Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (43 page)

In August, Thurlow Weed wrote Seward that a Lincoln victory was “an
impossibility.” Republicans considered desperate
scenarios: If Lincoln lost New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, he could still win by three electoral votes; if Nevada, which was enjoying a silver rush, became a state in time for the election, his margin would be six votes.

Late in August Lincoln wrote a brief memo to himself sketching what he would do if he lost: since he believed it would be impossible, with a Democratic administration, to save the Union, he would try to work with the Democratic president-elect to save it in the four months before the inauguration. It was a desperate thought—Why would the victor cooperate with his defeated opponent? But it salved Lincoln’s honor—
I will have done all I could
—and allayed his fears of approaching impotence—
I will try to do something
. He brought the memo, folded, to a cabinet meeting and asked his secretaries to sign it, unread, so that he could prove his intentions later on. Lincoln was a master of small-group theatrics, but the tone of melodrama and self-pity in this little show suggests his alarm and foreboding.

The Democratic convention, which met in Chicago from August 29 to 31, gave the Republicans their first sign of hope. The nomination
went to George McClellan on the first ballot. The Little Napoleon seemed like a good candidate: he had always been popular with his troops, taking good care of them everywhere but on the battlefield. He also had ample reason to dislike Lincoln. But McClellan wanted to win the war. The convention, however, was dominated by peace Democrats who cheered when the band in the hall played “Dixie.” The platform they wrote called for “immediate efforts” to end the fighting. McClellan refused to run on it, though he accepted the nomination. In attacking Lincoln from different directions at once, the Democrats gave the impression of fighting each other.

One thing on which war Democrats and peace Democrats could agree was racism. Democratic campaign pamphlets called Lincoln “Abraham Africanus,” whose first commandment was, “Thou shalt have no other God
but the negro.” One Democratic cartoon showed white Republican men dancing with fleshy black women in low-cut gowns (the reader knew what would happen next). Racial manners and mores were different then: the letters and casual conversation of every white politician of the day, the most Radical Republicans included, could be culled for racist remarks and expressions. But the Democrats said theirs in public; they were proud to say them. Racism was both a campaign plank and a policy position; the Democrats were the party of negrophobia.

Two days after the Democrats adjourned, Atlanta fell. Finally the direction of the war could be measured in something more dramatic than attrition. The Confederacy had already been severed along the Mississippi. Sherman was now poised to sever it again, between the Carolinas and the Gulf states.

The tangible victory changed the dynamic of the election even more than the dynamic of the war. In one stroke the administration was transformed from a quagmire to a success. Lincoln tended to every detail that might make success complete. In September, as a sop to the Radicals, he asked Montgomery Blair to resign as postmaster general; the Radicals should have the satisfaction of feeling that, even though they
could not lift Chase or Frémont to the White House, they could drive a Blair from the cabinet. The Blairs accepted the dismissal with good grace: their view was, anything to get Lincoln reelected. The following month, Chief Justice Taney went to his reward, age four score and seven years.
Chase yearned to succeed him, but Lincoln, who wanted Chase’s support on the hustings, withheld nominating him until after the election.

Soldiers were an important part of the Republican coalition—McClellan was popular with the troops, but Lincoln, it turned out, was even more popular, mental and moral leadership trumping military command. Everything was done to get out the soldier vote. Since Indiana law did not allow troops to cast absentee ballots, Sherman gave his Indiana regiments furloughs for the bellwether state elections in October.

Cash flowed to civilian poll workers. Days before the election, Weed, hopeful once more, wrote Lincoln that “every ward” in New York and Brooklyn had been “abundantly supplied with ‘
material aid.’”

Election Day was November 8. Twenty-five states voted. Lincoln won every state he had carried in 1860, except for his share of New Jersey’s electoral votes. Three new states had joined the Union since the 1860 election—Kansas, West Virginia, and Nevada (under the wire, on October 31); Lincoln won these, too. He also carried Missouri and Maryland, for a total of 212 electoral votes. McClellan took Delaware, Kentucky, and all of New Jersey, for 21 electoral votes. Lincoln’s victory in the popular vote was equally lopsided—55 percent to 45 percent (he carried Illinois by nearly the same margin). No one in the Confederacy, of course, participated, which skewed the results. But Lincoln would have won even if every Confederate state had voted and McClellan had carried them all; Lincoln’s popular vote, over 2.2 million, was 350,000 more than he had received in 1860.

After all the intrigue and jabber of a capital city, and all the fears and qualms of a campaign, Lincoln’s endless White House sessions with ordinary folk, retold by them to the folks back home, and his written
and spoken words, often eloquent, always clear, had brought him to this point. He was the symbol of the Union and of its cause. Despite all the distractions and sufferings of wartime, voters recognized it.

Tradition forbade Lincoln from campaigning himself, though he did make brief remarks to Union regiments that marched to the White House to be reviewed before being mustered out. In these he explained—less resoundingly than at Gettysburg, but no less earnestly—what the Union was fighting for. “Nowhere in the world,” he told the 148th Ohio, was there “a government of so much liberty and equality”; it was the people’s duty to transmit it “to our children and our children’s children forever.” This was a thought he had been turning over in his mind from the Lyceum Address (“the perpetuation of our political institutions”) to the Gettysburg Address (“shall not perish from the earth”). As he had for a decade, he looked back to the founding fathers, for it was their handiwork that Americans had to transmit: “We are striving to maintain the government and institutions of our fathers.” But in these remarks Lincoln also, at long last, included his actual father. Thomas Lincoln had a role to play in the American system, too. “The present moment,” Lincoln said, “finds me at the White House, yet there is as good a chance for your children [to be there] as there was for my father’s. . . . To the humblest and poorest amongst us are held out the highest
privileges and positions.”

His father had given him life, and under the system of the founding fathers, that was opportunity enough for any man to rise as high as he could.

Lincoln’s reelection and the renewed impetus given to the war effort were stages in the fulfillment of his life’s work. What about death’s work?

Lincoln’s grandfather had been killed by Indians; Lincoln himself had seen the bodies of men who had been scalped in the Black Hawk War. In his domestic life, he had lost a mother, a sister, a fiancée, and
a young son to various diseases, all before reaching the White House. Such brushes with death were common enough in early nineteenth-century America.

The destruction of the Civil War was uncommon. After Lincoln’s death, William Herndon, ruminating on his friend’s intellectual preoccupations, came up with a homely phrase. Lincoln, he wrote, tended to ignore individuals “unless they should concretely appear and tap [him] on the shoulder and say, ‘
Here we are again.’” The war gave many taps on the shoulder—especially the shoulder of the commander in chief.

Lincoln’s former law student Elmer Ellsworth had been killed in Alexandria in May 1861, in one of the first engagements of the war. In October 1861 another Illinois friend, Edward Baker, was killed in the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, a sharp engagement in the lull before the Peninsula Campaign. Baker had been Lincoln’s peer in Illinois Whig politics; he was the namesake of Lincoln’s second son and the man who had introduced the president-elect to the crowd from the podium at his first inauguration. Lincoln said Baker’s death struck him “like a whirlwind
from a desert”; at the funeral, he wept “like a child.”

William McCullough was the court clerk in Bloomington, Illinois, on Lincoln’s old circuit. When the war began, he asked the president to help him join an Illinois cavalry unit. He needed presidential help because he was fifty years old and had lost an arm in a farm accident. Lincoln intervened for his old friend. In December 1862, in the early days of the Vicksburg campaign, McCullough was killed in a cavalry skirmish in northern Mississippi. Lincoln wrote a letter of condolence to McCullough’s daughter Fanny. “In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever
expect it.” Only time, he wrote, would ease the pain. But time now brought only more deaths.

The powers-that-be in Washington were not insulated from battle. Simon Cameron, when he was secretary of war, lost his brother James at the First Battle of Bull Run. William Seward’s third son, William Jr., had
a horse shot out from under him during a cavalry battle in Maryland (he escaped with nothing worse than a broken leg). Edward Bates had one son in the Union Army, one in the Missouri militia, one at West Point, and another in the Confederate Army. Deaths in the family crossed political lines. Mary Lincoln lost two half-brothers and a brother-in-law fighting on the Confederate side. When she invited Emilie Helm, her widowed sister, to the White House, Lincoln was criticized for it: in the minds of his enemies, he could be by turns a black man, white trash, and a rebel sympathizer.

As the commander in chief, Lincoln was exposed to losses beyond those of family and friends. At the end of 1864, he wrote a letter, which has become one of his most famous, to
Lydia Bixby, a Boston widow who, he had been told by the military, had lost the shocking total of five sons. There is some dispute about whether the Bixby letter was actually written by Lincoln, or for him by John Hay. Whoever was the wordsmith labored under the futility of his own words: “I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.” Lincoln, it turned out, had been misinformed. Mrs. Bixby had lost two sons in battle; one was honorably discharged, one deserted, and one either deserted or died in a Confederate prison. But wasn’t the loss of two (possibly three) sons grievous enough? The loss of one?

Sometimes the specter of loss came almost literally close enough to tap Lincoln on the shoulder. Noah Brooks was a young journalist who had met Lincoln in Illinois in the 1850s, then covered his presidency for a California newspaper. One day he accompanied Lincoln on a visit to a soldiers’ hospital in Washington. Ahead of them, as they made their rounds, a “well-dressed lady” was distributing tracts. After she had moved on, “a patient picked up with languid hand the leaflet dropped upon his cot, and, glancing at the title, began to laugh.” When Lincoln and Brooks came up to the man, Lincoln gently reproved him: “That
lady doubtless means you well, and it is hardly fair for you to laugh at her gift.” The soldier explained why he could not help it: “She has given me a tract on ‘The Sin of Dancing,’ and both of my legs are
shot off.”

The story has the shape of a joke—one of Lincoln’s, perhaps. But this joke was on Lincoln himself. And on the legless soldier, of course.

Joshua Speed witnessed one of Lincoln’s close encounters with the war, not involving death, only military justice and the helplessness of those caught in its meshes. But Speed was acute enough to understand its impact.

Late in the war, Speed came to Washington to see the president. Lincoln asked him to sit in his office until he was done with visitors. At last only “two ladies in humble attire” were left. One was the wife of a man who had been arrested for resisting the draft in western Pennsylvania, the other the mother of another resister. “They both commenced to speak at once,” and Lincoln asked for their written petition.

“We’ve got no petition,” the older one said. “We couldn’t write one, and had no money to pay for writing one. I thought it best to come and see you.”

Lincoln called for the relevant administrator and told him that, after thinking over the matter—it was evidently an ongoing case—he had decided to pardon all the accused. (“I believe I will turn out the flock,” was how he put it.)

The younger woman fell to her knees in gratitude, but Lincoln told her to get up. “Don’t kneel to me, thank God and go.” Then the older woman bade him farewell: “Good-bye, good-bye, Mr. Lincoln. I shall never see you again till we meet in Heaven.”