16th
president of the United States (1861-65), who preserved the Union during the
Civil War and brought about the emancipation of the slaves.
Life,
Childhood
and youth, Prairie
lawyer, Private life, Early
politics, The
road to presidency, President Lincoln, Outbreak
of war, Leadership
in war, Wartime
politics, Postwar policy, Reputation
and character, Bibliography.
Born
in a backwoods cabin three miles south of Hodgenville, Kentucky, Lincoln was two
years old when he was taken to a farm in the neighbouring valley of Knob Creek.
His earliest memories were of this home and, in particular, of a flash flood
that once washed away the corn and pumpkin seeds he had helped his father plant.
The father, Thomas Lincoln, was descended from a weaver's apprentice who had
migrated from England to Massachusetts in 1637. Though much less prosperous than
some of his Lincoln forebears, Thomas was a sturdy pioneer. On June 12, 1806, he
married Nancy Hanks. The Hanks genealogy is difficult to trace, but Nancy
appears to have been of illegitimate birth. She has been described as
"stoop-shouldered, thin-breasted, sad," and fervently religious.
Thomas and Nancy Lincoln had three children: Sarah, Abraham, and Thomas (died in
infancy).
In
December 1816, faced with a lawsuit challenging the title to his Kentucky farm,
Thomas Lincoln moved with his family to southwestern Indiana. There, as a
"squatter" on public land, he hastily put up a "half-faced
camp"--a crude structure of logs and boughs with one side open to the
weather--in which the family took shelter behind a blazing fire. Soon he built a
permanent cabin, and later he bought the land on which it stood. Abraham helped
to clear the fields and to take care of the crops but early acquired a dislike
for hunting and fishing. In afteryears he recalled the "panther's
scream," the bears that "preyed on the swine," and the poverty of
Indiana frontier life, which was "pretty pinching at times." The
unhappiest period of his boyhood followed the death of his mother in the autumn
of 1818. As a ragged nine year old, he saw her buried in the forest, then faced
a winter without the warmth of a mother's love. Fortunately, before the onset of
a second winter, Thomas Lincoln brought home from Kentucky a new wife for
himself, a new mother for the children. Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln, a widow
with two girls and a boy of her own, had energy and affection to spare. She ran
the household with an even hand, treating both sets of children as if she had
borne them all; but she became especially fond of Abraham, and he of her. He
afterward referred to her as his "angel mother."
This
stepmother doubtless encouraged Lincoln's taste for reading, yet the original
source of his desire to learn remains something of a mystery. Both of his
parents were almost completely illiterate, and he himself received little formal
education. He once said that, as a boy, he had gone to school "by littles"--a
little now and a little then--and his entire schooling amounted to no more than
one year's attendance. His neighbours later recalled how he used to trudge for
miles to borrow a book. According to his own statement, however, his early
surroundings provided "absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education.
Of course, when I came of age I did not know much. Still, somehow, I could read,
write, and cipher to the rule of three; but that was all." Apparently the
young Lincoln did not read a large number of books but thoroughly absorbed the
few that he did read. These included Parson Weems's Life and Memorable Actions
of George Washington (with its story of the little hatchet and the cherry tree),
Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, and Aesop's Fables. From his earliest days
he must have had some familiarity with the Bible, for it doubtless was the only
book his family owned.
In
March 1830 the Lincoln family undertook a second migration, this one to
Illinois, with Lincoln himself driving the team of oxen. Having just reached the
age of 21, he was about to begin life on his own. Six feet four inches tall, he
was rawboned and lanky but muscular and physically powerful. He was especially
noted for the skill and strength with which he could wield an ax. He spoke with
a backwoods twang and walked in the long-striding, flatfooted, cautious manner
of a plowman. Good-natured though somewhat moody, talented as a mimic and
storyteller, he readily attracted friends. He was yet to demonstrate whatever
other abilities he possessed.
After
his arrival in Illinois, having no desire to be a farmer, Lincoln tried his hand
at a variety of occupations. As a "rail splitter" he helped to clear
and fence his father's new farm. As a flatboatman, he made a voyage down the
Mississippi River to New Orleans. (This was his second visit to that city, his
first having been made in 1828, while he still lived in Indiana.) On his return
he settled in New Salem, a village of about 25 families on the Sangamon River.
There he worked from time to time as storekeeper, postmaster, and surveyor. With
the coming of the Black Hawk War (1832), he enlisted as a volunteer and was
elected captain of his company. Afterward he joked that he had seen no
"live, fighting Indians" during the war but had had "a good many
bloody struggles with the mosquitoes." Meanwhile, aspiring to be a
legislator, he was defeated in his first try and then repeatedly reelected to
the state assembly. He considered blacksmithing as a trade but finally decided
in favour of the law. Already he had taught himself grammar and mathematics, and
now he began to study lawbooks. In 1836, having passed the bar examination, he
began to practice law.
The
next year he moved to Springfield, Illinois, the new state capital, which
offered many more opportunities for a lawyer than New Salem did. At first he was
a partner of John T. Stuart; then of Stephen T. Logan; and finally, from 1844
on, of William H.Herndon. Nearly 10 years younger than Lincoln, Herndon was more
widely read, more emotional at the bar, and generally more extreme in his views.
Yet this partnership seems to have been as nearly perfect as such human
arrangements ever are. Lincoln and Herndon kept few records of their law
business, and they split the cash between them whenever either of them was paid.
It seems they had no money quarrels.
Within
a few years after his removal to Springfield, Lincoln was earning from $1,200 to
$1,500 annually, at a time when the governor of the state received a salary of
$1,200 and circuit judges only $750. He had to work hard. To keep himself busy
he found it necessary not only to practice in the capital but also to follow the
court as it made the rounds of its circuit. Each spring and fall he would set
out by horseback or buggy to travel hundreds of miles over the thinly settled
prairie, from one little county seat to another. Most of the cases were petty
and the fees small.
The
coming of the railroads, especially after 1850, made travel easier and practice
more remunerative. Lincoln served as a lobbyist for the Illinois Central
Railroad to assist it in getting a charter from the state, and thereafter he was
retained as a regular attorney for that railroad. After successfully defending
the company against the efforts of McLean County to tax its property, he
received the largest single fee of his legal career--$5,000. (He had to sue the
Illinois Central in order to collect the fee.) He also handled cases for other
railroads and for banks, insurance companies, mercantile and manufacturing
firms. In one of his finest performances before the bar, he saved the Rock
Island Bridge, the first to span the Mississippi River, from the threat of the
river transportation interests that demanded the bridge's removal. His business
included a number of patent suits and criminal trials. One of his most effective
and famous pleas had to do with a murder case. A witness claimed that, by the
light of the moon, he had seen Duff Armstrong, an acquaintance of Lincoln's,
take part in a killing. Referring to an almanac for proof, Lincoln argued that
the night had been too dark for the witness to have seen anything clearly, and
with a sincere and moving appeal he won an acquittal.
By
the time he began to be prominent in national politics, about 20 years after
launching upon his legal career, Lincoln had made himself one of the most
distinguished and successful lawyers in Illinois. He was noted not only for his
shrewdness and practical common sense, which enabled him always to see to the
heart of any legal case, but also for his invariable fairness and utter honesty.
While
residing in New Salem, Lincoln was acquainted with Ann Rutledge. Apparently he
was fond of her, and certainly he grieved with the entire community at her
untimely death, in 1835, at the age of 19. Afterward stories were told of a
grand romance between Abraham and Ann, but these stories lack the support of
sound historical evidence. A year after the death of Miss Rutledge, Lincoln was
carrying on a halfhearted courtship with Mary Owens. Miss Owens concluded that
Lincoln was "deficient in those little links which make up the chain of
woman's happiness." She turned down his proposal.
So
far as can be known, the first and only real love of Lincoln's life was Mary
Todd. High-spirited, quick-witted, and well-educated, Miss Todd came from a
rather distinguished Kentucky family, and her Springfield relatives belonged to
the social aristocracy of the town. Some of them frowned upon her association
with Lincoln, and from time to time he too had doubts whether he ever could make
her happy. Nevertheless, they became engaged. Then, on a day in 1841 that
Lincoln recalled as the "fatal first of January," they broke the
engagement, apparently on his initiative. For some time after that, he was
overwhelmed by a mood of terrible depression and despondency. Finally the two
were reconciled and on November 4, 1842, were married.
Four
children, all boys, were born to the Lincolns. Robert Todd, the eldest and only
one to survive to adulthood, was never very close to his father. Edward Baker
was nearly four when he died, and William Wallace was 11. Thomas, affectionately
known as "Tad," outlived his father; Tad, who had a cleft palate and a
lisp, was Lincoln's favourite. Lincoln left the upbringing of his sons largely
to their mother, who was alternately strict and lenient in her treatment of
them.
The
Lincolns had a mutual affectionate interest in the doings and welfare of their
boys, were fond of one another's company, and missed each other when apart, as
existing letters show. Like most married couples, the Lincolns also had their
domestic quarrels, which sometimes were hectic but which undoubtedly were
exaggerated by contemporary gossips. Mrs. Lincoln suffered from recurring
headaches, fits of temper, and a sense of insecurity and loneliness that was
intensified by her husband's long absences on the lawyer's circuit. After his
election to the presidency, she was afflicted in spirit by the death of her son
Willie, by the ironies of war that made enemies of Kentucky relatives and
friends, and by the unfair public criticisms of her as mistress of the White
House. She lost all money sense and ran up embarrassing bills. She also put on
some painful scenes of wifely jealousy. At last, in 1875, she was officially
declared insane, but that was after she had undergone the further shock of
seeing her husband murdered at her side. During their earlier married life, Mrs.
Lincoln unquestionably encouraged her husband and served as a prod to his own
ambition. During their later years together she probably strengthened and tested
his innate qualities of tolerance and patience.
With
his wife, Lincoln attended Presbyterian services in Springfield and in
Washington but never joined any church. He once explained:
When
any church will inscribe over its altar, as its sole qualification for
membership, the Saviour's condensed statement of the substance of both Law and
Gospel, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all
thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor, as thyself," that church
will I join with all my heart and all my soul.
Early
in life he had been something of a skeptic and freethinker. His reputation had
been such that, as he once complained, the "church influence" was used
against him in politics. When running for Congress in 1846, he issued a handbill
to deny that he ever had "spoken with intentional disrespect of
religion." He went on to explain that he had believed in the doctrine of
necessity--"that is, that the human mind is impelled to action, or held in
rest by some power over which the mind itself has no control." Throughout
his life he also believed in dreams and other enigmatic signs and portents. As
he grew older, and especially after he became president and faced the
soul-troubling responsibilities of the Civil War, he developed a profound
religious sense, and he increasingly personified necessity as God. He came to
look upon himself quite humbly as an "instrument of Providence" and to
view all history as God's enterprise. "In the present civil war," he
wrote in 1862, "it is quite possible that God's purpose is something
different from the purpose of either party--and yet the human instrumentalities,
working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose."
Lincoln
was fond of the Bible and knew it well. He also was fond of Shakespeare. In
private conversation he used many Shakespearean allusions, discussed problems of
dramatic interpretation with considerable insight, and from memory recited long
passages with rare feeling and understanding. He liked the essays of John Stuart
Mill, particularly the famous one on liberty, but disliked heavy or metaphysical
works.
Though
he enjoyed the poems of Lord Byron and Robert Burns, his favourite piece of
verse was the work of an obscure Scottish poet, William Knox. Lincoln often
quoted Knox's lines beginning: "Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be
proud?" He liked to relax with the comic writings of Petroleum V. Nasby,
Orpheus C. Kerr, and Artemus Ward, or with a visit to the popular theatre.
When
Lincoln first entered politics, Andrew Jackson was president. Lincoln shared the
sympathies that the Jacksonians professed for the common man, but he disagreed
with the Jacksonian view that the government should be divorced from economic
enterprise. "The legitimate object of government," he was later to
say, "is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done,
but cannot do at all, or cannot do so well, for themselves, in their separate
and individual capacities." He most admired Henry Clay and Daniel Webster
among the prominent politicians of the time. Clay and Webster advocated using
the powers of the federal government to encourage business and develop the
country's resources by means of a national bank, a protective tariff, and a
program of internal improvements for facilitating transportation. In Lincoln's
view, Illinois and the West as a whole desperately needed such aid to economic
development. From the outset, he associated himself with the Clay and Webster
party, the Whids.
As
a Whig member of the Illinois State Legislature, to which he was elected four
times from 1834 to 1840, he devoted himself to a grandiose project for
constructing with state funds a network of railroads, highways, and canals.
Whigs and Democrats joined in passing an omnibus bill for these undertakings,
but the Panic of 1837 and the ensuing business depression brought about the
abandonment of most of them. While in the legislature he demonstrated that,
though opposed to slavery, he was no abolitionist. Resolutions were introduced,
in 1837, in response to the mob murder of Elijah Lovejoy, an antislavery
newspaperman of Alton. Instead of denouncing lynch law, these resolutions
condemned abolitionist societies and upheld slavery within the Southern states
as "sacred" by virtue of the federal Constitution. Lincoln refused to
vote for the resolutions. Together with a fellow member he drew up a protest
against them. This maintained, on the one hand, that slavery was "founded
on both injustice and bad policy" and, on the other, that "the
promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its
evils."
During
his single term in Congress (1847-49), Lincoln, as the lone Whig from Illinois,
gave little attention to legislative matters as such. He proposed a bill for the
gradual and compensated emancipation of slaves in the District of Columbia, but
the bill was to take effect only with the approval of the "free white
citizens" of the district. It displeased abolitionists as well as
slaveholders and never was seriously considered.
Much
of his time Lincoln devoted to presidential politics, to unmaking one president,
a Democrat, and making another, a Whig. He found an issue and a candidate in the
Mexican War. With his "spot resolutions" he challenged the statement
of Pres. James K. Polk that Mexico had started the war by shedding American
blood upon American soil. Along with other members of his party, Lincoln voted
to condemn Polk and the war while voting supplies for carrying it on. At the
same time he laboured for the nomination and election of the war hero Zachary
Taylor. After Taylor's success at the polls, Lincoln expected to be named
commissioner of the general land office as a reward for his campaign services,
and he was bitterly disappointed when he failed to get the job. His criticisms
of the war, meanwhile, had not been popular among the voters in his own
congressional district. At the age of 40, frustrated in politics, he seemed to
be at the end of his public career.
For
about five years he took little part in politics, and then a new sectional
crisis gave him a chance to re-emerge and rise to statesmanship. In 1854 his
political rival Stephen a. Douglas manoeuvred through Congress a bill for
reopening the entire Louisiana Purchase to slavery and allowing the settlers of
Kansas and Nebraska (with "popular sovereignty") to decide for
themselves whether to permit slaveholding in those territories. The Kansas
Nebraska Act provoked violent opposition in Illinois and the other states of the
old Northwest. It gave rise to the Republican Party while speeding the Whig
Party on the way to disintegration. Along with many thousands of other homeless
Whigs, Lincoln soon became a Republican (1856). Before long, some prominent
Republicans in the East talked of attracting Douglas to the Republican fold, and
with him his Democratic following in the West. Lincoln would have none of it. He
was determined that he, not Douglas, should be the Republican leader of his
state and section. In their basic views, he and Douglas were not quite so far
apart as they seemed in the heat of political argument. Neither was an
abolitionist, neither a proslavery man. But Lincoln, unlike Douglas, insisted
that Congress must exclude slavery from the territories. He disagreed with
Douglas' belief that the territories were by nature unsuited to the slave
economy and that no congressional legislation was needed to prevent the spread
of slavery into them. He declared (1858): "A house divided against itself
cannot stand. I believe the government cannot endure permanently half slave and
half free." He predicted that the country eventually would become "all
one thing, or all the other." Again and again he insisted that the civil
liberties of every U.S. citizen, white as well as black, were at stake. The
territories must be kept free, he further said, because "new free
states" were "places for poor people to go and better their
condition." He agreed with Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers,
however, that slavery should be merely contained, not directly attacked. In the
Lincoln Douglas debates of 1858, while contesting for Douglas' seat in the
United States Senate, he drove home the inconsistency between Douglas'
"popular sovereignty" principle and the Dred Scott decision (1857), in
which the U.S. Supreme Court held that Congress could not constitutionally
exclude slavery from the territories. Though he failed to obtain the Senate
seat, Lincoln gained national recognition and soon began to be mentioned as a
presidential prospect for 1860.
On
May 18, 1860, after Lincoln and his friends had made skillful preparations, he
was nominated on the third ballot at the Republican Convention in Chicago. He
then put aside his law practice and, though making no stump speeches, gave his
full time to the direction of his campaign. His "main object," he had
written, was to "hedge against divisions in the Republican ranks," and
he counselled party workers to "say nothing on points where it is probable
we shall disagree." With the Republicans united, the Democrats divided, and
a total of four candidates in the field, he carried the election on November 6.
No one in the Deep South voted for him and no more than 40 out of 100 in the
country as a whole. Still, the popular votes were so distributed that he won a
clear and decisive majority in the electoral college.
After
Lincoln's election and before his inauguration, the state of South Carolina
proclaimed its withdrawal from the Union. To forestall similar action by other
Southern states, various compromises were proposed in Congress. The most
important, the Crittenden Compromise, included constitutional amendments (1)
guaranteeing slavery forever in the states where it already existed and (2)
dividing the territories between slavery and freedom. Though Lincoln had no
objection to the first of these amendments, he was unalterably opposed to the
second and indeed to any scheme infringing in the slightest upon the free-soil
plank of his party's platform. "I am inflexible," he privately wrote.
He feared that a territorial division, by sanctioning the principle of slavery
extension, would only encourage planter imperialists to seek new slave territory
south of the American border and thus would "put us again on the highroad
to a slave empire." From his home in Springfield he advised Republicans in
Congress to vote against a division of the territories. The proposal was killed
in committee. Six additional states then seceded and, with South Carolina,
combined to form the Confederate States of America.
So,
before Lincoln took office, a disunion crisis was upon the country. Attention,
North and South, focussed in particular upon Ft. Sumter, in Charleston Harbor.
This fort, still under construction, was garrisoned by U.S. troops under Maj.
Robert Anderson. The Confederacy claimed it and, from other harbour
fortifications, threatened it. Foreseeing trouble, Lincoln, while still in
Springfield, confidentially requested Winfield Scott, general in chief of the
U.S. Army, to be prepared "to either hold, or retake, the forts, as the
case may require, at, and after the inauguration." In his inaugural address
(March 4, 1861), besides upholding the Union's indestructibility and appealing
for sectional harmony, Lincoln restated his Sumter policy as follows:
The
power confided to me, will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property,
and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts;
but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no
invasion--no using of force against, or among the people anywhere.
Then,
near the end, addressing the absent Southerners: "You can have no conflict,
without being yourselves the aggressors."
No
sooner was he in office than Lincoln received word that the Sumter garrison,
unless supplied or withdrawn, would shortly be starved out. Still, for about a
month, Lincoln delayed to act. He was beset by contradictory advice. On the one
hand, General Scott, Secretary of State William H. Seward, and others urged him
to abandon the fort; and Seward, through a go-between, gave a group of
Confederate commissioners to understand that the fort would in fact be
abandoned. On the other hand, many Republicans insisted that any show of
weakness would bring disaster to their party and to the Union. Finally Lincoln
ordered the preparation of two relief expeditions, one for Ft. Sumter and the
other for Ft. Pickens, in Florida. (He afterward said he would have been willing
to withdraw from Sumter if he could have been sure of holding Pickens.) Before
the Sumter expedition, he sent a messenger to tell the South Carolina governor:
I
am directed by the President of the United States to notify you to expect an
attempt will be made to supply Fort-Sumpter with provisions only; and that, if
such attempt be not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition,
will be made, without further notice, or in case of an attack upon the Fort.
Without
waiting for the arrival of Lincoln's expedition, the Confederate authorities
presented to Major Anderson a demand for Sumter's prompt evacuation, which he
refused. On April 12, 1861, at dawn, the Confederate batteries in the harbour
opened fire.
"Then,
and thereby," Lincoln informed Congress when it met on July 4, "the
assailants of the Government, began the conflict of arms." The
Confederates, however, accused him of being the real aggressor. They said he had
cleverly manoeuvred them into firing the first shot so as to put upon them the
onus of war guilt. Though some historians have repeated this charge, it appears
to be a gross distortion of the facts. Lincoln was determined to preserve the
Union; to do so he thought he must take a stand against the Confederacy, and he
concluded he might as well take this stand at Sumter.
Lincoln's
primary aim was neither to provoke war nor to maintain peace. In preserving the
Union, he would have been glad to preserve the peace also, but he was ready to
risk a war that he thought would be short.
After
the firing on Ft. Sumter, Lincoln called upon the state governors for troops
(Virginia and three other states of the upper South responded by joining the
Confederacy). He then proclaimed a blockade of the Southern ports. These
steps--the Sumter expedition, the call for volunteers, and the blockade--were
the first important decisions of Lincoln as commander in chief of the army and
navy. He still needed a strategic plan and a command system for carrying it out.
General
Scott advised him to avoid battle with the Confederate forces in Virginia, to
get control of the Mississippi River, and by tightening the blockade to hold the
South in a gigantic squeeze. Lincoln had little confidence in Scott's
comparatively passive and bloodless "Anaconda" plan. He believed the
war must be actively fought if it ever was to be won. Overruling Scott, he
ordered a direct advance on the Virginia front, which resulted in defeat and
rout for the Federal forces at Bull Run (July 21, 1861). After a succession of
more or less sleepless nights, Lincoln produced a set of memorandums on military
policy. His basic thought was this: the armies should advance concurrently on
several fronts and should move in such directions as to hold and use the support
of Unionists in Missouri, Kentucky, western Virginia, and eastern Tennessee. He
later explained:
I
state my general idea of this war to be that we have the greater numbers, and
the enemy has the greater facility of concentrating forces upon points of
collision; that we must fail, unless we can find some way of making our
advantage an over-match for his; and that this can only be done by menacing him
with superior forces at different points, at the same time.
This,
with the naval blockade, comprised the essence of Lincoln's strategy.
From
1861 to 1864, while hesitating to impose his ideas upon his generals, Lincoln
experimented with command personnel and organization. Accepting the resignation
of Scott (November 1861), he put George B. McClellan in charge of the armies as
a whole. After a few months, disgusted by the slowness of McClellan, he demoted
him to the command of the Army of the Potomac alone. He questioned the soundness
of McClellan's plans for the peninsular campaign, repeatedly compelled McClellan
to alter them, and, after the Seven Days' Battles before Richmond (June-July
1862), ordered him to give them up. Then he tried a succession of commanders for
the army in Virginia--John Pope, McClellan again, Ambrose E. Burnside, Joseph
Hooker, and George Gordon Meade--but was disappointed with each of them in turn.
Meanwhile, he had in Henry W.Halleck a general in chief who gave advice and
served as a liaison with field officers but who shrank from making important
decisions. For nearly two years the Federal armies had no very effective unity
of command. President Lincoln, General Halleck, and War Secretary Edwin M.
Stanton acted as an informal council of war. Lincoln, besides transmitting
official orders through Halleck, also communicated directly with the generals,
sending personal suggestions in his own name. To generals opposing Robert E.
Lee, he suggested that the object was to destroy Lee's army, not to capture
Richmond or to drive the invader from Northern soil.
Finally
Lincoln looked to the West for a top general. He admired the Vicksburg Campaign
of Ulysses S. Grant. Nine days after the Vicksburg surrender (which occurred on
July 4, 1863), he sent Grant a "grateful acknowledgment for the almost
inestimable service" he had done the country. Lincoln sent also an
admission of his own error. He said he had expected Grant to bypass Vicksburg
and go on down the Mississippi, instead of crossing the river and turning back
to approach Vicksburg from the rear. "I feared it was a mistake," he
wrote in his letter of congratulations. "I now wish to make the personal
acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong."
In
March 1864 Lincoln promoted Grant to lieutenant general and gave him command of
all the Federal armies. At last Lincoln had found a man who, with such able
subordinates as William T. Sherman, Philip Sheridan, and George H. Thomas, could
put into effect those parts of Lincoln's concept of a large-scale, coordinated
offensive that still remained to be carried out. Grant was only a member, though
an important one, of a top-command arrangement that Lincoln eventually had
devised. Overseeing everything was Lincoln himself, the commander in chief.
Taking the responsibility for men and supplies was Stanton, the secretary of
war. Serving as a presidential adviser and as a liaison with military men was
Halleck, the chief of staff. And directing all the armies, while accompanying
Meade's Army of the Potomac, was Grant, the general in chief. Thus Lincoln
pioneered in the creation of a high command, an organization for amassing all
the energies and resources of a people in the grand strategy of total war. He
combined statecraft and the overall direction of armies with an effectiveness
that year by year increased. His achievement is all the more remarkable in view
of his lack of training and experience in the art of warfare. This lack may have
been an advantage as well as a handicap. Unhampered by outworn military dogma,
Lincoln could all the better apply his practical insight and common sense--some
would say his military genius--to the winning of the Civil War.
There
can be no doubt of Lincoln's deep and sincere devotion to the cause of personal
freedom. Before his election to the presidency he had spoken often and
eloquently on the subject. In 1854, for example, he said he hated the Douglas
attitude of indifference toward the possible spread of slavery to new areas.
"I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself," he
declared. "I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just
influence in the world; enables the enemies of free institutions with
plausibility to taunt us as hypocrites. . . ." In 1855, writing to his
friend Joshua Speed, he recalled a steamboat trip the two had taken on the Ohio
River 14 years earlier. "You may remember, as I well do," he said,
"that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio there were, on board, ten or
a dozen slaves, shackled together with irons. That sight was a continual torment
to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio, or any other
slave-border."
Yet,
as president, Lincoln was at first reluctant to adopt an abolitionist policy.
There were several reasons for his hesitancy. He had been elected on a platform
pledging no interference with slavery within the states, and in any case he
doubted the constitutionality of federal action under the circumstances. He was
concerned about the possible difficulties of incorporating nearly 4,000,000
Negroes, once they had been freed, into the nation's social and political life.
Above all, he felt that he must hold the border slave states in the Union, and
he feared that an abolitionist program might impel them, in particular his
native Kentucky, toward the Confederacy. So he held back while others went
ahead. When Gen. John C. Frémont and Gen. David Hunter, within their respective
military departments, proclaimed freedom for the slaves of disloyal masters,
Lincoln revoked the proclamations. When Congress passed confiscation acts (in
1861 and 1862), he refrained from a full enforcement of the provisions
authorizing him to seize slave property. And when Horace Greeley in the New York
Tribune appealed to him to enforce these laws, Lincoln patiently replied (August
22, 1862):
My
paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to
save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave
I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it;
and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do
that.
Meanwhile,
in response to the rising antislavery sentiment, Lincoln came forth with an
emancipation plan of his own. According to his proposal, the slaves were to be
freed by state action, the slaveowners were to be compensated, the federal
government was to share the financial burden, the emancipation process was to be
gradual, and the freedmen were to be colonized abroad. Congress indicated its
willingness to vote the necessary funds for the Lincoln plan, but none of the
border slave states were willing to launch it, and in any case few Negro leaders
desired to see their people sent abroad.
While
still hoping for the eventual success of his gradual plan, Lincoln took a quite
different step by issuing his preliminary (September 22, 1862) and his final
(January 1, 1863) Emancipation Proclamation. This famous decree, which he
justified as an exercise of the president's war powers, applied only to those
parts of the country actually under Confederate control, not to the loyal slave
states nor to the Federally occupied areas of the Confederacy. Directly or
indirectly the proclamation brought freedom during the war to fewer than 200,000
slaves. Yet it had great significance as a symbol. It indicated that the Lincoln
government had added freedom to reunion as a war aim, and it attracted liberal
opinion in England and Europe to increased support of the Union cause.
Lincoln
himself doubted the constitutionality of his step, except as a temporary war
measure. After the war the slaves freed by the proclamation would have risked
re-en-slavement, had nothing else been done to confirm their liberty. Something
else was done: the Thirteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution, and
Lincoln played a large part in bringing about this change in the fundamental
law. Through the chairman of the Republican National Committee he urged the
party to include a plank for such an amendment in its platform of 1864. The
plank, as adopted, stated that slavery was the cause of the rebellion, that the
President's proclamation had aimed "a death blow at this gigantic
evil," and that a constitutional amendment was necessary to "terminate
and forever prohibit" it. When Lincoln was re-elected on this platform and
the Republican majority in Congress was increased, he was justified in feeling,
as he apparently did, that he had a mandate from the people for the Thirteenth
Amendment. The newly chosen Congress, with its overwhelming Republican majority,
was not to meet until after the lame duck session of the old Congress during the
winter of 1864-65. Lincoln did not wait. Using his resources of patronage and
persuasion upon certain of the Democrats, he managed to get the necessary
two-thirds vote before the session's end. He rejoiced as the amendment went out
to the states for ratification, and he rejoiced again and again as his own
Illinois led off and other states followed one by one in acting favourably upon
it. (He did not live to rejoice in its ultimate adoption.)
Lincoln
deserves his reputation as the Great Emancipator. His claim to that honour, if
it rests uncertainly upon his famous proclamation, has a sound basis in the
support he gave to the antislavery amendment. It is well founded also in his
greatness as the war leader who carried the nation safely through the four-year
struggle that brought freedom in its train. And, finally, it is strengthened by
the practical demonstrations he gave of respect for human worth and dignity,
regardless of colour. During the last two years of his life he welcomed Negroes
as visitors and friends in a way no president had done before. One of his
friends was the distinguished former slave Frederick Douglass. Afterward
Douglass wrote: "In all my interviews with Mr. Lincoln I was impressed with
his entire freedom from prejudice against the colored race."
To
win the war, President Lincoln had to have popular support. The reunion of North
and South required, first of all, a certain degree of unity in the North. But
the North contained various groups with special interests of their own. Lincoln
faced the task of attracting to his administration the support of as many
divergent groups and individuals as possible. So he gave much of his time and
attention to politics, which in one of its aspects is the art of attracting such
support. Fortunately for the Union cause, he was a president with rare political
skill. He had the knack of appealing to fellow politicians and talking to them
in their own language. He had a talent for smoothing over personal differences
and holding the loyalty of men antagonistic to one another. Inheriting the
spoils system, he made good use of it, disposing of government jobs in such a
way as to strengthen his administration and further its official aims.
The
opposition party remained alive and strong. Its membership included war
Democrats and peace Democrats, often called ?Copperheads? a few of whom
collaborated with the enemy. Lincoln did what he could to cultivate the
assistance of the war Democrats, as in securing from Congress the timely
approval of the Thirteenth Amendment. So far as feasible, he conciliated the
peace Democrats. He gave heed to the complaints of one of them, Gov. Horatio
Seymour of New York, in regard to the draft quota for that state. He commuted
the prison sentence of another, Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, to
banishment within the Confederate lines. In dealing with persons suspected of
treasonable intent, Lincoln at times authorized his generals to make arbitrary
arrests. He justified this action on the ground that he had to allow some
temporary sacrifice of parts of the Constitution in order to maintain the Union
and thus preserve the Constitution as a whole. He let his generals suspend
several newspapers, but only for short periods, and he promptly revoked a
military order suppressing the hostile Chicago Times. In a letter to one of his
generals he expressed his policy thus:
You
will only arrest individuals and suppress assemblies or newspapers when they may
be working palpable injury to the military in your charge, and in no other case
will you interfere with the expression of opinion in any form or allow it to be
interfered with violently by others. In this you have a discretion to exercise
with great caution, calmness, and forbearance.
Considering
the dangers and provocations of the time, Lincoln was quite liberal in his
treatment of political opponents and the opposition press. He was by no means
the dictator critics often accused him of being.
Within
his own party he confronted factional divisions and personal rivalries that
caused him as much trouble as did the activities of the Democrats. True, he and
most of his fellow partisans agreed fairly well upon their principal economic
aims. With his approval, the Republicans enacted into law the essentials of the
program he had advocated from his early Whig days--a protective tariff; a
national banking system; and federal aid for internal improvements, in
particular for the construction of a railroad to the Pacific Coast. The
Republicans disagreed among themselves, however, on many matters regarding the
conduct and purposes of the war. Two main factions arose: the
"radicals" and the "conservatives." Lincoln himself inclined
in spirit toward the conservatives, but he had friends among the radicals as
well, and he strove to maintain his leadership over both. In appointing his
cabinet, he chose his several rivals for the 1860 nomination and, all together,
gave representation to every important party group. Wisely he included the
outstanding conservative, Seward,
and the outstanding radical, Salmon P. Chase. Cleverly he overcame cabinet
crises and kept these two opposites among his official advisers until Chase's
resignation in 1864.
He
had to deal with even more serious factional uprisings in Congress. The big
issue was the reconstruction of the South. The seceded states of Louisiana,
Arkansas, and Tennessee having been largely recovered by the Federal armies,
Lincoln late in 1863 proposed his "ten percent plan," according to
which new state governments might be formed when 10 percent of the qualified
voters had taken an oath of future loyalty to the United States. The radicals
rejected Lincoln's proposal as too lenient, and they carried through Congress
the Wade Davis Bill, which would have permitted the remaking and re-admission of
states only after a majority had taken the loyalty oath. When Lincoln pocket
vetoed that bill, its authors published a "manifesto" denouncing him.
Already
he was the candidate of the "Union" (that is, the Republican) party
for re-election to the presidency, and the Wade-Davis manifesto signalized a
movement within the party to displace him as the party's nominee. He waited
quietly and patiently for the movement to collapse, but even after it had done
so, the party remained badly divided. A rival Republican candidate, John C.
Fremont, nominated much earlier by a splinter group, was still in the field.
Leading radicals promised to procure Frémont's withdrawal if Lincoln would
obtain the resignation of his conservative postmaster general, Montgomery Blair.
Eventually Frémont withdrew and Blair resigned. The party was reunited in time
for the election of 1864.
In
1864, as in 1860, Lincoln was the chief strategist of his own electoral
campaign. He took a hand in the management of the Republican Speakers' Bureau,
advised state committees on campaign tactics, hired and fired government
employees to strengthen party support, and did his best to enable as many
soldiers and sailors as possible to vote. Most of the citizens in uniform voted
Republican. He was reelected with a large popular majority (55 percent) over his
Democratic opponent, General McClellan.
In
1864 the Democratic platform called for an armistice and a peace conference, and
prominent Republicans as well as Democrats demanded that Lincoln give heed to
Confederate peace offers, irregular and illusory though they were. In a public
letter, he stated his own conditions:
Any
proposition 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 against the United states will be
received and considered by the Executive government of the United States, and
will be met by liberal terms on other substantial and collateral points.
When
conservatives protested to him against the implication that the war must go on
to free the slaves, even after reunion had been won, he explained: "To me
it seems plain that saying reunion and abandonment of slavery would be
considered, if offered, is not saying that nothing else or less would be
considered, if offered." After his re-election, in his annual message to
Congress, he said: "In stating a single condition of peace, I mean simply
to say that the war will cease on the part of the government, whenever it shall
have ceased on the part of those who began it." On February 3, 1865, he met
personally with Confederate commissioners on a steamship in Hampton Roads. He
promised to be liberal with pardons if the South would quit the war, but he
insisted on reunion as a precondition for any peace arrangement. In his second
inaugural address he embodied the spirit of his policy in the famous words
"with malice toward none; with charity for all." His terms satisfied
neither the Confederate leaders nor the radical Republicans, and so no peace was
possible until the final defeat of the Confederacy.
At
the end of the war, Lincoln's policy for the defeated South was not clear in all
its details, though he continued to believe that the main object should be to
restore the "seceded States, so-called," to their "proper
practical relation" with the Union as soon as possible. He possessed no
fixed and uniform program for the region as a whole. As he said in the last
public speech of his life (April 11, 1865), "so great peculiarities"
pertained to each of the states, and "such important and sudden
changes" occurred from time to time, and "so new and
unprecedented" was the whole problem that "no exclusive and inflexible
plan" could "safely be prescribed." With respect to states like
Louisiana and Tennessee, he continued to urge acceptance of new governments set
up under his 10 percent plan during the war. With respect to states like
Virginia and North Carolina, he seemed willing to use the old rebel governments
temporarily as a means of transition from war to peace. He was on record as
opposing the appointment of "strangers" (carpetbaggers) to govern the
South. He hoped that the Southerners themselves, in forming new state
governments, would find some way by which whites and Negroes "could
gradually live themselves out of their old relation to each other, and both come
out better prepared for the new." A program of education for the freedmen,
he thought, was essential for preparing them for their new status. He also
suggested that the vote be given immediately to some Negroes--"as, for
instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly
in our ranks."
On
the question of reconstruction, however, Lincoln and the extremists of his own
party stood even farther apart in early 1865 than a year before. Some of the
radicals were beginning to demand a period of military occupation for the South,
the confiscation of planter estates and their division among the freedmen, and
the transfer of political power from the planters to their former slaves. In
April 1865 Lincoln began to modify his own stand in some respects and thus to
narrow the gap between himself and the radicals. He recalled the permission he
had given for the assembling of the rebel legislature of Virginia, and he
approved in principle--or at least did not disapprove--Stanton's scheme for the
military occupation of southern states. After the cabinet meeting of April 14,
Attorney General James Speed inferred that Lincoln was moving toward the radical
position. "He never seemed so near our views," Speed believed. What
Lincoln's reconstruction policy would have been, if he had lived to complete his
second term, can only be guessed at.
On
the evening of April 14, 1865, John wilkes Booth shot Lincoln as he sat in
Ford's Theatre in Washington, and early the next morning Lincoln died.
"Now
he belongs to the ages," Stanton is supposed to have said as Lincoln
breathed his last. Many thought of him as a martyr. The assassination had
occurred on Good Friday, and on the following Sunday, memorable as "Black
Easter," hundreds of speakers found a sermon in the event. Some of them saw
more than mere chance in the fact that assassination day was also crucifixion
day. One declared: "Jesus Christ died for the world; Abraham Lincoln died
for his country." Thus the posthumous growth of his reputation was
influenced by the timing and circumstances of his death, which won for him a
kind of sainthood.
Among
the many who remembered Lincoln from personal acquaintance, one was sure he had
known him more intimately than any of the rest and influenced the world's
conception of him more than all the others put together. That one was his former
law partner Herndon. When Lincoln died, Herndon began a new career as Lincoln
authority, collecting reminiscences wherever he could find them and adding his
own store of memories. Though admiring Lincoln, he objected to the trend toward
sanctifying the man. He saw, as the main feature of Lincoln's life, the far more
than ordinary rise of a self-made man, a rise from the lowest depths to the
greatest heights--"from a stagnant, putrid pool, like the gas which, set on
fire by its own energy and self-combustible nature, rises in jets, blazing,
clear, and bright." To emphasize this point, Herndon gave his most eager
attention to evidences of the dismal and sordid in Lincoln's background. An
extremely significant event in Lincoln's development, as Herndon viewed it, was
a "romance of much reality" with Ann Rutledge. Lincoln loved no one
but Ann and, after her death, never ceased to grieve for her. His memory of her
both saddened and inspired him. As for his wife, Mary Todd, she married him out
of spite, then devoted herself to making him miserable. So Herndon would have
it, and after him countless biographers and novelists and playwrights elaborated
upon his views, which persist as accepted knowledge about Lincoln despite their
refutation by historical scholarship.
Lincoln
has become a myth as well as a man. The legendary is to be found in imaginative
literature and in folklore, in poems, plays, novels, anecdotes, and the like. It
is also to be found in ostensibly factual productions, including footnoted
biographies and histories.
The
Lincoln of legend has grown into a protean god who can assume a shape to please
almost any worshipper. He is Old Abe and at the same time a natural gentleman.
He is Honest Abe and yet a being of superhuman shrewdness and cunning. He is
also Father Abraham, the wielder of authority, the support of the weak; and he
is an equal, a neighbour, and a friend.
Lincoln
the man has a reputation that may be considered apart from that of Lincoln the
myth. While he was still alive, his reputation began to grow, and before his
death his qualities of greatness already were widely recognized. In the midst of
the Civil War, for instance, the Washington Chronicle found a resemblance
between him and George Washington in their "sure judgment,"
"perfect balance of thoroughly sound faculties," and "great
calmness of temper, great firmness of purpose, supreme moral principle, and
intense patriotism." The Buffalo Express referred to his "remarkable
moderation and freedom from passionate bitterness," then added: "We do
not believe that Washington himself was less indifferent to the exercise of
power for power's sake." An English newspaper, the Liverpool Post,
suggested that "no leader in a great contest ever stood so little chance of
being the subject of hero worship as Abraham Lincoln," if one were to judge
only by the way he looked. His long arms and legs, his grotesque figure, made
him too easy to caricature and ridicule. "Yet," this newspaper
concluded, "a worshiper of human heroes might possibly travel a great deal
farther and fare much worse for an idol than selecting this same lanky
American." His inner qualities--his faithfulness, honesty, resolution,
insight, humour, and courage--would "go a long way to make up a hero,"
whatever the man's personal appearance.
Lincoln's
best ideas and finest phrases were considered and written and rewritten with
meticulous revisions. Some resulted from a slow gestation of thought and phrase
through many years. One of his recurring themes--probably his central theme--was
the promise and the problem of self-government. As early as 1838, speaking to
the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield on "The Perpetuation of Our Political
Institutions," he recalled the devotion of his Revolutionary forefathers to
the cause and went on to say:
Their
ambition aspired to display before an admiring world, a practical demonstration
of the truth of a proposition, which had hitherto been considered, at best no
better, than problematical; namely, the capability of a people to govern
themselves.
Again
and again he returned to this idea, especially after the coming of the Civil
War, and he steadily improved his phrasing. In his first message to Congress
after the fall of Ft. Sumter, he declared that the issue between North and South
involved more than the future of the United States.
It
presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional
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.
And
finally at Gettysburg he made the culminating, supreme statement, concluding
with the words:
.
. . that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for
which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve
that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall
have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people,
for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
A
guide for the general reader is Paul M. Angle,
A Shelf of Lincoln Books: A Critical, Selective Bibliography of Lincolniana
(1946, reissued 1972). Practically all the known writings of Lincoln himself are
available in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. by Roy
P. Basler, 9 vol.
(1953-55), with two supplements (1974, 1990). A judicious selection from these
volumes is reprinted in The Living Lincoln, ed. by Paul
M. Angle and Earl
Schenk Miers (1955,
reissued 1992). Lincoln on Democracy, ed. by Mario
M. Cuomo and Harold
Holzer (1990), contains
Lincoln's writings on this subject.
Classic
multivolume biographies are John G. Nicolay
and John
Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A
History, 10 vol. (1890, reissued 1917), also available in an abridged ed. edited
by Paul
M. Angle, 1 vol. (1966); Albert Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1858, 2 vol. (1928, reissued 1971); Carl
Sandburg, Abraham
Lincoln: The Prairie Years, 2 vol. (1926), and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, 4
vol. (1939), both reissued together in 1 vol. (1984); and J.G.
Randall, Lincoln, the
President, 4 vol. (1945-55). One-volume biographies include Benjamin P. Thomas,
Abraham Lincoln (1952, reissued 1986); Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Toward None (1977, reissued 1985), and Abraham
Lincoln, the Man Behind the Myths (1984); Oscar Handlin
and Lilian
Handlin, Abraham Lincoln
and the Union (1980); Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr.,
Philip
B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, Lincoln (1992), containing 900 pictures; Michael
Burlingame, The Inner
World of Abraham Lincoln (1994), a psychobiography; and David
Herbert Donald, Lincoln
(1995). Paul Horgan, Citizen of New Salem (also published as Abraham Lincoln,
Citizen of New Salem, 1961), concentrates on Lincoln's early life; while Mark
E. Neely, Jr., The Last
Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America (1993), traces
Lincoln's later political life through his own speeches.
Matters
of controversy may be found in Richard N. Current,
The Lincoln Nobody Knows (1958, reprinted 1980); David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered, 2nd ed., enlarged (1961, reissued
1989); Don E. Fehrenbacher, Lincoln in Text and Context (1987), which compiles
essays on prewar politics, the Civil War, and Lincoln's changing image; and Gabor
S. Boritt and Norman
O. Forness (eds.), The
Historian's Lincoln: Pseudohistory, Psychohistory, and History (1988).
Lincoln's
administration is documented in Phillip Shaw Paludan,
The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (1994). Works dealing with aspects of
Lincoln's statesmanship are Don
E. Fehrenbacher, Prelude
to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s (1962, reissued 1970); David
M. Potter, Lincoln and
His Party in the Secession Crisis (1942, reprinted 1979), with emphasis on the
period between Lincoln's election and the firing on Ft. Sumter; William
B. Hesseltine, Lincoln
and the War Governors (1948, reissued 1972); Kenneth
M. Stampp, And the War
Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860-1861 (1950, reprinted 1980); T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals (1941, reissued 1969), and Lincoln and His
Generals (1952, reprinted 1981); David A. Nichols,
Lincoln and the Indians: Civil War Policy and Politics (1978); Gabor S. Boritt,
Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (1978); James M. McPherson,
Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (1990); and Robert W. Johannsen,
Lincoln, the South, and Slavery: The Political Dimension (1991).
Books
dealing with specific Lincoln issues are numerous. Ruth
Painter Randall, Mary
Lincoln: Biography of a Marriage (1953, reissued 1961), and Lincoln's Sons
(1955), examine Lincoln's family life. Randall effectively refutes the views of William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Herndon's Life of Lincoln, ed. by Paul
M. Angle (1930, reissued
1983). Two books about the president's wife are Jean
H. Baker, Mary Todd
Lincoln: A Biography (1987); and Mark E. Neely, Jr.,
and R.
Gerald McMurtry, The
Insanity File: The Case of Mary Todd Lincoln (1986, reissued 1993). An able and
realistic treatment of Lincoln's legal career is John
J. Duff, A. Lincoln,
Prairie Lawyer (1960). Philip
B. Kunhardt, Jr., A New
Birth of Freedom: Lincoln at Gettysburg (1983), focuses on aspects of his famous
speech; as does Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America
(1992). Harold Holzer (compiler and ed.), Dear Mr. Lincoln: Letters to the
President (1993), assembles letters written by ordinary citizens covering all
topics. Harold Holzer, Gabor S. Boritt, and Mark E. Neely, Jr.,
The Lincoln Image: Abraham Lincoln and the Popular Print (1984), explores
Lincoln's rise to fame through the medium of prints. Merrill D. Peterson,
Lincoln in American Memory (1994), examines the view each succeeding generation
has had toward Lincoln.
Comparisons
between Lincoln and other historical figures include David
Zarefsky, Lincoln,
Douglas, and Slavery (1990), which delves into the background of the
Lincoln-Douglas debates and outlines each speaker's rhetorical methods; and William
Catton and Bruce
Catton, Two Roads to
Sumter (1963, reissued 1971), which analyzes the dual roads taken by Lincoln and
Jefferson Davis that led to the Civil War.
An overall view of Lincoln's assassination may be found in William Hanchett, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies (1983). More detailed accounts of the last hours of his life include Jim Bishop, The Day Lincoln Was Shot (1955, reprinted 1984); and W. Emerson Reck, A. Lincoln, His Last 24 Hours (1987).
|
|
|
|
|
|
