Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (37 page)

Kentucky was critical. If it seceded, the Union anaconda would have to swallow the Ohio River before it could begin on the Mississippi. “To lose Kentucky,” Lincoln wrote, “is nearly the same as to lose the
whole game.” At the end of May 1861, Kentucky declared itself neutral. Lincoln, without conceding that a state had any power to do such a thing, bided his time. Confederate troops moved into the western end of the state in September, which allowed local unionists to depict them as aggressors. Thereafter, despite numerous battles and raids, the state was officially in the Union camp. Throughout, Lincoln took counsel from his old friend Joshua Speed, who was now living in Kentucky, and from his own sense, as a native son, of how important and how delicately balanced the state was.

Lincoln’s very sensitivity to Kentucky could be used against him, however. Benjamin Wade, a Republican senator from Ohio, disliked Lincoln for his caution, and believed that Lincoln’s Kentucky roots were the source of it: Lincoln, he said, was “
poor white trash.” Vilification was one of the few race-blind enterprises in America: Lincoln could simultaneously be a degraded white man and a degraded black man.

Lincoln welcomed the support, so far as it was offered, of unionist Democrats. Most northern Democrats were incensed by the fall of Fort Sumter, none more so than Stephen Douglas. Lincoln’s longtime rival had wanted him to call up 200,000 militia in April 1861 instead of 75,000. A high-strung temperament and years of hard drinking had undermined Douglas’s health, however, and he died, at age forty-eight, in June. Lincoln ordered the White House to be draped in mourning for thirty days.

One southern Democrat shared Douglas’s unionist passion. Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, a former tailor, was a self-made populist. Although he was proslavery, he was virulently anti-secession. His opinion of his fellow southerners as the nation came unglued was that they “ought to be
hanged for all this.” Johnson had to flee his state when it seceded, but he would return as military governor.

Lincoln’s support among Democrats waxed and waned with the tide of battle and with their opportunities to find partisan advantage. Democrats looked for weapons to attack their Republican rivals in the Constitution (by defending habeas corpus) and in the gutter (by upholding racism). Lincoln, for his part, looked to the Democrats for occasional allies and for opportunities to sow confusion. When New York elected a Democratic governor, Horatio Seymour, in 1862, Lincoln reached out to him, suggesting that if he supported the war zealously he might be the next president. Was Lincoln offering Seymour a promise of future support, or the appearance of a promise, to lull him? Bait, or
bait in a trap? Seymour responded cautiously. Soon enough, ordinary partisanship resumed, and the two leaders were fighting openly.

Lincoln’s main support in running his administration, and therefore in keeping the country together, was his own party, the Republicans. They commanded majorities in both houses of Congress throughout his administration (though Democrats made gains in the midterm elections of 1862, after it became clear that the war would not be won quickly). But dominance can be a temptation to disagree—there are so many of us, we can afford to fight among ourselves. Lincoln had to
employ all his talents to keep Republicans in good spirits and away from each other’s throats.

One of his most magnanimous acts was to defend Simon Cameron after he was eased out of the cabinet as secretary of war. Lincoln made him minister to Russia in February 1862 as consolation. But in Cameron’s absence, a House committee investigating the War Department issued a damning report, detailing bad contracts that had been hastily issued in the first days of the war, and calling for Cameron to be censured. Lincoln wrote Congress saying that he and the rest of the cabinet were “at least equally responsible” for Cameron’s mismanagement: the times had required stopgap measures, and everyone in the administration had approved them. Cameron was overwhelmed with gratitude. “Very many men in your situation,” he wrote Lincoln from St. Petersburg, “would have permitted an innocent man
to suffer.” And very many more men would have permitted an incapable one to take all the blame. Cameron would never forget Lincoln’s generosity, and Lincoln would be able to call on him later.

In December 1862 Lincoln had to frustrate a
power play by his treasury secretary, Salmon P. Chase, and the Republican Senate caucus. After the disappointing midterm elections and the debacle of Fredericksburg, there was a powerful desire to find a scapegoat. Chase and his congressional friends settled on Secretary of State William Seward, whom they accused of running the administration himself, and of running it into the ground. When Seward learned of their charges, he wrote Lincoln offering to resign.

Lincoln did not want to be seen as Seward’s tool, and he did not want senators dictating his cabinet—especially not senators who were in cahoots with one of his own secretaries. He wrong-footed Chase by inviting a committee of unhappy senators to present their complaints about the administration to a meeting of the entire cabinet (minus Seward). When secretary after secretary assured the senators that Seward was no dark mastermind, and that all of them had the president’s ear, Chase buckled. Confronted by the unanimous testimony of
his colleagues, he was not bold enough to be the only man in the room to criticize Seward.

After the meeting, Chase’s Senate allies scorned him for his failure to speak up. Why had he said one thing to them, and another in front of the full cabinet? One angry senator offered a pithy explanation: “He lied.” Chase, mortified, offered to resign himself. Lincoln then wrote to both Seward and Chase, asking them to stay at their posts (both, after all, were competent men). Seward agreed happily, Chase morosely. Lincoln kept the secretaries he wanted, kept a congressional faction at bay, and kept himself in charge. Sometimes a leader must manipulate men in secret; sometimes he must manipulate them openly, to show his mastery.

These intra-Republican fights were about more than personalities. The Republicans, like any major party, embraced different shades of opinion. In Lincoln’s cabinet, Caleb Smith (who would resign in December 1862 from ill health) and Edward Bates tended to favor moderate courses; so did the Blairs, despite their combative natures. Seward continued to take the moderate tone he had assumed before Lincoln’s inauguration. His moderation was the effect of his congenital optimism. Once the war began, he was convinced that the victory of the Union and the destruction of slavery were assured: Why push too hard at an open door? Chase and his congressional friends—Charles Sumner, Benjamin Wade—thought of themselves as Radicals, as did Stanton.

Lincoln mastered tendencies as well as men. He managed to place himself in the center of Republican opinion and to keep its factions, if not happy—there were almost always some Republicans who were unhappy about something—at least not rebellious. One newspaper described Lincoln’s maneuvers this way: “The art of riding two horses is not confined to the
circus.”

As he worked to preserve the Union, Lincoln simultaneously advanced the Republican Party’s goals—in his terse summary to Alexander Stephens, “We think [slavery] is wrong, and ought to be
restricted.”

On the question of slavery’s expansion, Lincoln had told his fellow Republicans that he was “inflexible.” He was in fact a bit flexible: he was willing to allow slavery in the New Mexico territory—the present state plus Arizona. But he opposed any deal that would give slavery a free field in Central America or the Caribbean. The secession of the South and its congressmen, coupled with Republican dominance of the White House and Capitol Hill, put the territorial question to rest after forty years of contention: in May 1862 Congress formally ended slavery in all the territories.

Lincoln showed his belief in the wrongness of slavery in other ways. In December 1861 he called for diplomatic recognition of Liberia and Haiti. Liberia was a project of the American Colonization Society, and Haiti had been liberated in an eighteenth-century slave revolt, the largest in modern history. Diplomatic recognition of these countries was a symbolic statement about slavery, and even race; one Democratic newspaper worried about “
strapping negro” ambassadors coming to Washington.

Slavery itself was abolished in the District of Columbia, a goal Lincoln had discussed as long ago as 1837. In the summer of 1862 Congress passed a bill emancipating the District’s slaves immediately and compensating owners. Lincoln, who had long favored compensation, preferred gradual, not immediate, emancipation, and worried what effect the bill might have in the border states. But he signed it anyway.

The foreign slave trade had been illegal since 1808, and had been equated with piracy, a capital crime, since 1820. Yet, although America maintained an Atlantic naval squadron to seize slave ships, only one American had ever been convicted of the crime, and he had been given a light sentence and a fine (the latter pardoned by President Buchanan). In November 1861 Captain Nathaniel Gordon, a slaver from Portland, Maine, who had been captured off the Congo River with a shipload of almost nine hundred slaves bound for Cuba, was tried in New York City and sentenced to death. Lincoln gave him a two-week stay of execution to prepare his soul, but warned him to “relinquish . . . all expectation of pardon by
Human Authority.” In February 1862 Gordon was hanged.

Lincoln continued to pursue the idea of colonization, which was, in his own mind, part of the solution to the problem of slavery. In his speech on the
Dred Scott
decision, he had compared blacks to the Jews of the Bible, destined for their own homeland; the land he had in mind as president was not Liberia but Central America. The Chiriqui coast on the Isthmus of Panama seemed to be a likely spot; it was supposed to have coal mines, and the isthmus was a busy trade route. The Blairs were enthusiastic supporters of colonization; they envisioned outposts of free blacks as vanguards of American influence in the Caribbean Basin. Lincoln and the Blairs contemplated a black-only version of the slave owners’ dream of southern expansion.

In August 1862 Lincoln asked to meet a delegation of free black men from Washington, DC, picked by their churches, to push his Central American scheme. While calling slavery “the greatest wrong inflicted on any people,” he said that free blacks could not hope to be treated as equals in America: “[I] present it as a fact with which we have to deal. I cannot alter it if I would.” So why shouldn’t they move elsewhere? He tried to inspire them by comparing the hardships of emigration to George Washington’s trials during the Revolution—“yet [Washington] was a happy man, because he was engaged in benefiting his race.” He ended with auctioneer’s patter. “Could I get a hundred tolerably intelligent men” to try it? “Can I have fifty? If I could find
twenty five . . . ” Lincoln’s auditors, who had no desire to live anywhere but where they now did, said nothing critical to the president’s face, but none accepted his offer. (And just as well—Chiriqui’s coal proved to be too low-grade to be usable.) Colonization was, as it had always been, a nonstarter. Still, the meeting was noteworthy in one respect: it was the first time a president had received a delegation of blacks in the White House.

All these things might have been done by a peacetime president with firm convictions and a solid congressional majority. But Lincoln had to apply the principles of his party to the institution of slavery in wartime.
What should be done with the slaves of rebels? With escaped slaves? What, if anything, should be done with the slaves of those who had remained loyal?

At the beginning of the war, Lincoln named John Frémont, the first Republican presidential candidate, commander of the Western Department with responsibility for Missouri. In August 1861 Frémont declared martial law in the state and freed all slaves belonging to Confederate sympathizers. Lincoln did not want generals making policy, and he particularly did not want them making policies that freed slaves while nearby Kentucky, a slave state, still hung in the balance. If Frémont needed the labor of rebels’ slaves, Lincoln wrote, “he can seize them and use them; but when the need is past, it is not for him to fix their permanent future condition. That must be settled according to laws made by law-makers, and not by
military proclamation.” When Frémont became entangled in a charge of graft, Lincoln took the opportunity to reassign him.