Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (27 page)

Lincoln, now bearded, posed for this photograph in Springfield shortly before departing for Washington, D.C., on February 11, 1861.

Lincoln set the tone in his first remarks of substance, at Lafayette, Indiana, to a sea of unfamiliar faces: “While some of us may differ in political opinion,” he reflected, the common bonds of “christianity, civilization and patriotism” ensured that “we are all united in one feeling for the Union.” The revolutionary struggle, the example of “those noble fathers—Washington, Jefferson and Madison,” the ideas of liberty and equality of opportunity for all, as incorporated into the Declaration and Constitution, giving “hope to the world for all future time”: these would be Lincoln’s continuing themes, the reasons why the Union was worth saving. If it could not be saved upon these principles, then “I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.” At the same time he sought to harness the common religious sensibilities of his audience by pointedly stressing his dependence upon (sequentially) “Divine Providence,” “God,” “the Providence of God,” “that God who has never forsaken this people,” “the Divine Power, without whose aid we can do nothing,” “that Supreme Being who has never forsaken this favored land,” “the Maker of the Universe,” “the Almighty,” and “Almighty God.” These themes converged with particular clarity in his address to the New Jersey Senate, at Trenton, near the site of Washington’s celebrated crossing of the Delaware: “I am exceedingly anxious that this Union, the Constitution, and the liberties of the people shall be perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made, and I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle.”
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Lincoln provided a personal focus for diffuse loyalism. Speaking with considerable skill, both in formal addresses to state legislatures and in impromptu but careful remarks at receptions and temporary railroad halts, he established a personal rapport with the curious tens of thousands who turned out to meet their next president. At Dunkirk, in upstate New York, where some twelve thousand or so had gathered around a specially constructed Union arch over the track, Lincoln stepped from his car, expressed his regret at having no time to speak, placed his hand on the staff bearing the stars and stripes, and simply said, to a tumult of applause from a hat-swinging and handkerchief-waving crowd, “I stand by the flag of the Union, and all I ask of you is that you stand by me as long as I stand by it.” Nicolay described “a current of electrical communion” that commonly ran from speaker to audience, as crowds encountered an unpretentious, sympathetic, kindly but resolute man who “was of them as well as for them”; and less partial sources reported Lincoln’s obvious success in patriotic outreach to his fellow citizens.
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Lincoln’s second purpose was to test and read the public mood. He had already composed his inaugural address, whose themes had been building in his mind since his election, and perhaps before, and now he had the opportunity to try out elements of his larger argument as he moved east. (The document itself traveled in his carpetbag, initially in the custody of his son Robert, who earned a rare taste of his father’s temper when he let it out of his sight on the very first day.) Early on Lincoln presented ideas quite tentatively, as questions, but the encouraging warmth of response reassured him just how broad-based northern Unionism was. At Indianapolis, in a speech whose substance he had carefully pondered before leaving home, he stressed that his remarks were suggestions only and, instead of stating bluntly that secession was illegal and revolutionary, pursued an interrogatory approach. “By what principle of original right is it that one-fiftieth or one ninetieth of a great nation, by calling themselves a State, have the right to break up and ruin that nation as a matter of original principle? Now, I ask the question—I am not deciding anything,” said Lincoln to sympathetic and continuing laughter, “where is the mysterious . . . right . . . for a certain district of country with inhabitants . . . to play tyrant over all its own citizens, and deny the authority of everything greater than itself.” Lincoln got the answer he wanted to hear: state secession was constitutional nonsense.
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A similar “fury of enthusiasm,” as it seemed to the traveling party, accompanied Lincoln’s more resolute remarks about the restoration of de facto national authority over the new Confederacy. He spoke of his peaceful intent (“The man does not live who is more devoted to peace than I am”), the need for patience, the artificiality of the crisis, his view that there should be no armed “invasion” of southern states, and his determination that “there will be no blood shed unless it be forced upon the Government.” But at the same time he hinted at the limits of federal tolerance and at his scorn for secessionists’ using the term “coercion” to describe the federal administration’s defense of its routine authority. To cheers he asked, “if the Government, for instance, but simply insists upon holding its own forts, or retaking those forts which belong to it, or the enforcement of the laws of the United States in the collection of duties upon foreign importations, or even the withdrawal of the mails from those portions of the country where the mails themselves are habitually violated; would any or all of these things be coercion?” In the New Jersey General Assembly, he made his steeliest comment of all. After declaring his devotion to seeking a peaceful settlement, he said very deliberately, “But it may be necessary to put the foot down firmly,” lifting his own foot lightly before pressing it quickly down on the floor. This, reported the
New York Tribune,
provoked “cheers so loud and long that for some moments it was impossible to hear Mr. L.s voice.” Andrew Jackson, iron-willed defender of the Union against South Carolina “nullifiers” and secessionists thirty years earlier, was the admired presidential model, not straitjacketed, enervated James Buchanan.
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Lincoln also used the journey to stress his dependence on his people’s support during the crisis ahead. This was not simple flattery, nor the routine expression of truisms, but a means of testing the opinion of those of all parties without whom he knew that he—“an accidental instrument” and temporary servant—would fail. “When the people rise in masses in behalf of the Union and the liberties of their country, truly it may be said, ‘The gates of hell shall not prevail against them,’” he told a cheering crowd in Indianapolis. “In all the trying positions in which I shall be placed . . . my reliance will be placed upon you and the people of the United States—and I wish you to remember now and forever, that it is your business, and not mine . . . to rise up and preserve the Union and liberty, for yourselves, and not for me.” At Trenton he asked his audience directly: “If I do my duty, and do right, you will sustain me, will you not?” and elicited gratifying and reassuring cries of “Yes,” “Yes,” “We will.”
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By the end of his journey’s twelfth and final day, on George Washington’s birthday, Lincoln could reflect on a trip during which he had spoken directly to more people outside Illinois than he had ever done before. Once he was president, events would prevent his repeating this sustained face-to-face exercise, but for now the rousing cries of “Lincoln and Union forever” assured him of broad-based support within the free states for a determined policy of maintaining federal authority over the southern separatists. Nighttime events on February 22 momentarily threatened to dent both Lincoln’s confidence and the public’s faith in his firmness: yielding to close advisers and Pinkerton detectives, who were convinced that in Baltimore he faced a real threat of assassination by southern sympathizers, he agreed to travel surreptitiously over the last leg of his journey to Washington. The upshot was ridicule in much of the press, which exercised its fertile imagination at Lincoln’s expense. But the episode in practice changed little and did nothing to alter Lincoln’s judgment that the policy embodied in his inaugural address would enjoy broad public support.

Ten days later, watched by thousands, Lincoln stood in Washington before a capitol building still under construction, preparing to take his oath of office and protected from a distance by companies of riflemen, batteries of flying artillery, and a cavalry guard. These were symbols of a fractured Union in crisis, but the opening passages of Lincoln’s address sought to reassure the country “that the property, peace and security of no section are to be in anywise endangered by the now incoming Administration.” He would ensure the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law and other constitutional provisions designed to protect slaveholders. He would accept a constitutional amendment formally guarding “the domestic institutions of the States” against federal interference. He took the oath “with no mental reservations.” The Union was no threat to the South.
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That Union, however, was perpetual and indivisible. So dictated the principles of universal law: “no government proper, ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination”; “if the United States be . . . but an association of States in the nature of contract merely, can it, as a contract, be peaceably unmade, by less than all the parties who made it?” This, too, was the transparent verdict of the nation’s own history: the Union predated the Constitution and had been formed for perpetuity. State ordinances of secession, then, were legally void; violence against the authority of the United States was an act of revolution or insurrection. Following his “simple duty” as directed by the Constitution, Lincoln would ensure that the laws were “faithfully executed.”

But what would this mean in practice? Secession had been accompanied by the separatists’ widespread seizure of federal forts, arsenals, and other installations, but a few remained under Union control. Lincoln would use his power “to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts.” But there would be “no invasion—no using of force against, or among the people anywhere”; no “obnoxious strangers” would be pressed into federal offices unfilled locally; and the mails would not be delivered against the wishes of the community.

Lincoln realized that his promises would effect no change of heart amongst rebels who sought “to destroy the Union at all events.” But, convinced that the wreckers did not comprise a southern, and certainly not a national, majority, he spent most of the remainder of his address offering reasons why his “countrymen, one and all,” both the “dissatisfied” and the contented, should share his faith in popular government, in the rule of a majority constrained by a Constitution which worked to protect the rights of minorities. Only when a majority trampled on those rights was revolutionary dismemberment of the policy morally justified. But the points of current controversy—above all the powers and responsibilities of Congress toward slavery in the territories—were not explicitly covered by the Constitution. In such cases the minority must acquiesce in the government of a majority “held in restraint by constitutional checks, and limitations, and always changing easily, with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments.” A legally guided, virtuous, and vigilant majority was “the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it, does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism.” Lincoln, as president, was its authorized agent, impotent to negotiate the destruction of the Union. No great harm could be done in the four short years of any one administration, responsible as it was to the “great tribunal” of the American people.

Lincoln appealed for patience to allow for the workings of “intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him, who has never yet forsaken this favored land,” and drew to a close by affirming the nation’s bonds of affection: “The mystic chords of memory, stre[t]ching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” But the new president’s eloquence would cut little ice with those who were ostensibly its main target: the people of the lower South who could either revoke the secession ordinances or, by challenging federal authority where it continued to function within the separatist states, intensify what Lincoln defined as their aggression against the Union. When he addressed them as “fellow citizens” and spoke of disunion as “formidably attempted”—but by implication not achieved, or achievable—he used language destined, if not intended, to widen still further the chasm between Washington and them.

Lincoln, though, had in mind a wider audience: the citizens of the loyal states who had not voted for him in November, but whose support he needed if he were successfully to face down the secessionists. Not least he had to scotch the fears of critics who believed that he desired “to add civil war to disunion.”
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His target included the citizens of the eight states of the upper South, where secession had been resisted and successfully voted down in February, and through some of which Lincoln had proposed to travel en route to Washington until concerns for his security supervened.
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It was with these people in mind that he declared that the government would not “assail” the seceded states and that “the momentous issue of civil war” lay not in his hands, but with the separatists, who could, he insisted, “have no conflict, without being . . . [themselves] the aggressors.” And it was with special regard for the sensibilities of southern loyalists that he heeded the advice proffered by Seward and Orville Browning to tone down some of the steelier and more menacing phrases of the speech’s first draft, which had declared an intent to “reclaim” fallen federal forts.