Lincoln (91 page)

He brought this sense of serenity and power to a controversy that Governor Seymour opened after the New York City draft riots. Seymour, whom critics had accused of coddling the rioters, tried to persuade the President to suspend the draft in New York, on the grounds, first, that conscription was unconstitutional, and, second, that the quotas allotted to his state were
“glaringly unjust.” In a series of letters the governor detailed his objections and his protests against the draft quotas.

In what Hay called “a sockdolager” of a reply, which was widely published in the newspapers, Lincoln showed none of the hesitancy that had paralyzed him for the past six months. If discrimination against New York could be shown, he wrote Seymour, he was willing to make concessions “so far as consistent, with practical convenience,” but he was not prepared to hold up the draft until Seymour could procure a United States Supreme Court ruling on its constitutionality. The Confederacy, he pointed out, was forcing every able-bodied man into their army, “very much as a butcher drives bullocks into a slaughter-pen,” and the Union could not spare the time either for another experiment with the failed volunteer system or for a test in the courts.

The correspondence between the New York governor and the President sputtered on for several weeks, Seymour insisting “that there is no theory which can explain or justify the enrollments [i.e., the draft quotas] in this State” and Lincoln persisting: “My purpose is to be just and fair; and yet to not lose time.” Eventually the President felt forced to prepare an order calling the New York State militia into federal service for the purpose of enforcing the draft, but Seymour yielded just in time, and the draft began without much incident on August 19. In the showdown, the governor, not the President, blinked.

At about the time of this controversy, Lincoln, remembering the success of his letters to Corning and to Birchard about the Vallandigham affair, began drafting another public paper that would explain the draft and defend its constitutionality. “I... address you without searching for a precedent upon which to do so,” he began, noting that it was especially important to avoid “misunderstanding between the public and the public servant.” To opponents who claimed the draft was unconstitutional, he pointed out that the Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power “to raise and support armies.” The conscription act was thus “a law made in litteral pursuance of this part of the United States Constitution.” Nor was there doubt about the expediency of the draft. Only by raising additional armies could the “republican institutions, and territorial integrity of our country... be maintained,” he continued. “There can be no army without men.” Since voluntary recruiting had ceased, the draft was necessary.

But when it came to defending specific provisions of the conscription act, which exempted a man from the draft if he provided a substitute or paid a commutation fee of $300, Lincoln’s language became murky and his reasoning tortured. Confusingly, he termed the commutation clause a boon to poor men because without it the price of substitutes might skyrocket, “thus leaving the man who could raise only three hundred dollars, no escape from personal service.” He also had trouble defending the draft quotas allocated to states and districts, arguing that absolute equality was unattainable
and adding, somewhat feebly, that “errors will occur in spite of the utmost fidelity.”

It was not a satisfactory document and, probably because he realized he was trying to defend the indefensible, Lincoln shelved it. If he was going to reach out directly to the people, he needed a stronger case.

No letter, public or private, could help Lincoln resolve the tangle of problems in Missouri. Still close to the frontier stage of development, with a heritage of violence from the antebellum struggles over Kansas, Missouri was a constant source of difficulty to the Lincoln administration. After General Samuel R. Curtis’s major victory at Pea Ridge, Arkansas, on March 7–8, 1862, organized Confederate military operations in the state ceased, but Southern troops continued to lurk along the border in Arkansas, encouraging and assisting numerous bands of bushwhackers and guerrillas, the most notable of which was the murderous band of William C. Quantrill. The depredations of these pro-Confederate groups were matched by the raids staged by “Jayhawkers” from Kansas, who sought revenge for the destruction wrought by the Missouri “Border Ruffians” during the Kansas imbroglio. As a result, civilian life and property was at risk throughout the state. The sparsely settled western counties became a war zone, and throughout the state there was security only in sight of federal troops or state militia.

After Governor Claiborne F. Jackson fled Missouri in 1861, a state convention named Hamilton R. Gamble, a conservative former Whig, provisional governor, and he continued to hold this office until 1864. Gamble and General John M. Schofield, whom Lincoln appointed to succeed Halleck in Missouri, got along well enough, but after September 1862, when Curtis replaced Schofield, relations between the governor and the military deteriorated. Curtis began to listen to Missouri antislavery men, who complained that Gamble was motivated only by “hunkerism, and a wish for political influence.” Presently the governor and the general were locked in controversy, and both appealed to the President for help.

When the rival factions in Missouri presented clear-cut issues to the President, he had no hesitation in choosing his course—though he sometimes had difficulty in getting his subordinates to follow his orders. In December 1862 when federal troops arrested the Reverend Samuel B. McPheeters, pastor of the Pine Street Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, for “unmistakeable evidence of sympathy with the rebellion,” Lincoln warned General Curtis “that the U. S. government must not... undertake to run the churches” and ordered him to “let the churches, as such take care of themselves.” After an interview with the minister the President was convinced that McPheeters was, at heart, a rebel sympathizer, but so long as he committed no overt act, Lincoln did not want him punished “upon the suspicion of his secret
sympathies.” Then, having taken the high ground, he made the mistake of leaving the final decision to General Curtis. Hearing no further complaint, Lincoln supposed that his wishes had been carried out—only to learn, nearly a year later, that Curtis had prohibited McPheeters from preaching in his own church. Exasperated, the President repudiated the military order, making his position explicit: “I have never interfered, nor thought of interfering as to who shall or shall not preach in any church; nor have I knowingly, or believingly, tolerated any one else to so interfere by my authority.”

More complicated Missouri issues the President tried to decide on a case-by-case basis, giving a free hand neither to civilian authorities nor to the military. Pressed by Gamble to rule whether the new militia companies he was raising were going to be under the authority of the governor or the federal commander, Lincoln declined to give an opinion on the abstract merits of the question and demanded to know the consequences of whatever action he might take. “I ... think it is safer,” he wrote Attorney General Bates, with characteristic pragmatism, “when a practical question arises, to decide that question directly, and not indirectly, by deciding a general abstraction supposed to include it, and also including a great deal more.”

As the war progressed, Unionists in Missouri divided into bitterly hostile factions called the “Charcoals” (so called because of their concern for blacks and abolition) and the “Claybanks” (named because their principles were thought to be a pallid gray), and both groups demanded presidential support. Lincoln found it hard to choose between them. Temperamentally he felt closer to the Claybanks (or Conservatives), many of whom were, like himself, former Whigs who had been moderate on the slavery question. Gamble and his fellow Conservatives had loyally stood by the Union in the secession crisis. The President said later that they had “done their whole duty in the war faithfully and promptly” and when they disagreed with the President’s actions had “been silent and kept about the good work.” At the same time, he realized that when it came time to cast about for votes the Conservatives were “tempted to affiliate with those whose record is not clear.” The Charcoals (or Radicals), on the other hand, were ideologues, whose dogmatic support of abolition and assumption of moral superiority Lincoln found hard to endure. But he recognized that the Radicals were “absolutely uncorrosive by the virus of secession.” Personally hostile to the President, they were “the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with,” though he admitted that “after all their faces are set Zionwards.”

He refused to back either faction. When the Radicals charged him with favoring their opponents in a controversy over patronage in St. Louis, Lincoln replied firmly, “I have stoutly tried to keep out of the quarrel, and so mean to do.” But it grew harder and harder to maintain his balance. By May 1863 he was writing with a real note of exasperation: “It is very painful to me that you in Missouri can not, or will not, settle your factional quarrel among yourselves. I have been tormented with it beyond endurance for
months, by both sides. Neither side pays the least respect to my appeals to your reason.”

By the end of the month he decided to end this “pestilential factional quarrel” by removing Curtis, who had been charged with being too friendly with the Radicals, and reinstating Schofield, who was thought to be more broadly acceptable. He offered the new commander a simple test for success: “If both factions, or neither, shall abuse you, you will probably be about right. Beware of being assailed by one, and praised by the other.”

By that test Lincoln himself was an enormous success. The Conservatives considered him a prisoner of the Charcoals. The Radicals were convinced that the President was supporting Governor Gamble’s plot to restore the slave power with the aid of Schofield, whose odor in the public nostrils they said was “less fragrant than that of a polecat.”

Both factions began to attack Lincoln. The awkwardness of the President’s position became clear in the summer of 1863, when Missourians were debating plans for the gradual emancipation of the slaves, a topic that had long been dear to Lincoln’s heart. “You and I must die,” he told a congressman, “but it will be enough for us to have done in our lives if we make Missouri free.” Aware that emancipation sentiment in a slave state had to be carefully nurtured, he repeatedly warned against those who urged radical steps. A state like Missouri that tolerated slavery, he suggested, was like a man who had “an excrescence on the back of his neck, the removal of which, in one operation, would.result in the death of the patient, while ‘tinkering it off by degrees’ would preserve life.” He let it be known that “the Union men in Missouri who are in favor of gradual emancipation represented his views better than those who are in favor of immediate emancipation.” But he refused to endorse the Conservatives’ plan, which would not end slavery in Missouri until 1870 and provided for peonage ranging from eleven years to life. This scheme Lincoln found “faulty
in postponing
the benefits of freedom to the slave, instead of giving him an immediate vested interest therein.”

Angered by the President’s neutrality, Governor Gamble came to Washington in a vain effort to win his support for the Conservative plan, but he got nowhere. Leaving, he attacked Lincoln as “a mere intriguing, pettifogging, piddling politician.”

Lincoln’s position equally infuriated the Radicals. In September they organized a delegation, headed by Charles D. Drake, to go to Washington and demand the removal of Schofield. They intended to present their demands to the President in the strongest possible terms, giving him, as one said, the choice “whether he would ride in their wagon or not.”

Exasperated by a problem that was taking up too much of his time and attention and angered by Radical attacks on General Schofield, against whom no charge of dishonesty or incompetence had ever been raised, Lincoln gave the Missourians a frosty reception when they came to the White House on September 30. He rejected their demands that he remove Schofield, put the entire state back under martial law, decree immediate emancipation,
and authorize the recruitment of Missouri blacks into the army. Informing the Radicals that he understood the causes of the chaos in Missouri as well as they did, he observed that in time of war “blood grows hot, and blood is spilled.... Confidence dies, and universal suspicion reigns. Each man feels an impulse to kill his neighbor, lest he be first killed by him. Revenge and retaliation follow.... But this is not all. Every foul bird comes abroad, and every dirty reptile rises up. These add crime to confusion.” The circumstances required harsh measures to preserve order, and General Schofield had effectively carried those measures out. Bristling, he bluntly declined to remove Schofield and stoutly announced: “I... shall do what seems to be my duty. . . . It is my duty to hear all; but at last, I must... judge what to do, and what to forbear.” The Radicals went home his permanent enemies.

Lincoln no longer believed that he could solve the Missouri question to anyone’s satisfaction, including his own. He had, he told Attorney General Bates, “no
friends in Missouri.
” The whole issue reminded him of a lesson he had learned as a boy when he was plowing. “When he came across stumps too deep and too tough to be torn up, and too wet to burn,” he said, “he plowed round them.”

Never at his best when dealing with factions within his own party, Lincoln welcomed opportunities to rally behind him all of the Republicans, as well as those Democrats who endorsed his war policies. The approach of the fall elections gave him the opportunity to show that he was still a master politician.

The 1863 elections were crucial for Lincoln and his party. At stake were important local offices throughout the North and, especially, governorships in Maine, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kentucky, and Iowa. If the strong Democratic resurgence manifest in the fall elections of 1862 continued, Republican chances of winning the next presidential election would be in peril. “All the instant questions will be settled by the coming elections,” reported a White House intimate. “If they go for the Democracy, then Mr. Lincoln will not wind up the war [and] a new feeling and spirit will inspire the South.”