Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (45 page)

Well
over
thirty
thousand
people
gathered
for
Lincoln’s
Second
Inaugural
address,
though
the
general
commotion
meant
that
few
heard
him,
and
several
of
those
who
did
were
distracted
by
the
presence
of
the
drunken
vice
president,
Andrew
Johnson.
Only
in
its
printed
form
did
the
remarkable
speech
command
the
recognition
it
warranted.

Still, it is possible to reach a few plausible conclusions on what Lincoln might have done had he lived. Events would have tested his wartime preference for self-reconstruction over imposition from Washington, and for leaving it to the reorganized governments themselves to resolve the issue of black rights. The historian William C. Harris rightly argues that Lincoln would have exercised greater influence than Johnson over the white Unionist leadership; intervened to block the draconian and discriminatory Black Codes; rationed presidential pardons; stopped the quick return to political power of high-ranking Confederates; and pressed hard to achieve at least partial black suffrage.
⁹⁸
Lincoln was too wise and too experienced to have isolated himself—as Johnson did—from the heartland of his party. And, as resurgent rebels resorted to a strategy of terror, he might even have discovered an appetite for the protective use of federal power. One thing is certain: on the issue of race, the Lincoln of 1865 had advanced well beyond his ideas of 1858. In Washington, he became the first leader to welcome blacks into the White House, to invite them to formal receptions, and to incorporate them in an inaugural procession. He was, according to Frederick Douglass, “emphatically the black mans President.”
⁹⁹
If Lincoln could so clearly broaden his mind during his first term of office, then further growth would surely have occurred during his second.

Lincoln’s tenderness toward the southerners led many to fear that the Union, on the verge of winning the war, would contrive to lose the peace. In fact, there was no danger that the president would abandon his stated terms of peace—the ending of all hostilities, reunion, and emancipation—or be outmaneuvered by Davis into conceding an armistice. When Congress learned the details of his secret meeting with Confederate peace commissioners on a steamer at Hampton Roads on February 3, 1865, the record not only allayed fears of a Union sellout but won Lincoln almost universal plaudits for his political skill. One measure of his desire for reconciliation with magnanimity, however, was his suggestion to the commissioners that Congress find $400 million to compensate slaveholders, in return for voluntary emancipation and immediate reunion. It was an extraordinary initiative, driven in part by the hope that it would inhibit postwar guerrilla resistance and by the calculation that it would cost the Union less than if the war dribbled on into the summer months. A stunned cabinet, understandably thinking that Lincoln’s political touch had deserted him and fearing “distrust and adverse feeling,” unanimously opposed the idea, which would never have won the approval of Congress.
¹⁰⁰
Lincoln let the plan die.

Lincoln, however, confirmed his desire for a magnanimous postwar reconciliation in the most remarkable speech of his life, on March 4, at the ceremony for his second inauguration. The rush of events suggested that the Confederacy was speedily crumbling. A crowd of over thirty thousand expected the language of triumph, or at least a tone of celebration. Instead, Lincoln delivered a short, seven-hundred-word address in which he avoided blame, spoke inclusively, emphasized the shared experience of the two parties to the conflict, and set out a case for a lack of vengeance toward the South. His peroration stipulated the cast of mind with which the victors should approach reunion: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
¹⁰¹

These scriptural cadences provided a fitting climax to a speech in which Lincoln sought to find political guidance through religious inquiry, by exploring the theological meaning of the events over which he had presided for four years. Religious themes had been largely absent, or present in only a minor key, in his earlier addresses, but they so dominated the second inaugural speech that it assumed the character of a sermon. The address was brief, but rich in meaning, and pulled together as a prescription for action thoughts on God’s mystery and purposes that he had developed before—in his private memorandum after the Second Bull Run, in his letters to Mrs. Gurney and Albert Hodges, and in his remarks to visiting evangelicals.

“All knew,” Lincoln said, that the South’s “peculiar and powerful interest” in slaves was “somehow, the cause of the war.” His sympathy for the moral predicament of the South had never blinded him to the wrongness of slavery or allowed him to feel any warmth toward those—especially religious men—who contrived an intellectual defense of it. But whatever his distaste for Confederate theology (“not the sort of religion upon which people can get to heaven” was how he had recently classified it), he cautioned against the sin of self-righteousness: “Let us judge not that we be not judged.”
¹⁰²
Adopting the same reasoning that had informed his private meditation of September 1862, Lincoln moved to the same conclusion. The Union’s victory, when it came, would have been secured at such cost that there was only one logical explanation: “The Almighty has His own purposes.” Working through human history, God had delivered “this terrible war” as his punishment to both North and South for their implication in the sin of slavery. “Woe unto the world because of offences!”
¹⁰³
(Here, by invoking the sins and responsibilities of communities and nations, Lincoln exposed his intellectual debt to the Puritan-Calvinist tradition of citizenship.) “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away,” but if God—omnipotent, inscrutable, and mysterious—“wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’”
¹⁰⁴

Lincoln took much satisfaction in this speech. He told Thurlow Weed that he expected it “to wear as well as—perhaps better than—anything I have produced.” But he knew that its message was disquieting. The idea that the war was punishment for northern as well as southern sins affronted many. “Men are not flattered by being shown that there is a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world.” This was a truth especially humbling to himself. And humility would be his watchword as he shaped the administration’s postwar purposes. During his pursuit of power he had told Republicans “to do our duty
as we understand i
t
”; now, after four grueling years in office, he spoke of working “with firmness in the right,
as God gives us to see the right.
”
¹⁰⁵

The abrasions of war had cumulatively wrought profound changes in Lincoln’s thought and political agenda. By stages the cautious Kentucky Whig moved into the orbit of Yankee Protestant Republicanism, ready to give more sympathetic consideration—if not complete approval—to the radicals’ program. He advanced toward emancipation, and a broadening of black civil and political rights, with intellectual and not merely political conviction. Religion became more important to him. His God acquired a more Calvinist, conventionally Protestant, appearance. At the same time, however, Lincoln kept his humility and his temperamental distrust of the absolutism, the pretensions to superior sanctity, and pharisaism of those religionists who pressed him toward more radical action against the South.

Yet, ironically, the certainty of moral superiority and the tendency toward self-righteousness that Lincoln saw, and distrusted, within mainstream northern Protestantism would prove one of his most valuable instruments of power. The patriotic energy which came from Unionists’ conviction that their cause was right, just, blessed, and godly was essential to northern victory. Lincoln recognized that reality. As the next chapter will demonstrate, Lincoln knew that nourishing and mobilizing patriotic sentiment—on both the home and the military fronts—was fundamental to his power and to Confederate defeat.

CHAPTER 6

The Instruments of Power: Coercion and Voluntary Mobilization, 1861–65

T
o experience war is to experience force, and Americans of the Civil War era knew that raw truth better than any other generation in their nation’s history. If the Confederacy was subject to the greater devastation of its physical landscape, and the greater proportionate loss of life, the Union suffered its own grievous human agonies. Victory, the Lincoln administration gradually learned, would come only as the North’s superiority in manpower and material resources expressed itself in the force of bullet, bayonet, and shell, and in the physical destruction of the enemy—and that would mean unprecedented bloodshed on both sides.

Military coercion of the Confederacy involved political coercion on the Union home front. Few aspects of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency have attracted more discussion than his use of emergency executive powers. We have seen how, after Sumter, he called up the militia, proclaimed a blockade, and ordered the use of Treasury funds for war supplies, all before he called Congress into special session. He subsequently sanctioned arbitrary arrests, abolished slavery by presidential proclamation, endorsed conscription, and began his own program of national reconstruction. Confederates and northern political foes cried “tyrant.” The charge was tendentious, but the nation’s unprecedented crisis certainly spurred Lincoln and the executive branch into forceful, interventionist, and even coercive leadership. Earlier generations had expressed fears for the future of republicanism—whether from the executive “usurpation” of Federalists in the 1790s or from the tyranny of “King Andrew” Jackson four decades later—but no previous administration had deployed political and military power as energetically as did the Union government during the Civil War.
¹

For all that, what is remarkable about Lincoln’s success in sustaining support for the Union’s formidable four-year war effort is just how little it depended on executive coercion, repression, and the long arm of the War Department. The main task facing the Union administration was not how to coerce or dragoon an unwilling population into an unwanted conflict; rather, it was how best to encourage, nurture, and sustain a potent Union patriotism. The North’s superiority over the Confederacy in manpower and matériel gave hope of eventual victory, but this would count only if the enthusiasm for war immediately following the bombardment of Fort Sumter was consolidated into a longer-term appetite for the fight. Opposition Democrats and Confederate leaders alike expected Lincoln’s administration to founder on the rocks of war-weariness. In fact, popular Unionism proved remarkably resilient: voluntary enlistments provided most of the federal troops, and Lincoln secured a handsome reelection in 1864. But patriotism required nurturing from above. Without a clear articulation of the war’s purpose by the Union leadership in general, and the president in particular, it is doubtful whether the people of the North would have retained their collective will to continue so grueling a conflict. Neither James Madison in the War of 1812 nor James K. Polk in the conflict with Mexico had been entirely successful in harmonizing national sentiment behind his leadership, and by definition these had been less divisive struggles than an internecine civil war. The burden of the argument here is that one of Lincoln’s greatest achievements was his articulation of a rationale for the war and its sacrifices; that its formulation and reformulation were shaped in terms which, from his reading of public opinion, he knew would resonate with mainstream Unionists and cement the war coalition; that for its dissemination his administration imaginatively exploited a formidable network of governmental and voluntary agencies; and that his presidential leadership rested chiefly on persuasion, not coercion.

Lincoln possessed considerable personal authority, but his mobilization of popular support depended only to a modest degree on loyalty to him personally, and certainly not on charismatic power, strictly defined. “Charismatic rule,” if we follow the sociologist Max Weber’s analysis, has to be contrasted with the traditional authority of hereditary rulers and with the impersonal bureaucracy of “legal authority.” Charismatic power is founded on the perceived greatness and mission in the proclaimed leader during a time of crisis and instability. Lincoln’s power, however, derived from holding an established political office and working within what Weber described as the “legal-rational” framework of control. It did not depend primarily on his personal qualities.
²
Although the events of 1861–65 represented the greatest crisis and upheaval in the republic’s history, Lincoln’s power came not from challenging or subverting the routine political system or the state itself, but from acting as the defender of the constitutional status quo, as Unionists defined it. He emphasized and represented continuity, not radical disjunction. Had McClellan, for example, been serious about supplanting Lincoln, and replaced an elected president with an unelected military ruler (in McClellan’s case, one perceived as heroic, romantic, Napoleonic, and driven by a sense of mission), then a charismatic form of domination might have developed—and would certainly have been necessary had conventional constitutional forms been overturned. But what is significant is the
resilience
of the “rational-legal” system of republican constitutionalism during the Civil War, not its fragility.

Still, in the unprecedented—and subsequently unequaled—crisis facing the Union, the personal qualities of the Union’s political leadership mattered. In Lincoln’s case, those qualities, as popularly perceived, were well designed to encourage and sustain a mass mobilization in support of the Union. That mobilization would have occurred regardless of who in particular was president, but we may reasonably doubt that under any other incumbent it would have been sustained so well and for so long. Perceived as the patriot, the president of honest endeavor, and the plain man who knew his people, Lincoln came to enjoy a depth of popular support belied by the chronic sniping of the Washington political classes and the querulous editorial fraternity.

COERCION, REPRESSION, AND EXECUTIVE POWER

Lincoln was a naturally cautious, kindly, and merciful man, but the remorseless logic of his single-minded pursuit of reunion led him to an ever more uncompromising use of the levers of military and political power. Both the Confederate enemy and the disloyal elements on the home front felt a tightening noose of coercion.

While it may be anachronistic to describe the conflict in its later stages as a “total war,” the North’s military policy did evolve over the course of hostilities from conducting a war of conciliation toward white civilians into waging a “hard war” against them. At first, respect for the ordinary people of the South, and the idea that they were semidetached from their political leaders, led the administration to think they could be won back to loyalty as the Union armies advanced. But the military experiences of spring and early summer 1862 changed that. Lincoln came to see what others had been arguing for some time: that the war could no longer be fought, as he contemptuously put it, “with elderstalk squirts charged with rosewater.” He was probably behind the War Department’s executive order of July 22 empowering commanders to seize and use civilian southerners’ property for military purposes.
³
Adopting an emancipation policy marked the end of conciliation, of course, but it did not lead to an immediate assault on the South’s people and economy. Only in the spring of 1863, in the western theater, were military resources seriously deployed to this end, and not until the following year did the “hard war” concept take effect in the East. Industrial capacity and railroads were destroyed, crops seized, buildings burned, homes plundered, animals killed and eaten, and slaves freed. Confederate loyalists, and especially slaveowners, were the intended chief targets, but all southern civilians, including slaves, felt the threat of physical violence and were liable to intimidation and humiliation. In the winter of 1864–65, William Tecumseh Sherman’s notorious marches of destruction from smoldering Atlanta to the sea, and on into the Carolinas, provided the climax of this combined assault on the South’s psyche, material resources, and will to resist.

A corresponding evolution in military strategy accompanied this development of a hard war policy. Here, too, Lincoln played an important role, in this case actually forcing the pace of change. As a commander-in-chief with little military experience, but one who gave hours to hard strategic thought, Lincoln has subsequently won high marks from historians. Operating from first principles, rather than the textbooks of the revered Baron Jomini and other military interpreters of Napoleonic warfare, he came to see much earlier than his commanders the best means of exploiting the Union’s advantage in numbers. While McClellan planned a Jominian concentration of massive force against Richmond, Lincoln was telling his western commanders that his “general idea” was that—since “we have the
greater
numbers, and the enemy has the
greater
facility of concentrating forces upon points of collision”—the best way to exploit the Union’s superiority was by menacing the enemy “with superior forces at
different
points, at the
same
time.” To this strategic insight he added another: that the tracking and destroying of Confederate armies, not places, was the key to victory. “I think
Lee’s
Army, and not
Richmond,
is your true objective point,” he told Joseph Hooker in the summer of 1863. “Fight him when oppertunity offers.” Lincoln wept bitterly when Meade chose not to pursue and crush Lee’s retreating forces after Gettysburg.
⁴

Behind Lincoln’s military aggression stood a cold statistical ruthlessness. After the grievous defeat at Fredericksburg, where the Union lost three men for every two Confederates, Lincoln remarked “that if the same battle were to be fought over again, every day, through a week of days, with the same relative results, the army under Lee would be wiped out to its last man, the Army of the Potomac would still be a mighty host, [and] the war would be over.” As the war entered its final phase, in the winter of 1864–65, he drew public attention to the fact that an increase in population meant that, despite the melancholy multiplying of Union graves, “we have
more
men
now
than we had when the war
began.
”
⁵

At the time of Fredericksburg, Lincoln had failed to identify any commander ready to confront what William O. Stoddard, assistant to Nicolay and Hay, called this “awful arithmetic,” but within fifteen months he had at last found one, promoted him to the revived rank of lieutenant general, and made him his general-in-chief. In Ulysses S. Grant Lincoln had a commander whose aggressive strategy and overall plan bore striking parallels to his own. Grant understood the need to synchronize the activity of the Union forces in the eastern and western theaters; to put the destruction of the enemy’s armies before occupying strategic positions; to advance across the whole front; and to turn those troops passively occupying captured territory into active raiders. He discussed his thinking with Lincoln, explaining that “it was his intention to make all the line useful—those not fighting could help the fighting.” According to Hay, the president “recognized with especial pleasure” his own ideas, remarking, “Those not skinning can hold a leg.”
⁶

One further element completed Grant’s grand design for 1864: an assault not just on southern armies but on all of the Confederacy’s war resources. Military defeat alone was inadequate. To destroy armies you had to deny them food, ammunition, and other supplies. Lincoln made no protest against this determined embrace of hard war policy, though it would hand a sharp weapon to political opponents and alienate some of the administration’s conservative supporters. But the policy followed logically from emancipation, which made conciliation and compromise with the armed South an impossibility. Neither he nor his commanders intended all-out savagery or wanton excess. Rather they saw a controlled and morally justified means of bringing the war to a close. When Sherman described his marches as “not . . . war but rather statesmanship,” he intended no irony or black humor.
⁷
And with this perception of hard war as fundamentally political in purpose Lincoln surely agreed.

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–85) established his name in the western theater with the seizure of Forts Henry and Donelson, and won Lincoln’s admiration for the brilliance of his strategy in the Vicksburg campaign during 1862–63. In March 1864 the president made him lieutenant general and commander of all Union armies.