Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (44 page)

Lincoln “instantly took her right hand in both of his and following her to the door . . . said, ‘I am afraid with all my troubles I shall never get there. But if I do I will find you. That you wish me to get there is the best wish you could make for me.’”

Finally the two old friends were alone. “Lincoln,” said Speed, “with my knowledge of your nervous sensibility, it is a wonder that such scenes as this don’t kill you.”

Lincoln answered that that scene was the only thing he had done all day that had given him any pleasure.

Lincoln and Speed had been the closest of friends twenty-five years earlier. Marriage and distance had parted them, then politics had parted them still more: in the 1850s, Speed could not understand Lincoln’s vehemence in opposing the expansion of slavery, while Lincoln could not understand Speed’s failure to understand. Once the Union fell apart, their differences shrank away; Speed and his brother James were Lincoln’s eyes and ears in problematic Kentucky. In December 1864, after Edward Bates had resigned as attorney general, for reasons of age and ill health, Lincoln picked Speed’s brother to replace him.

One of the bonds uniting Lincoln and Speed at the height of their friendship had been women and distress—women they had distressed, women who distressed them. Here, in the president’s office, was another tableau of Lincoln, Speed, and two distressed women, purged of any question of sex or marriage. It could have been a sentimental scene rendered by a period artist—a print by Currier and Ives, or one of John Rogers’s mass-produced statuary groups—with a title such as “Mercy in War-time,” or “The President’s Good Deed.”

And surrounding the entire scene, like the throb of steam engines, was each man’s awareness, Lincoln’s especially, that this drama of mercy was an eddy in a rush of conquest, resistance, liberation, injury, imprisonment, illness, and death. A fatalist, such as Lincoln professed to be, must have smiled at the tininess of the pleasures that even he, the commander in chief, could snatch from the torrent.

Alongside the war and its inspiring, lurid, brutal movements of men and ideas, Lincoln’s domestic troubles seem inconsequential. Yet they troubled him. In February 1862 his third son, Willie, had died of typhoid fever, age eleven. Mary Lincoln despaired, convinced that God had taken Willie as punishment for her political ambition. Lincoln believed that he communed with his dead son in dreams; Mary tried to contact him through spiritualist mediums.

Before and after her child’s death, Mrs. Lincoln was an unfortunate first lady. Yearning to cut a figure in Washington society, she splurged on clothing and furniture, ran into debt, and had to be bailed out by Congress. Washington society, unimpressed by her accoutrements, rejected her as an anxious parvenu. More serious were her migraine headaches—a torment that only those who suffer from them can comprehend. In a memorable image, she compared hers to an Indian pulling the bones out of her face. These daily burdens added their weight to the burdens that came with Lincoln’s job.

He could think of the death and destruction of the war as being in the service of a cause. Still it was terrible (“
this terrible war,” he called it in an 1864 letter to Eliza Gurney, a Quaker who visited him in the White House). Lincoln had compared slavery to a disease in his Peoria speech. The founding fathers had hidden it “away in the Constitution, just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he
bleed to death.” Now that it was being cut out, many Americans were bleeding to death.

There are two wrong ways to write about war. One is to treat it as wholly glorious, noble, or purposeful. Propagandists embrace this error, and orators are tempted by it; even a text as chaste as the Gettysburg Address could be so misheard—not, presumably, by many in its first audience, in a newly made cemetery where coffins were still stacked, but by those removed from the event by time or lack of imagination.

The other wrong way to write about war is to treat it as wholly meaningless—empty carnage. One of the modern pioneers of that error was Lord Byron, who devoted
a canto of
Don Juan
to the battle for Ismail, an Ottoman town captured by Russia in 1790:

              
Thus on they wallowed in the bloody mire

                   
Of dead and dying thousands, sometimes gaining

              
A yard or two of ground, which brought them nigher

                   
To some odd angle for which all were straining;

              
At other times, repulsed by the close fire,

                   
Which really poured as if all hell were raining,

              
Instead of heaven, they stumbled backwards o’er

              
A wounded comrade, sprawling in his gore.

Each error speaks for a truth—noble causes sometimes require the last full measure of devotion, and war is hell—but the truths are only true when held simultaneously in the mind. Lincoln’s intellectual and rhetorical gifts showed him the purpose of the war; his nervous sensibility (Speed was more right about Lincoln’s sensitivities than Herndon) showed him the horror.

As 1864 drew to a close, Grant was still investing Petersburg, trying to encircle it. Six days before the election, Sherman had begun to march from Atlanta to Savannah and the Atlantic coast.

Two political dramas played out over this military one. In 1861 the newly elected Lincoln had indicated that he favored a proposed Thirteenth Amendment declaring that the federal government had no power to end slavery in the states. (Lincoln believed that was implied constitutional law, so why not put it in the Constitution?) A last-ditch compromise proposal, it crumbled along with the country. Now, as the war finally seemed to be ending, there was a push, from abolitionists and Radical Republicans, for a different Thirteenth Amendment, one which would end slavery by constitutional mandate.

Charles Sumner proposed a text based on the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen: “All persons are equal before the law, so that no person can hold another as a slave.” The Senate Judiciary Committee, wiser than he was, instead echoed the Northwest Ordinance, the founding document that had shaped the lives of millions of Americans, including the Lincolns: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime . . . shall exist within the United States.” The amendment did not forbid holding
“persons . . . to labor,” it forbade “slavery”: the institution was first named in the Constitution as it was being ushered out of it. The Senate approved the Thirteenth Amendment by the necessary two-thirds margin in April, and the Republican (or National Union) convention endorsed it in early June. But on June 15, the amendment fell short in the House.

The November elections gave the Republicans increased majorities in Congress, but they would take their seats no earlier than March 1865 (and then only if Lincoln called a special session). A renewed push for a Thirteenth Amendment came in the lame-duck session of the same Congress that had failed to approve it.

The wen or cancer of slavery was being cut out by war. Everywhere the Union armies penetrated—Sherman took Savannah just before Christmas—slaves were being freed under the provisions of the Emancipation Proclamation. No conceivable replacement for Chief Justice Taney (least of all Salmon P. Chase, who finally got the job in December) would lead the Court in undoing the proclamation with some
Dred Scott
–like decision.

Yet the Emancipation Proclamation was a war measure only. Legal challenges and delays could proliferate in peacetime. Slavery still lingered in the loyal border states (though Maryland had abolished it in November 1864, and Missouri was moving to do the same). Anyone with a legalistic mind, which included Lincoln, would want the matter resolved, before the war ended, if possible.

Lincoln lobbied to pass the Thirteenth Amendment. He used persuasion, calling on former Whigs to honor the spirit of Henry Clay (Clay the master legislator, or Clay the lover of freedom? There was no difference now, since both qualities pulled in the same direction). He used more tangible inducements, too: one congressman who changed his vote became ambassador to Denmark.

At the same time, Lincoln was fielding a peace initiative from the Confederacy. Lincoln himself had encouraged it, allowing Francis Blair Sr. to go to Richmond in January 1865 for an unofficial talk with Jefferson Davis, a prewar friend of Blair’s. While the Civil War raged,
Napoleon III had put a puppet of France on the throne of Mexico; Blair’s idea was that there should be an American truce, during which the Union and Confederate armies would join in driving the French out. Davis was sufficiently interested to send peace commissioners to negotiate with Lincoln.

Rumors of the talks reached Congress and threatened to delay the Thirteenth Amendment: Was peace at hand? What would be the terms? How would they affect the status of slavery? On January 31 Lincoln sent a note to the floor manager for the amendment in the House stating that there were no Confederate peace commissioners in Washington, “or likely
to be in it.” The amendment got the necessary two-thirds in the House that day and went out to the states for ratification.

On February 3 Lincoln and Seward met the Confederate peace commissioners on a ship off Hampton Roads, Virginia. (Lincoln had told the House the truth, literally—Hampton Roads was not Washington.)

The three-man team Davis had sent included Lincoln’s old friend Alexander Stephens. Stephens’s tenure as vice president of the Confederacy had been an ongoing quarrel with his president. (One example will serve for many: In 1861
Davis had embargoed the South’s cotton, to show European governments what they would suffer if the North prevailed. Stephens had argued for shipping it out and using it as collateral to buy weapons. Stephens, the economically sophisticated ex-Whig, was correct.) Stephens became an early leader of the Confederacy’s peace faction, looking for chances to negotiate a settlement. Now his path had crossed Lincoln’s once again. The two had shared a moment of history, by then more than sixteen years past, and still shared a lingering respect for each other.

Both sides ached to stop the fighting. The war was clearly coming to an end, but there was still no telling how far off the end was. Sherman, after taking Savannah, had swung north. Ultimately he and Grant would link up. But perhaps the shrunken Confederate armies in northern Virginia and the Carolinas would link up first. Typical of the ongoing grind of war was a battle at the Salkehatchie River in South Carolina, west
of Charleston, the day of the Hampton Roads Conference. One of the Union generals involved was Francis Blair Jr., son of Lincoln’s negotiator. The conflict delayed Sherman’s advance for one day. Eighteen Union men and eight Confederates died. It was a small engagement as such things went, but it had killed more than five times as many men as had supposedly been lost to Lydia Bixby.

Yet neither the memory of old ties nor the pressure of new deaths could save the conference. The two sides could not even agree on the terms under which they met. Davis looked for peace between “the
two countries.” Lincoln sought peace for “the people of our one common country.” The Mexican plan, which was Blair’s idea, not Lincoln’s, went nowhere. The parties adjourned
without result.

Lincoln presented one idea that he had floated at the Hampton Roads Conference to his cabinet on February 5. It was his old vision of compensating slave owners for the loss of their slaves. His latest version of the plan was to offer $200 million to the Confederate states if they gave up before April 1, plus another $200 million if the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified by July 1. Lincoln was willing to pay for peace; since the war was costing $3 million a day, he argued that his plan might actually save money. Lincoln was also willing to acknowledge northern complicity in slavery. “If it was wrong in the South to hold slaves,” he had said at Hampton Roads, “it was wrong in the North to carry on the
slave trade.” The cabinet, believing that the way to end slavery was to win the war, opposed him unanimously, and he folded up his proposal.

The fighting continued.

Fifteen

G
OD THE
F
ATHER

L
INCOLN’S LIFE, LIKE ANY MAN’S, CAN BE READ AS A SERIES
of engagements with his fathers.

Thomas Lincoln, who had been unsuited to his son in so many ways, and not acknowledged by his son even in the ways that he had been suitable—Thomas had given Abraham life, and shown him how to tell a story, win a wrestling match, and decline a drink—was finally mentioned by him in a few late speeches to homeward-bound troops.