The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (19 page)

The plain, simple man who had become President naturally paid no attention to his wife’s social ambitions. He was busy with affairs of state and the conduct of war. He found relaxation playing with his two young sons who romped through the dignified and historic Executive Mansion as though it were an old stable. The eldest son, Robert, was away at Harvard, so Lincoln depended upon Willie and Tad for companionship. During the darkest moments of the early campaigns he was able to throw off his fits of despondency in their company. He had a natural love for children that was, perhaps, in some way a compensation for his lack of success in dealing with women. He may have been an indifferent lover and an abstracted and neglectful husband, but the only failure that could be charged against him as a father was that he
completely spoiled his children. And he spoiled them not only because he was excessively devoted to them; but also because he himself was so restless under restraint that he could not bear seeing his children disciplined. When they played tricks on the grave-faced Cabinet members and army officers who came to visit him, he would never mete out punishment. His behavior in the most formal residence in the land was entirely informal. He brought to the White House the unvarnished manners of the frontier and the small town.

He was criticized even in the North as a buffoon and a vulgarian. But it must be remembered that the mores he offended were the elaborately refined ones that had been imported from Victorian England. When he spoke plain language and acted like a natural human being, the overstuffed gentlemen winced and the Dresden-china ladies swooned. Lincoln’s secretary, John Hay, who zealously respected the manners of the best society himself, nevertheless was astute enough to see through Lincoln’s surface crudities to the real man underneath. He said of him:

I believe that Lincoln is well understood by the people; but there is a patent-leather, kid-glove set who know no more of him than an owl does of a comet blazing into his blinking eyes. Their estimates of him are in many cases disgraceful exhibitions of ignorance and prejudice. Their effeminate natures shrink instinctively from the contact of a great reality like Lincoln’s character. I consider Lincoln republicanism incarnate, with all its faults and all its virtues. As, in spite of some rudeness, republicanism is the sole hope of a sick world, so Lincoln with all his foibles, is the greatest character since Christ.

Young Hay became greatly devoted to the whimsical, unconventional President whom he irreverently refers to in his diary as the Tycoon or the Ancient. He describes Lincoln prowling restlessly through the dark halls of the White House in shirt-tails and slippers to find someone with whom he could share a particularly funny passage from Artemus Ward or
Thomas Hood. Hay was vastly amused at the President’s feet, which always seemed to be seeking a level higher than his head; he speaks of how Lincoln would use them to steady a telescope as he inspected shipping on the Potomac, and of how visitors to the White House were sometimes shocked to see a windowsill lined with a row of men’s shoe soles—the biggest of which were always proudly pointed out by the servants as belonging to the President himself.

But Hay realized, too, that although the President was sometimes undignified, he was never lacking in true dignity. He could spend time playing with his children and jesting with his friends, but actually he was a terribly serious person whose whole energies were concentrated on winning the War. Only three weeks after the firing on Sumter, Lincoln had already figured out for himself the essential nature of the conflict. Hay recorded this analysis in his diary, reproducing the President’s own words:

For my part, I consider the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us, of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves. There may be one consideration used in stay of such final judgment, but that is not for us to use in advance.

That is, that there exists in our case, an instance of so vast and far-reaching a disturbing element, which the history of no other free nation will probably ever present. That, however, is not for us to say at present. Taking the government as we found it we will see if the majority can preserve it.

Under the President’s energetic leadership a majority of the Northern people came to the defense of the system of popular government. Troops, munitions and money were readily provided. The South, which had nourished the delusion that the Yankees would not fight, now began to realize
that she had a first-class war on her hands. The border states wavered between Northern and Southern allegiance, and their wavering weakened the South more than it did the North. The North was in such a powerful position that these few undecided states did not seriously matter, although Lincoln greatly overestimated their importance. There were 22,000,000 people in the states that finally stood with the Union, against fewer than 9,000,000 people in the Confederate states, nearly 4,000,000 of whom were slaves who could hardly be expected to fight to preserve their own bondage. Even more disparate was the proportion of wealth in the North and in the South. An analysis of resources in the two sections at the beginning of the war shows that:

In 1860, the North had produced $167,295,000 worth of flour and meal as compared with the South’s $55,849,000.… The North had 19,770 miles of railway track; the South, 10,513.… The North … had 109,000 manufacturing establishments to the South’s 31,300. The capital investment in Northern manufactures was $842,000,000 to the South’s $167,855,000. The number of workers in Northern manufactures was 1,131,600 to the South’s 189,500. The value of the manufactured products turned out in the North was $1,594,486,000 to the South’s $291,375,000.… The capital stock of the North’s banks was put at $292,594,000; of the South’s banks, at $129,287,000. The total bank deposits in the North stood at $187,678,000; in the South, at $66,124,000. In the North, money in circulation totaled $119,826,000; in the South, $87,276,000. (
The United States—A Graphic History.
Hacker, Modley and Taylor. New York, 1937.)

As the war went on this disparity increased enormously. For the first year the South stupidly withheld her cotton from the European market, then, as the Northern blockade became more efficient it almost entirely shut off the Southern ports. The North was able to raise a huge purchasing fund through taxation and loans. The South had to resort to inflation early in the War. Because of the depreciation of currency on both
sides it is impossible to arrive at any reasonable comparison of war income. All that can be said is that in 1865 the printing-press money issued by the Confederacy had no value at all, whereas the North, which had spent more than three billion dollars in financing the War, still had a currency with an exchange value of at least fifty cents in gold. Even during the lowest tide of Northern defeat, the United States dollar never went below thirty-nine cents; it rose rapidly after the War, reaching par in less than fourteen years. The North emerged from the War stronger and more powerful than ever.

But if the North had population and wealth, the South had the one thing that the North lacked most—able military leaders. The President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, was a professional soldier. The group of generals headed by Robert E. Lee were the pick of the men who had been trained at West Point and in army service. Lincoln’s greatest problem during the first years of the War was to find at least one man competent to lead the great Northern army to victory.

General Winfield Scott, seventy-five-year-old veteran of the War of 1812, was the titular head of the little Federal army when the War began. It was obvious that he did not have the energy or the health to see the campaign through. Nor was there any likely successor to him anywhere in sight. The United States, as usual, had been too sure of peace to bother with training adequate leaders for war.

The first active fighting took place in the border states, where a few miniature battles occurred. The western and mountainous part of Virginia, which had no part in the slave economy of the tidewater section, gave early indications of her intentions to stay with the North. Late in June, a young Union commander, George Brinton McClellan, distinguished himself by waging successful warfare against the few rebels remaining in that part of the state. McClellan was a West Point man, a professional soldier who had resigned from
the army to engage in railroad work. He left the presidency of an Ohio railroad to become a soldier again. With a dearth of Union leaders, McClellan’s minor victories made him seem outstanding. Lincoln watched his career with interest. He needed bright young men to lead his armies.

As the Northern army continued to grow, an expeditionary force was sent from Washington across the river to clear the rebels out of Alexandria and Arlington Heights. One of the leaders of this force, a young colonel from Illinois, E. E. Ellsworth, was killed in an attempt to take down the Confederate flag that had so long been flaunted in the face of the President and the people in Washington. This young soldier’s death brought home the reality of war with great personal effect to Lincoln. Ellsworth had accompanied him on the train from Springfield to Washington, and he had become very much attached to the dashing boy commander. He wrote a moving letter of condolence to Ellsworth’s parents.

Early in June, the capital of the Confederate States was transferred from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia. As the Federal armies spread out around Washington and increased in size, the Northern people, whipped up by newspaper comment, began to feel that a quick drive against the new Confederate capital would put down the insurrection and restore peace. The cry became “On to Richmond!” The Confederate Congress was due to assemble there on July 20, and it seemed possible that a well-organized attack might prevent the Rebel Congress from sitting.

The extraordinary session of Congress convened by Presidential proclamation met in Washington on July 4. The seats that had been occupied by Senators and Representatives from Southern states stood vacant as silent reminders of the fact that the nation was now disunited. But dissension and wrangling had gone with the departed Congressmen; the men who remained almost unanimously supported the President’s
war measures. When he asked for 400,000 more men and $400,000,000 to carry on a War that had as yet been nothing but a series of skirmishes, only five votes were cast in the House against supplying the necessary means.

In the special message addressed to this Congress, Lincoln outlined the first few steps that the Government had taken in order to meet the rebellion against it; he answered the Southern arguments on the right of secession; and he went out of his way to speak to the people of the nation in order to make it clear to them that the War was “essentially a people’s contest.”

He saw clearly that the issue was basic—one that would serve as precedent in the conduct of democratic governments throughout the world for generations to come. He summed up the essential meaning of the American Civil War in a single paragraph that can stand as the central core of the democratic argument against the slaveholder’s rebellion which apologists have tried to explain away by tenuous constitutional reasoning and much sophistry. The words he had spoken in private to John Hay were now made public in a rephrased and tightly developed form:

And this issue embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man the question whether a constitutional republic or democracy—a government of the people by the same people—can or cannot maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes. It presents the question whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration according to organic law in any case, can always, upon the pretenses made in this case, or on any other pretenses, or arbitrarily without any pretense, break up their government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. It forces us to ask: “Is there, in all republics, this inherent and fatal weakness?” “Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”

As he spoke, preparations were under way for the first major encounter with the Confederate forces. A large body of troops under the command of General Beauregard had been lying near Manassas Junction for two months. Manassas, which lay in a valley watered by a creek named Bull Run, was about thirty miles from the Union camps around Arlington. The two armies had fired occasional shots at each other’s pickets, but had never actually approached each other. Under pressure of Northern public opinion, Federal troops were being made ready to march against the Confederates in order to capture the important Manassas railroad junction and to drive on toward Richmond.

On July 16, about twenty-eight thousand men under the command of General McDowell started out to meet the enemy’s force of thirty-two thousand. Several days of marching, maneuvering and preliminary encounters took place before the main battle on Sunday, July 21. On that day, Congressmen and Washington people drove out to see their army defeat the rebels. Lincoln waited anxiously in the White House for the outcome of this first major test of arms.

During the afternoon the telegraphic dispatches from the field were very encouraging, although it seemed that the battle might have to continue for another day before victory was assured. The President went for his usual afternoon drive. When he returned, his secretaries told him in great excitement that Seward had been to the White House with news that the Union forces had been routed. Lincoln walked over to the army headquarters, where he was handed a telegram reading: “General McDowell’s army in full retreat.… The day is lost. Save Washington and the remnants of this army.… The routed troops will not re-form.”

During the evening the news was confirmed. The President waited up all night, listening to the accounts given him by
Congressmen and other civilians who had fled madly before the retreating soldiers. When morning came, the sky was heavily overcast and a steady rain was falling. The first of the troops, whose inexperience in warfare had cost them the battle, began to stream into Washington. Sympathetic citizens set up coffee-stands, where the unhappy men munched their breakfasts in silence. Their Commander-in-Chief stood at a window in the White House, looking out at the falling rain. He had not erred in asking Congress for 400,000 men. The War was not going to be an easy one.