The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (91 page)

One of the things that made this difficult was that the arithmetic kept changing, not only in the lengthening casualty lists, but also in the value fluctuations of what men carried in their wallets, a region where their threshold of pain was notoriously low. Gold opened the year at 152 on the New York market. By April it had risen to 175, by mid-June to 197, and by the end of that month to an astronomical 250. Reassurances from money men that the dollar was “settling down” brought the wry response that it was “settling down out of sight.” Sure enough, on July 11, as Early descended on Washington, gold soared to 285, reducing the value of the paper dollar to forty cents. Moreover, Lincoln faced this crisis without the help of the man who had advised him in such matters from the outset: Salmon Chase.

In late June, with the office of assistant treasurer of New York about to be vacated, the Secretary recommended a successor unacceptable to Senator Edwin D. Morgan of that state, who suggested three alternates for the post. “It will really oblige me if you will make a choice among these three,” Lincoln wrote Chase, explaining the political ramifications of a tiff with Morgan at this time. Chase then requested a personal interview, which Lincoln refused “because the difficulty does not, in the main part, lie within the range of a conversation between you and me.” In reaction to this snub, the Secretary went home and, as was his custom in such matters, “endeavored to seek God in prayer.” So he wrote in his diary that night, adding: “Oh, for more faith and clearer sight! How stable is the City of God! How disordered the City of Man!” Mulling it over he reached a decision. His resignation was on the presidential desk next morning. “I shall regard it as a real relief if you think proper to accept it,” he declared in a covering letter.

Lincoln read this fourth of the Ohioan’s petulant resignations, and accepted it forthwith. “Of all I have said in commendation of your
ability and fidelity, I have nothing to unsay,” he replied, “and yet you and I have reached a point of mutual embarrassment in our official relationship which it seems cannot be overcome or longer sustained consistently with the public service.” Ohio’s Governor John Brough, who happened to be in town, went to the White House in an attempt to “close the breach,” as he had done in one of the other instances of a threatened resignation, only to find that he could perform no such healing service here today. “You doctored the business up once,” Lincoln told him, “but on the whole, Brough, I reckon you had better let it alone this time.” Chase departed, still in something of a state of shock from the unexpected thunderclap, and retired to think things over, for a time, in the hills of his native New Hampshire.

A replacement was not far to seek. Next morning, July 1, when William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, called on the President to recommend someone else for the Treasury post, Lincoln smiled and informed him that his nomination had just been sent for approval by his colleagues on the Hill. Fessenden’s dismay was plain. “You must withdraw it. I cannot accept,” he protested. His health was poor; Congress was to adjourn tomorrow, and he looked forward to a vacation away from the heat and bustle of the capital. “If you decline, you must do it in open day,” Lincoln told him, “for I shall not recall the nomination.” Fessenden hurried over to the Senate in an attempt to block the move, only to find that he had been unanimously confirmed in about one minute. Regretfully, with congratulations pouring in from all quarters — even Chase’s — he agreed to serve, at least through the adjournment. A soft-money man like his predecessor, he was sworn in on July 5, and it was observed that no appointment by the President, except perhaps the elevation of Grant four months before, had met with such widespread approval by the public and the press. “Men went about with smiling faces at the news,” one paper noted.

Lincoln himself was not smiling by then. His trouble with Chase — whom he described as a man “never perfectly happy unless he is thoroughly miserable, and able to make everyone else just as uncomfortable as he is” — had been personal; Chase irked him and he got rid of him. But on the day after Fessenden’s appointment he found himself in an even more irksome predicament, one that was susceptible to no such resolution because the men involved were not subject to dismissal; not by him, at any rate. On the morning of July 2, last day of the congressional session that was scheduled to adjourn at noon, Lincoln sat in the President’s room at the Capitol, signing last-minute bills, including one that repealed the Fugitive Slave Law and another that struck the $300 commutation clause from the Draft Act. Both of these he signed gladly, along with others, but as he did so there was thrust upon him the so-called Wade-Davis bill, passed two months ago
by the House and by the Senate within the hour. He set it aside to go on with the rest, and when an interested observer asked if he intended to sign it, he replied that the bill was “a matter of too much importance to be swallowed in that way.”

He found it hard, in fact, to swallow the bill in any way at all, since what it represented was an attempt by Congress — more specifically, by the radicals in his party — to establish the premise that the legislative, not the executive, branch of government had the right and duty to define the terms for readmission to the Union by states now claiming to have left it; in other words, to set the tone of Reconstruction. Sponsored by Benjamin Wade in the Senate and Henry Winter Davis in the House, the bill proceeded from Senator Charles Sumner’s thesis that secession, though of course not legally valid, nonetheless amounted to “State suicide,” and it set forth certain requirements that would have to be met before the resurrected corpse could be readmitted to the family it had disgraced by putting a bullet through its head. Lincoln had done much the same thing in his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, back in December, but this new bill, designed not so much to pave as to bar the path to reunion, was considerably more stringent. Where he had required that ten percent of the qualified voters take a loyalty oath, the Wade-Davis measure required a majority. In addition, all persons who had held state or Confederate offices, or who had voluntarily borne arms against the United States, were forbidden to vote for or serve as delegates to state constitutional conventions; the rebel debt was to be repudiated, and slavery outlawed, in each instance. Moreover, this was no more than a precedent-setting first step; harsher requirements would come later, once the bill had established the fact that Congress, not the President, was the rightful agency to handle all matters pertaining to reconstruction of the South. Sumner and Zachariah Chandler in the Senate, Thaddeus Stevens and George W. Julian in the House — Jacobins all and accomplished haters, out for vengeance at any price — were strong in their support of the measure and were instrumental in ramming it through on this final day of the session.

Gideon Welles saw clearly enough what they were after, and put what he saw in his diary. “In getting up this law, it was as much an object of Mr. Henry Winter Davis and some others to pull down the Administration as to reconstruct the Union. I think they had the former more directly in view than the latter.” Lincoln thought so, too, and was determined to keep it from happening, if he could only find a way to do so without bringing on the bitterest kind of fight inside his party.

The fact was, he had already found what he perceived might be the beginning of a way when he set the bill aside to go on signing others. Zachariah Chandler, who had asked him whether he intended
to endorse it and had then been told that it was “too important to be swallowed in that way,” warned him sternly, in reference to the pending election: “If it is vetoed, it will damage us fearfully in the Northwest. The important point is the one prohibiting slavery in the reconstructed states.” “That is the point on which I doubt the authority of Congress to act.” “It is no more than you have done yourself.” “I conceive that I may, in an emergency, do things on military grounds which cannot be done constitutionally by Congress,” Lincoln replied, and Chandler stalked out, deeply chagrined.

His chagrin, and that of his fellow radicals, was converted to pure rage the following week — July 8; Early was crossing South Mountain to descend on Frederick — when Lincoln, having declined either to sign or to veto the bill, issued a public proclamation defending his action (or nonaction) on grounds that, while he was “fully satisfied” with some portions of the bill, he was “unprepared” to give his approval of certain others. “What an infamous proclamation!” Thaddeus Stevens protested. “The idea of pocketing a bill and then issuing a proclamation as to how far he will conform to it!”

By means of the “pocket veto,” as the maneuver came to be called, Lincoln managed to avoid, at least for a season, being removed from all connection with setting the guidelines for Reconstruction; but he had not managed to avoid a fight. Indeed, according to proponents of the bill now lodged in limbo, he had precipitated one. Convinced, as one of them declared, that his proposed course was “timid and almost pro-slavery,” they took up the challenge of his proclamation, which they defined as “a grave Executive usurpation,” and responded in more than kind, early the following month in the New York
Tribune
, with what became known as the Wade-Davis Manifesto. Seeking “to check the encroachments of the Executive on the authority of Congress, and to require it to confine itself to its proper sphere,” bluff Ben Wade and vehement Henry Davis charged that “a more studied outrage on the legislative authority of the people has never been perpetrated,” and they warned that Lincoln “must understand that our support is of a cause and not of a man,” especially not of a man who would connive to procure electoral votes at the cost of his country’s welfare.

All this the manifesto set forth, along with much else of a highly personal nature from the pens of these Republican leaders, just three months before the presidential election. Lincoln declined to read or discuss it, not wanting to be provoked any worse than he was already, but he remarked in this connection: “To be wounded in the house of one’s friends is perhaps the most grievous affliction that can befall a man.”

Horace Greeley, editor of the paper in which the radical manifesto made its appearance, had been involved for the past month in an affair that added to Lincoln’s difficulties in presenting himself as a man
of war who longed for peace. Hearing privately in early July that Confederate emissaries were waiting on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls with full authority to arrange an armistice, Greeley referred the matter to the President and urged in a long, high-strung letter that he seize the opportunity this presented to end the fighting. “Confederates everywhere [are] for peace. So much is beyond doubt,” he declared. “And therefore I venture to remind you that our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country also longs for peace — shudders at the prospect of fresh conscription, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood.” Placed thus in the position of having to investigate this reported gleam of sunlight (which he suspected would prove to be moonshine) Lincoln was prompt with an answer. “If you can find any person anywhere professing to have any proposition of Jefferson Davis in writing, for peace, embracing the restoration of the Union and the abandonment of slavery, whatever else it embraces, say to him he may come to me with you.” The editor, aware of the risk of ridicule, had not counted on being personally involved. He responded with a protest that the rebel agents “would decline to exhibit their credentials to me, much more to open their budget and give me their best terms.” Lincoln replied: “I was not expecting you to send me a letter, but to bring me a man, or men.” He also told Greeley, in a message carried by John Hay, who was to accompany him on the mission, “I not only intend a sincere effort for peace, but I intend that you shall be a personal witness that it is made.”

Being thus coerced, Greeley went with Hay to Niagara, where he discovered, amid the thunder and through the mist, what Lincoln had suspected from the start: that the “emissaries” not only had no authority to negotiate, either with him or with anyone else, but seemed to be in Canada for the purpose of influencing, by the rejection of their empty overtures, the upcoming elections in the North. He retreated hastily, though not in time to prevent a rash of Copperhead rumors that the President, through him, had scorned to entertain decent proposals for ending the bloodshed. Lincoln wanted to offset the effect of this by publishing his and Greeley’s correspondence, omitting of course the editor’s references to “our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country,” as well as his gloomy prediction of a Democratic victory in November. Greeley said no; he would consent to no suppression; either print their exchange in full or not at all. Obliged thereby to let the matter drop, Lincoln explained to his cabinet that it was better to withhold the letters, and abide the damaging propaganda, than “to subject the country to the consequences of their discouraging and injurious parts.”

Simultaneously, in the opposite direction — down in Richmond itself — another peace feeler was in progress, put forth by Federal emissaries who had no more official sanction than their Confederate
counterparts in Canada. Still, Lincoln had better hopes for this one, not so much because he believed that it would end the conflict, but rather, as he remarked, because he felt that it would “show the country I didn’t fight shy of Greeley’s Niagara business without a reason.” What he wanted was for the northern public to become acquainted with Jefferson Davis’s terms for an armistice, which he was sure would prove unacceptable to many voters who had been lured, in the absence of specifics, by the siren song of orators claiming that peace could be his for the asking, practically without rebel strings. Moreover, he got what he wanted, and he got it expressed in words as strong and specific as any he himself might have chosen for his purpose.

Colonel James F. Jaquess, a Methodist minister who had raised and led a regiment of Illinois volunteers, had become so increasingly shocked by the sight of fellow Christians killing each other wholesale — especially at Chickamauga, where he lost more than two hundred of his officers and men — that he obtained an extended leave of absence to see what he could do, on his own, to prepare the groundwork for negotiations. He had no success until he was joined in the effort by J. R. Gilmore, who enjoyed important Washington connections. A New York businessman, Gilmore had traveled widely in the South before the war, writing of his experiences under the pen name Edmund Kirke, and he managed to secure Lincoln’s approval of an unofficial visit to Richmond by Jaquess and himself, under a flag of truce, for the purpose of talking with southern leaders about the possibility of arriving at terms that might lead to a formal armistice. On Saturday, July 16, the two men were conducted past one of Ben Butler’s outposts and were met between the lines by Judge Robert Ould, head of the Confederate commission for prisoner exchange. By nightfall they were lodged in the Spotswood Hotel, in the heart of the rebel capital, Jaquess wearing a long linen duster over his blue uniform. Next morning, amid the pealing of church bells, they conferred with Judah Benjamin, who promised to arrange a meeting for them that evening, here in his State Department office, with the President himself. They returned at the appointed time, and there — as Gilmore later described the encounter — at the table, alongside the plump and smiling Benjamin, “sat a spare, thin-featured man with iron-gray hair and beard, and a clear, gray eye full of life and vigor.” Jefferson Davis rose and extended his hand. “I am glad to see you, gentlemen,” he said. “You are very welcome to Richmond.”