, for government matters unrelated to the
conflict. He seldom initiated legislation on Capitol Hill and used his veto less than any other important American President. Beyond signing his name, he had little connection with the homestead, railroad, and banking bills flowing out of the wartime capitol. Not that he lacked interest in such measures. No, they implemented his own national economic outlookâthey promoted the “material growth of the nation” and the rise of the “many,” and so were related to the central idea. Yet he was too preoccupied with the war to initiate economic legislation in Congress.
Every day, whenever he could spare a moment, Lincoln hurried to the telegraph office of the War Department to get the latest war news. He was there during almost all the crucial campaigns, pacing back and forth with his hands clasped behind him, sending out anxious telegraphic messages to some southern battlefront:
What news now? What from Hooker? What goes?
He even brought documents to the telegraph office and worked on them at a borrowed desk. It was here, as he awaited military developments, that he wrote an early draft of his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.
In short, the war and Lincoln's response to it defined him as a President. Here is a classic illustration of how the interaction of people and events shapes the course of history. As the war grew and changed, so Lincoln grew and changed. At first, he warned that the conflict must not turn into a “remorseless revolutionary struggle,” lest that cause wide-scale social and political wreckage. As a consequence, his initial war strategies were cautious and limited. But when the conflict ground on with no end in sight, Lincoln resorted to one harsh war measure after another to subdue the rebellion and save popular government: he embraced martial law, property confiscation, emancipation, Negro troops, conscription, and scorched-earth warfare. These turned the war into the very thing he had cautioned against: a remorseless revolutionary struggle whose concussions are still being felt.
And it became such a struggle because of Lincoln's unswerving commitment to the war's central idea.