Our One Common Country (4 page)

CHAPTER TWO

Lacking in the Quality of Leadership

On Tuesday, November 8, 1864, the election went off quietly in the Army of the Potomac, said the
New York Daily Tribune.
Some regiments voted in long blue lines, others in company roll calls, others “miscellaneously, as the spirit moved them.” On the treacherous Petersburg siege line, they shuttled between the rifle pits and the polling stations one regiment at a time, “to make a sure thing of keeping the Rebs from disturbing the election.” One hundred fifty Rebs, more or less, would disturb the electorate no more. Fresh in the minds of the voters' Third Division was the sight of their twisted corpses, left where they had fallen in Saturday's failed attack. Southern men and boys recovered the remains under white flags of truce as the Northerners cast their ballots in kettles and ammunition crates.

Early in the war, the Democratic challenger, General George B. McClellan, had trained and inspired these same Union men. They had loved him then for his reluctance to spend their lives. In 1862, Lincoln had relieved him for spending them too cautiously. Now the Democrats promised them peace while Lincoln promised them victory. They were voting for Lincoln by a margin of three to one, as the
Tribune
reported with no pretense of objectivity: “It is unnecessary to say that an overwhelming majority of the vote cast was for the present Administration and its no compromise with traitors and vigorous prosecution of the war policy.”

Just a few weeks earlier, when the Democrats had convened on August 29, the
Tribune
was pleading for compromise, the administration's policy was in flapping disarray, and almost no one thought that Lincoln could win, least of all Lincoln. Editors, politicians, and preachers who were not
demanding peace were demanding vengeance, and the president favored neither.

No one rejected peace without reunion more firmly than he. The very name of the Richmond government was unutterable to him. He would speak of “the Rebels” or “the other fellow,” never of the Confederacy, but he spoke of the war in sadness, not in anger. He called it “this great trouble.” For Jefferson Davis, the Yankees were “brutes in human form.” True Southerners, he said, would prefer to combine with hyenas. For Lincoln, the people of the South were “lost sheep.” He had issued a proclamation asking God not to crush them but to soften their hearts, enlighten their minds, and quicken their consciences, “that they may not be utterly destroyed.” We are fighting for the Union, he would say, and reunion would entitle the Southern people to all of their rights and privileges as soon as they came home. Supported by fellow moderates in the fractious Republican Party, he had already offered amnesty to every returning Rebel who would take an oath of allegiance, excepting their senior leaders. In private he said he would look the other way if even the worst of them fled the country.

But the Radical Republican wing—the Jacobins, they were sometimes called, after the French Revolution's executioners—objected almost violently to Lincoln's magnanimity, looking forward as they were to cartloads of traitors being hauled to the scaffold on coffins. Fond of bloody rhetoric, they declared that the seceded states had committed suicide. Far from welcoming their leaders back to Congress, the Jacobins meant to hang them, subdue their beaten people like so many broken tribes, and govern their conquered territory “as England governs India.”

They despised their Republican president, expected to consign him to a single term, and vetted potential successors in 1864 who would crush the beaten South in 1865. Descended from two presidents, Congressman Charles Francis Adams had been mentioned. Allowing in 1860 that Lincoln seemed “tolerably capable,” Adams had lowered his grade after reading his rustic speeches as president-elect. “I am very much afraid in this lottery we have drawn a blank.” When they met face-to-face, the rail splitter impressed the Bostonian as “a vulgar man, ill-fitted both by education and nature for the post of President.” Lincoln's aide John Hay,
a handsome young poet and a graduate of Brown, said the people understood Lincoln well, but the “patent leather kid glove set” knew “no more of him than an owl does of a comet. . . .”

Lincoln's brother moderates prevailed. Swallowing their misgivings and renaming themselves the National Union Party, the Republicans renominated him in June and endorsed his campaign for a Constitutional amendment banning slavery, which had already passed the Senate but was sure to fail in the House. His reconstruction policy was something else again. The platform demanded for traitors “the punishment due to their crimes.”

On July 2, Congress passed a punitive reconstruction bill coauthored by Republican senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Republican congressman Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, both of whom held the Republican chief executive in low esteem. Senator Wade replied to a dinner invitation to the White House with the puritan streak emblematic of his kind: “Are the President and Mrs. Lincoln aware that there is a civil war? If they are not, Mr. and Mrs. Wade are, and for that reason decline to participate in feasting and dancing.”

When Congress adjourned on the Fourth of July, Lincoln pocket-vetoed the Wade-Davis bill, spinning its supporters into twirling fits of rage. A few weeks later, Wade and Davis released a reply that fell just short of calling the commander in chief a traitor on the eve of his reelection campaign. Henry Raymond, the moderate founder, editor, and publisher of the
New York Times
and the chairman of the Republican Party, lined up with the president, which might have carried more weight had he not been running his campaign. For the Radicals, said the
Times,
the war was not fought to restore the Union but to pillage the South and reduce its people to peonage. John Albion Andrew, the Radical Republican governor of Massachusetts, would not have put it much differently. In 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation had left him ecstatic, parading around the Governor's Council Chamber while a friend sang “Old John Brown,” but Andrew had now discovered that Abraham Lincoln was “lacking in the quality of leadership. A man of a more prophetic nature would have led the party better.”

If the Radicals were tough on Lincoln, the Democrats were tougher. Sympathetic to the South, they were strong in several states and,
counterintuitively, in Manhattan, disgruntled as she was by her lost cotton trade. Softest on secession and hardest on the war were the Peace Democrats—Copperheads, the Republicans called them. Their cousins the War Democrats were a step or two nearer the center. Neither faction was upset by the Southern choice of labor systems. If the government fell to the Democrats, the odds were good that the Union would be dissolved or restored by negotiations preserving slavery, a contingency that did not disturb the sleep of most of the Northern electorate.

In the bloody month of July 1864, Lincoln flirted with peace talks, pushed by Horace Greeley, the most influential journalist in America, who had said he would “drive Lincoln into it.” His advice to a restless youth epitomized his style: “Go west, young man, go west! There is health in the country and room away from our crowds of idlers and imbeciles!” Horace Greeley was a fearless crusader, a brilliant mind, and a very odd duck. Lincoln had known him since they served together in Congress in 1848. He admired him as others did, in a distasteful sort of way, with a wary respect for his power. Among the labeled pigeonholes on the president's upright desk, full of clippings, notes, and letters, was a slot for Ulysses S. Grant and another for Horace Greeley. Everybody knew his name. Everybody who was anybody read his newspaper. Shunning libidinous scandals and bottled cancer cures, the
New York Daily Tribune
was respected in the North, vilified in the South, and a ripping good read. Greeley
made it ring with incisive editorials, intelligent book reviews, and more accurate news than was customary. Republican in its politics, abolitionist in its passions, the
Tribune
gave space to thinkers of every stripe. Karl Marx had been a correspondent. So had the Transcendentalists. Now it printed extracts from the pestilent Richmond press. Horace Greeley was unafraid of ideas.

Round-faced and paunchy, with wire-rimmed glasses, an egg-bald pate, and wild white hair on the back and sides of his head, he shaved his face clean with the exception of his neck, where a thick white ruff protruded from ear to ear like a rabbit fur collar, a tonsorial eccentricity in an age that perfected the genre. Unmistakable on sight, an amused admirer said, Greeley stormed the streets in a battered top hat pointed backward on his
head, a trademark linen overcoat—once white, now less so—flying open to the breeze, a flamboyant silk kerchief knotted loosely at his neck, the buttons and buttonholes of a greasy brown vest mismatched in biblical fashion: “The last shall be first and the first last.” To give his look some punch he would sport a pink umbrella. An atheist among evangelicals, a socialist when the word was new, he promoted free love in a sexually repressed culture; condemned capital punishment in a country that hanged thieves; was violently opposed to liquor, monopolies, and corsets; and passionately in favor of labor unions, women's suffrage, and human waste as fertilizer. A bully to his staff, he sat for the camera with an arrogant jaw, a pitiless mouth, and unforgiving eyes, proclaiming the simple truth that Horace Greeley's
Tribune
could make or break a cause, elect or unseat a politician.

Having helped Lincoln win the presidency, Greeley had berated him ever since, for wildly erratic reasons. In May of 1864, the
Tribune
had proclaimed that the war must be won without compromise. Swerving left in July, appalled by Grant's losses, flattered by Rebel agents in Canada who approached him as a go-between, Greeley wrote to Lincoln all but begging him to negotiate. The South was eager to end the war, he said, while “our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country also longs for peace.” Lincoln replied sardonically that Greeley could bring to Washington any Rebel agents who were authorized to offer reunion and abolition, whatever else they might propose. To receive them in the White House without such a pledge, said the president's aide John Hay, would have raised false hopes and assured a Republican defeat. No such pledge materialized.

On July 13, Greeley urged Lincoln again to meet with Davis's ­Canadian-based envoys. Lincoln sent Hay to see them at Niagara Falls instead, just enough accommodation to deny the Democrats' claim that the president scorned peace. As Hay would soon record, the Rebel lead negotiator had false teeth, false hair, false eyes, and no authority at all, let alone the required pledge. It was clear in due course, as Davis would tacitly confess, that his agents in the frozen North had no more noble purpose than to damage the Republicans at the polls.

Boxed in by Greeley at one end and Davis at the other, Lincoln climbed out with a letter, addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” which Hay delivered to the Rebels: Any Southern offer “which embraces the
restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole union, and the abandonment of slavery, and which comes by and with an authority that can control the armies now at war with the United States” (an avoidance of the Rebel government's legitimacy, if not an invitation to a coup) would be met by “liberal terms.” Until now, Lincoln had not made abolition a condition of peace. Knowing that Davis would reject abolition
and
reunion, he had thought it astute to demand both. In this he was mistaken.

Seeing the letter's value, the Rebels released it to the press. Overnight, negotiation became anathema in the South, and Lincoln's stock plunged in the North. Democrats who were willing to die for the Union refused to die for the slaves. On the other side of the aisle, the Jacobins exploded, set off by the very idea of negotiations, let alone by liberal terms.

On July 6, a writer friend of Greeley's named James Gilmore asked Lincoln to let Colonel Jacques, the fighting Methodist minister, make another peace overture to Davis, abetted by Gilmore and his Southern friends. Purporting to be moved by the colonel's belief that God had blessed his mission, Lincoln blessed it too. After Gilmore and Jacques won an audience with Davis in the presidential office in Richmond's Capitol Square, the colonel shed his linen duster, revealed his dress blue uniform in the heart of the enemy camp, and admonished its commander in chief, respectfully if not wisely, that slavery was dead and the South must lose the war, but a generous amnesty might be had if the Rebels gave up now. Having spoken as a military man, Jacques reverted to his ministry and asked how a Christian peace might be obtained.

“In a very simple way,” Davis said. “Withdraw your armies from our territory and peace will come of itself.” Mr. Lincoln's terms were “
very
generous,” but the South had no need of his amnesty. “Amnesty, sir, applies to criminals.” Nor was it fighting for slavery. “We are fighting for independence, and that, or extermination, we
will
have.” Showing Gilmore and Jacques the door, Davis suggested they might “say to Mr. Lincoln that I shall at any time be pleased to receive proposals for peace on the basis of our independence. It will be useless to approach me with any other.”