Lincoln (92 page)

Lincoln watched all these races closely, monitoring frequent reports from Republican workers in the field. Convention prohibited him from taking an active part in most of the canvasses, but, with or without the President’s explicit approval, his aides did whatever was necessary to ensure the defeat of the Democrats. In Kentucky, General Burnside proclaimed martial law, and the imprisonment of Democratic candidates and voters helped secure the election of Governor Thomas E. Bramlette, a “Union Democrat” favored by the Lincoln administration. In Pennsylvania, Republican Governor Curtin was in a close battle for reelection against Pennsylvania Chief Justice George W. Woodward, whose court held preliminary hearings on the constitutionality
of the conscription act in September. Secretary Chase rallied banker Jay Cooke and all the others who had benefited from the financial policies of the administration by warning, “Gov. Curtin’s reelection or defeat is now the success or defeat of the administration of President Lincoln.” To strengthen the Republican vote, the President acceded to Curtin’s request and authorized a fifteen-day leave so that government clerks from Pennsylvania could go home to vote, and Secretary of War Stanton permitted commanders to furlough Pennsylvania troops, who could be counted on to vote Republican.

Ohio was a source of special worry to Lincoln, for the Democrats had nominated Vallandigham for governor. The President found it hard to believe that “one genuine American would, or could be induced to, vote for such a man as Vallandigham,” yet he recognized that his opponents saw this election as a means to repudiate his administration. Consequently he watched the Ohio election, he told Gideon Welles, with “more anxiety... than he had in 1860 when he was chosen,” and he encouraged his friends and the members of his administration to work for the election of the Republican candidate, John Brough. In Ohio, as in Pennsylvania, government clerks and soldiers were furloughed so that they could go home to vote. Secretary Chase stumped his home state for Brough, and Governor Yates of Illinois and Governor Morton of Indiana also campaigned for him.

Illinois was also critical, and, as Lincoln’s home state, it offered the one contest in which propriety permitted the President to participate. Republicans thought his presence was badly needed, because Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg had the paradoxical effect of strengthening peace sentiment. Many voters believed that, with the Confederacy on its last legs, it was time to end the fighting and negotiate peace. On June 17, even before those victories, the antiwar forces held a huge rally in Springfield, presided over by Senator William A. Richardson, the Democrat elected to succeed Browning. After listening to angry antiadministration oratory, the mass meeting demanded “the restoration of the Union as it was” and voted against “further offensive prosecution of this war.”

Lincoln believed such resolutions, which were echoed by other antiadministration gatherings all over the North, rested on fundamentally wrongheaded assumptions. A call for the restoration of the Union as it was meant abandonment of the Emancipation Proclamation and all other measures against slavery. It also meant an end to the recruitment of blacks into the Union armies, just at the time when Negro soldiers were proving their valor at Port Hudson on the Mississippi and in Charleston harbor, where black troops of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Colored Infantry, under Robert Gould Shaw, made a heroic but unsuccessful assault on Battery Wagner.

Equally misguided, in the President’s judgment, was talk of negotiated peace. Gettysburg and Vicksburg indicated that Confederate power was at last beginning to disintegrate, and, as he told John Hay, he anticipated “that
they will break to pieces if we only stand firm now.” He was convinced that the Confederate army controlled the South. It was Jefferson Davis’s “only hope, not only against us, but against his own people”; without that military control, the Southern people “would be ready to swing back to their old bearings.” Until the Confederate army was ready to sue for peace, there could be no meaningful negotiation. For this reason Lincoln refused to receive Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens, who asked permission to come to Washington under a flag of truce, ostensibly in order to facilitate exchange of prisoners. Curbing his personal wish to go to Fort Monroe for an informal chat with Stephens, the President allowed his cabinet to persuade him not to have any official communication with the Davis government. Even the appearance of peace negotiations would strengthen the enemy.

Eager to put his views before the public, Lincoln welcomed an invitation from James C. Conkling to attend a huge rally “in favor of law and order and constitutional government” at Springfield on September 3. Doubtless he was tempted by Conkling’s promise “that not only would the thousands who will be here be prepared to receive you with the warmest enthusiasm but the whole country would be eager to extend to you its congratulations on the way.” Conkling reminded him that party activity in Illinois was already spirited and noted, “The Presidential campaign for your successor
(if any)
has already commenced in Illinois.”

The President really wanted to go back to Springfield, but he was not able to get away from his duties in Washington because Rosecrans had finally begun his long-awaited campaign to maneuver the Confederates out of Chattanooga. Tied to his desk, Lincoln sent Conkling a carefully composed letter to be read to the assembly. “Read it very slowly,” he urged. He wanted his views to be heard and understood.

The letter was a hard-hitting defense of his administration’s policies. Though it began with a tribute to “all those who maintain unconditional devotion to the Union,” it was a frankly partisan message. He dismissed as “deceptive and groundless” charges that he was preventing peace through compromise. Suppressing any notice of Alexander Stephens’s aborted mission, he assured his listeners that he had “no word or intimation... in relation to any peace compromise” from the rebels. He then turned to a defense of his Emancipation Proclamation, which his opponents condemned as unconstitutional. “I think differently,” he stoutly replied. “I think the constitution invests its commander-in-chief, with the law of war, in time of war.” And, according to the laws of war, property, including slaves, could be taken when needed. As a military measure, he had offered the slaves freedom, and he firmly insisted, “The promise being made, must be kept.” To opponents who said that they would not fight to free Negroes, he replied, “Fight you, then, exclusively to save the Union.” But when peace did come, he predicted, “there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet,
they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.”

“The signs look better,” he wrote. Because Western armies had captured Vicksburg, “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea. Thanks to the great North-West for it.” Thanks, too, went to the sons of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, “hewing their way right and left.” And he did not forget the Union soldiers from “the Sunny South..., in more colors than one.” Nor did he ignore what he called, in an inappropriate attempt at cuteness, “Uncle Sam’s Web-feet,” which had made their tracks on the bays, rivers, bayous, and “wherever the ground was a little damp.” “Thanks to all,” he cheered. “For the great republic—for the principle it lives by, and keeps alive—for man’s vast future,—thanks to all.”

Received “with the greatest enthusiasm” by the 50,000 to 75,000 cheering Unionists who attended the Springfield rally, Lincoln’s letter to Conkling was published in full in nearly every major newspaper throughout the country. The Democratic
New York World
criticized it as Lincoln’s first stump speech in his reelection campaign, but it won strong praise from the President’s supporters. It was a “noble, patriotic, and Christian letter,” wrote Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, and his colleague, Charles Sumner, echoed praise for this “true and noble letter, which is an historic document.” Read to a mass meeting in New York City, it “was received with shouts, cheers, thanksgiving, and tears.” The force and wisdom of the letter caused the
New York Times
to express gratitude that the nation was led by “a ruler who is so peculiarly adapted to the needs of the time as clear-headed, dispassionate, discreet, steadfast, honest Abraham Lincoln.” Praising the letter as “one of those remarkably clear and forcible documents that come only from Mr. Lincoln’s pen,” the
Chicago Tribune
editorial ended, “God bless Old Abe!”

That euphoria was only slightly diminished by news of Union military reverses at the end of September. On the morning of September 21, coming into John Hay’s bedroom before the secretary was up, Lincoln sat down on his bed and said: “Well, Rosecrans has been whipped, as I feared. I have feared it for several days. I believe I feel trouble in the air before it comes.” Rosecrans had pushed on beyond Chattanooga, and Confederates routed the Union troops in the costly battle of Chickamauga, where only the rocklike firmness of George H. Thomas saved the Army of the Cumberland from disaster. Afterward, while the Union army huddled in the city of Chattanooga, under siege and virtually cut off from supplies, Rosecrans behaved, Lincoln said, “like a duck hit on the head.”

So grave was the situation that Stanton called a hurried midnight council on September 23–24, asking the President to come back to the city from the Soldiers’ Home. Rosecrans, Stanton announced, could hold out for ten days but badly needed reinforcements. Since Meade had no significant operations under way, Stanton proposed to detach 30,000 men from the Army of the
Potomac, transporting them by rail from Virginia, across the Appalachian Mountains, and south through Kentucky and Tennessee; he promised they would come to Rosecrans’s rescue in five days. Lincoln, who had seen so many brilliant military stratagems fail, was pessimistic and remarked, “I will bet that if the order is given tonight, the troops could not be got to Washington in five days.” Stiffly Stanton replied that he was not inclined to bet on so grave a subject, and he persuaded the group to authorize the immediate sending of the Eleventh and Twelfth corps, under Joseph Hooker, with more troops to follow. To the President’s surprise and delight Stanton’s plan worked. Making an innovative and carefully coordinated use of railroads for military purposes, the War Department transported about 20,000 men and 3,000 horses and mules from Virginia to eastern Tennessee, traveling 1,159 miles in seven to nine days.

Shortly afterward, Lincoln put Grant in charge of the new Division of the Mississippi, which combined the former departments of the Ohio, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee, and replaced Rosecrans with Thomas. By the end of October, Grant relieved Chattanooga, and the Union armies began preparing to drive Bragg’s troops back into Georgia.

Politically the news of the rescue could not have come at a better time for Republicans. Buoyed by this military success, Iowa Republicans reported that they had “swept the state overwhelmingly.” From Curtin’s campaign for reelection, the President received welcome news: “Pennsylvania stands by you, keeping step with Maine and California to the music of the Union.” And—most critical in Lincoln’s eyes—Chase telegraphed from Cincinnati that Vallandigham’s defeat in Ohio was “complete, beyond all hopes.” The next month Republicans also carried the New York elections. It was evident, a Democratic observer sourly remarked, that the Republicans had “effectively ... inoculated the general mind with ideas which involve, sooner or later, the acquiescence of the community in any measures that may be adopted against the Democracy.”

For these successes Republicans gave much credit to Lincoln’s public letters—to the Conkling letter in particular, but also to those addressed to Corning and Birchard concerning Vallandigham and to Seymour concerning the draft. These letters were considered so effective that they were collected and republished for wide circulation as
The Letters of President Lincoln on Questions of National Policy
in a twenty-two-page pamphlet, which sold for 8 cents a copy. No one could measure their impact on the voters, but Governor Israel Washburn, reporting “the square and unqualified support” of the administration in the Maine election, wrote the President that his letter to Conkling “aided not a little in swelling our wonderful majority.”

As news of further Republican victories became known, Lincoln enjoyed a burst of unaccustomed popularity. The
Chicago Tribune,
so often critical of the President and his administration, now called him “the most popular man in the United States” and flatly predicted: “Were an election for President to be held tomorrow, Old Abe would, without the special aid of any of
his friends, walk over the course, without a competitor to dispute with him the great prize which his masterly ability, no less than his undoubted patriotism and unimpeachable honesty, have won.”

During the fall of 1863 there was, apart from the campaigns around Chattanooga, a lull in the war. The federal fleet, under Admiral Dahlgren, continued to bombard the fortifications of Charleston harbor but without decisive results. In northern Virginia, Meade followed a strategy of maneuver and minor engagement with Lee, with no major battle in prospect. The President, for once, had time on his hands, and he busied himself with such matters as an interview with a Mrs. Hutter, who had invented some earmuffs she wanted to introduce into the service, and a recommendation for “one of Mrs. L’s numerous cousins” for a job in the Treasury Department.

When Mary returned refreshed from her vacation in the mountains, a normal social life began again at the White House. The Lincolns began going to the theater again, seeing Maggie Mitchell’s performance of
Fanchon, the Cricket
at Ford’s Theatre. But, pleading a diplomatic indisposition, Mary did not accompany her husband when he attended the wedding of Kate Chase, daughter of the Secretary of the Treasury, to Senator William Sprague, the millionaire Rhode Island manufacturer, on November 12. She regarded Kate, who was younger, prettier, and slimmer, as a rival for the social leadership of the capital and rightly suspected that she was promoting her father’s presidential prospects. To compensate for his wife’s absence, Lincoln stayed for an unusually long time at the wedding.