Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (56 page)

Democrats coined the term “miscegenation” in 1864, during their campaign to associate the Republicans with the social and sexual mixing of the races. In this print, a portrait of Lincoln looks down benignly on a “negro ball” where white Republican leaders dance with black women, “thus testifying their faith by their works.”

The target of this savage 1864 political cartoon is twofold: Lincoln’s racial policies and his administration’s incompetence. Backstage for a production of
Othello,
Lincoln is blackfaced for the role. Seward is drunk, Greeley ineffectual. Welles sleeps and Butler plunders. Stanton gives instructions to soldiers to secure Lincoln’s reelection. Andrew Johnson is a straw dummy.

Even so, McClellan was not crushed: although he took only New Jersey and the slave states of Delaware and Kentucky, he won a respectable 44 percent of the four million votes cast. A solid core of Democratic voters, committed to the Union but not to emancipation, kept the party a viable and competitive force in the free states of the Middle Atlantic seaboard and the Midwest. In some areas McClellan won with a bigger vote than his party had secured in 1860. These were mainly cities and mining counties with a large proportion of Irish and other foreign-born laborers anxious about inflation, the power of capital, and being drafted into a war for the Negro. “Pat casts his vote (or votes) on the side which he is told is hostile to ‘naygurs,’ ” Greeley judged, “and struggles to roll back a threatened inundation of free black labor from the South.”
⁹⁵

By contrast, Lincoln’s strength lay chiefly amongst native-born farmers, but he also did well amongst the skilled workers and professional middle classes of the cities. New England and areas of Yankee settlement remained strongholds, but the party now took a grip in places where it had once been quite weak, including Baltimore and Philadelphia. In the lower North and border states the appeal to conservative Unionists of the Fillmore-Bell-Everett stamp proved even more successful than it had been four years earlier, and Everett himself campaigned for the president’s reelection. As in 1860, Lincoln made some headway with German voters in Missouri, Illinois, and Wisconsin, having taken pains to ensure they were targeted in their own language. And, true to the promise that (as one volunteer told the president) “the Soldiers vote will be all on one side,” Lincoln benefited from a four-to-one advantage amongst the fighting men. While not crucial to his overall victory, it certainly gave him the edge in a handful of states.

In this scene at a camp of the Army of the Potomac on presidential election day 1864, an artist for
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
imaginatively sketched a Lincoln-like figure in earnest discussion with a soldier, as other loyal fighting men wait to vote the Union ticket.

Especially remarkable was the political fusion of most of the core elements of northern Protestantism with the Union-Republican party. “There probably never was an election in all history into which the religious element entered so largely, and so nearly all on one side,” rejoiced the editor of the nation’s chief Methodist newspaper, expressing the widespread belief of most party activists. The big evangelical denominations, and the small, radical antislavery offshoots, together with the Quakers, Unitarians, and other liberal Protestant groups, swung behind Lincoln even more firmly than they had in 1860. McClellan unsurprisingly retained the Democrats’ hold on most Catholic voters; Protestant editors universally lamented the “rebel sympathy” of the newly naturalized Irish Romanists in particular. Democrats probably also won a majority of Episcopalian and old-school Presbyterian voters, as well as antimission Baptists and Disciples in the lower Midwest. But most Protestants found their center of gravity securely within a Union party that seems to have tugged many Baptists and Methodists, and even old-school Presbyterians, from Democratic moorings. In a celebratory editorial, written in the gray dawn after election day, Theodore Tilton attributed Lincoln’s victory to “nothing less than an over-ruling Divine Hand outstretched to save the Republic.” More prosaically we can see it as in large part the result of an extraordinary mobilization of Union opinion by those who saw themselves as God’s agents: the leaders of the Protestant churches.
⁹⁶

Lincoln regarded his reelection, both process and outcome, as a defining episode of the war, one which thoroughly vindicated his faith in “the people.” He rejoiced with Hay that a “quiet and orderly” election had revealed the essentially noncoercive genius of the Union’s free institutions and the nation’s capacity to function even in wartime “without running into anarchy or despotism.” During the darkest days of the conflict, he had been sure that the nation would endure if its survival were to depend on the loyalty of ordinary men and women to its ideals and institutions. When, briefly, it had seemed that a peace candidate might triumph in 1864, he had not doubted the continuing depth of popular Unionism, nor had he given any thought to canceling or postponing an election which embodied the constitutional and republican values for which the war was being fought, and through which the voices of nationalism could express themselves. He knew, as a fellow Illinoisan put it, “that we are not to expect the Union to be saved by any one in particular, but by the whole people. . . . They must save it—the wise common sense of the people rather than the craft of its leaders, the organic wisdom of the nation rather than the cunning of astute politicians.”
⁹⁷

What would have followed a victory for McClellan on the Chicago platform is a matter of uncertain speculation. Nicolay, along with so many others, thought it would see peace bought “at the cost of Disunion, Secession, Bankruptcy and National Dishonor, and an ‘ultimate’ Slave Empire.”
⁹⁸
McClellan himself would no doubt have opposed a permanent separation, but it is not clear how he would have prevented it had he been driven to concede an armistice. Either way, universal emancipation would have been an improbable outcome: whether a Democratic peace brought a reunified nation or a fractured Union, it would surely have seen slavery still legally protected in parts of North America.

In the event, the Union-Republican victory kept the door open for the triumph of a quite different vision for the nation, one articulated by both Lincoln and a myriad of local activists. It was based on a deep sense of America’s historical significance and providential role, and on a continuing commitment in the present and future to a set of ideas based less on blood and race than on ideals of equality and freedom. One of Lincoln’s great political achievements was so to define these national ideals and elevate the Union cause as to harness the energizing forces of Yankee Protestant radicalism, without at the same time frightening off more conservative Unionists. In emphasizing, as historians have done, Lincoln’s shrewd holding together of a broad Union coalition and his pragmatism in keeping conservatives on board, there is a danger of undervaluing the significance of the more radical elements in the amalgam. Lincoln knew that for most of the time, given the problems facing any third party in a two-party political system, radicals had little option but to stick with the Republicans. But he also recognized the destructive power of defeatism and war-weariness, and the need to harness enough of the radicals’ vision to keep Union loyalists energized and inspired. He needed the radicals, just as they needed him. Over time he showed enough of those who were ready to listen that he was, in Congressman William Kelley’s words, “the wisest radical of them all.”
⁹⁹

CHAPTER 7

The Potency of Death

W
ith the war in its final spasm and his thoughts turning to the business of a merciful peace, Lincoln embarked on a second term of office physically and mentally drained. One cabinet meeting, in mid-March, had to be held in his sickroom. He ate and slept little. Photographs reveal a deeply furrowed face wounded with exhaustion. Yet, given the remorseless pressures of wartime leadership, these images—though poignant—are unsurprising. More remarkable is that Lincoln’s mind and body survived so well the rigors and demands of his job. He drew on unusual muscular strength, developed in his youth through hard physical labor (he could still, remarkably, grasp an ax at the end of its handle and hold it out horizontally at arm’s length without trembling). Equally important was his mental toughness, including tenacity in thought and a firm resolve once his purpose was fixed. This fortitude, allied to a powerful sense of duty, gave Lincoln a rare capacity for sustained labor. Even on the morning after his election triumph in 1864, when a restorative break might have seemed in order, a clerk found him at his desk engaged in “dull routine drudgery.”
¹

Hard work, however important, does not itself explain Lincoln’s political achievements. But diligence was allied to a cluster of other qualities which contributed to the assurance in office of a man whose previous lack of executive experience had led many to fear political disaster. Amongst the chief of those characteristics was what Gideon Welles described as Lincoln’s “wonderful self-reliance.” Lincoln as president lacked any friendship as close as that which he had once enjoyed with Joshua Speed, and he possessed in the grief-stricken Mary a wife who demanded more emotional support than she returned; by way of compensation, he was blessed with an unusual confidence in his own judgment. He was not deaf to the opinions of others, but, as Leonard Swett said, “he arrived at all his conclusions from his own reflections.”
²

Alexander Gardner’s photograph, taken in February 1865, reveals the accumulated strain on the
president.

This self-assurance was related to a powerful sense of self-worth quite noteworthy in a man so ungainly and so conscious of his plainness. Francis Carpenter admired the president’s jocular indifference to his lack of physical grace, and John Hay recorded Lincoln’s pleasure over a dream in which he had replied to a comment about his ugliness: “The Lord prefers common-looking people: that is the reason he makes so many of them.”
³
But this conviction of his own worth—which made him unusually resistant to feelings of political jealousy and toughened him against the chronic abrasion of wartime criticism—stopped short of becoming an overdeveloped self-regard. Most of those who dealt with Lincoln recognized a political confidence that never spilled over, through vanity or a misplaced dignity, into arrogance or self-glorification. A man whose favorite poem was William Knox’s “Oh, Why Should the Spirit of Mortal Be Proud” needed little warning about the damaging power of human pride and the evanescence of worldly glory.

To Lincoln’s self-reliance and self-worth can be added a conscious striving for self-restraint. The same impulse that led him to avoid alcohol—anxiety over the loss of self-control and rationality—informed his political dealings. Anger and personal hostility should not be allowed to compromise political and military objectives. “Quarrel not at all,” he told a young officer. “No man resolved to make the most of himself, can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper, and the loss of self-control.” Lincoln remained embarrassed by the memory of his duel with James Shields. As president he occasionally used rage for tactical effect, and more than once he turned to his pen as therapy for anger or exasperation, by writing letters (as to Meade after Gettysburg) which on prudent reflection he chose not to send. But only rarely was he seen to lose his equanimity. Lincoln, said Swett, was “a very poor hater. He never judged men by his like, or dislike for them. . . . I do not think he ever removed a man because he was his enemy, or because he disliked him.” In a similar vein, John Forney thought him “a capital peacemaker, . . . especially resolute in refusing to adopt the enemies of his friends.”
⁴

Keeping control of his spontaneity also meant that Lincoln never showed, in David Davis’s words, “gushing feelings,” but most of those who dealt with him warmed to what they commonly described as his sincerity and straightforwardness. Of course, Lincoln was skilled in communicating only what he wanted to reveal, but he had a rare gift for speaking candidly without giving offense. In his dealings with individuals, as well as in his handling of policy issues, he drew by common consent on an unsurpassed understanding of human nature. His long years on the circuit no doubt contributed to this shrewdness in judging people, while his formidable memory meant that, as one admirer put it, he “seemed to have read the character, and to know the peculiarities of every leading man in Congress and the country.” Even Bennett of the
New York Herald,
hardly a sycophant, paid tribute to the president’s “shrewd perception of the ins and outs of poor weak human nature,” which “enabled him to master difficulties which would have swamped almost any other man.”
⁵

Though most Unionists believed Lincoln lacked the brilliance and nobility that they felt the presidency demanded in a time of crisis, his personal strengths served the administration well: over the long haul which no leadership committed to restoring the Union could have avoided, Lincoln’s tenacity, patience, shrewdness in personal dealings, and unblinking focus on essentials more than offset his lack of administrative experience and his inefficient, unbusinesslike ways. It was easy to underestimate him—though from that he derived unexpected advantage. In the prewar courtroom, in Swett’s memorable metaphor, anyone “who took Lincoln for a simple-minded man would very soon wake up with his back in a ditch.” In wartime, the Union’s competing egos only slowly woke up to the full reality of the quaint president’s increasing control and authority.

While treating Congress with relative deference, rarely using the presidential veto, and giving his cabinet secretaries considerable autonomy in their own particular spheres, Lincoln jealously guarded the president’s power in key domains. As head of the executive branch, he alone would define the war’s goals and set the means of achieving them. As commander-in-chief, he would not cede all authority to his generals; indeed, learning from the chronic failings of McClellan, he strengthened his grip on the strategic reins. As the leader of his party, he saw its value as an instrument of popular mobilization, while equally understanding the dangers of partisan narrowness in a conflict which needed the Union’s “discordant elements,” as he termed them, to be bound firmly together.
⁶
And, as the nation’s representative and political figurehead during what he defined as “a people’s war,” he put his faith in his own proven sensitivity to public opinion.

Through this formidable, if unspectacular, combination of personal qualities, political authority, and diagnostic ability, Lincoln sustained what proved to be a stunningly effective overall strategy. Historians have rightly made much of his caution, especially in the earlier phases of the war, as he knit border conservatives, residual Whigs, and War Democrats into the Union coalition. Rather less has been made of Lincoln’s understanding of the need to inspire and energize the North, and to inoculate it against the most virulent strains of war-weariness and defeatism, by articulating an ideal of the nation that spoke to a higher patriotism and an expanded vision of the Union. He did this on his own terms and not the radicals’, but the vision that he offered in the later stages of the conflict owed far more to New England Protestantism and “Yankeedom” than it did to his cultural roots in the border and lower North. Lincoln’s growing religious seriousness as president is worthy of note, but what is more important in explaining his political achievement is his effective channeling of the forces of mainstream Protestant orthodoxy, the most potent agent of American nationalism.

The Lincoln presented here, then, was an energetic, active president. His commonly noted fatalism induced not political passivity but an understanding that the individual politician would fail if he tried to swim against or resist the larger tide. “Lincoln’s whole life was a calculation of the law of forces, and ultimate results,” Swett maintained. The world to him was a question of cause and effect.
⁷
This did not encourage inertia in a man for whom “work, work, work” was “the main thing.” Rather, it meant identifying and promoting the means by which the larger forces at play could be advanced. Convinced that the Union both should and could be saved, and sure that slavery’s days were numbered, Lincoln seized his historical moment as the instrument of a providential purpose.

Four years’ active leadership gave Lincoln few opportunities for even brief relaxation—let alone recuperation—from the burdens of office. Work itself was not a great strain, though: it was the fits of grief that proved most disabling. Willie’s death stabbed at his heart; the mounting slaughter in the field brought on deep depression. During the first bloody week of the Wilderness campaign he scarcely slept. Carpenter described a man in torment, pacing to and fro, “his hands behind him, great black rings under his eyes, his head bent forward upon his breast, —altogether such a picture of the effects of sorrow, care, and anxiety as would have melted the hearts of the worst of his adversaries.” Yet Lincoln had strategies for survival, fashioned during a lifetime punctuated by bouts of despair—what he called the “hypo.” He had been particularly afflicted by melancholia as a younger man, notably over romantic attachments, and had come to learn an empowering lesson: each attack would pass in time. “You can not now realize that you will ever feel better,” he told a bereaved young woman. “And yet it is a mistake,” he added, revealing his own therapy: “You are sure to be happy again.”
⁸

Relief also came from his well-developed sense of the ridiculous. Lincoln used humor as his recreational drug. What others derived from a glass of wine or a pleasurable meal, Lincoln got from hearty laughter. He relished humorous writing and delighted in David Ross Locke’s comic creation, Petroleum V. Nasby. He loved anecdotes and jokes, refined and vulgar. He used them sometimes as political camouflage but at other times as a refuge, contagiously leading the laughter. Forney deliberately took proven raconteurs with him on his visits to the White House to lighten the president’s gloom. People who lacked a sense of humor were a trial to Lincoln: of one cabinet member, probably Chase, he complained—in words borrowed from the English clergyman Sydney Smith—that “it required a surgical operation to get a joke into his head.” When during the dismal days of 1862 he was rebuked by a senator for embarking on a humorous story, he protested poignantly, “I say to you now, that were it not for this occasional
vent,
I should die.”
⁹

But Lincoln was fundamentally too serious-minded to find refuge in levity alone. Much of his love of Shakespeare derived from the dramatist’s extraordinary insights into human psychology and from his meditations on political power and its transience, burdens, and griefs. “He read Shakespeare more than all other writers together,” recalled Hay, who listened for hours, evening after evening, as Lincoln read to him from his favorite plays:
Hamlet, King Lear,
the histories, and, especially,
Macbeth.
Lincoln’s relish for the speeches of flawed legitimate monarchs like Lear and Richard II, and of the usurping rulers Richard III, Macbeth, and Claudius, cannot be plausibly explained by some sublimated tyrannical impulse in himself. Rather, the experience of these Shakespearean heads of state, whose ambition had won them “the hollow crown,” spoke to the condition of a man whose restless desire for the highest office in the Union had delivered a fearful, bone-wearying duty. His particular fascination with Claudius’s soliloquy, beginning “O, my offence is rank,” in which the murderous king struggles honestly and despairingly with his conscience, and which Lincoln considered “one of the finest touches of nature in the world,” may well have had to do with his own (at times crushing) sense of responsibility, if not guilt, for the onset of a murderous war. Shakespeare—particularly through his great comic creation Falstaff—brought Lincoln the joy of laughter, too, but it was above all for “companionship in melancholy” that the overburdened president turned to his favorite dramatist.
¹⁰

There was one venue above all where Lincoln could be sure of an escape into laughter or unreal tragedy: the theater. At Ford’s or at Grover’s, with family and friends, he could hope to find a refuge from office-seekers and the pestering clamor of the White House, and—as Noah Brooks put it—might “unfix his thoughts from cares and anxieties.” He attended all kinds of entertainment, from opera to minstrelsy, from Shakespeare to popular but undistinguished comedy. It was to one of the latter,
Our American Cousin
at Ford’s Theatre, that Lincoln prepared to go on the evening of Good Friday, April 14, 1865. Five days earlier Robert E. Lee had surrendered his army to Grant at Appomattox Court House, less than a week after the fall of the Confederate capital. In these twilight days between war and peace—with Joseph E. Johnston’s forces still at large but vulnerable in North Carolina, with the Union public jubilantly expecting an imminent end to the conflict, and with the president encouraging ideas of national reconciliation based on loyalty, clemency, and political rights for certain classes of blacks—Lincoln recovered a boyish cheerfulness which startled Mary. “We must
both,
be more cheerful in the future,” he told her on the afternoon of his final visit to the theater; “between the war and the loss of our darling Willie—we have both, been very miserable.”
¹¹