Lincoln Part 30

Lincoln's July 4, 1861, message to the special session of Congress offered a full explanation of the course he had pursued in the Sumter crisis, blamed the Southerners for beginning the conflict, and defended the subsequent actions he had taken to sustain the Union. Valuable as history, the message was more significant as prediction. Taken together with his proclamation of April 15, it clearly defined Lincoln's view of the war and explained how he intended to prosecute it.

The conflict, he consistently maintained, was not a war between the government of the United States and that of the Confederate States of America. So to define it would acknowledge that the Union was not a perpetual one and that secession was const.i.tutional. This Lincoln could not even tacitly admit. Throughout the next four years he sustained the legal fiction that the war was an "insurrection" of individuals in the Southern states who joined in "combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings." Though he sometimes referred to the conflict as a civil war, he usually called it a "rebellion"-a term he employed more than four hundred times in his messages and letters. He never recognized that any of the Southern states was, or could be, out of the Union, and he did not identify the enemy as the Confederate States of America. On the very rare occasions he was forced to refer to that government, it was always as "the so-called Confederate States of America."

In the years ahead Lincoln was not always able to keep to the purest formulation of his interpretation of the war. Had he done so, captured Confederate soldiers would have been treated as criminals and captured Southern seamen as pirates. This, as Jefferson Davis bluntly warned him, could only lead to retaliation. Without any public announcement, the Lincoln administration modified its position. Throughout the war captured Confederate soldiers and sailors were confined in prison camps-camps that were, in both the Union and the Confederacy, overcrowded and squalid beyond belief but were nevertheless preferable to the common jails where these prisoners might have been sent.

Lincoln's view of the war as simply a domestic insurrection was also contradicted by the naval blockade he imposed on Southern ports. As both Secretary Welles and Charles Sumner advised, under international law his proper course was to close all Southern ports. A blockade was an instrument of war between two belligerent powers; by imposing it, the President was tacitly recognizing the Confederacy as a belligerent. But Lincoln was convinced that an order closing the ports would be repeatedly tested by foreign vessels and that conflict with the European naval powers would result, and he ordered the blockade. Thaddeus Stevens, leader of the Pennsylvania Republicans, ridiculed this as "a great blunder and absurdity" because in legal terms it meant "we were blockading ourselves." When he angrily confronted the President over this issue, Lincoln put on his best simple-countryman air and said, "I don't know anything about the law of nations, and I thought it was all right."

"As a lawyer, Mr. Lincoln," Stevens remarked, "I should have supposed you would have seen the difficulty at once."

"Oh, well," the President replied, "I'm a good enough lawyer in a Western law court, I suppose, but we don't practice the law of nations up there, and I supposed Seward knew all about it, and I left it to him." "But it's done now and can't be helped," he added to Stevens's fury, "so we must get along as well as we can."

With these exceptions Lincoln adhered to his definition of the war, and throughout the next four years the implications of his decision were far-reaching. Because, in his eyes, the Confederacy did not exist, there could never be any negotiations leading to recognition or a peace treaty. Because the insurrection was the work of individuals, not of any organized government, the states of the South remained in the Union throughout the war, fully ent.i.tled to all the protections guaranteed by the Const.i.tution. Those guarantees covered the right of private property-including slaves. Punishment for partic.i.p.ating in the rebellion could be inflicted on traitorous individuals, not on the states in which they resided, and when victory came to the Union cause, the Southern states would be, as they always had been, equal to all others in the United States.

Lincoln's July 1861 message, together with his proclamations, also made it clear that he considered the prosecution of the war primarily a function of the Chief Executive, to be carried out with minimal interference from the other branches of the government and without excessive respect to const.i.tutional niceties protecting individual rights. To carry out his duties as commander-in-chief, he believed that he could exercise powers normally reserved to the legislative branch of government. Proclaiming a blockade, extending the period for volunteer enlistment to three years, increasing the size of the regular army and navy, and entrusting public funds to private persons for the purchase of arms and supplies would ordinarily require the prior approval of Congress, but the emergency required the President to act before such authorization was granted. "It was with the deepest regret," he explained, "that the Executive found the duty of employing the war-power, in defence of the government, forced upon him." "These measures, whether strictly legal or not," he informed Congress in July, "were ventured upon, under what appeared to be a popular demand, and a public necessity; trusting, then, as now, that Congress would readily ratify them." "It is believed," he added, "that nothing has been done beyond the const.i.tutional competency of Congress."

Even touchier was his decision to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, an action that touched on the power both of the legislative and the judicial branches of the government. In neither law nor precedent was it clear where the authority for such suspension lay. The const.i.tutional provision concerning suspension appeared in Article I, detailing the powers of Congress, but whether the Philadelphia convention had placed it there to identify it as a purely legislative function or for stylistic reasons because it did not fit elsewhere was unclear and subsequently became a matter of great controversy in the Congress and among legal experts.

Belief that only Congress had the right to suspend the writ was the basis for Chief Justice Taney's fulminations against the President in his Merryman ruling. Lincoln made no reply at the time, but in his message to Congress the President pointed out that the Const.i.tution was silent as to who was to exercise the power of suspending the writ and claimed that in a dangerous emergency when the Congress was not in session the Chief Executive was obliged to act. "It was not believed that any law was violated," he added. Then he went on to suggest that "such extreme tenderness of the citizen's liberty" as Taney had shown could lead to the danger of allowing "all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated."

The next years would see greater infringements on individual liberties than in any other period in American history. Repeatedly the writ of habeas corpus was suspended in localities where secession seemed dangerous, and on September 24, 1862, and again on September 15, 1863, Lincoln suspended the privilege of the writ throughout the country. Initially control of the arbitrary arrests of civilians was given to the Secretary of State, and by the best count, 864 persons were imprisoned and held without trial in the first nine months of the war. After February 1862, when such arrests became the province of the Secretary of War, the number of cases greatly increased. Most of the persons so arrested were spies, smugglers, blockade-runners, carriers of contraband goods, and foreign nationals; only a few were truly political prisoners, jailed for expressing their beliefs. It was nevertheless clear from Lincoln's first message to Congress that devotion to civil liberties was not the primary concern of his administration.

In his July 1861 message Lincoln palliated such transgressions of const.i.tutional niceties because of the importance of the struggle in which the country was engaged. At issue in the contest was more than the fate of the United States. Antic.i.p.ating a phrase he would use two years later in the Gettysburg Address, he suggested, "It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a const.i.tutional republic, or a democracy-a government of the people, by the same people-can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes." More, even, than that, it was a struggle for the rights of man. "This," he told the Congress, "is essentially a People's contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men-to lift artificial weights from all shoulders-to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all-to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life."

III

The Congress that heard Lincoln's message on July 5, when a clerk read it in a dull monotone, was controlled by members of his own party. After the withdrawal of Southern senators and representatives, Republicans held large majorities in both chambers-32 out of 48 members of the Senate, 106 out of 176 members of the House of Representatives. Congressmen from the border slave states who called themselves Unionists generally cooperated with the Republicans during this session. Only about one out of four members of either chamber belonged to the Democratic party, decimated by secession and demoralized by the unexpected death, on June 3 of Stephen A. Douglas, who might have led a loyal opposition to the Lincoln administration.

The reception of the President's message indicated that party lines were, for the moment, unimportant. Few had the heart to engage in partisan bickering, and "irrepressible applause" greeted Lincoln's recommendation that Congress appropriate $400,000,000 to sustain an army of 400,000 men. Converting itself, as one member said, into "a giant committee of ways and means," the Congress promptly went beyond the President's requests and appropriated $500,000,000 to field an army of 500,000 men.

In the country, too, the message was greeted with enthusiasm. Most commended the President's seemingly straightforward account of the events leading up to the attack on Fort Sumter. Several editors noted with pleasure that Lincoln made no mention of slavery or the extension of slavery in the national territories but put the issue before the country simply as one of Union versus Disunion. It was no surprise that a Republican paper like Greeley's New York Tribune praised the message for avoiding "episodes and circ.u.mlocutions" and going "straight to the hearts of the patriotic millions," but it was a sign of the times when the Democratic New York World commended "this excellent and manly Message," which contained "more unborrowed and vigorous thought" than any presidential utterance since the days of Andrew Jackson.

Promptly Congress moved to pa.s.s bills retroactively approving most of Lincoln's extraconst.i.tutional actions. There was dissent only on the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, which made many Republicans, as well as nearly all the Democrats, unhappy. Senator John Sherman of Ohio best captured the feeling of many congressmen: "I approve of the action of the President.... He did precisely what I would have done if I had been in his place-no more, no less; but I cannot here, in my place, as a Senator, under oath, declare that what he did do was... strictly legal, and in consonance with the provisions of the Const.i.tution."

Such discord was muted because the Union army was preparing to advance while Congress debated. Pressure for an offensive had been building ever since Lincoln's initial call for troops, though n.o.body had a clear idea of what strategy should be followed. Initially Lincoln, who made no pretense of having military knowledge, thought the troops should be used to repossess Fort Sumter and other captured federal installations along the Southern coast, but this thoroughly impracticable scheme would have required large amphibious operations far beyond the competence of either the army or the navy in 1861. General Scott, the most revered military expert in the country, offered what was described as an "Anaconda Plan," which called for cordoning off the Confederacy with a tight naval blockade while advancing with an army of perhaps 85,000 down the Mississippi River from southern Illinois. The plan had some merit-but it rested on the remarkable a.s.sumption that the Confederate army in Virginia, which even Scott granted might total more than 100,000 men, would remain idle while the Union forces were advancing in the West. Montgomery Blair believed that "a very inconsiderable part" of the Union army could put down the rebellion by distributing arms to the Union men of the South, who were at present "overawed by the armed marauders that Jeff Davis has sent throughout the country." George B. McClellan, the hero of small engagements in western Virginia, proposed to gain victory by marching an army of 80,000 up the Great Kanawha Valley, across the Appalachian Mountains, to seize Richmond from the west. His scheme showed the ignorance of topography that was to characterize his subsequent campaigns.

Despite the absence of clear strategic plans, the demand for a Union advance became explosive after federal troops suffered several minor setbacks during the early months of the war. The most conspicuous of these occurred on May 24, the day after Virginia formally ratified its ordinance of secession, when Lincoln directed federal troops to cross the Potomac and occupy Alexandria. Moving stealthily, Union forces, including the Zouave regiment that Elmer Ellsworth had recruited in New York, compelled the Virginia troops to withdraw. Flushed with victory, Ellsworth spotted a secession flag flying above the Marshall House-a flag the President could see with his spygla.s.s from the White House-and dashed up the stairs to tear it down. On his way down the hotelkeeper shot and killed him. Ellsworth's death deeply grieved Lincoln, who thought of this young officer as almost another son. The funeral ceremonies were held in the White House, and afterward the President wrote the young man's parents of their shared affliction: "So much of promised usefulness to one's country, and of bright hopes for one's self and friends, have rarely been so suddenly dashed, as in his fall."

The tragedy-one that would have gone almost unnoticed in later years, when deaths were reported by the thousands-reinforced the drumbeat of politicians and newspapers calling for action. Up to this point Lincoln had favored delay, but he now ordered an advance against the Confederate army near Mana.s.sas, Virginia, where it was a constant threat to Was.h.i.+ngton.

Since Scott was too old and infirm to take the field, Lincoln put General Irvin McDowell, a forty-two-year-old West Point graduate who had served with distinction in the Mexican War, in charge of the advance. On June 29, Lincoln met with his cabinet and military advisers in the White House to discuss McDowell's plans, which were simple and direct. Believing that General P. G. T. Beauregard had about 35,000 men at Mana.s.sas, he proposed to attack the Confederates before they could be reinforced. Scott demurred because he believed in "a war of large bodies," not "a little war by piecemeal," but the President and the cabinet overruled him, and McDowell was authorized to begin his campaign on July 9.

It was not until a week later that McDowell was ready to move-a very costly week's delay that gave the Confederacy a chance to reinforce Beauregard's army with Joseph E. Johnston's troops from the Shenandoah Valley. Slowly McDowell's army began to march out to meet the Confederate army at Mana.s.sas. (That is what the Southerners called the place; Yankees found that one undistinguished Southern crossroads looked much like another, and they called the field of engagement Bull Run, after the creek that meandered near it.) McDowell's plans were widely known in Was.h.i.+ngton, and his invading army was accompanied by six United States senators, at least ten representatives, scores of newspapermen, and many of what a reporter called "the fairer, if not gentler s.e.x," who often brought picnic baskets in their buggies.

a.s.sured by Scott that McDowell would be successful, Lincoln quietly went to church on July 21. In midafternoon he went to Scott's office, only to find the general-in-chief taking his afternoon nap. When the President woke him up, the general said that early reports from the battlefield signified nothing and before dropping off to sleep again predicted McDowell's victory. But by six o'clock that evening Seward came to the White House with the news that McDowell's army was in full retreat. At the War Department the President read the dispatch of an army captain of engineers: "The day is lost. Save Was.h.i.+ngton and the remnants of this army.... The routed troops will not re-form." All evening the President and the cabinet members cl.u.s.tered in Scott's office, hearing more and more alarming news. That night, stretched out on a couch in the cabinet room of the White House, the President listened to firsthand reports from terrified eyewitnesses of the defeat. He did not go to bed that night.

The next day Lincoln began to a.s.sess the damage. He learned that many of McDowell's troops had fought bravely and well. The Union army would have won the battle except for the unantic.i.p.ated arrival of Johnston's forces from the Valley. Even then, facing overwhelming odds, most of the volunteer Union regiments had retreated in good order, and the demoralized mob described by so many witnesses was largely composed of teamsters, onlookers, and ninety-day troops whose terms of enlistment were about to expire. The army was defeated but not crushed, and McDowell's troops were fed into the substantial fortifications on the south side of the Potomac. By nightfall Cameron wired to worried New Yorkers, "The capital is safe."

The immediate political reaction to the defeat was to rally behind the President. In order to make that support clear, both houses of Congress voted almost unanimously for John J. Crittenden's resolution declaring "that this war is not waged... for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor purpose of overthrowing ... established inst.i.tutions [meaning slavery]... but to defend... the Const.i.tution and to preserve the Union." That resolution echoed the pledge in Lincoln's inaugural address not to interfere with slavery within the states.

But such unity was only a facade. Bull Run was a severe Union defeat, and finger-pointing and recriminations inevitably followed. McDowell unfairly received a good share of the blame. Scott, too, was condemned for allowing such an ill-prepared campaign to get under way. Restive under criticism, the old general made an apology that was more like a defense when he talked with several Illinois congressmen in Lincoln's presence two days after the battle. "I am the greatest coward in America," he announced. "I will prove it; I have fought this battle, sir, against my judgment; I think the President of the United States ought to remove me to-day for doing it; as G.o.d is my judge, after my superiors had determined to fight it, I did all in my power to make the Army efficient. I deserve removal because I did not stand up, when my army was not in condition for fighting, and resist it to the last."

The President interjected, "Your conversation seems to imply that I forced you to fight this battle."

Scott avoided a direct response by saying, "I have never served a President who has been kinder to me than you have been."

Unlike the general, Lincoln was willing to a.s.sume the blame for the defeat. Coolly reviewing the evidence, he concluded that the Mana.s.sas campaign, though unsuccessful, had not been ill advised. He knew that Union soldiers were raw recruits, but so were their Confederate opponents. On neither side did commanding officers have experience in conducting large-scale engagements. A crus.h.i.+ng defeat of the Confederate army at Bull Run could have ended the war.

The President moved immediately to remedy the causes of the Union defeat. To boost morale he visited the fortifications around Was.h.i.+ngton and a.s.sured the troops that as commander-in-chief he would make sure they had all needful supplies. But he also recognized the need for better discipline. When he inspected the troops at Fort Corcoran, a disgruntled officer complained that Colonel William T. Sherman had threatened to shoot him like a dog for planning to go to New York without a leave. In a stage whisper that the other soldiers could easily hear, the President said, "Well, if I were you, and he threatened to shoot, I would not trust him, for I believe he would do it."

Clearly a new commanding general was needed, and on the day after the battle Lincoln summoned George B. McClellan from western Virginia to take charge of the forces around Was.h.i.+ngton and to build a new army out of the three-year volunteer regiments that were just beginning to arrive in the capital.

IV

During the next months while McClellan was organizing and training the new soldiers, Lincoln had a breathing spell from political pressure, because everybody recognized that it would take time to build a real army. During these weeks the President and his family could for the first time enjoy living in the White House. Initially they had been overwhelmed by the size of the Executive Mansion with its thirty-one rooms, not including the conservatory, various outbuildings, and stables. The East Room alone was about as large as their entire Springfield house. Except for the family dining room, the first floor was open to all visitors. An aged Irish doorkeeper, Edward McMa.n.u.s, was supposed to screen visitors, but in practice anybody who wanted to could stroll in at any hour of the day and often late at night. On the second floor nearly half the rooms were also public, so that the Lincolns' private quarters, which at first seemed so palatial, proved to be remarkably constricted. The upstairs oval room became the family sitting room. The two adjoining rooms on the south side were those of the President and Mrs. Lincoln; as in Springfield, they had separate but connecting bedrooms. Across the wide corridor were the state guest room, called the Prince of Wales Room, and the infrequently used room of Robert, who was in the White House only during Harvard vacations. Tad and Willie had smaller rooms on the north side.

The younger boys found endless opportunities for mischief and adventure in the Executive Mansion. To adults the soldiers stationed on the south grounds of the White House were an ominous reminder of danger, but to Willie and Tad the members of the "Bucktair Pennsylvania regiment were playmates who could always be counted on for stories and races. Catching the martial spirit, Willie and Tad took great pleasure in drilling all the neighborhood boys they could round up. With two special friends who just matched them in age-Bud and Holly Taft, sons of a federal judge who lived nearby-they commandeered the roof of the mansion for their fort, and there, with small logs painted to look like cannon, they resolutely fired away at unseen Confederates across the Potomac.

Children in the White House were something new for Americans, and citizens began showering the boys with presents. The most valued, and the most lasting, were the pets. Someone gave Willie a beautiful little pony, to which he was devoted; he rode the animal nearly every day and, being a generous boy, often allowed Tad to ride, even though the younger boy was so small that his legs stuck straight out on the sides. Especially cherished were two small goats, Nanko and Nanny, which frisked on the White House grounds and, when they had an opportunity, tore up the White House garden. At times the animals, like the general public, seemed to have the run of the White House. On one occasion Tad harnessed Nanko up to a chair, which served him as a sled, and drove triumphantly through the East Room, where a reception was in progress. As dignified matrons held up their hoop skirts, Nanko pulled the yelling boy around the room and out through the door again.

When Lincoln could find time, he played with his boys. One day Julia Taft, the teenage sister of Bud and Holly, heard a great commotion in the upstairs oval room and entered to find the President of the United States lying on his back on the floor, Willie and Bud holding down his arms, Tad and Holly, his legs. "Julie, come quick and sit on his stomach!" cried Tad, as the President grinned at her grandly. There were also quiet times when Lincoln told stories or read to the boys; he would balance Willie and Bud on each knee while Tad mounted the back of his big chair and Holly climbed on the arm.

But such relaxed times were rare because Lincoln worked harder than almost any other American President. After a meager breakfast he went immediately to his office, where he signed as many papers and commissions as he could before the day's regular schedule began. A solid black walnut table occupied the center of the office; here the cabinet members gathered for their biweekly sessions. Along one wall of the office were a sofa and two upholstered chairs, above which hung maps of the theaters of military operations. A large upright mahogany desk, so battered that one of Lincoln's secretaries thought it must have come "from some old furniture auction," was in one corner. The pigeonholes above it served as a filing cabinet. Lincoln's smaller working desk stood between the two windows.

Adjoining the President's office were rooms occupied by his small staff, equipped with nondescript furnis.h.i.+ngs. Most of the floor of this wing of the White House was covered with oilcloth, which made it easier to clean up after overflowing or missed spittoons. Lincoln's private secretary was the self-effacing, methodical Nicolay, and the effervescent John Hay served as Nicolay's a.s.sistant. As the burden of correspondence grew, William O. Stoddard, technically a clerk in the Interior Department, was brought in to help with the initial screening of the 200 to 300 letters that came in each day. One of his jobs was to throw away the letters from cranks and lunatics. Much later, when Stoddard became ill, Edward D. Neill of Minnesota, another clerk in the Interior Department, took his place. Hay spelled out the duties of these a.s.sistants when he instructed Neill to take charge in his temporary absence: "There will probably be little to do. Refer as little to the President as possible, Keep visitors out of the house when you can. Inhospitable, but prudent. I have a few franked envelopes. Let matters of ordinary reference go without formality of signature."

Absolutely devoted to Lincoln, Nicolay and Hay were convinced that he would be remembered as a great President, and they early agreed that they would someday write a history of his administration. Lincoln promised to help them. Behind Lincoln's back Nicolay and Hay affectionately referred to him as "the Ancient" (possibly derived from "Old Abe") or "the Tyc.o.o.n," in reference to the all-powerful Emperor of j.a.pan. Lincoln always addressed Nicolay by his last name and treated him with great respect, but he called Hay "John" and treated him like a son.

In the first days of his administration Lincoln tried to be orderly and businesslike. He attempted to scan and digest all the morning papers that reached the White House. Finding that too time-consuming, he instructed his secretaries to prepare a digest of the news for his perusal, but presently he discontinued even that. Though he occasionally glanced at the telegraphic news dispatches in one or two papers, he read none of the newspapers consistently and almost never looked at their editorials. There was, he believed, nothing that newspapermen could tell him that he did not already know.

From early morning until dusk visitors thronged these business rooms of the White House. In the early months of the administration the line was so long that it extended down the stairs to the front entrance, with a candidate for a job or a military appointment perched on each step. Most of these applicants could be handled expeditiously. Lincoln quickly scanned letters of recommendation, referred pet.i.tioners to the proper department heads, and listened intently to complaints and made proper sympathetic noises. Whenever possible he avoided flatly rejecting an application, preferring to tell one of his celebrated "leetle stories" to suggest how impossible the request was. When an officer accused of embezzling forty dollars of government money appealed for leniency on the ground that he had really stolen only thirty dollars, the President was reminded of an Indiana man who charged his neighbor's daughter with unseemly behavior in having three illegitimate children. "'Now that's a lie,' said the man whose family was so outrageously scandalized, 'and I can prove it, for she only has two.'"

Remarkably, the President's systematic lack of system seemed to work. Stories of his accessibility to even the humblest pet.i.tioner, his patience, and his humanity spread throughout the North. For the first time in American history citizens began to feel that the occupant of the White House was their representative. They referred to him as Father Abraham, and they showered him with homely gifts: a firkin of b.u.t.ter, a crate of Bartlett pears, New England salmon. With special appropriateness a man from Johnsburgh, New York, sent the President "a live American Eagle[,] the bird of our land," which had lost one foot in a trap. "But," the New Yorker continued, "he is yet an Eagle and perhaps no more cripled [sic] than the Nation whose banner he represented, his wings are sound and will extend seven feet."