matter much to Lincoln, and he was accustomed to brush them aside in
his familiar, humorous way. When Mr. Bushnell brought to Washington
the plans for the _Monitor_, the recent invention of Mr. Ericsson,
which became famous in the sea-fight with the rebel _Merrimac_, most
of the naval officers expressed doubts as to the efficiency of the
_Monitor_ in a naval fight. Mr. Lincoln’s opinion was asked. He said he
knew little about ships, but he “did understand a flat-boat, and this
invention was flat enough.”
Later, at a meeting of the Army board, when asked by Admiral Smith what
he thought of the _Monitor_, he remarked, with his most quizzical look,
“Well, I feel a good deal about it as a fat girl did when she put her
foot in her stocking; she thought there was something in it.”
All present laughed at this drollery, but it was the way Lincoln
sometimes took of conveying a really serious thought.
At that period of the war and until the battle of Gettysburg, two
years later, Southern leaders acted upon the theory that the people
of the North were greatly divided in their sympathies, and that the
“Copperheads” would either develop sufficient strength to stop the war;
or, in the event of invasion of the Northern States, they would take
up arms in support of the Confederacy. John Morgan’s raid into Ohio
encouraged that belief, although he was captured and imprisoned; but
the utter indifference shown by the Pennsylvania “Copperheads,” who had
talked loudest in favor of the Southern cause, completely disillusioned
the Confederate chiefs. Vallandigham and Voorhees were shown to be
without great influence. I had a direct statement from a member of the
Lincoln Cabinet that the President did not approve of Vallandigham’s
arrest by General Burnside, or his trial by court-martial and
banishment to the Southern lines. Lincoln declared the proceedings to
be those of an over-zealous general.
Defeat after defeat of the Northern forces followed that of Big Bethel.
The raw volunteers from the Northern States could not successfully
oppose the better-trained Southern troops, led by West Point graduates.
Mr. Lincoln never lost heart; his courage never abated during those
terrible months, while many men close to him were in a mental condition
of dismay and panic.
The day of Burnside’s defeat at Fredericksburg Lincoln spent hours
in the office of the War Department in dressing-gown and slippers,
forgetting even to eat. When he heard of the great disaster he bowed
his head in despair, and murmured, “If there is any man out of
perdition who suffers more than I do, I pity him.”
Sufficient credit was never given to Thurlow Weed for his successful
efforts in England to prevent recognition of the Confederacy. Mr.
Lincoln described Weed as “a master of masters in politics,” and sent
him on that difficult mission late in 1861 when the situation looked
very dark. Our able minister at the court of St. James’s, Charles
Francis Adams, possessed Mr. Lincoln’s entire confidence, but the
President deemed it advisable to have a special commissioner to present
his protest against the apprehended British recognition of the Southern
Confederacy.
The day before Mr. Weed’s departure I met him in the rotunda of the
old Astor House, and found him imbued with more hope than I felt,
regarding the conflict with the South. Of course, he made no mention
of his intended mission to England, thinking that he could get away
without the fact becoming known. He was disappointed, however, as the
day following his departure all the newspapers published the news of
his special embassy. There were no Atlantic cables in those days, and
by prompt action on his arrival he managed to hold his first interview
with Lord Russell before official information reached the British
Cabinet from Washington regarding the purpose of his presence in London.
Henry Ward Beecher also visited England at Mr. Lincoln’s request,
possibly at the suggestion of John Bright, who was almost the only
prominent Briton who remained friendly to the Federal cause. Gladstone,
Palmerston, and Disraeli were at that time in open sympathy with the
Confederacy.
Mr. Beecher’s mission was wholly unofficial, and his efforts were
devoted to delivering addresses, such as only he could make, throughout
England. These speeches and Mr. Weed’s efforts created such a wave
of popular sentiment in behalf of the Federal cause that the British
Cabinet, if ever it had the purpose, was deterred from recognizing the
States in rebellion. It was the same kind of moral suasion employed
by Gladstone prior to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, and which
prevented England from going to the defense of Turkey, then her ally.
The relief experienced through General Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg and
his retreat across Maryland into Virginia was followed, ten days later
(July, 1863), by the draft riots in New York.
The horrors of those three days have never been fully described.
Led and encouraged by Southern sympathizers, who had retained
the feelings they held before the war, the rabble of the city
surged through the streets, destroying property, burning a negro
orphan-asylum, and killing black men. Nominally a protest against
enforced enlistment, the riots were really an uprising of the dangerous
element that existed in the city at the time.
I lived in Thirty-fourth Street, near Eighth Avenue, and had been a
persistent speaker against the extension of slavery and in favor of the
Federal cause. The day before the riots began, an anonymous note was
received by my family, stating that our home would be attacked and that
we had best leave the city. We did not heed the warning.
On the first day of the riots, July 13, 1863, a crowd gathered in
front of my house, shouting: “Down with the abolitionists!” “Death to
Dittenhoefer!” I sent a messenger for the police, and a squad arrived
as the leaders of the mob were preparing to break in my door. Active
club work dispersed the crowd, and by order of the captain of the
precinct several policemen were kept on guard until the end of the
riots.
It was at this time that I met Mrs. Carson, the daughter of the only
Union man in South Carolina, who, with her father, was compelled, after
the firing on Fort Sumter, to leave South Carolina, while his property
was confiscated. I had been anxious to sell my house in Thirty-fourth
Street. Noticing a “For Sale” sign on the property, Mrs. Carson called
on me and expressed a willingness to buy the house at the price named,
asking me to see Samuel Blatchford, who in later years became a Supreme
Court Judge of the United States, and who, she said, was the head
of an association raising funds for her support in New York. I saw
Judge Blatchford, and a contract was signed for the sale. Later, in
consequence of the serious illness of my wife, I was obliged to ask
Judge Blatchford to cancel the contract, saying that, by way of making
up for the disappointment, I would gladly contribute a sum of money
to the fund for Mrs. Carson. The contract was accordingly canceled. I
never saw Mrs. Carson afterward. About a year before the close of the
rebellion, Mr. Lincoln offered to appoint me judge of the district
court of South Carolina, my native State, but my increasing business
in the city of New York and the disinclination of my wife to move to
South Carolina compelled me to decline the honor.
A little while before the offer of the Carolina judgeship was made me
by the President I received a letter signed by Mrs. Carson, in which
the writer said that the President had asked her to recommend a man for
the position, and, remembering what I had done years before, she had
suggested my name to him. For a long time I could not think who Mrs.
Carson could be, until my wife reminded me of the incident of the sale
of the house.
Patriotic neglect of self-interest in behalf of the salvation of
the Union caused thousands of Northerners to lose opportunities
for accumulating wealth from the vast sums of money disbursed by
the Government; but there was a class at home and in Congress that
neglected no chance to enrich itself. Its leaders were more concerned
about the commercial phase of the conflict than the triumph of the
Federal arms.
They gambled on the destiny of the Republic, and their sources of
information reached to the innermost sanctuaries of Government
departments.
On advance information of a staggering defeat to the Northern arms,
they bought gold for a rise. Early news of a Federal victory caused
them to sell the precious metal for a decline. This transaction was
described by these gamblers in the nation’s life-blood as “coppering
old Lincoln.”
This detestable clan pushed its representatives into the very councils
of state, asserting its right to dictate the policy of the country,
foreign and domestic. Its members were as intolerably arrogant as if
they had amassed their wealth by the strictest integrity.
During a great part of the war President Lincoln, unsuspected by
him, was surrounded by a coterie of professional heroes, commercial
grafters, and alleged statesmen, every one of whom was in politics for
personal profit. Many “shining lights” then lauded for their patriotism
have long since been exposed as selfish and corrupt egotists. Close as
some of these unworthy persons contrived to get to Mr. Lincoln, they
were never able to besmirch him in any way.
During one of my visits to the White House some weeks before the
promulgation of the Emancipation Proclamation, I had the temerity to
refer to the oft-reported plan of Mr. Lincoln, before the rebellion
burst upon the country, to free the Southern slaves by purchase. It
was a theme that had often engaged my thoughts. After the beginning
of the war and a realization that the conflict was costing more than
$1,000,000 per day, I had become somewhat reconciled to the idea.
Mr. Lincoln was slow to answer, saying, in effect, that however wise
the idea might have been, it was too late to revive it. He did not
intimate that he had in contemplation the Emancipation Proclamation
which was to take effect January 1, 1863.
Mr. Lincoln had all the figures about slave property at his
finger-ends, but, much to my regret, I did not make a memorandum of
the interview and, therefore, cannot recall the exact number of slaves
that he estimated would have to be purchased. Field hands were valued
at from six hundred to one thousand dollars each, but the old men and
women and young children would reduce the average price. This would
have absorbed $500,000,000, a sum that, prior to the experience of one
year’s war expenditure, would have appeared staggering. When, however,
Mr. Lincoln called attention to the rapidly growing national debt, with
no prospect of ending the conflict for years to come, he exclaimed:
“What a splendid investment it would have been!”
These words, as the mentally distressed Lincoln uttered them in that
dark hour of the Civil War, were of thrilling import. He rose to his
full height; my eyes instinctively traced his majestic length from his
slippers to his head of iron-gray hair, and there was an expression of
sadness in his face that I never shall forget.
Referring to the severe criticisms that were launched against him
respecting the views he entertained about the reconstruction of the
Union, he said:
“I do the best I can, and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If
the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount
to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was
right would make no difference.”
The entrance of a delegation prevented a continuance of the
conversation. Years afterward, Col. A. K. McClure told me that as late
as August, prior to the November elections of 1864, President Lincoln
had recurred to his plan for freeing the negroes by purchase, and
settling the war on the basis of universal extinction of slavery in all
States of the Union at an expense of $400,000,000, a compromise which
he believed the Southern leaders, in their hopeless condition after
the battle of Gettysburg, would be glad to accept. Mr. Lincoln went on
to predict that the promulgation of such a scheme at that time would
defeat his re-election. McClure not only confirmed him in that opinion,
but added that Congress was in no mood to appropriate so large a sum of
money.
Redemption of these bonds, if the Union was restored after the war,
would fall in part on the Southern people; they would be paying out of
their own pockets for the liberation of their slaves. This statement
of McClure’s is remarkable because it indicates that Lincoln believed
that the _status quo ante bellum_ could be restored and reconstruction
formalities avoided. Unfortunately, under Andrew Johnson, who succeeded
to the Presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, and subsequently under
President Hayes, the “carpet-bag” régime, with all its horrors and
corruption, was inflicted upon the Southern States.
Colonel McClure’s judgment was keen and accurate. Congress, led by
Senator Sumner and Representatives Thaddeus Stevens and Henry Winter
Davis, would have repudiated such a proposition if made by Lincoln.
Even after his re-election he could not have secured the money for that
purpose.
Mr. Carpenter, who made the famous painting of the Cabinet when Mr.
Lincoln read the draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, and who was
a client of mine, told me Mr. Lincoln had said to him that for a long
time he had been considering the necessity of eventually issuing the
Proclamation; but that he was held back by the intense desire that
was always in his mind to restore the Union, and his fear that if he
proclaimed emancipation prematurely the restoration of the Union would
be prevented. During his entire administration and in all his addresses
this desire to restore the Union was supreme and it controlled his
every action.
On the momentous occasion when Lincoln read the preliminary draft of
his Emancipation Proclamation before his Cabinet, he amused himself and
the others--with the exception of Secretary Stanton, who was plainly
amazed at the President’s seeming levity--by first reading to them from
Artemas Ward’s amusing story of “The High-Handed Outrage at Utica.”
Later on I remember having been present when Lincoln said, “If my name
is ever remembered it will be for this act; my whole soul is in it.”
It is curious, the thing we call history. An act popularly regarded as
madness at one period is hailed as concrete wisdom at another. History
is only a crystallization of popular beliefs.
Many people very close to Lincoln have doubted his sympathy for
the slaves, and have referred to his frequent characterization of
abolitionists as “a disturbing element in the nation, that ought to be
subjected to some sort of control.” They assert that his efforts were
directed solely to restraining the ambitions of the slaveholders to
extend their system of human bondage over larger areas of the United
States.
Such judgment of Lincoln is at variance with my personal observations
and does him a grave injustice. His nature was essentially
sympathetic, although he never went the length of asserting that he
regarded the black man as his social equal.
Subsequent observation has shown me that the immediate admission of the
liberated slaves to equal rights of franchise was an error.
It revived the former bitterness with which the Southern people had
regarded the Northerners, and imposed a grievous injustice upon them,
an injustice naturally and forcibly resented. And so followed the
formation of the “Invisible Empire” and the excesses of the “Ku-Klux
Klan.”
VIII
THE RENOMINATION
The renomination of Mr. Lincoln in 1864 was not accomplished with ease.
The difficulties did not all show upon the surface, because some of the
President’s closest associates were secretly conspiring against him.
Open and frank opposition came from such influential Republicans as
Henry Winter Davis, of Maryland, Benjamin F. Wade, of Ohio, and Horace
Greeley, of New York, who believed his re-election impossible. But the
opposition of Salmon P. Chase, of Ohio, was secret, as he had been
scheming for the nomination himself. Chase, while regarding himself as
Mr. Lincoln’s friend and constantly protesting his friendship to the
President, held a condescending opinion of Mr. Lincoln’s intellect.
He could not believe the people so blind as to prefer Abraham Lincoln
to Salmon Chase. He vigorously protested, both verbally and in
letters written to every part of the country, his indifference to the
Presidency, at the same time painting pessimistically the dreadful
state of government affairs, and indicating, not always subtly, his
willingness to accept the nomination.
As to Chase’s candidacy, Lincoln once said, according to Nicolay: “I
have determined to shut my eyes as far as possible to everything of the
sort. Mr. Chase makes a good secretary and I shall keep him where he
is.” Then with characteristic magnanimity, he added: “If Chase becomes
President, all right. I hope we may never have a worse man.” But as
Joseph Medill, editor of the Chicago _Tribune_, wrote in December, 1863:
I presume it is true that Mr. Chase’s friends are making for his
nomination, but it is all lost labor; Old Abe has the inside track
so completely that he will be nominated by acclamation when the
convention meets.
A reference here to the activities of Chase’s brilliant daughter,
Kate Chase Sprague, in the Tilden and Hayes contest many years later,
may be pardoned. It is well known that through her potent influence
the contest was finally decided in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes, and
against Samuel J. Tilden. This influence, it has been said, was used
in a spirit of revenge against Mr. Tilden for defeating her father for
the Democratic nomination in 1868. Col. A. K. McClure agrees with me in
this, as will be shown by the following quotation from his book, _Our
Presidents and How We Make Them_:
The Democratic National Convention met in New York on the 4th
of July, 1868. There was a strong sentiment among the delegates
favorable to the nomination of a liberal Republican for President,
but Chief Justice Chase, who was an old-time Democrat and who had won
a very large measure of Democratic confidence by his ruling in the
impeachment case of President Johnson, was a favorite with a very
powerful circle of friends who had quietly, but very thoroughly, as
they believed, organized to have him nominated by a spontaneous tidal
wave after a protracted deadlock between the leading candidates.
Chase would have been nominated at the time Seymour was chosen,
and in like manner, had it not been for the carefully laid plan of
Samuel J. Tilden to prevent the success of Chase. Tilden was a master
leader, subtle as he was able, and he thoroughly organized the plan to
nominate Seymour, not so much that he desired Seymour, but because he
was implacable in his hostility to Chase.
It was well known by Chase and his friends that Tilden crucified Chase
in the Democratic convention of 1868, and this act of Tilden’s had
an impressive sequel eight years later when the election of Tilden
hung in the balance in the Senate, and when Kate Chase Sprague, the
accomplished daughter of Chase, decided the battle against Tilden.
While Charles Sumner was openly for Lincoln, he privately criticized
him, even after the promulgation of the Emancipation Proclamation which
had freed the slaves of the South.
I have always believed that Lincoln did not consult with Sumner as to
that message, and that that was the cause of his ill-feeling. Thaddeus
Stevens, the great Free Soil representative of Pennsylvania, was
dissatisfied because the President was unwilling to confiscate all the
property of the secessionists and to inflict other punishments upon
them: he was openly hostile to Lincoln.
For the following hitherto unpublished letter, from Horace Greeley to
Mark Howard, a prominent Connecticut Republican, I am indebted to the
latter’s daughter, Mrs. Graves. It throws an interesting light upon the
fears and uncertainties of the period, and indicates Greeley’s lack of
confidence in Lincoln as the strong man of the nation. The letter is
dated ten months before the second election, and Greeley’s opposition
to Mr. Lincoln’s renomination became the more undisguised and intense
as time went on.
OFFICE OF THE TRIBUNE.
NEW YORK, _Jan. 10, 1864_.
DEAR SIR,--I mean to keep the Presidency in the background until
we see whether we cannot close up the war. I am terribly afraid of
letting the war run into the next Presidential term; I fear it will
prove disastrous to go to the ballot-boxes with the war still pending.
Let us have peace first, then we can see into the future.
Yours,
HORACE GREELEY.
MARK HOWARD, ESQ.,
Hartford, Conn.
Horace Greeley gave open expression to his opposition in the New York
_Tribune_, Friday, April 29, 1864.
In this issue Mr. Greeley, referring to the statement of the President,
“I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events
have controlled me,” declared that “had he been a little more docile
to their teaching and prompt to apprehend their bearing we should have
been saved many disasters and rivers of precious blood. May we hope
that with regard to the murder of our soldiers who have surrendered,
and other questions of the hour, he will have learned something from
the sore experience of the past?”
Other newspapers joined the _Tribune_ in opposing Lincoln’s
renomination, as witness these excerpts from the New York _Herald_,
August 6, 1864:
Senator Wade, of Ohio, and Representative Davis, of Maryland,
Chairman of the Senate and House Committees on the rebellious States
prepared and presented in their official capacity an indictment
against Abraham Lincoln, the executive head of the nation, and the
nominee of his party for another term of office, charging him with
arrogance, ignorance, usurpation, knavery, and a host of other deadly
sins including that of hostility to the rights of humanity and to the
principles of republican government.
Mr. Lincoln has been frequently represented as entertaining and
expressing an ardent wish that he could slip off his shoulders the
anxieties and labors belonging to his present position and place upon
them the musket and knapsack of a Union volunteer. The opportunity
of realizing that wish now presents itself. The country would be
overjoyed to see it realized, and all the people would say “Amen” to
it. Let him make up his mind to join the quota which his town of
Springfield, Ill., will next be called on to furnish. He is said to
have done well as railsplitter, and we have no doubt that he will do
equally well as a soldier. As a President of the United States he must
have sense enough to see and acknowledge he has been an egregious
failure. The best thing he can do now for himself, his party, and his
country is to retire from the high position to which, in an evil hour,
he was exalted.
One thing must be self-evident to him, and that is that under no
circumstances can he hope to be the next President of the United
States, and if he will only make a virtue of necessity and withdraw
from the Presidential campaign....
In the New York _Tribune_, August 24, 1864, under the heading,
“Copperhead Treason,” the _Daily News_ is quoted as referring to
President Lincoln as “our intriguing chief magistrate.”
Finally, there was general disaffection, centering largely in New York
and St. Louis, and a so-called convention of opponents of Lincoln
gathered at Cleveland in May, and indulged in denunciation of Lincoln,
which included a bitter letter from Wendell Phillips. This self-styled
“radical Democracy” adopted a platform, nominated Fremont, and
practically disappeared.
The patriotic and self-sacrificing people of the North were almost a
unit in sustaining President Lincoln, and, by sheer force of numbers,
swept aside the ungrateful or designing Republican leaders who would
have defeated the great emancipator.