Lincoln (80 page)

But the President, greatly influenced by Bishop Whipple and Commissioner Dole, refused to be stampeded. He consulted Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt about a way of avoiding a decision, by allowing state authorities to determine which Indians should die. When Holt told him firmly, “The power cannot be delegated,” the President deliberately went through the record of each convicted man, seeking to identify those who had been guilty of the most atrocious crimes, especially murder of innocent farmers and rape. He came up with a list of thirty-nine names, which he carefully wrote out in his own hand: “Te-he-hdo-ne-cha,” “Tazoo” alias “Plan-doo-ta,” and so on. Wiring the list to the military authorities, he warned the telegraph operator to be particularly careful, since even a slight error might send the wrong man to his death.

On December 26 the thirty-eight men (one more man was pardoned at the last minute) were executed—the largest public execution in American history. Few praised Lincoln for reducing the list of condemned men. On the contrary, his clemency lighted a brief firestorm of protest in Minnesota, which did not die down until the Secretary of the Interior promised the white settlers “reasonable compensation for the depredations committed.” Even so, considerable resentment remained against Lincoln and his administration, so that in 1864, Republicans lost strength in Minnesota. Senator
(formerly Governor) Ramsey told the President that if he had hanged more Indians he would have had a larger majority. “I could not afford to hang men for votes,” Lincoln replied.

The Indian uprising in Minnesota was but one of the many subjects that the President had to address in his annual message to Congress on the state of the Union. Indeed, preparing that message, which was due on December 1, took up so much of his time that he felt obliged to limit his public receptions to two hours each day during November.

The message offered Lincoln an opportunity to reformulate the basic goals of his administration. He knew that it would be addressed to a highly critical audience. Congressional Democrats, cheered by the outcome of the recent elections, which would increase their membership in the next House of Representatives from forty-four to seventy-two, could be counted upon to be more partisan than usual, less inclined to follow the lead of a Republican President. Republicans in both houses would likely be more restive, too. Many of the more conservative Republican representatives, especially those from New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, were now lame ducks, and their influence was diminished. The Radical members had a growing sense of desperation. Many feared that Lincoln, after studying the election returns, would fall under conservative influences. Signs of a retreat were discovered in his appointment of Burnside, instead of a Radical general like Joseph Hooker, and they worried that he might renege on his promise to issue a final emancipation decree on January 1. Thaddeus Stevens thought it was urgent to commit the President to a Radical program “before the Locos [i.e., the Democrats] came in.” All expected the message to define the President’s position.

Lincoln did not deliver his message in person to the Congress. Instead, as was customary, his secretary, Nicolay, took the document to Capitol Hill, where a clerk read it aloud. Much of the message was entirely routine in nature, summarizing the work of the departments, usually in words supplied to the President by members of the cabinet. It began with a long account of foreign relations that concluded with a balanced sentence written by Seward: “If the condition of our relations with other nations is less gratifying than it has usually been at former periods, it is certainly more satisfactory than a nation so unhappily distracted as we are, might reasonably have apprehended.” The President then claimed the congressmen’s “most diligent consideration” of financial affairs, and, in passages supplied by Secretary Chase, called for “a return to specie payments ... at the earliest period compatible with due regard to all interests concerned” and urged the creation of a national banking system. The message went on to discuss the condition of the Post Office Department, which reported “much improved”
efficiency; of the Department of the Interior, including a summary of the Sioux uprising; and of the newly created Department of Agriculture (which was headed by a commissioner and was not represented in the cabinet).

Lincoln then turned, rather surprisingly, to a restatement of the physical impossibility of separating the United States into two republics and quoted a long extract from his inaugural address on this point. Rather puzzlingly he next paid tribute to the upper Mississippi and Ohio Valley region, which he said was “the great body of the republic.” Having no seacoast, this region could never consent to a partition of the Union that would deprive it of either its Eastern or its Western outlets.

As the clerk droned on, congressmen must have felt that they were listening to a fairly conventional, if not especially well-organized, presidential message, but it came alive when Lincoln reached the topic that really interested him: compensated emancipation. The subject came as a surprise to many, who thought the Emancipation Proclamation had settled that question. But by referring to the Emancipation Proclamation only in passing, Lincoln was expressing his continuing doubts about the efficacy of his decree. In private conversations, even more than in his public message, he was pessimistic, predicting that the Proclamation “would not make a single negro free beyond our military reach.” About this time he entertained a group of clergymen who visited the White House with an anecdote about a case in a Western court where a lawyer tried to establish that a calf had five legs by calling the tail a leg. “But,” said the President, “the decision of the judge was that
calling
the tail a leg, did not make it a leg, and the calf had but four legs after all.” So, he reminded his guests, “proclaiming slaves free did not make them free.” The President was aware that neither the preliminary proclamation nor the final decree promised on January 1 affected slavery in the border states and in the states of the upper South. Moreover, he recognized that the Emancipation Proclamation had a legal basis only as an act of war. Once peace came, the courts might declare it unconstitutional, or a new administration might retract it.

Consequently his State of the Union address suggested a way of permanently getting rid of slavery throughout the land. In an unusual attempt at executive leadership, the President proposed three amendments to the Constitution. The first authorized the payment of United States bonds to any state that abolished slavery by January 1, 1900; the second guaranteed the freedom of all slaves who “enjoyed actual freedom by the chances of the war” but authorized payment to their masters if they were not disloyal; and the third authorized congressional appropriations for “colonizing free colored persons, with their own consent, at any place or places without the United States.”

The package was new, but the proposals were similar to those the President had put forward in his March message to Congress, and the whole plan was much like the one he had vainly entreated the border-state congressmen to accept in June. Most who were allowed to preview the President’s message
judged the plan impracticable. Though touched by the “noble sentiments and admirable language” of the message, Chase advised against including the specifics of the plan, since “there is no probability that a vote of two thirds can be commanded for
any
amendment of the constitution touching slavery or that any such amendment can obtain the sanction of two thirds of the States.” Browning judged that the President was suffering from a “hallucination” in proposing a scheme which, even if unopposed, would require at least four years to be adopted.

Aware of the difficulties, Lincoln argued for his plan with a passion and eloquence not shown in his public addresses since the Lincoln-Douglas debates. “Mr Lincoln’s whole soul is absorbed in his plan of remunerative emancipation,” David Davis reported, “and he thinks if Congress dont fail him that the problem is solved.” Feeding his uncharacteristic optimism were rumors that Maryland and Kentucky might now be ready to accept compensated emancipation. Moreover, the President thought there was a good possibility—though he was careful not to mention this to Congress—that some of the Southern slave states, or parts of them, would be back in the Union before the end of the year.

Throughout the fall Lincoln had been actively encouraging both Southern Unionists and army officers stationed in the South to bring about what was, in effect, a secession from the Confederacy through the election of loyal representatives and senators, who would ask for their rightful seats in the United States Congress. He had some hope that these elections would take place in the occupied areas of Tennessee, Arkansas, and the Norfolk region of Virginia, but he pinned his hopes on Louisiana, where, he hoped, “gentlemen of character, willing to swear support of the constitution, as of old, and known to be above reasonable suspicion of duplicity,” would take the lead in restoring their state to the Union so as “to have peace again upon the old terms under the constitution of the United States.” “All see how such action will connect with, and affect the proclamation of September 22,” he added significantly. In other words, if the Southern states, or parts of them, set up loyal governments and sent representatives to Congress, they would be exempt from the final proclamation of emancipation.

Elated that he might be able to bring some of the rebellious states back into the Union, and confident that if Burnside or Rosecrans or Grant could inflict a crippling blow on the enemy others would follow, Lincoln foresaw the possibility that by January the war might be nearly over and the Union might be restored—but the United States would still be a slaveholding nation.

This was not a prospect that troubled him for the long run, because he was convinced that slavery was doomed. “He thinks the foundations of slavery have been cracked by the war, by the Rebels,” a visitor reported in November. Consequently the main task now was to plan for a transition from slavery to freedom. Such a plan had to be acceptable to the whites of the border states, whose support Lincoln now needed even more because
of Republican defeats in the recent elections, and it had to be attractive to whites in the Deep South, if their newly restored loyalty was to prove genuine. But what concerned him most, the interviewer recorded, was “to provide for the blacks—he thinks still that many of them will colonize, and that the South will be compelled to resort to the Apprentice System.” He was confident his plan would meet all these goals.

But if the plan was to work, it would have to be adopted immediately. Time was short because he was firmly committed to issuing his final Emancipation Proclamation on January 1. “From the expiration of the ‘days of grace,’” he told a visitor, “the character of the war will be changed. It will be one of subjugation and extermination.” The prospects for voluntary emancipation in the border states would be diminished. Lost, too, would be the President’s most powerful hold on whites in the Confederacy: the possibility that they could retrieve something from their “peculiar institution” if they returned to the Union.

Behind Lincoln’s urgency was another, less clearly articulated purpose. There had been grave erosion of support in the coalition on which he depended. During the past six months necessity and—as Lincoln thought—Providence had pushed his administration, though in uncertain spurts and starts, in a more radical direction. The Emancipation Proclamation and the removal of McClellan were the most obvious examples. These moves had cost him much of his support from Moderates yet did little to win the support of Radical Republicans. If the President was to survive politically, he had to assert his leadership by moving back toward the center.

That need gave to the State of the Union message what Lincoln himself admitted might seem a tone of “undue earnestness.” Ardently he urged the Congress to unite behind his plan, which “would restore the national authority and national prosperity, and perpetuate both indefinitely.” “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present,” he reminded the legislators. “The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall our selves, and then we shall save our country.”

“Fellow-citizens,” he began his concluding paragraph,
“we
cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. . . . We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it.” Now the time had come to act, and, in phrases that had a Shakespearean cadence, the President reminded the legislators: “In
giving
freedom to the
slave,
we
assure
freedom to the
free
—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve.” Now was the time for decision. “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth.”

Any chance for Lincoln’s plan for a speedy restoration of the Union was lost on December 13. General Burnside, against the advice and warnings of the
President, threw the Army of the Potomac across the Rappahannock into Fredericksburg. Then he ordered his soldiers to advance directly uphill toward Marye’s Heights, where the Confederates lay waiting for them. By the end of the day one in ten of Burnside’s soldiers was a casualty—dead, wounded, or missing; the Confederate losses were less than half as great. It was the worst defeat in the history of the American army.

News of Burnside’s defeat was slow to reach the anxious President. Not until late at night did he learn of the outcome from Henry Villard. Lincoln grilled the journalist, who had come straight from the battlefield, about the extent of Union losses, the morale of the troops, and the chances for success if another attack was made. Fearing that the President did not fully understand the extent of the catastrophe, Villard stressed that every general officer he had encountered thought that success was impossible and that the army might suffer a worse disaster unless it was immediately withdrawn to the north side of the river. “I hope it is not so bad as all that,” Lincoln said with a melancholy smile.