Lincoln (61 page)

While maintaining a tenuous hold on the border states, Lincoln took steps to increase Northern preparedness. On May 3 he called up additional volunteers, this time for three years. Without waiting for congressional authorization, he also expanded the regular United States Army by adding eight regiments of infantry, one of cavalry, and one of artillery and ordered the enlistment of 18,000 seamen in the navy. Earlier, on April 19, he had proclaimed a blockade of the ports of the seven Confederate states, subsequently extended to include those of North Carolina and Virginia. Two days later, with the unanimous concurrence of his cabinet, he dispatched an armed revenue cutter to protect ships from California bearing gold so necessary for Union finances. At the same time, again without congressional authorization, he directed the commandants of the navy yards at Boston, New York, and Philadelphia each to purchase and arm five steamships in order to preserve water communication to Washington. In case that communication was temporarily cut off, he empowered Governor E. D. Morgan of New York and an associate, Alexander Cummings, who was recommended by Secretary Cameron, to act for the government in forwarding troops and supplies. He also authorized the Treasury Department, without requiring security, to advance $2,000,000 to a New York committee headed by John A. Dix, to pay “such requisitions as should be directly consequent upon the military and naval measures necessary for the defence and support of the government.”

In the weeks after the firing on Fort Sumter, the demands on the President’s time were incessant and exhausting, but now that he could clearly see what had to be done, he bore up well under the strain. When the writer Bayard Taylor visited Washington, he was delighted to discover, contrary to rumor, that Lincoln was not exhausted or sick but instead appeared “very fresh and vigorous... thoroughly calm and collected.” Even Seward was impressed. “Executive skill and vigor are rare qualities,” he wrote his wife in June. “The President is the best of us; but he needs constant and assiduous cooperation.”

Lincoln’s July 4, 1861, message to the special session of Congress offered a full explanation of the course he had pursued in the Sumter crisis, blamed
the Southerners for beginning the conflict, and defended the subsequent actions he had taken to sustain the Union. Valuable as history, the message was more significant as prediction. Taken together with his proclamation of April 15, it clearly defined Lincoln’s view of the war and explained how he intended to prosecute it.

The conflict, he consistently maintained, was not a war between the government of the United States and that of the Confederate States of America. So to define it would acknowledge that the Union was not a perpetual one and that secession was constitutional. This Lincoln could not even tacitly admit. Throughout the next four years he sustained the legal fiction that the war was an “insurrection” of individuals in the Southern states who joined in “combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” Though he sometimes referred to the conflict as a civil war, he usually called it a “rebellion”—a term he employed more than four hundred times in his messages and letters. He never recognized that any of the Southern states was, or could be, out of the Union, and he did not identify the enemy as the Confederate States of America. On the very rare occasions he was forced to refer to that government, it was always as “the so-called Confederate States of America.”

In the years ahead Lincoln was not always able to keep to the purest formulation of his interpretation of the war. Had he done so, captured Confederate soldiers would have been treated as criminals and captured Southern seamen as pirates. This, as Jefferson Davis bluntly warned him, could only lead to retaliation. Without any public announcement, the Lincoln administration modified its position. Throughout the war captured Confederate soldiers and sailors were confined in prison camps—camps that were, in both the Union and the Confederacy, overcrowded and squalid beyond belief but were nevertheless preferable to the common jails where these prisoners might have been sent.

Lincoln’s view of the war as simply a domestic insurrection was also contradicted by the naval blockade he imposed on Southern ports. As both Secretary Welles and Charles Sumner advised, under international law his proper course was to close all Southern ports. A blockade was an instrument of war between two belligerent powers; by imposing it, the President was tacitly recognizing the Confederacy as a belligerent. But Lincoln was convinced that an order closing the ports would be repeatedly tested by foreign vessels and that conflict with the European naval powers would result, and he ordered the blockade. Thaddeus Stevens, leader of the Pennsylvania Republicans, ridiculed this as “a great blunder and absurdity” because in legal terms it meant “we were blockading ourselves.” When he angrily confronted the President over this issue, Lincoln put on his best simple-countryman air and said, “I don’t know anything about the law of nations, and I thought it was all right.”

“As a lawyer, Mr. Lincoln,” Stevens remarked, “I should have supposed you would have seen the difficulty at once.”

“Oh, well,” the President replied, “I’m a good enough lawyer in a Western law court, I suppose, but we don’t practice the law of nations up there, and I supposed Seward knew all about it, and I left it to him.” “But it’s done now and can’t be helped,” he added to Stevens’s fury, “so we must get along as well as we can.”

With these exceptions Lincoln adhered to his definition of the war, and throughout the next four years the implications of his decision were far-reaching. Because, in his eyes, the Confederacy did not exist, there could never be any negotiations leading to recognition or a peace treaty. Because the insurrection was the work of individuals, not of any organized government, the states of the South remained in the Union throughout the war, fully entitled to all the protections guaranteed by the Constitution. Those guarantees covered the right of private property—including slaves. Punishment for participating in the rebellion could be inflicted on traitorous individuals, not on the states in which they resided, and when victory came to the Union cause, the Southern states would be, as they always had been, equal to all others in the United States.

Lincoln’s July 1861 message, together with his proclamations, also made it clear that he considered the prosecution of the war primarily a function of the Chief Executive, to be carried out with minimal interference from the other branches of the government and without excessive respect to constitutional niceties protecting individual rights. To carry out his duties as commander-in-chief, he believed that he could exercise powers normally reserved to the legislative branch of government. Proclaiming a blockade, extending the period for volunteer enlistment to three years, increasing the size of the regular army and navy, and entrusting public funds to private persons for the purchase of arms and supplies would ordinarily require the prior approval of Congress, but the emergency required the President to act before such authorization was granted. “It was with the deepest regret,” he explained, “that the Executive found the duty of employing the war-power, in defence of the government, forced upon him.” “These measures, whether strictly legal or not,” he informed Congress in July, “were ventured upon, under what appeared to be a popular demand, and a public necessity; trusting, then, as now, that Congress would readily ratify them.” “It is believed,” he added, “that nothing has been done beyond the constitutional competency of Congress.”

Even touchier was his decision to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, an action that touched on the power both of the legislative and the judicial branches of the government. In neither law nor precedent was it clear where the authority for such suspension lay. The constitutional provision concerning suspension appeared in Article I, detailing the powers of Congress, but whether the Philadelphia convention had placed it there to identify it as a purely legislative function or for stylistic reasons because it did not fit elsewhere was unclear and subsequently became a matter of great controversy in the Congress and among legal experts.

Belief that only Congress had the right to suspend the writ was the basis for Chief Justice Taney’s fulminations against the President in his
Merryman
ruling. Lincoln made no reply at the time, but in his message to Congress the President pointed out that the Constitution was silent as to who was to exercise the power of suspending the writ and claimed that in a dangerous emergency when the Congress was not in session the Chief Executive was obliged to act. “It was not believed that any law was violated,” he added. Then he went on to suggest that “such extreme tenderness of the citizen’s liberty” as Taney had shown could lead to the danger of allowing “all the laws,
but one,
to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated.”

The next years would see greater infringements on individual liberties than in any other period in American history. Repeatedly the writ of habeas corpus was suspended in localities where secession seemed dangerous, and on September 24, 1862, and again on September 15, 1863, Lincoln suspended the privilege of the writ throughout the country. Initially control of the arbitrary arrests of civilians was given to the Secretary of State, and by the best count, 864 persons were imprisoned and held without trial in the first nine months of the war. After February 1862, when such arrests became the province of the Secretary of War, the number of cases greatly increased. Most of the persons so arrested were spies, smugglers, blockade-runners, carriers of contraband goods, and foreign nationals; only a few were truly political prisoners, jailed for expressing their beliefs. It was nevertheless clear from Lincoln’s first message to Congress that devotion to civil liberties was not the primary concern of his administration.

In his July 1861 message Lincoln palliated such transgressions of constitutional niceties because of the importance of the struggle in which the country was engaged. At issue in the contest was more than the fate of the United States. Anticipating a phrase he would use two years later in the Gettysburg Address, he suggested, “It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes.” More, even, than that, it was a struggle for the rights of man. “This,” he told the Congress, “is essentially a People’s contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”

The Congress that heard Lincoln’s message on July 5, when a clerk read it in a dull monotone, was controlled by members of his own party. After the withdrawal of Southern senators and representatives, Republicans held large
majorities in both chambers—32 out of 48 members of the Senate, 106 out of 176 members of the House of Representatives. Congressmen from the border slave states who called themselves Unionists generally cooperated with the Republicans during this session. Only about one out of four members of either chamber belonged to the Democratic party, decimated by secession and demoralized by the unexpected death, on June 3 of Stephen A. Douglas, who might have led a loyal opposition to the Lincoln administration.

The reception of the President’s message indicated that party lines were, for the moment, unimportant. Few had the heart to engage in partisan bickering, and “irrepressible applause” greeted Lincoln’s recommendation that Congress appropriate $400,000,000 to sustain an army of 400,000 men. Converting itself, as one member said, into “a giant committee of ways and means,” the Congress promptly went beyond the President’s requests and appropriated $500,000,000 to field an army of 500,000 men.

In the country, too, the message was greeted with enthusiasm. Most commended the President’s seemingly straightforward account of the events leading up to the attack on Fort Sumter. Several editors noted with pleasure that Lincoln made no mention of slavery or the extension of slavery in the national territories but put the issue before the country simply as one of Union versus Disunion. It was no surprise that a Republican paper like Greeley’s
New York Tribune
praised the message for avoiding “episodes and circumlocutions” and going “straight to the hearts of the patriotic millions,” but it was a sign of the times when the Democratic
New York World
commended “this excellent and manly Message,” which contained “more unborrowed and vigorous thought” than any presidential utterance since the days of Andrew Jackson.

Promptly Congress moved to pass bills retroactively approving most of Lincoln’s extraconstitutional actions. There was dissent only on the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, which made many Republicans, as well as nearly all the Democrats, unhappy. Senator John Sherman of Ohio best captured the feeling of many congressmen: “I approve of the action of the President.... He did precisely what I would have done if I had been in his place—no more, no less; but I cannot here, in my place, as a Senator, under oath, declare that what he did do was... strictly legal, and in consonance with the provisions of the Constitution.”

Such discord was muted because the Union army was preparing to advance while Congress debated. Pressure for an offensive had been building ever since Lincoln’s initial call for troops, though nobody had a clear idea of what strategy should be followed. Initially Lincoln, who made no pretense of having military knowledge, thought the troops should be used to repossess Fort Sumter and other captured federal installations along the Southern coast, but this thoroughly impracticable scheme would have required large amphibious operations far beyond the competence of either the army or the navy in 1861. General Scott, the most revered military expert in the
country, offered what was described as an “Anaconda Plan,” which called for cordoning off the Confederacy with a tight naval blockade while advancing with an army of perhaps 85,000 down the Mississippi River from southern Illinois. The plan had some merit—but it rested on the remarkable assumption that the Confederate army in Virginia, which even Scott granted might total more than 100,000 men, would remain idle while the Union forces were advancing in the West. Montgomery Blair believed that “a very inconsiderable part” of the Union army could put down the rebellion by distributing arms to the Union men of the South, who were at present “overawed by the armed marauders that Jeff Davis has sent throughout the country.” George B. McClellan, the hero of small engagements in western Virginia, proposed to gain victory by marching an army of 80,000 up the Great Kanawha Valley, across the Appalachian Mountains, to seize Richmond from the west. His scheme showed the ignorance of topography that was to characterize his subsequent campaigns.