Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (35 page)

Lincoln was adept at sensing the mood of the country (at least that part of it that had not seceded). He did this by attending to his correspondents and to his callers. He might ignore their suggestions and refuse their requests, but he noted what they said. The hordes of petitioners, favor-seekers, well-wishers, would-be counselors, old ladies, clergymen, and disgruntled military officers who wrote him or trekked to the White House to see him were a four-year immersion in popular sentiment. There were no pollsters then to ask people questions; people came straight to Lincoln, by mail or in person, and spoke their minds.

He kept tabs on his team of rivals, observing their rivalries with each other and with himself. He might not take their advice, but he took their temperature. He always knew better what they were thinking than they
knew what he was thinking; if they schemed against him, he generally had a better sense of their chances of success than they themselves had.

On one occasion, circumstances forced his hand on a high-level personnel decision: in January 1862, he had to dismiss Simon Cameron for incompetence and waste; the Great Winnebago Chieftain was simply not up to running the War Department.
Lincoln replaced him with Edwin Stanton, impressed with his energy and intelligence, despite their awkward personal history. (Stanton would do an excellent job, and become devoted to Lincoln.) In every other controversy over cabinet personnel, whether caused by critics demanding a secretary’s head or by a secretary himself threatening to resign, the man in question stayed or left as Lincoln himself wished.

Another requirement of the presidency almost as important as political skill is that the president should look the part. George Washington, tall, graceful, strong, light-footed on the dance floor—and a centaur when he rode—had set the highest standard for his successors.

Lincoln’s appearance gave his enemies much to work with. His gangliness and his newly hirsute face suggested the higher primates. During the McCormick reaper case Stanton had called him a “long-armed ape,” and after his election critics nationwide took up the theme. A South Carolina newspaper called him “the Ourang Outang at the White House.” George McClellan, commander of the Union armies, called him “a well-meaning baboon” and a “gorilla.” Another Union officer fretted that when Lincoln reviewed the troops, he “grinn[ed] like a baboon.” Ape imagery had political resonance, since it was routinely used to degrade black people. If Lincoln, as an enemy of slavery, was their presumptive friend, it could be used to degrade him too. A century and a half later the African-American writer Toni Morrison would call Bill Clinton the first black president (this was before Barack Obama got the job). But she was wrong: Lincoln was.

Lincoln did have a way of showing himself to advantage, however. That was through the camera’s lens. The day of his Cooper Union address, he had gone to the studio of
Mathew Brady, on Broadway, to have
his picture taken. Brady was America’s premier photographer, and the image he made—Lincoln standing beside a “pillar” (actually a prop), with his left hand resting on a stack of books—would be the first view most Americans had of him. This was the clean-shaven Lincoln, before Grace Bedell wrote her letter. It was reproduced in lithographs, engravings, and small photographs during the 1860 campaign.

Even after Lincoln grew his beard, cameras looked, as they often do, beyond such an obvious feature to highlight others. The camera loved the bones of Lincoln’s cheeks, and the nose like a prow. But photographs inevitably alighted on his deep-set eyes (“his eyebrows,” wrote Herndon, “cropped out like a huge rock on the
brow of a hill”). Because he had to hold still for the long exposures of the day, his photographed eyes lacked the sparkle they showed when he laughed. But at rest they conveyed seriousness, sometimes sadness. They were the visible symbol of that strain of his personality that treasured dark poetry and skirted (or plunged into) depression.

Lincoln the mature politician usually guarded his sadness; literature offered a safe and circumscribed outlet for it. But close observers spotted it. Seward noticed this quality in Lincoln even before his inauguration: “The President,” he told a dinner party, “has a curious vein of sentiment running through his thought.” By “sentiment” he meant tender emotion rather than sentimentality. Then Seward added that it was Lincoln’s “most valuable
mental attribute.” Valuable not for an executive, but for a leader in time of war.

The way Lincoln reached people who never met him, or who wanted more than his picture, was through his words. Presidents then spoke less often than they do today; the Whig Party in which Lincoln had grown up, ever reacting against the example of Andrew Jackson, believed that presidents should speak even less than they did. But thanks to the troubled times in which Lincoln served, he spoke and wrote for public consumption more than was then normal.

A president typically gave an Inaugural Address and annual messages to Congress (these, unlike modern State of the Union addresses, were
delivered in writing, not in person). A president might also send messages to Congress on special occasions. In his proclamation of April 15, 1861, Lincoln called on Congress to assemble for a special session on July 4 to consider the crisis of disunion. When it met, he gave it a lengthy written overview of the rebellion so far and his thoughts on what should be done.

Lincoln made remarks to delegations of citizens who visited him and to revelers in the streets outside the White House celebrating Union victories. Occasionally he even traveled to nearby Maryland or Pennsylvania for ceremonies—fairs to raise money for treating wounded soldiers, the dedication of a cemetery—at which he would speak briefly. He was invited once to return to Springfield for a Republican rally, but rejected the idea as too time-consuming.

He made good use of an old practice. The founders had occasionally written letters, nominally personal, which they expected to be circulated among interested parties or even published. Jefferson surely knew that something as eloquent as his letter to John Holmes on the “fire-bell in the night” would be widely read as soon as he was dead, if it was not leaked to the newspapers beforehand. Lincoln used the technique to deal with one of his knottiest problems—suspending the writ of habeas corpus.

The US Constitution (Article I, Section 9) allows habeas corpus to be suspended during rebellions and invasions so that alleged wrongdoers can be arrested and tried by military tribunals rather than ordinary courts. In April 1861, to combat saboteurs,
Lincoln suspended habeas corpus along the rail line connecting Washington and Philadelphia. In September 1862, to allow the army to arrest anyone interfering with recruitment, he suspended it nationwide.

In 1863 a military tribunal went too far.
Clement Vallandingham, a vociferous antiwar Democrat from Ohio, gave a speech denouncing the war as “wicked, cruel and unnecessary,” fought “for the freedom of the blacks and the enslavement of the whites.” The army arrested him for discouraging enlistments—Who would volunteer to fight to free blacks
and enslave whites?—which only made him a martyr. Lincoln ordered Vallandingham released and exiled to the Confederacy, but he realized he needed to do more to undo the damage.

He got his chance when a New York Democrat, Erastus Corning, sent him a letter protesting Vallandingham’s treatment. Lincoln’s reply, a copy of which he mailed simultaneously to the
New York Tribune
, carefully explained the constitutional justification for suspending habeas corpus—something the administration had not yet done at length. He also went after Vallandingham. He used pathos, contrasting the politician’s fate with that of ordinary folk: “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?” He used humor, comparing rebellion to sickness and military tribunals to medicine, arguing that there was no chance of the remedy outlasting the disease: Would anyone “contract so strong an appetite for emetics during temporary illness as to persist in feeding upon them during the remainder of his healthful life?” The letter, reissued as a pamphlet, sold 500,000 copies and finished Vallandingham as a political leader. The Democrat left the Confederacy to run for governor of Ohio from Canadian soil, and was crushed.

Lincoln’s joke about feeding on emetics was in his best debater’s style: Paine on the platform, winning arguments by getting laughs. As a rule, however, Lincoln as president saved the jokes for personal interactions, to distract and to lighten his own mood. He loved other people’s jokes as much as his own. His favorite humorist was David Ross Locke, a journalist with the
Toledo Blade
, who wrote under the persona of Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby. Locke’s creation had the opinions of Clement Vallandingham and the vocabulary—elaborately misspelled—of a tavern-keeper. “There is now 15 niggers, men, wimin and children . . . in Wingert’s Corners [Nasby’s fictional hometown], and yisterday another arrove. I am bekomin alarmed, fer if they inkreese at this rate, in suthin over sixty yeres they’ll hev a majority
in the town.” Lincoln thought
Nasby was hilarious, and he would regale callers and his cabinet with his latest grotesqueries.

For his public pronouncements, however, Lincoln generally wrote and spoke seriously. He held the highest office in the land at the worst moment of its history, and he suited his rhetoric to his place and time. His style was direct, sometimes tinged with poetry; occasionally, when reaching for an effect, he overreached, yet he regularly managed to tap what Seward had called the vein of sentiment.

The conclusion of his second
Annual Message to Congress, given in December 1862, showed him finding his range. His topic was how the end of the war might be hastened by ending slavery; Lincoln wanted to impress Congress with the magnitude of the question and the weight of their shared responsibility, and he finished with three rhetorical strokes, like chimes. “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.” This was an attempt at loftiness—a failed attempt. There was a little too much horsehair stuffing in it. After a few beats, Lincoln tried again: “
We
cannot escape history.” This was better, a statement as simple as it was sweeping. Then, after a few more beats, bull’s-eye: “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth.” This was as lofty as Henry Clay at his most eloquent; it was sweeping, surveying all of history; the cluster of monosyllables, varied by only two adverbs, seems as plain as dirt, but there is gold dust in it: the sliding
l
s, the very intonations of loss, are stopped by the sharp almost-rhyme of
last/best
.

Words alone do not win wars or lead men, but what words could do, Lincoln’s would.

Lincoln’s task as the Civil War unfolded was twofold: to preserve the Union and to fulfill the goals of the Republican Party.

Preserving the Union was his duty under the Constitution. The oath of office, prescribed in Article II, Section 1, bound him to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Fulfilling the goals of the Republican Party was the condition under which he had won his office. Although the founding fathers professed to dislike parties—
Madison, in the
Federalist
, called them “factions,” and Washington
in his Farewell Address warned against them—they themselves created the first two-party system (Republicans vs. Federalists) almost as soon as their Constitution went into effect. In seventy-one years of presidential elections, parties large and small had come and gone, and in one case changed names (Jefferson’s Republicans becoming Jackson’s Democrats). But parties themselves had become an inescapable feature of American political life—the mechanisms by which leaders acquired office and the people expressed their will.

Lincoln might have saved the Union immediately after his election simply by abandoning the principles on which he and the Republican Party had run. There were various efforts to urge him to do just that. One compromise proposal, floated in December 1860 by John Crittenden, an old Whig senator from Kentucky, would have pushed the Missouri line to California by constitutional amendment, and made this amendment unchangeable. Lincoln had begun his rise to the White House by fighting to restore the Missouri line—but that was the old line, dividing slavery from freedom in the former Louisiana territory. An extended line, crossing the continent and graven into the Constitution, would be an incentive, Lincoln wrote, to grabbing “all [territory] south of us, and making slave
states of it”—Central America, the Caribbean, whatever might be won in a new Mexican War. “A year will not pass,” he predicted, “until we shall have
to take Cuba” to satisfy slaveholders. Indeed, expansion into the subtropics was the only way an outnumbered South could recover parity in the Senate. But Republicans, as Lincoln wrote Alexander Stephens, thought slavery was “
wrong
and ought to
be restricted.” On any proposal to let it grow into new territories, Lincoln was “
inflexible.”