Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (54 page)

Throughout the two months of serious campaigning, Lincoln, like McClellan, made few appearances in public, and cultivated an impression that he was remote from the action: he told Francis Carpenter, “I cannot run the political machine; I have enough on my hands without
that.
It is the
people’s
business, —the election is in their hands.” But he was busy enough behind the scenes, trying to keep the party focused, intervening on behalf of incumbent Republicans in congressional races, striving to heal local conflicts in fractious key states, notably Pennsylvania and Missouri, and aiming to neuter hostile editors like Bennett of the
New York Herald
by dangling the prospect of a government post. Lincoln’s concessions to both conservatives and radicals reinforced the unifying effect on the party of the Chicago outcome: even Wade and Davis took to the stump, as did Chase, aglow in hope that he might replace the ailing chief justice, Taney. The president kept in touch not just with Raymond and the party’s national executive committee but with local leaders, taking a deep interest in the activities of the Union Leagues and valuing no less their work as propagandists.
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Gratifyingly for the White House, the campaign drenched the electorate in an unprecedented torrent of publications, produced at unheard-of expense. Whatever the frictions between the powerful state committees and the Union Congressional Committee, between the localities and the center of a loose-jointed, largely decentralized organization, the party’s organizers supplied literally millions of printed items. Underpinning the party’s propaganda battle were the hundreds of small-town daily papers, whose proudly independent editors had sustained Lincoln even during the hard days of summer, reflecting a telling depth of support for the president amongst local subscribers. These editors encouraged the efforts of the myriad local Wide Awake and Union clubs, chided members into ever more energetic canvassing and document distribution, and carried throughout their neighborhoods uplifting reports of public meetings, spectacular marches, and horse-drawn patriotic tableaux.
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No less significant than the administration’s faith in the agency of party was their rallying of institutional Protestantism. Lincoln himself seized every reasonable opportunity to harness to his chariot of reelection the patriotism of religious bodies. A striking instance occurred in May. The supreme body of the Methodist Episcopal Church, meeting in Philadelphia, appointed five ministers to deliver an address to the president and assure him of the denomination’s continuing support for the Union and its war aims. One of the party, Granville Moody, knew the president and met him in advance. Lincoln, with his party’s nominating convention only weeks away, saw a chance to stage-manage the occasion and asked Moody to leave a copy of the address. When the deputation arrived the next morning, they were ushered in by the secretary of state and received “with great courtesy” by the president and senior cabinet members. The president stood “straight as an arrow” as he listened to the Methodists’ statement and then took from his desk the brief response that he had prepared overnight. In five short sentences he thanked them, endorsed their sentiments, ensured that other churches would take no offense by his singling out Methodists for praise, and then flatteringly described them as “the most important of all” denominations: “It is no fault in others that the Methodist Church sends more soldiers to field, more nurses to the hospitals, and more prayers to heaven than any.” After a brief, informal conversation, the ministers withdrew, much impressed with Lincoln’s generous, high-toned remarks. Returning to their conference the next morning, proudly clutching a signed copy of the president’s words to show their colleagues, they were taken aback to discover that a full account of the meeting had already been published in the daily papers. The White House had telegraphed the news the previous day; the story had gone into type in Philadelphia even before the committee had left Washington. Lincoln’s reply was designed not just for his five visitors but for the other seven thousand ministers and nearly one million members of the largest, most influential church of the land. Lincoln had left nothing to chance.
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By early September the majority of the North’s active Protestants were evidently committed to Lincoln’s reelection. Though a group of alienated radicals, many of them liberal Protestants, took a lead from Anna Dickinson, Wendell Phillips, and other unyielding critics of the administration, far more significant was the binding of Garrison’s wing of abolitionism and its newspaper presses into the National Union coalition. They joined mainstream evangelicals to form a broad front of political activists. Lincoln had good reason at this time to remark to a Congregationalist minister, “I rely upon the religious sentiment of the country, which I am told is very largely for me.” Indeed, the final two months of the campaign witnessed the most complete fusing of religious crusade and political mobilization in America’s electoral experience.
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The Kentucky Presbyterian Robert Breckinridge, who chaired the party’s Baltimore convention in June, was only one of hundreds of ministers who adorned National Union platforms and took to the stump. In Chillicothe, Ohio, Granville Moody opened the party’s campaign with a three-hour speech liberally interspersed with hymn-singing, prayer, and Scripture readings on the duty of loyalty. Thomas Eddy drove himself to exhaustion as he engaged in an unending round of ward and camp meetings, election speeches, political sermons, addresses to troops, and—as a Methodist newspaper editor—religio-political journalism. The National Union Committee employed Henry Ward Beecher to speak in the final stages of the campaign. Matthew Simpson, at the request of local Republican organizers, delivered his celebrated war speech—a set-piece tour de force—at the New York Academy of Music just a few days before the poll, in the presence of the
Tribune
and the city’s other newspapers: though avoiding conspicuous partisanship, the bishop left no one in any doubt that his celebration of national greatness amounted to a passionate call to sustain the “railsplitter . . . President.”
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The Union Leagues printed and circulated many of these political sermons. Religious tract society agents distributed campaign literature. Religious newspapers called on churches to become Republican clubs. Gatherings of ministers, in Baptist and Congregational associations, Presbyterian synods, and Methodist conferences, more or less explicitly told their members to vote the Lincoln ticket. They “should march as churches in our processions, as churches to the polls,” insisted the
New York
Independent.
The abolitionist minister Gilbert Haven called on his fellow Methodists “once more [to] march to the ballot-box, an army of Christ, with the banner of the cross, and deposit, as she can, almost a million votes for her true representative.”
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In May 1864 Lincoln deftly used his reply to a Methodist delegation to flatter their church without disparaging other denominations.

Encouraging this interplay of religion and politics were Lincoln’s calls for days of national prayer and thanksgiving, which he made on several occasions during the war. He had on several earlier occasions reached out to the devout in this way. As well as providing an opportunity for ministers to rally support for the continuing struggle, these services gave the hundreds of thousands who attended a consciousness of belonging to a single community united in sacrifice and aspiration. By a short proclamation Lincoln could use one of his most supportive networks to secure a national charge of adrenaline. He chose his occasions with deliberation, as his political opponents understood. In 1864 he hesitated over appointing a day of fasting and humiliation during the low point of summer, fearing its impact on popular morale, and left it to Congress to take the initiative. But after the successes at Mobile and Atlanta, he moved swiftly to proclaim Sunday, September 10, a day of thanksgiving. In this he was effectively licensing every minister to wave the Union-Republican flag from the pulpit. Opposition Democrats, sensing a blend of low political cunning and New England hypocrisy (“Phariseeism,” as they termed it), cried foul when Union clergy read to their congregations a proclamation which attributed the turn of events to God’s intervention and asked for prayers “that He will continue to uphold the government of the United States against all the efforts of public enemies and secret foes.” Then, on October 20, Lincoln issued a further Proclamation of Thanksgiving: with the election less than three weeks away, he pointedly wrote of the Union’s hope, under “our Heavenly Father,” of “an ultimate and happy deliverance” from the trials of war, and the triumph of “the cause of freedom and humanity.”
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Through platform, pulpit, and printed page, Republican party activists rallied a public overwhelmingly devoted to restoring the Union. Issues of principle would dominate, but campaign discourse necessarily included celebrating Lincoln’s presidential qualities and countering the carping of those who deemed him unfit for his job. The president’s Republican critics detected vacillation, timidity, weakness, and a lack of the “over-shadowing ability” that marked, for instance, Chase’s handling of national finances or Grant’s military command. Lincoln himself judged he was most vulnerable on the score of his personal leadership, and generally even those who listed his virtues also conceded his shortcomings, fallibility, and lack of brilliance. But if few claimed greatness for Lincoln, almost all extolled his personal integrity, kindliness, honesty of purpose, political candor and fair-dealing, refusal to bear grudges, and—above all—his persevering and unbending Unionism. These qualities took on added luster when set alongside the somber portrait that National Union men sketched of McClellan: the vain, opportunistic, cowardly, and two-faced nominee of a badly divided party.

Union party campaigners, then, were hardly exponents of a cult of personality. Yet they benefited from a widely shared perception of Lincoln as a moral agent, whether as an honest, plain man of the people or as the human means by which a higher power had delivered emancipation. John Gulliver, the Congregational minister of Norwich, Connecticut, in a widely circulated public letter, praised him for his stern antislavery resolve throughout the turns and twists of war: “Slow, if you please, but
true.
Unimpassioned, if you please, but
true.
Jocose, trifling, if you please, but
true.
Reluctant to part with unworthy official advisers, but
true
himself
—true as steel
!
” And on the night of Lincoln’s reelection a fellow clergyman displayed a transparency over his door: “The angel of the Lord called unto Abraham out of heaven a second time.” Harriet Beecher Stowe and others helped wrap Lincoln, the southern-born westerner of unorthodox belief but now the friend of fast-days and national thanksgivings, in the mantle of high-principled New England Puritanism.
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This Democratic cartoon places a callous and cowardly Lincoln amongst the
Union casualties at Antietam. He asks his friend Lamon to “sing us ‘Picayune
Butler’ or something else that’s funny.” The unfounded story appeared in the oppositionist
New York World.
Lincoln is clad in the garments—Scottish
cap and military cloak—he was said to have worn when he made his furtive nighttime entry into Washington in February 1861.

Faint echoes of the 1840s still sounded, though. According to one of Lincoln’s Treasury officials, Lucius E. Chittenden, “there were sullen whisperings that Mr. Lincoln had no religious opinions nor any interest in churches or Christian institutions.” The president was not helped by his apparent ambivalence toward the National Reform Association, an interdenominational body established in 1863 to secure a Christian amendment to the Constitution, recognizing the nation’s dependence on God. The association had initially enjoyed the support of mainstream evangelicals who thought that the unamended Constitution explained why the Emancipation Proclamation had not brought about any improvement in the Union’s fortunes. Lincoln himself seemed to give its representatives a sympathetic hearing. But the movement’s popularity slowly waned as a variety of radical evangelicals, Jews, and non-Christians expressed their opposition, and as the Union secured battlefield success. When Lincoln failed to act purposefully, Thomas Sproull, the editor of the
Reformed Presbyterian and Covenanter,
denounced the president as a deist who had never distinctly recognized Christianity and had “refused to honor the Son.” Sproull appealed to all “who believe in Christ” to prevent the infidel’s return to office.
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