LINCOLN: WAR STATESMAN
Lincoln was one of those men who require some mighty crisis to call
their genius forth. Though more successful than Grant in ordinary
life, he was never regarded as a national figure in law or politics
till he had passed his fiftieth year. He had no advantages of birth;
though he came of a sturdy old English stock that emigrated from
Norfolk to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, and though
his mother seems to have been, both intellectually and otherwise,
above the general run of the Kentuckians among whom he was born
in 1809. His educational advantages were still less. Yet he soon
found his true affinities in books, as afterwards in life, not
among the clever, smart, or sentimental, but among the simple and
the great. He read and reread Shakespeare and the Bible, not because
they were the merely proper things to read but because his spirit
was akin to theirs. This meant that he never was a bookworm. Words
were things of life to him; and, for that reason, his own words
live.
He had no artificial graces to soften the uncouth appearance of his
huge, gaunt six-foot-four of powerful bone and muscle. But he had
the native dignity of straightforward manhood; and, though a champion
competitor in feats of strength, his opinion was always sought as
that of an impartial umpire, even in cases affecting himself. He
"played the game" in his frontier home as he afterwards played
the greater game of life-or-death at Washington. His rough-hewn,
strong-featured face, shaped by his kindly humor to the finer ends
of power, was lit by a steady gaze that saw yet looked beyond,
till the immediate parts of the subject appeared in due relation
to the whole. Like many another man who sees farther and feels more
deeply than the rest, and who has the saving grace of humor, he knew
what yearning melancholy was; yet kept the springs of action tense
and strong. Firm as a rock on essentials he was extremely tolerant
about all minor differences. His policy was to live and let live
whenever that was possible. The preservation of the Union was his
master-passion, and he was ready for any honorable compromise that
left the Union safe. Himself a teetotaller, he silenced a temperance
delegation whose members were accusing Grant of drunkenness by
saying he should like to send some of his other generals a keg of
the same whisky if it would only make them fight.
When he took arms against the sea of troubles that awaited him at
Washington he had dire need of all his calm tolerance and strength.
To add to his burdens, he was beset by far more than the usual
horde of office-seekers. These men were doubly ravenous because
their party was so new to power. They were peculiarly hard to place
with due regard for all the elements within the coalition. And each
appointment needed most discriminating care, lest a traitor to
the Union might creep in. While the guns were thundering against
Fort Sumter, and afterwards, when the Union Government was marooned
in Washington itself, the vestibules, stairways, ante-rooms, and
offices were clogged with eager applicants for every kind of civil
service job. And then, when this vast human flood subsided, the
"interviewing" stream began to flow and went on swelling to the
bitter end. These war-time interviewers claimed most of Lincoln's
personal attention just when he had the least to spare. But he would
deny no one the chance of receiving presidential aid or comfort and
he gladly suffered many fools for the chance of relieving the sad
or serious others. Add to all this the ceaseless work of helping to
form public opinion, of counteracting enemy propaganda, of shaping
Union policy under ever-changing circumstances, of carrying it
out by coalition means, and of exercising civil control over such
vast armed forces as no American had hitherto imagined: add these
extra burdens, and we can begin to realize what Lincoln had to
do as the chief war statesman of the North.
A sound public opinion is the best embattlement of any home front.
So Lincoln set out to help in forming it. War on a national scale
was something entirely new to both sides, and especially unwelcome
to many people in the North, though the really loyal North was
up at Lincoln's call. Then came Bull Run; and Lincoln's renewed
determination, so well expressed in Whitman's words: "The President,
recovering himself, begins that very night--sternly, rapidly sets
about the task of reorganizing his forces, and placing himself in
positions for future and surer work. If there was nothing else
of Abraham Lincoln for history to stamp him with, it is enough to
send him with his wreath to the memory of all future time, that he
endured that hour, that day, bitterer than gall--indeed a crucifixion
day--that it did not conquer him that he unflinchingly stemmed it,
and resolved to lift himself and the Union out of it."
Bull Run was only the beginning of troubles. There were many more
rocks ahead in the stormy sea of public opinion. The peace party
was always ready to lure the ship of state out of its true course
by using false lights, even when certain to bring about a universal
wreck in which the "pacifists" would suffer with the rest. But
dissensions within the war party were worse, especially when caused
by action in the field. Frémont's dismissal in November, '61, caused
great dissatisfaction among three kinds of people: those who thought
him a great general because he knew how to pose as one and really
had some streaks of great ability, those who were fattening on
the army contracts he let out with such a lavish hand, and those
who hailed him as the liberator of the slaves because he went
unwarrantably far beyond what was then politically wise or even
possible. He was the first Unionist commander to enter the Northern
Cave of Adullam, already infested with Copperhead snakes.
There he was joined by McClellan exactly a year later; and there
the peace-at-current-prices party continued to nurse and cry their
grievances till the war was over. McClellan's dismissal was a matter
of dire necessity because victory was impossible under his command.
But he was a dangerous reinforcement to the Adullamites; for many
of the loyal public had been fooled by his proclamations, the press
had written him up to the skies as the Young Napoleon, and the
great mass of the rank and file still believed in him. He took
the kindly interest in camp comforts that goes to the soldier's
heart; and he really did know how to organize. Add his power of
passing off tinsel promises for golden deeds, and it can be well
understood how great was the danger of dismissing him before his
defects had become so apparent to the mass of people as to have
turned opinion decisively against him. We shall presently meet
him in his relation to Lincoln during the Virginian campaign, and
later on in his relation to Lee. Here we may leave him with the
reminder that he was the Democratic candidate for President in
'64, that he was still a mortal danger to the Union, even though
he had rejected the actual wording of his party's peace plank.
The turn of the tide at the fighting front came in '63; but not
at the home front, where public opinion of the most vocal kind
was stirred to its dregs by the enforcement of the draft. The dime
song books of the Copperhead parts of New York expressed in rude
rhymes very much the same sort of apprehension that was voiced
by the official opposition in the Presidential campaign of '64.
Abram Lincoln, what yer 'bout?
Stop this war, for it's played out.
Another rhyme, called "The Beauties of Conscription," was a more
decorous expression of such public opinion.
And this, the "People's Sovereignty,"
Before a despot humbled!
. . . .
Well have they cashed old Lincoln's drafts,
Hurrah for the Conscription!
. . . .
Is not this war--this MURDER--for
The negro, _nolens volens?_
So, carrying out their ideas to the same sort of logical conclusion,
the New York mob of '63 not only burnt every recruiting office they
found undefended but burnt the negro orphan asylum and killed all
the negroes they could lay their hands on.
Public opinion did veer round a little with the rising tide of
victory in the winter of '63 and '64. But, incredible as it may
seem to those who think the home front must always reflect the
fighting front, the nadir of public opinion in the North was reached
in the summer of '64, when every expert knew that the resources of
the South were nearing exhaustion and that the forces of the North
could certainly wear out Lee's dwindling army even if they could
not beat it. The trumpet gave no uncertain sound from Lincoln's
lips. "In this purpose to save the country and its liberties no
class of people seem so nearly unanimous as the soldiers in the
field and the sailors afloat. Do they not have the hardest of it?
Who should quail while they do not?" But the mere excellence of a
vast fighting front means a certain loss of the nobler qualities in
the home front, from which so many of the staunchest are withdrawn.
And then war-weariness breeds doubts, doubts breed fears, and fears
breed the spirit of surrender.
There seemed to be more Copperheads in the conglomerate opposition
than Unionists ready to withstand them. The sinister figure of
Vallandigham loomed large in Ohio, where he openly denounced the
war in such disloyal terms that the military authorities arrested
him. An opposition committee, backed by the snakes in the grass of
the secret societies, at once wrote to Lincoln demanding release.
Lincoln thereupon offered release if the committee would sign a
declaration that, since rebellion existed, and since the armed forces
of the United States were the constitutional means of suppressing
rebellion, each member of the committee would support the war till
rebellion was put down. The committee refused to sign. More people
then began to see the self-contradictions of the opposition, and
most of those "plain people" to whom Lincoln consciously appealed
were touched to the heart by his pathetic question: "Must I shoot
the simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch
a hair of the wily agitator who induces him to desert?"
But there was still defection on the Union side, and among many
"plain people" too; for Horace Greeley, the best-known Union editor,
lost his nerve and ran away. And Greeley was not the only Union
journalist who helped, sometimes unwittingly, to pervert public
opinion. The "writing up" of McClellan for what he was not, though
rather hysterical, was at least well meant. But the reporters who
"wrote down" General Cox, because he would not make them members
of his staff in West Virginia, disgraced their profession. The
lies about Sherman's "insanity" and Grant's "intoxication" were
shamelessly excused on the plea that they made "good stories."
Sherman's insanity, as we have seen already, existed only in the
disordered imagination of blabbing old Simon Cameron. Grant, at
the time these stories were published, was strictly temperate.
Amid all the hindrances--and encouragements, for the Union press
generally did noble service in the Union cause--of an uncensored
press, and all the complexities of public opinion, Lincoln kept
his head and heart set firmly on the one supreme objective of the
Union. He foresaw from the first that if all the States came through
the war United, then all the reforms for which the war was fought
would follow; but that if any particular reform was itself made
the supreme objective, then it, and with it all the other reforms,
would fail, because only part of the Union strength would be involved,
whereas the whole was needed. Moreover, he clearly foresaw the
absolute nature of a great civil war. Foreign wars may well, and
often do, end in some sort of compromise, especially when the home
life of the opponents can go on as before. But a great civil war
cannot end in compromise because it radically changes the home
life of one side or the other. Davis stood for "Independence or
extermination"; Lincoln simply for the Union, which, in his clear
prevision, meant all that the body politic could need for a new and
better life. He accepted the word "enemy" as descriptive of a passing
phase. He would not accept such phraseology as Meade's, "driving the
invader from our soil." "Will our generals," he complained, "never
get that idea out of their heads? The whole country is our soil."
He was a life-long advocate of Emancipation, first, with compensation,
now as part of the price to be paid for rebellion. Emancipation,
however, depended on the Union, not the Union on it. His Proclamation
was ready in the summer of '62. But to publish it in the midst of
defeat would make it look like an act of despair. In September,
when the Confederates had to recross the Potomac after Antietam, the
Proclamation was given to the world. Its first effect was greater
abroad than at home; for now no foreign government could say, and
rightly say, that the war, not being fought on account of slavery,
might leave that issue still unsettled. This was a most important
point in Lincoln's foreign policy, a policy which had been haunted
by the fear of recognition for the South or the possibility of
war with either the French or British, or even both together.
Lincoln's Cabinet was composed of two factions, one headed by Seward,
the Secretary of State, the other by Chase, the Secretary of the
Treasury. Both the fighting services were under War Democrats:
the Army under Stanton, the Navy under Welles. All these ministers
began by thinking that Lincoln had the least ability among them.
Seward and Welles presently learnt better. Stanton's exclamation
at Lincoln's death speaks for itself "Now he belongs to the ages!"
But Chase never believed that Lincoln could even be his equal.
Chase and the Treasury were a thorn in the side of the Government;
Chase because it was his nature, the Treasury because its notes fell
to thirty-nine cents in the dollar during the summer of '64. Welles,
hard-working and upright, was guided by an expert assistant. Stanton,
equally upright and equally hardworking, made many mistakes. And
yet, when all is said and done, Stanton was a really able patriot
who worked his hardest for what seemed to him the best.
Such were the four chief men in that Cabinet with which Lincoln
carried out his Union policy and over which he towered in what
became transcendent statesmanship--the head, the heart, the genius
of the war. He never, for one moment, changed his course, but kept
it fixed upon the Union, no matter what the winds and tides, the
currents and cross-currents were. Thus, while so many lesser minds
were busy with flotsam and jetsam of the controversial storm, his
own serener soul was already beyond the far horizon, voyaging toward
the one sure haven for the Ship of State.
But Lincoln was more than the principal civilian war statesman: he
was the constitutional Commander-in-Chief of all the Union forces,
afloat and ashore. He was responsible not only for raising, supplying,
and controlling them, but for their actual command by men who, in
the eyes of the law, were simply his own lieutenants. The problem
of exercising civil control without practicing civilian interference,
always and everywhere hard, and especially hard in a civil war,
was particularly hard in his case, in view of public opinion, the
press, his own war policy, and the composition of his Cabinet.
His solution was by no means perfect; but the wonder is that he
reached it so well in spite of such perverting factors. He began
with the mere armed mob that fought the First Bull Run beset with
interference. He ended with Farragut, Grant, and Sherman, combined
in one great scheme of strategy that included Mobile, Virginia,
and the lower South, and that, while under full civil control,
was mostly free from interference with its naval and military
work--except at the fussy hands of Stanton.
The fundamental difference between civil control, which is the
very breath of freedom, and civilian interference, which means
the death of all efficiency, can be quite simply illustrated by
supposing the proverbial Ship of State to be a fighting man-of-war.
The People are the owners, with all an owner's rights; while their
chosen Government is their agent, with all an agent's delegated
power. The fighting Services, as the word itself so properly implies,
are simply the People's servants, though they take their orders
from the Government. So far, so good, within the limits of civil
control, under which, and which alone, any national resources--in
men, money, or material--can lawfully be turned to warlike ends.
But when the ship is fitting out, still more when she is out at sea,
and most of all when she is fighting, then she should be handled only
by her expert captain with his expert crew. Civilian interference
begins the moment any inexpert outsider takes the captain's place;
and this interference is no less disastrous when the outsider remains
at home than when he is on the actual spot.
Lincoln and Stanton were out of their element in the strategic
fight with Lee and Stonewall Jackson, as the next chapter abundantly
proves. But they will bear, and more than bear, comparison with
Davis and Benjamin, their own special "opposite numbers." Benjamin,
when Confederate Secretary of War in '62, nearly drove Jackson
out of the service by ordering him to follow the advice of some
disgruntled subordinates who objected to being moved about for
strategic reasons which they could not understand. To make matters
worse, Benjamin sent this precious order direct to Jackson without
even informing his immediate superior, "Joe" Johnston, or even Lee
himself. Thus discipline, the very soul of armies, was attacked
from above and beneath by the man who should have been its chief
upholder. Luckily for the South things were smoothed over, and
Benjamin learnt something he should have known at first.
Davis had none of Lincoln's diffidence about his own capacity for
directing the strategy of armies. He had passed through West Point
and commanded a battalion in Mexico without finding out that his
fitness stopped there. He interfered with Lee and Jackson, sometimes
to almost a disabling extent. He forced his enmity on "Joe" Johnston
and superseded him at the very worst time in the final campaign. He
interfered more than ever just when Lee most required a free hand.
And when he did make Lee a real Commander-in-Chief the Southern
cause had been lost already. Lincoln's war statesmanship grew with
the war. Davis remained as he was.
Lincoln had to meet the difficulties that always occur when
professionals and amateurs are serving together. How much Lincoln,
Stanton, professionals, and amateurs had to do with the system that
was evolved under great stress is far too complex for discussion
here. Suffice it to say this: Lincoln's clear insight and openness
of mind enabled him to see the universal truth, that, other things
being equal, the trained and expert professional must excel the
untrained and inexpert amateur. But other things are never precisely
equal; and a war in which the whole mass-manhood is concerned brings
in a host of amateurs. Lincoln was as devoid of prejudice against
the regular officers as he was against any other class of men; and
he was ready to try and try again to find a satisfactory commander
among them, in spite of many failures. The plan of campaign proposed
by General Winfield Scott (and ultimately carried out in a modified
form) was dubbed by wiseacre public men the "Anaconda policy"; witlings
derided it, and the people were too impatient for anything except "On
to Richmond!" Scott, unable to take the field at seventy-five, had
no second-in-command. Halleck was a very poor substitute later on.
In the meantime McDowell was chosen and generously helped by Lincoln
and Stanton. But after Bull Run the very people whose impatience
made victory impossible howled him down.
Then the choice fell on McClellan, whose notorious campaign fills
much of our next chapter. There we shall see how refractory
circumstances, Stanton's waywardness among them, forced Lincoln
to go beyond the limits of civil control. Here we need only note
McClellan's personal relations with the President. Instead of summoning
him to the White House Lincoln often called at McClellan's for
discussion. McClellan presently began to treat Lincoln's questions
as intrusions, and one day sent down word that he was too tired to
see the President. Lincoln had told a friend that he would hold
McClellan's stirrups for the sake of victory. But he could not
abdicate in favor of McClellan or any one else.
It was none of Lincoln's business to be an actual Commander-in-Chief.
Yet night after weary night he sat up studying the science and art
of war, groping his untutored way toward those general principles
and essential human facts which his native genius enabled him to
reach, but never quite understanding--how could he?--their practical
application to the field of strategy. His supremely good common
sense saved him from going beyond his depth whenever he could help
it. His Military Orders were forced upon him by the extreme pressure
of impatient public opinion. He told Grant "he did not know but
they were all wrong, and he did know that some of them were."
McClellan was not the only failure in Virginia. Burnside and Hooker
also failed against Lee and Jackson. All three suffered from civilian
interference as well as from their own defects. At last, in the
third year of the war, a victor appeared in Meade, a good, but
by no means great, commander. In the fourth year Lincoln gave the
chief command to Grant, whom he had carefully watched and wisely
supported through all the ups and downs of the river campaigns.
Grant's account of his first conference alone with Lincoln is eloquent
of Lincoln's wise war statesmanship:
He stated that he had never professed to be a military man or
to know how campaigns should be conducted, and never wanted to
interfere in them.... All he wanted was some one who would take
the responsibility and act, and call on him for all the assistance
needed, pledging himself to use all the power of the government
in rendering such assistance.... He pointed out on the map two
streams which empty into the Potomac, and suggested that the army
might be moved on boats and landed between the mouths of these
streams. We would then have the Potomac to bring our supplies and
the tributaries would protect our flanks while we moved out. I
listened respectfully, but did not suggest that the same streams
would protect Lee's flanks while he was shutting us up. I did not
communicate my plans to the President; nor did I to the Secretary
of War or to General Halleck.
Trust begot trust; and some months later Grant showed war statesmanship
of the same magnificent kind. McClellan had become the Democratic
candidate for President, to the well-founded alarm of all who put
the Union first. In June, when Grant and Lee were at grips round
Richmond, Lincoln was invited to a public meeting got up in honor
of Grant with only a flimsy disguise of the ominous fact that Grant,
and not Lincoln, might be the Union choice. Lincoln sagaciously wrote
back: "It is impossible for me to attend. I approve nevertheless
of whatever may tend to strengthen and sustain General Grant and
the noble armies now under his command. He and his brave soldiers
are now in the midst of their great trial, and I trust that at
your meeting you will so shape your good words that they may turn
to men and guns, moving to his and their support." The danger to
the Union of taking Grant away from the front moved Lincoln deeply
all through that anxious summer of '64, though he never thought
Grant would leave the front with his work half done. In August an
officious editor told Lincoln that he ought to take a good long
rest. Lincoln, however, was determined to stand by his own post of
duty and find out from Grant, through their common friend, John
Eaton, what Grant's own views of such ideas were. This is Eaton's
account of how Grant took it:
We had been talking very quietly. But Grant's reply came in an
instant and with a violence for which I was not prepared. He brought
his clenched fists down hard on the strap arms of his camp chair.
"They can't do it. They can't compel me to do it." Emphatic gesture
was not a strong point with Grant. "Have you said this to the
President?" "No," said Grant, "I have not thought it worth while
to assure the President of my opinion. I consider it as important
for the cause that he should be elected as that the army should
be successful in the field."
When Eaton brought back his report Lincoln simply said, "I told you
they could not get him to run till he had closed out the rebellion."
On the twenty-third of this same gloomy August, lightened only
by the taking of Mobile, Lincoln asked his Cabinet if they would
endorse a memorandum without reading it. They all immediately signed.
After his reëlection in November he read it out: "This morning,
as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this
Administration will not be reëlected. Then it will be my duty to
so coöperate with the President-elect as to save the Union between
the election and the inauguration, as he will have secured his
election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards."
He added that he would have asked McClellan to throw his whole
influence into getting enough recruits to finish the war before
the fourth of March. "And McClellan," was Seward's comment, "would
have said 'Yes, yes,' and then done nothing."
Lincoln's reëlection was helped by Farragut's victory in August,
Sherman's in September, and Sheridan's raid through the Shenandoah
Valley in October. But it was also helped by that strange, vivifying
touch which passes, no one knows how, from the man who best embodies
a supremely patriotic cause to the masses of his fellow patriots,
and then, at some great crisis, when they scale heights which he
has long since trod, comes back in flood and carries him to power.
Lincoln stories were abroad; the true were eclipsing the false; and
all the true ones gained him increasing credit. Naval reformers,
and many others too, enjoyed the homely wit with which he closed
the first conference about such a startlingly novel craft as the
plans for the _Monitor_ promised: "Well, Gentlemen, all I have to
say is what the girl said when she put her foot into the stocking:
'It strikes me there's something in it.'" The army enjoyed the joke
against the three-month captain whom Sherman threatened to shoot
if he went home without leave. The same day Lincoln, visiting the
camp, was harangued by this prospective deserter in presence of many
another man disheartened by Bull Run. "Mr. President: this morning
I spoke to Colonel Sherman and he threatened to shoot me, Sir!"
Lincoln looked the two men over, and then, in a stage whisper every
listener could hear, said: "Well, if I were you, and he threatened
to shoot me, I wouldn't trust him; for I'm sure he'd do it." Both
Services were not only pleased with the "rise" Lincoln took out
of a too inquisitive politician but were much reassured by its
model discretion. This importunate politician so badgered Lincoln
about the real destination of McClellan's transports that Lincoln
at last promised to tell everything he could if the politician
would promise not to repeat it. Then, after swearing the utmost
secrecy, the politician got the news: "They are going to sea."
The whole home front as well as the Services were touched to the
heart by tales of Lincoln's kindness in his many interviews with
the war-bereaved; and letters like these spoke for themselves to
every patriot in the land:
Executive Mansion, November 21, 1864.
Mrs. Bixby, Boston, Massachusetts.
Dear Madam: I have been shown in the files of the War Department
a statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts that you are
the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of
battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine
which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so
overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation
that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.
I pray that our heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your
bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved
and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid
so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.
Yours very sincerely and respectfully,
Abraham Lincoln.
Nor did the Lincoln touch stop there. It even began to make its
quietly persuasive way among the finer spirits of the South from
the very day on which the Second Inaugural closed with words which
were the noblest consummation of the prophecy made in the First.
This was the prophecy: "The mystic chords of memory, stretching
from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and
hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus
of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the
better angels of our nature." And this the consummation: "With
malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the
right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish
the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him
who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan--to
do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among
ourselves and with all nations."