Authors: Stephen B. Oates
He had come a long distance from the harassed political candidate of 1858, opposed to emancipation lest his political career be jeopardized, convinced that only the distant future could remove slavery from his troubled land, certain that only colonization could solve the ensuing problem of racial adjustment. He had also come a long way in the matter of Negro social and political rights, as we shall see. The Proclamation had indeed liberated Abraham Lincoln, enabling him to act more consistently with his moral convictions.
He had none of the racial prejudice that infected so many whites of that time, even advanced Republicans like Benjamin Wade. Frederick Douglass, who interviewed Lincoln in 1863, said he was “the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color.” Other blacks also testified that the President treated them as they wanted to be treatedâas human beings with feelings. He did not tell dialect jokes in their presence, did not condescend to them,
did not spell out his thoughts in imbecilic one-syllable language, as did many other whites when speaking to Negroes. He opened the White House doors to black visitors as no other President had ever done before and as few would do after. At his New Year's reception in 1865, he shook hands with a parade of Negro men and women, some in their Sunday finest, others in patched overalls, who had come to pay their respects to the man who signed “the Freedom bill.”
During his inaugural reception that March, the President learned that Frederick Douglass was at the front door of the executive mansion, but was having trouble getting past the police because he was a Negro. Lincoln had him shown in at once, hailed him as “my friend Douglass,” and asked what he thought of the Inaugural Address. “There is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours,” Lincoln said. Douglass replied that he was impressed, that he thought it “a sacred effort.” “I am glad you liked it!” Lincoln said. In truth, he strongly identified with this proud black man, referring to “the similarity with which I had fought my way up, we both starting off at the lowest round of the ladder.”
Douglass, reflecting back on Lincoln's presidency, recalled how in the first year and a half of the war, Lincoln “was ready and willing” to sacrifice black people for the benefit and welfare of whites. But since the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Douglass said, American blacks had taken Lincoln's measure and had come to admire and some to love this complicated man. Though Lincoln had taxed Negroes to the limit, they had decided, in the roll and tumble of events, that “the how and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln.”
Lincoln became a tough wartime President, flexing his executive muscles and expanding his war powers whenever necessity demanded. “Necessity,” he argued, “knows no law.” In the exigency of domestic insurrection, he would do whatever he thought imperative to save the country and all it represented. Yet he did not intend to establish a precedent for an “imperial presidency,” one that would allow subsequent chief executives to meddle in the internal affairs of other nations, under the pretext of saving the world. In short, we cannot blame Lincoln for Lyndon Johnson's disastrous policy in Vietnam. Except for emancipation, Lincoln regarded all of his severe war measures as temporary necessities to end the rebellion and preserve the American experiment, the central idea of the war.
Consider his emergency measures during the eighty days between the outbreak of war and the convening of Congress on Independence Day, 1861. Since rebel forces were threatening to occupy Washington and the nation was on the brink of disintegration, Lincoln met with his Cabinet, and they all decided that they must assume broad emergency powers or let the government fall. Accordingly, Lincoln directed that Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles empower several individualsâamong them his own brother-in-lawâto forward troops and supplies to embattled Washington. The President allowed his Secretary of War to authorize the governor of New York and one Alexander Cummings to transport troops and acquire supplies for the public defense. Since Lincoln believed that government departments brimmed with traitors, he
himself chose private citizens known for “their ability, loyalty, and patriotism” to spend public money for arms and military preparations. Perhaps these emergency measures were “without authority of law,” Lincoln told Congress later, but he deemed them absolutely necessary to save popular government itself. And his Cabinet unanimously agreed.
With Cabinet approval, Lincoln also declared a blockade of the southern coast, added 22,000 men to the regular army and 18,000 to the navy, called for 42,000 three-year volunteers, and put national armories into full production. As Lincoln subsequently informed Congress, “These measures, whether strictly legal or not, were ventured upon, under what appeared to be a popular demand, and public necessity; trusting, then as now, that Congress would readily ratify them.” When Congress convened in July, it did indeed ratify “all the acts, proclamations, and orders of the President” relating to the army and navy and the volunteers, “as if they had been issued and done under the previous express authority and direction of Congress.” In short, if Lincoln went beyond the letter of the law to save the government, Congress sanctioned his actions.
Generally Congress did the same in the area of martial law and military arrests. From the outset, Lincoln dealt harshly with “the enemy in the rear”âwith what he called “a most efficient corps of spies, informers, suppliers, and aiders and abettors” of the rebellion who took advantage of “Liberty of speech, Liberty of the press and
Habeas corpus
” to disrupt the Union war effort. Consequently, he suspended the writ of habeas corpusâwhich required that a citizen be told why he was being heldâand authorized army commanders to declare martial law in various areas behind the lines and to try civilians in military courts without juries. Lincoln openly defended such an invasion of civil liberties, contending that strict measures were essential if the laws of the Unionâand liberty itselfâwere to survive the war.
Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus infuriated Roger B. Taney, Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, who
accused the President of usurping power. Taney argued that only Congress could legally suspend the writ, and he admonished Lincoln not to violate the very laws he had sworn to defend. “Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted,” Lincoln asked Congress, in reference to habeas corpus, “and the government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated?” Moreover, the Constitution did not specify which branch of the government could suspend the writ, so that Lincoln did not think he had broken any laws or violated his oath of office.
Still, he invoked his presidential powers in heretofore undreamed-of ways, as we have seen in the matter of emancipation. Recall, though, the novelty of the war. Nothing like this had ever occurred in America, and there were no guidelines in dealing with dissent and national security in the midst of a giant domestic insurrection that imperiled the nation itself. As in most war matters, Lincoln and his Cabinet found themselves in uncharted legal territory.
In 1862 the President centralized jurisdiction over internal-security matters in the War Department. To deal with such matters, the department created a corps of civilian provost marshals, but allowed them too much independence in policing and jailing alleged disloyalists. Their zealous, far-ranging operations led to widespread criticism of the Lincoln administration. At the same time, Lincoln's War Department empowered army officers to apprehend anybody who discouraged volunteering or otherwise helped the enemy. And the department got up dragnets in which state militia, home guards, police chiefs, and vigilantes all participated. In all, they seized and imprisoned at least 14,000 peopleâmany of them antiwar Democratsâunder Lincoln's authority. The outcry against arbitrary arrests became so strident that Lincoln tried to restrain excessive use of power whenever he could. He speedily ordered the release of people unwarrantedly arrested, especially political prisoners. Also, when General Ambrose E. Burnside suspended the Chicago
Times
for virulent outbursts against the administration, Lincoln promptly revoked the order.
The most controversial military arrest was that of Clement L. Vallandigham, an Ohio congressman and a leading antiwar Democrat. “Valiant Val,” as his friends called him, accused Lincoln of dishonoring the Constitution with his “tyrannical” measures, of abandoning the war for the Union in favor of a crusade for Negroes in which the white people were to be enslaved. “I see nothing before us,” he warned war-weary northerners, “but universal political and social revolution, anarchy and bloodshed, compared with which the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution was a merciful visitation.” For Vallandigham, the solution was clear: stop the fighting and negotiate a peace with the rebels that would somehow restore the old Union and the old certitudes. Stumping Ohio in the spring of 1863, he denounced abolition, the war, and the despotism of “King Lincoln” and demanded a truce with the Confederacy. During one of his orations, an officer in civilian dress, detailed from General Burnside's headquarters, leaned against the platform taking notes. Three days later an infantry column broke into his Dayton home at midnight, found him in his underwear, gave him time to dress, and hauled him off to prison in Cincinnati. Dayton citizens rioted in protest, but to no avail. A military commission convicted Vallandigham of undermining government efforts “to suppress an unlawful rebellion” and sentenced him to imprisonment for the duration of the war.
Across the North, Democrats demanded Vallandigham's release and castigated Lincoln for exercising “arbitrary power” at the expense of liberty. In an open letter to them, Lincoln spoke bluntly in his own defense. Because he had “a reverence for the guaranteed rights of individuals,” Lincoln said, he had been “slow to adopt the strong measures, which by degrees I have been forced to regard as being within the exceptions of the constitution, and as indispensable to the public Safety.” He pointed out that military arrests of civilians had been made to
prevent
injury to the Union war effort; his government could not always wait for overt acts of treason before it moved. Had he promptly arrested traitors like Robert E. Lee, Lincoln said, it would almost certainly have weakened the rebellion and shortened the war. In truth, he ar
gued, “the time [is] not unlikely to come when I shall be blamed for having made too few arrests rather than too many.”
As for Vallandigham, the army had seized him because he was “laboring, with some effect, to prevent the raising of troops, to encourage desertions from the army, and to leave the rebellion without an adequate military force to suppress it.” In short, he was “warring upon the military,” on which the very life of the nation depended. Long experience, Lincoln went on, demonstrated that armies could not be maintained unless desertion was punished by the death penalty. “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts,” Lincoln asked, “while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert? This is none the less injurious when effected by getting a father, a brother, or friend, into a public meeting, and there working upon his feelings, till he is persuaded to write the soldier boy, that he is fighting in a bad cause, for a wicked administration of a contemptible government, too weak to arrest and punish him if he shall desert. I think that in such a case, to silence the agitator, and save the boy, is not only constitutional, but, withal, a great mercy.” Though he may actually have regretted Vallandigham's arrest, Lincoln refused to pardon him, instead ordering Vallandigham banished to the Confederacy.
Lincoln admitted that internal security in the midst of civil war was a complex problem and that errors and excesses had occurred. It pained him that government agents often confused antiwar rhetoric with disloyal designs and that innocent people suffered. That was why he tempered military arrests with generous pardons and refused to suppress popular assemblies and antiwar newspapers. Yet throughout the conflict he maintained a severe line on disloyalty; and most Republicans supported him. Without military law, they all feared, the rebellion would rage into the North and consume the government from within.
Lincoln was a tough warrior in other ways, too. He fully endorsed military conscriptionâwhich Congress authorized in April, 1863âand saw to it that the War Department rigorously
enforced the measure. No matter what some historians have claimed, the President also enforced the confiscation of enemy property, believing as he did that “the traitor against the general government” should forfeit his farms, plantations, and other property as just punishment for the crime of insurrection.
Still, Lincoln was no dictatorâthe very idea appalled him, for it violated everything he held sacred in government. In fact, one of the major reasons he remains our best President is that he shunned a dictatorship, even when some Americans thought it the only way to save the country. But what kind of country would remain if popular government itself were sacrificed? Was it not for this that the war was being fought? Consider Lincoln's stand on the presidential election of 1864. With Union fortunes still uncertain, some men urged Lincoln to cancel the contest lest it result in the victory of antiwar Democrats who would sell out the Union cause. Lincoln refused. “The election,” he said later, “was a necessity.” “We can not have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered us.” So he ran against George B. McClellan and the peace plank of the Democratic party, and he won in a fair and open contest.