Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (48 page)

The mass-produced, pocket-size
cartes de visite
turned Lincoln into a familiar and personal presence throughout the Union. Understanding their value, he readily sat to be photographed. The images here, including a tender study of “Father Abraham” with his son Tad, capture him from his arrival in Washington as president-elect, in February 1861, to the month before his assassination.

Some have considered Lincoln’s reticence a probable mistake, a damaging and self-inflicted wound, to be contrasted with Jefferson Davis’s recourse to speaking tours to bolster Confederate morale.
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But what Lincoln lost in this respect he more than made up for by the use of other media, by which he became a ubiquitous presence, both visually and in words. The mass-produced woodcut and lithograph carried Lincoln’s image into thousands of homes, as did the newly arrived mass-produced photograph. Lincoln sat dozens of times for photographers, and many of the seventy or so wartime likenesses of him were reproduced in huge numbers as pocket-size photographs. The president was not a vain man and knew he was no pinup, but he was only too ready to meet the popular demand for an easily available likeness and to give those who had never seen him in the flesh a sense of personal encounter.

Equally Lincoln made often brilliant use of the written word to communicate the purposes of the administration. The most formal of the president’s documents, his annual and special messages to Congress (which were forwarded from the White House, to be read out by a clerk in the legislative branch), naturally consumed much of his time and blended routine information, compact analysis of events, vigorous explanation of the administration’s course, and, occasionally, soaring rhetoric. Then there were the published accounts of the many less ceremonial, more informal occasions: Lincoln’s meetings and interviews with groups of visitors to the White House, for which he had often a scripted response. Probably most effective of all were Lincoln’s carefully crafted public letters to particular individuals or mass meetings, a device he used with increasing frequency after the slide in the administration’s political fortunes in the spring of 1862. Each was skillfully designed to rally opinion or prepare it for imminent changes in policy, and each addressed an issue crucial to the conduct and outcome of the war: emancipation and racial issues in his letters to Horace Greeley (August 1862), James C. Conkling, his Springfield friend (August 1863), and Albert Hodges (April 1864); conscription policy to New York Governor Horatio Seymour (August 1863); and treason, military arrests, and the suspension of habeas corpus to Erastus Corning, Matthew Birchard, and other New York and Ohio Democrats (June 1863). In some cases, as with his letter to a Union mass meeting in support of Maryland state emancipation in October 1864, the immediate and chief objective was local. On the other hand, his addresses to the workingmen of Manchester and London sought to rally overseas opinion. Some of the letters appeared not just in newspaper columns but as widely circulating pamphlets. Seen as a whole, the president’s pronouncements warrant the historian Phillip Paludan’s conclusion that for the duration of the war “Lincoln constantly manipulated public opinion”—albeit in the pursuit of a philosophically enhanced and rededicated Union, in the celebration of constitutionalism, and in the Whiggish, romantic belief that the statesman’s role was to appeal to “the better angels of [people’s] nature.”
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Lincoln wrote his masterly letter to Albert G. Hodges, Kentucky editor of the
Frankfort Commonwealth,
intending that it be published—and circulated widely. Aimed particularly at border-state conservatives who were angered by black enlistments and the erosion of slavery, Lincoln’s explanation of his actions shrewdly and calculatingly stressed the reactive, not proactive, element in his policy making (“events have controlled me”).

Lincoln surely regretted being unable to give voice to his own words. He was keenly alert to matters of intonation and emphasis, evident in his private recitation of Shakespearean soliloquies and in his canny advice to an actor playing Falstaff on how to get the best out of a line. Significantly, he accompanied his letter to Conkling, designed to be read out at a Union rally, with guidance on how it should be delivered. His enforced near-silence made him all the more attentive to the quality of his prose, which he sought to imbue with color, life, and energy. When, in his intended message to the special session of Congress in July 1861, Lincoln described the rebellion as “sugar-coated,” the government printer objected to what was then judged an undignified expression. Lincoln was unimpressed by the distinction his critic drew between the racy language appropriate for a mass meeting in Illinois and the prose of a historic, formal document: “That word expresses precisely my idea, and I am not going to change it. The time will never come in this country when the people won’t know exactly what
sugar-coated
means!” In his public letter to Greeley, to stress the difficulty in restoring the old Union unchanged, he had written: “Broken eggs can never be mended, and the longer the breaking proceeds the more will be broken.” Only reluctantly did he strike out a sentence which the editors of the
National Intelligencer
considered undignified. Sometimes Lincoln’s lively metaphors got the better of him: even the adoring Hay judged the letter to Conkling, with its allusion to the navy as “Uncle Sam’s web-feet,” to be scarred by “hideously bad rhetoric . . . [and] indecorums that are infamous.” However, these lapses came not from self-conscious cleverness, classical allusions, or showy erudition, but from striving to be plainly understood, and in the main Lincoln’s prose was arresting, lucid, and strikingly economical. For admirers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lincoln’s was the art that concealed art. By his careful avoidance of “fine writing,” as conventionally understood, and his embrace of language that had “the relish and smack of the soil,” he reached all classes, from the most sophisticated to “the lowest intellect.”
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In practice, it made no great difference whether Lincoln spoke or wrote. What really counted was that his words and ideas reached and moved the widest possible audience. Lincoln’s personal exertions in defining the administration’s objectives were only part of the overall exercise of tapping into the Union’s deep well of religio-patriotic sentiment. In seeking out the most potent agencies to harness that opinion, the government had to look beyond its official institutions, which had been chronically weak. The most powerful and extensive of the nation’s networks were voluntary associations. Preeminently these were twofold: the political party—its voluntarism supplemented and compromised by the rewards of government patronage—and the churches, with their associated philanthropic agencies. By energetically exploiting the steadfast loyalism of these institutions, a president tied to the White House was able to project himself and his cause into the heartland of the Union and beyond.

Lincoln needed no lessons in how the power of party might promote a cause.
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His presidential victory in 1860 had depended far less on his individual appeal than on the skill with which Republican organizers had projected him as the embodiment of the party’s philosophy and platform. But Lincoln’s election and nominal leadership of the party did not mean that the organization, whatever its potential for war mobilization, would effortlessly fall into line behind him and then stay there. The Republicans were a fragile, decentralized coalition. There were few established Lincoln loyalists in Congress. Organizationally the party was, in practice, little more than an agglomeration of local and state bodies. Philosophically, too, it was divided, as internal conflicts over emancipation, the conduct of the war, and reconstruction would show. If the party was to become a truly effective rallying force for the administration, Lincoln had to bind it together and impose his authority on it.

For these purposes he had to hand a potent weapon: presidential patronage. There was nothing new in a president fusing his roles as party leader and chief executive by distributing government jobs to the party faithful. But Lincoln had the added bonus of controlling appointments to the thousands of new offices thrown up by the wartime expansion of the army and government departments. An experienced and skillful party manager, who possessed a potent combination of tenacity, patience, and command of detail, he devoted an enormous slice of his time to disposing of these posts. It was a wearisome and even draining exercise, as he sought to avoid gratuitously upsetting the competitors for office while yet remaining evenhanded toward the various party factions, including his critics. But his attentiveness and refusal to be bullied undoubtedly paid off. He built up a bank of congressional indebtedness by meeting the patronage requests of interceding congressmen, and created such highly effective cadres of supporters at state level that he easily outmaneuvered those who had hoped to prevent his running for a second term.
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The demonstrations of Union patriotism that immediately followed hostilities at Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call to arms would certainly have occurred without the encouragement of grassroots Republicans, though in fact local party leaders leaped to beat the martial drum, and mobilize men and resources, in an unyielding response to secessionist defiance. But as the early enthusiasm gave way first to frustration and then to war-weariness, the need to keep before the people the purposes of the Union grew increasingly urgent. Lincoln looked to his congressmen, governors, and local leaders to pursue within their constituencies the themes of his formal addresses and to sell each new statement of policy and national purpose: the Emancipation Proclamation, the use of black troops, the unacceptability of peace on the terms of “the Union as it was.” It was an expectation only partly realized, as Republican conservatives jibbed at emancipation, while radical hard-liners articulated more ambitious objectives in less emollient language. But an influential core of party loyalists, notably amongst the Republican governors, proved their persisting worth to Lincoln as interpreters of the administration’s purpose.

The key northern governors in 1861 were loyal party men. They owed their office to the party; they had been agents of national victory in 1860. As the war progressed they encouraged the president to take more power into federal hands and became themselves increasingly dependent on Washington. Without War Department funds, Governor Morton of Indiana would have had to recall a Democratic legislature which, bitterly opposed to an emancipationist war, had refused appropriations. Yates of Illinois, fearing civil war in his state, asked Washington to supply four regiments. In the critical state elections of 1863, especially in Connecticut, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, Lincoln’s interventionism included dispensing patronage, getting troops furloughed home to vote, and ensuring that government clerks were given leave (and free railroad passes) to reach the polls. Thus the demands and protectiveness of the party increasingly bound state and national governments together, and their mutual dependence had huge implications for Washington’s communication of the Union’s purpose. For one thing, it made possible political stage management in cultivating public confidence. After McClellan’s retreat from Richmond in the summer of 1862, Lincoln feared that a call for a further 100,000 men, though badly needed, would provoke “a general panic and stampede . . . so hard it is to have a thing understood as it really is.” Instead, in a scheme involving Seward, Weed, and the Republican governors Morgan of New York and Curtin of Pennsylvania, Lincoln got the loyal governors to sign a memorial ostensibly emanating from them but actually drawn up by the administration.
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