Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (50 page)

Long exposure times made for fixed and dour faces amongst photographic subjects, but there is a rare hint of a smile of assurance in this picture of Lincoln, taken a month after the Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. The president fittingly holds in his left hand a copy of John Wien Forney’s ultra-loyal Washington
Daily Morning Chronicle.

Naturally enough, the publication societies put the president’s own words to their patriotic purposes. But Lincoln intervened directly himself. Wanting to ensure that his Corning letter, of which he was particularly proud, was not merely reproduced in friendly newspapers, he had it printed and sent to Republicans across the country on the frank of his private secretary. This kept the chief executive personally immune to charges of squalid electioneering but indicated the importance he attached to the letter’s circulation. The recipients included Francis Lieber, who wrote to assure the president that the Loyal Publication Society of New York would run off ten thousand copies. Around half a million of what another New Yorker described as “the best Campaign document we can have in this state” were produced for voters and for soldiers in the field.
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In that letter, as indeed elsewhere, Lincoln pursued the same intelligent political strategy that he had adopted from the outset, one which equated the Union-Republican party with inclusive, “large-tent” patriotism and dressed the opponents of the administration in the clothes of narrow, illegitimate faction. Corning and his fellow protesters had consciously chosen to call themselves “Democrats,” Lincoln noted with regret, “rather than ‘American citizens.’ ” He lamented that, in a “time of national peril,” they had chosen not to engage “upon a level one step higher than any party platform; because I am sure that from such [a] more elevated position, we could do better battle for the country we all love, than we possibly can from those lower ones,” where habit, prejudice, and “selfish hopes of the future” diverted energies into wasteful partisan warfare. “But since you have denied me this,” he added skillfully, “I will yet be thankful, for the country’s sake, that not all democrats have done so.” And, with that, he gathered the latter-day heirs of Andrew Jackson into the folds of the Union party.
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Making Republicans and Unionists one, defining them not as a conventional party but—in Lincoln’s public words to Conkling—as a patriotic home for all “noble men, whom no partizan malice, or partizan hope, can make false to the nation’s life”: this was how the Republicans managed “to delegitimize the opposition” and simultaneously allow Democrats the political leeway to support the administration but avoid the guilt of party betrayal.
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Lincoln and his party brilliantly managed to denigrate partisanship as the weapon of traitors and their fellow travelers, while yet garnering the advantages of a continuing two-party system.

The fall elections of 1863 marked the high point to date of this strategy of nonpartisan partisanship. The patriotic Union Leagues, with their membership rituals, oaths to the flag and the Bible, and mass meetings, may not have enjoyed formal links with the administration party, but in every essential respect they functioned as a force of electoral mobilization. In the key states the leagues’ energies fused with those of the formidable publication societies and the more conventional party organizers, to seek the electoral benefits of the upturn in the Union’s military fortunes in the summer and fall. Etiquette stopped Lincoln from openly campaigning, but whereas in 1862 he was sure his unpopularity made him a political liability, he now took a much more active interest in the Union-Republican canvasses, aware of their significance for his chances of reelection in 1864. He was not disappointed. Vallandigham’s defeat in the Ohio gubernatorial race and Curtin’s victory in Pennsylvania provided the administration with especially heartening successes. They suggested the disabling effect on the anti-administration forces of laboring under the tag of “rebel sympathizers,” while showing how the Republicans’ claim to patriotism and conservatism could bind many who still thought of themselves as Democrats into the Union coalition.
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POPULAR MOBILIZATION: CHURCHES AND PHILANTHROPIC ORGANIZATIONS

The churches and the benevolent organizations they sustained can claim to have been the first truly effective national networks in the United States. More consistently than any other governmental or voluntary agency in the early republic, they drew ordinary people into an arena extending beyond their locality and state. Being a member of a church usually meant being part of a denominational connection whose preachers and press gave members a taste of the world beyond, mobilizing them in pursuit of ambitious benevolent causes, national and international in scope. At the outbreak of the Civil War this network of churches and related philanthropic reform societies gave the North a potent weapon. Recruiting the clergy and lay leaders as active advocates of the Union cause would give the administration direct access to the nation’s largest complex of subcultures. In particular, it would harness the forces of evangelical Protestantism—the millions of Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and others who together formed the most formidable religious grouping in the country.

Lincoln had not needed the election of 1860, with its unprecedented fusing of religion and politics, to remind him that the American experiment of separating church and state had done little to blunt the political appetites of the clergy and their members. He could equally have been in no doubt about the subsequent rallying of the northern churches to the cause of Union. Bombarded by the resolutions of ecclesiastical bodies, besieged by religious deputations, and in regular receipt of the
New York
Independent,
the most influential of all religious papers, Lincoln and his White House secretaries were well equipped to gauge the shifts in religious opinion. Northern clergy, divided before the war over slavery, now united in defense of the Union, as the “higher law” minority of radical antislaveryites found common cause with “law and order” conservatives. Much of their analysis, even their words, echoed Lincoln’s own. Secession constituted rebellion and treachery when urged, as by Confederates, without good cause. It was an act of national suicide and anarchy, for its underlying principle destroyed all government. (Wisconsin Methodists rehearsed the
argumentum ad absurdum:
“Wisconsin may secede from the Union. . . . So this county may secede from Wisconsin, this township from the county, and this village from the township; and the fast boy who steals his father’s purse may secede.”) To destroy the American Union was to end a glorious and historically unique experiment in political and religious freedom, one revolving around government by the people, “the best form of government on earth.” The Union’s failure would resonate beyond the current time and place, for to sustain republicanism was to fight for “the peace of future ages . . . for free government in our land and in all the lands for all ages to come.”
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Thus the Union was not just politically significant; it had meaning for the romantic and spiritual sensibilities of Americans. Protestants prized it as the vehicle for God’s unique role for America within human history. The “acute millennial consciousness” of North American Protestants, carried to the New World by the original Puritan settlers and successively passed down to each new generation, gave the new nation a powerful sense of being God’s instrument in the coming of his Kingdom. Its physical geography and natural resources indicated the oneness that God had intended for it. For the first seven decades of the republic’s existence, most Protestants believed that the fusion of evangelical piety and republican government would have such a powerful moral effect that the Kingdom of God would be inaugurated by persuasion alone, without the need for arms. But southern secessionists, in an act of destruction that challenged God’s Providence, had changed all that. And whereas in the antebellum generation the call to defend the Union had been the cry of northern conservatives eager to find common ground with southern churches, it now became, in the historian James Moorhead’s words, a cry “infused with a new moral significance. . . . The holy Union that Northerners defended was no longer the compromise-tainted object of earlier years; it was democratic civilization in collision with an alien way of life.”
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If the majority of Protestants accepted the government’s initial definition of the war exclusively as a struggle to reestablish the Constitution and laws, there were those like Thomas Eddy who predicted from the start that the “logic of events” would transform it into an assault on slavery. With contrabands filling the Union camps, making the government further complicit in slavery, it seemed clear to one Methodist bishop, Leonidas Hamline, that “the North, under the present war regimen, has become responsible for slavery as never before, and must, under military rule, pronounce the slaves free, or God will not allow us to suppress this rebellion.” Through 1862 even cautious evangelicals warmed to emancipation and the use of black troops as divinely proffered means of ending the suffering and restoring the Union. American history, the culmination of world history, would resolve the battle between the Antichrist and the Christian order; between southern slavery, feudalism, and the Cavalier mentality on one side and freedom—Yankee and Puritan—on the other. Slavery was “waiting at Armageddon for the hosts of righteousness to march out and put him to final rout.” When it came, the Emancipation Proclamation appeared to purify the war and the nation, opening the way to victory. Exultant Wisconsin Wesleyans reminded Lincoln of God’s assurance that “if we take away from our midst the yoke . . . our light Shall break forth as the morning Our health Shall Spring forth Speedily and the glory of the Lord Shall be our reward.”
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Lincoln, as president, acted like a typical New England Whig in his easy acceptance of religion’s role in public affairs. He worked hard to keep open two-way channels with religious leaders, especially evangelicals, and to deal sensitively with them, aware not only of their power but also of the deep reservoir of goodwill on which he could draw. If it is not clear how much Lincoln’s cultivation of their company had to do with his own spiritual quest, there is no doubt that those contacts provided him with a way of reaching potent opinion-formers. In informal conversations at the White House he met the full denominational gamut of religious visitors who arrived confident of a catholic welcome from a president known for his nonsectarian tolerance and religious humility. Some came to lecture, some to deliver homilies, some to seek appointments, others merely to pay respects or renew acquaintance. They included the strategically placed, including editors of mass-circulation papers like Henry Ward Beecher and Theodore Tilton, denominational leaders like Matthew Simpson, and distinguished abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison. There were representatives of the chief wartime philanthropic bodies, particularly Henry Bellows and George H. Stuart of the United States Sanitary Commission, the most formidable and practical of the agencies devoted to the medical care and well-being of soldiers in the field.

Lincoln also held more formal meetings with delegations from particular denominations (Friends, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and others), from particular localities (notably the visit of leading Chicago clergy in September 1862), and from particular causes (including Sabbatarians, Sons of Temperance, Covenanters seeking a Christian amendment to the federal Constitution, and the U.S. Christian Commission). On occasion humor threatened to get the better of him, as when he told a delegation of temperance reformers that battlefield losses could not be blamed on the demon alcohol “as the rebels drink more & worse whiskey than we do.” Some failed to understand the political value of these meetings, seeing only an oppressed president deferring weakly to pressure groups. “I wish that Halleck would put a Guard on the White House to keep out the Committees of preachers, Grannies and Dutchmen that absorb Lincoln’s time and thought,” grumbled William T. Sherman.
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In fact, Lincoln turned these meetings to his political advantage, commonly responding to his visitors’ formal addresses with his own carefully crafted words.

There were other ways of reaching out to the influential religious element, not least through presidential patronage, which offered a means of stroking the institutional egos of churches, especially those which complained of neglect or discrimination. Inclusive Unionism, Lincoln understood, meant opening the door to Jewish army chaplains (just as it prompted him to overturn Grant’s ban on “Jew peddlers,” because it proscribed “an entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks”).
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It also meant giving special attention to the Methodists, who had for some time felt that their nationwide power had been undervalued in Washington. Now, in recognition of the Methodists’ sheer numbers and reputation for full-blooded Unionism, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton showered army contracts on their laymen. He also, in 1863, put at Bishop Edward Ames’s disposal those “secessionist” southern Methodist meetinghouses in vanquished areas lacking a loyal ministry. When Lincoln found out, he called on Stanton to rescind the order, unhappy at the blurring of the line separating governmental and ecclesiastical jurisdiction.
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Even so, the essential trust between the administration and the Methodist bishops was not compromised: important here was Lincoln’s willingness to honor many of Bishop Simpson’s requests for political offices for his co-denominationalists, the most notable being the appointments through James Harlan as secretary of the interior.
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