Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (40 page)

“We the People,” however, was more than a verbal fix. It identified those whom the Constitution would benefit and empower. All the jockeying and balancing at the Constitutional Convention had been done to design a government that would justly express the people’s will.
Time and again the delegates had said so.
Madison, the great analyst of the Constitution’s checks and balances, said that all the Constitution’s intricate defenses “against the inconveniencies of democracy” were “consistent with the democratic form of government.” Hamilton, the arch-elitist of the Constitutional Convention, who gave a day-long speech advocating life terms for senators and the executive, nevertheless insisted that even a constitution containing such features would still be republican because under it all officeholders were chosen “by the people, or [by] a process of election originating with the people.” Later he said that his fellow delegates “were now to decide forever the fate of Republican government.”

Morris put the people in the Preamble twice more, by implication. The last of the purposes of government he listed was securing the blessings of liberty “to ourselves and our posterity” (to the people of the present and of the future). Then, finally, at the very end of his long sentence, its subject found its verb: “We the People . . . do ordain and establish” the Constitution. The people must act—they must ordain and they must establish—so that they and their descendants might benefit.

The Committee of Style submitted Morris’s draft of the Constitution to the convention on September 12, 1787; there followed five days of last-minute arguments and adjustments.
None of the delegates, however, raised any questions about the new Preamble or its new opening. All of this, by Lincoln’s adulthood, was on the record, in Madison’s
Notes
.

So when Lincoln in the Special Message wrote of “the People,” he was following in the Preamble’s spirit, as well as echoing its words. He called the United States “a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people.” The “power which made the Constitution,” he wrote further on, “speaks from the preamble, calling itself ‘We, the People.’” Again he wrote, of the impending struggle, “This is essentially a People’s contest.” It was a contest between those whose preamble still honored the people, and those whose preamble had demoted them.

If suppressing the rebellion was a People’s contest, what was at stake?

One of the stakes that Lincoln discussed in the Special Message was economic. It was a matter that was dear to him: all people had a right to work for themselves. Lincoln had won the right when he stopped being hired out by Thomas Lincoln as a farmhand. A black woman would enjoy the right when she could eat the bread she made with her own hands. “The Union,” Lincoln wrote, was fighting “to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all.” Lincoln’s Union was a Union of self-made Lincolns and self-made black women.

But the idea of a People’s contest had a political as well as an economic meaning. In Lincoln’s view the American republic was democratic in spirit, and this had consequences for his administration and for the prosecution of the war.

In the Special Message he off-handedly equated a constitutional republic with a democracy (“a constitutional republic or a democracy”). This was sloppy political science. Not all republics in history had been democratic, and not all democracies maintained their republican forms for long. The founding fathers were well aware of the excesses and failures of democracy in the ancient world. The modern world had seen a sinister innovation in democratic governance, the despotic plebiscite: one man, one vote, one time. This was how the Bonapartes, Napoleon and his nephew Napoleon III, had cemented their power in France.

Yet for all its dangers democracy was ingrained into American habits and institutions, and the American republic had become more democratic over time. National political parties were a democratic innovation almost as old as the Constitution itself; the Twelfth Amendment, passed in 1804, assumes their existence by instituting the two-man ticket of a presidential candidate and a running mate (the tickets have always been picked by parties). In Lincoln’s lifetime the first Republican Party had changed its name to the Democratic Party, and Andrew Jackson, the incarnation of its new identity, was a populist. Jackson was the bogeyman
of Lincoln’s youth, but two of Lincoln’s favorite presidential candidates, William Henry Harrison in 1840 and himself in 1860, had won the White House with populist campaigns.

The voice of the people was filtered in a variety of ways, according to the Constitution—the Senate preserved the equality of states; two houses of Congress, and an executive limited the powers of each; and judges were chosen by elected representatives, not elected themselves. Lincoln the conservative lawyer/politician approved all these mechanisms. But in democracies, elections have consequences, and Lincoln meant to follow them out. The Republican Party, playing by the rules, had been the people’s choice in 1860. No possible coalition of its enemies could have kept it out of the White House. The people had spoken, and Lincoln meant to do what he had told them he would do until they spoke differently. Thus he and the Republicans had made no preinaugural compromises surrendering their views; nor would they back down until the people rebuked them at the polls. It was up to “the people themselves,” he wrote in the Special Message, “and not their servants [to] reverse their own
deliberate decisions.”

There was one other meaning of a People’s contest, and that was moral. The people had a responsibility to correct their own mistakes. This was one of the reasons why Lincoln pushed so steadily for compensating slave owners: not just to bribe them to free their slaves, not just to ease their pain for the loss of their property, but to spread their pain among all who had ever profited from slavery. He did not mention this reason in the Special Message. But in 1862, when he asked Congress for a constitutional amendment that would free all slaves by 1900 with compensation, he stated it plainly: “When it is remembered how unhesitatingly we all use cotton and sugar, and share the profits of dealing in them,” who could say “that the south has been more responsible than the north” for maintaining slavery? If both were responsible, “is it not just” that slavery be ended “at a
common charge”?

Acting to repair your own mistakes was Lincoln’s version of popular sovereignty.

Lincoln returned to his idea of the People’s contest again and again. He recalled it in July 1862 when he asked border-state politicians to accept compensation for the end of slavery: “I beseech you . . . as you would perpetuate popular government for the best people
in the world.” In September 1862 a delegation of ministers from Chicago asked him to issue an Emancipation Proclamation. He was only waiting for a victory to do it, but he told them, with some tartness, that the Union “already ha[d] an important principle” for which it was fighting: “Constitutional government is
at stake.”

The almost-victory at Antietam, which allowed Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, had been followed by defeats and stalemates. In Virginia there were the debacles of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. In the west, Ulysses Grant bent his energies to reducing Vicksburg, midway between Memphis and New Orleans, one of the Confederacy’s last bastions on the Mississippi River. After months of attacks, feints, and efforts to dig new channels through the bayous, he had managed by May 1863 to lay the city under siege. But it still held out.

In the east, the Confederates decided once again to move north. In June 1863 they crossed the Potomac into Maryland and then kept moving on into south-central Pennsylvania. Lincoln tapped a new commander, George Meade, to meet them. On the first of July the Union and Confederate armies collided at Gettysburg, a town forty-five miles southwest of Harrisburg. After three days of fighting, the invaders withdrew, beaten.

The convergence of a victory at Gettysburg, another victory at Vicksburg (which finally surrendered to Grant), and the Fourth of July made a banner day for the Union—and an unmissable opportunity to draw historical parallels and political lessons. When Lincoln addressed a happy throng that had gathered outside the White House on the evening of July 7, he did not let the opportunity pass. “How long ago is it?—eighty odd years—since on the Fourth of July, for the first time in the history of
the world, a nation . . . declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’” He rang the changes on the date, and on the Declaration of Independence. On July 4, 1826, the Declaration’s “two most distinguished” signers, Jefferson the author and John Adams the doughty advocate of independence, were taken by “Almighty God . . . from the stage of action,” Lincoln said. “And now, on this last Fourth of July just passed . . . a gigantic rebellion, at the bottom of which is an effort to overthrow the principle that all men were created equal,” had suffered twin defeats. Lincoln’s survey of famous Fourths was like a three-act play: 1776, the Declaration; 1826, the apotheosis of its signers; 1863, the confounding of its enemies. The founding fathers had gone, but their handiwork remained unconquered.

“Gentlemen,” Lincoln concluded, “this is a glorious theme, and
the occasion for a speech, but I am not prepared to make one worthy of the occasion.” That would come later. So he praised the Union Army, and asked the bands that had come along with the crowd for music.

Like many victories in the Civil War, the Union’s victories on July 4, 1863, were incomplete. The fall of Vicksburg was indeed a triumph—a key step in accomplishing the Anaconda plan. After the fall of Port Hudson in Louisiana on July 9, the Union commanded all the lower Mississippi, from the tip of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico, and the Confederacy was cut in two. Intelligent Confederates recognized the magnitude of the loss. Diarist Mary Chesnut was traveling by train when, she said, “a man came in, stood up, and read from a paper, ‘The surrender of Vicksburg.’ I felt as if I had been struck a hard blow on the
top of my head.”

After Gettysburg, however, Meade’s army had been too battered to pursue the surviving Confederates, who retired to Virginia. So the battle, though important, was not final, but one more episode in the grind of the eastern theater.

The casualties at Gettysburg were the worst of the war so far: more than 3,100 Union men killed (joined by 4,700 Confederates).
The bodies,
hastily buried on the battlefield, had been dug up, here and there, by grieving relatives or hungry hogs. “Arms and legs and sometimes heads” protruded from unquiet graves. An interstate commission organized a reburial and planned a ceremony in November to dedicate the cemetery. The oration was to be delivered by Edward Everett, George Washington’s rhapsode and losing vice-presidential candidate in 1860, still at sixty-nine years old one of America’s greatest orators. Lincoln was invited to give “a few appropriate remarks” after Everett finished.