Never Call Retreat (10 page)

Writing to Robert C. Winthrop of Massachusetts shortly after the first of the year, Mr. Bates insisted that if the slaves were set free—by proclamation, by the accident of war, or however—then they were not just partly free. They were altogether free, and so must come under the protection of the Constitution: "In the language of the Constitution they will be 'free persons.'" This was something for Northerners to think about. There were Northern states like Illinois that had laws barring the ingress of free Negroes, and Mr. Bates felt that the people of these states ought to reflect on the change:

"If blacks be, in constitutional law, citizens, and if the state legislature can exclude for color, then why not for race, religion, nativity or any other discretionary cause? The Constitution was made as it is for the very purpose of securing to every citizen common & equal rights all over the nation, and to prevent local prejudice & captious legislation in the states." There was no escape from it: "We must take the Constitution as we do our most beautiful shrubbery—if we will have roses, we must take them along with the thorns."
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This was the enormous vista that was beginning to open, and there were loyal Unionists who did not at all like the looks of it. On January 7 Mr. Lincoln told a friend in Kentucky that he hesitated to send to that state certain arms that were wanted by home-defense units because he did not know how they might be used. "The changed conduct towards me of some of her members of Congress, and the ominous outgivings as to what the Governor and Legislature of Kentucky intend doing," he confessed, "admonish me to consider whether any additional arms I may send there are not to be turned against the government."

When the war began he had said that to lose Kentucky would be about equal to losing the war itself. Now the danger was visible. A week earlier the administration had been warned by Major General Horatio G. Wright, commanding Federal troops in Ohio and Kentucky, that the state authorities were apt to take Kentucky clear out of the Union if the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. Wright thought he should keep several good regiments near the Kentucky capital, Frankfort, and he also thought that if an ordinance of secession were presented he should arrest everyone who voted for it; and altogether he wanted advice from headquarters. On the day the President wrote so gloomily to his Kentucky friend, General Halleck notified Wright that his projected course of action was approved and that he could go even further if he had to.

As it happened, this particular crisis finally dissolved. Kentucky did not try to secede. Stone's River having served notice that the Confederate tide after all was ebbing in those parts, and although a committee of the Kentucky House of Representatives not long after this reported that "the Rebellion cannot be conquered under the present policy of the government," and denounced Emancipation, suspension of habeas corpus and the arming of Negroes as acts of tyranny and crimes against civilization, nothing concrete was actually done.
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Yet the fact that the crisis had emerged was symptomatic. The war had taken on this new dimension. Having dared to invoke freedom the nation now must take the consequences; as Mr. Bates was pointing out, the formula that had been adopted to insure victory was also the formula for a social revolution. As the new year began the overriding question was how the people of the North (ultimately, the people of the whole country) would respond to that revolution. It was more than they had bargained for; they were not in the least prepared to meet it, or even to think about it; and it might well be more than they would accept. But it was beginning to happen, the only way to avert it was to give up the war itself, and responsible men in Washington could only wonder if firmer leadership was not needed to meet the profound state of public unrest.

To a certain extent this was a reflection of the military situation: unrest rose when military affairs went badly and sank when they went well. Of late affairs had been going badly, and Presidential Secretary John Nicolay expressed it accurately when he told his wife that "little disasters still tread on each other's heels"—the latest little disaster being a sudden blow by which Confederates in Texas had overwhelmed a Federal force of occupation at Galveston, capturing the revenue cutter
Harriet Lane
and reoccupying the city.

Editor Medill found himself in the mood of Alexander Stephens, and he wrote: "An armistice is bound to come during the year 1863. . . . We have to fight for a boundary." Congressman Elbridge Spaulding of New York told the Congress on January 12 that the cost of the war now was $2,500,000 a day, "Sundays included"; the government's income amounted to no more than $600,000 a day, and in little more than a year the public debt would reach $2,000,000,000. Captain John A. Dahlgren of the Washington Navy Yard entered the President's study a few days before Christmas just in time to hear a caller warn the President that the findings of the Committee on the Conduct of the War in regard to bungling generalship at Fredericksburg had better be made public at once because of public excitement. To this, Dahlgren noted, Mr. Lincoln replied with some heat that he did not like to swear but "why will people be such damned fools?"

But it went further than little disasters, oppressive fiscal arrangements and an itch to have defective generalship dissected in public. The determination to restore the Union at any cost had been, originally and for most Northerners, a determination to restore a cherished past; as sincerely as Mr. Davis himself, the average Northerner wanted to be let alone so that he could enjoy things as they used to be. Now he was beginning to see that things would never again, not this side of Jordan, be as they used to be. Instead of restoring the past the war was destroying it.

Increased public unrest, in short, rested at least partly on an uneasy awareness that the price of victory was likely to be an illimitable commitment to the future, Mr. Lincoln's hope that he might carry a truce in the belly of the war was an expression of his own anxiety; for a war in which no truce was possible was bound to bring such a commitment, and neither he nor anyone else knew how that commitment would finally be met. But the immediate necessities of war were controlling. If the war was to be won at all it was necessary for him to assert firmer direction, first over his own administration and next over the nation's biggest army, the Army of the Potomac.

The two went together. War, as Prussian Clausewitz held and as Mr. Lincoln knew by instinct, is an extension of politics; and by 1863 the converse also was true—politics was an extension of war. The war itself was a brutal and fearfully definitive substitute for a political debate and a national election. To appoint a general—any general—was of necessity to play a political card, even though all that was actually wanted was a man who could beat the Rebels. To deal with elected persons or with the voters who had elected them was always to speak and act from a platform built by the armies. The Emancipation Proclamation itself, which would change American politics forever, had come into existence as a military expedient. War and politics walked together now, not merely hand in hand but in one body.
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Mr. Lincoln's effort to assert firmer control was complicated by a singular fact. Basic to the situation was a widespread feeling that it was necessary for someone to control Mr. Lincoln himself—that his presidency was a sort of vacuum that needed to be filled by a man or men more dedicated, earnest, and forceful than he was. Both radical Republicans and conservative Democrats had this idea. The conservatives, to be sure, had suffered a check when General McClellan ceased to command the Army of the Potomac, but the radicals were hard at work. They wanted total war and total emancipation, and they felt that this reluctant administration was not likely to give them either. The reason, as they saw it, was that Mr. Lincoln was too weak and that Secretary of State William H. Seward was too strong; now they proposed to force Seward out of the cabinet and manage the administration themselves, using Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase as their principal instrument. In the middle of December thirty-two Republican Senators caucused for two days, listened to denunciations of Seward, agreed that there should be a partial reconstruction of the cabinet, and named nine of their number to call on Mr. Lincoln and tell him what he ought to do.
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Several factors were at work, not least the profound discontent of Chase, who had been complaining that the President overrode his cabinet and reduced it to an administrative nullity. In a sense Chase was right. The President was not a good administrator. He did not try to make an operating mechanism out of his cabinet, and probably the idea never occurred to him. He listened to everybody and then did what he thought best, and even when he let his ministers see the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation he said that he had already made up his mind about it but that he would like to hear what they had to say. It was at least clear that the cabinet did not manage the administration, and the situation was not eased by Seward's total willingness to let people believe that he himself did.

The Senators felt that the President should be guided and directed by a "cabinet council." Inasmuch as they agreed that the Senate ought to control a President's cabinet selections, they were actually demanding top control for the legislative branch. They were attacking not merely the President but the presidency; they were offended, not by Mr. Lincoln's supposed weakness, but by the fact that if he became strong he could use his strength. When they sat down with him in the White House on the evening of December 19—nine Senators, seven of them staunch radicals—they were in effect notifying Mr. Lincoln that he must remake his cabinet so that the administration would be in complete harmony . . . with itself, and with them.

Mr. Lincoln had no intention of doing this. He had told a friend that all of the responsibilities of the administration "belong to that unhappy wretch called Abraham Lincoln," and as he tried to meet those responsibilities the last thing he needed or wanted was a contrived or enforced harmony. Precisely because he was leading a divided country he needed diverse counsels. He had his own grave doubts about the era that lay ahead, and so did most of his fellow citizens, and the true strength of his leadership had to arise from his ability to work out his doubts as he went along. Only so could he hope to carry all factions with him. To choose between Seward and Chase would be to commit himself to one faction or another before it was time—to entrust the fate of the nation to the men who had no doubts at all. He needed to keep both ministers, and yet it would be difficult. Learning about the Senate caucus, Mr. Seward had quietly submitted his resignation.

The December 19 meeting brought no result. The Senators voiced their complaint and demanded Seward's removal; Mr. Lincoln listened, said he would think it over, and invited the Senators to come back the next evening. They agreed, and the President arranged a small surprise. On this second meeting, as soon as the Senators had been greeted and seated, Mr. Lincoln asked them if he might not bring in the cabinet.

Somewhat struck, they agreed to this, whereupon Mr. Lincoln brought in everybody except Seward, and permitted Senators and ministers to regard each other briefly.

Then he began to talk. He outlined the history of his administration, taking up one issue after another and telling how each one had been handled. He remarked that nobody could expect all cabinet members to think alike on everything, and he confessed that the pressure of the times had kept him from having frequent or extended cabinet sessions. However, he added, once he had settled upon a policy, all of the ministers always agreed on it. The cabinet had not been overridden; if it had not directed the President, it had always at least gone along with him. Having said all of this, Mr. Lincoln turned to his cabinet and asked each man, one after another, whether he had not given a true statement of the case.

True in substance: possibly stretched a little, here and there. On some points—notably the reinstatement of McClellan after the Second Battle of Bull Run—some cabinet members had been in most determined opposition, and had reluctantly accepted an accomplished fact only because there had been nothing else they could do. But in the main the account was close enough to accuracy, and the question provided infinite discomfort for Secretary Chase, who had provided most of the source material for the Senators' bill of particulars.

Dignified, able, dedicated, and always conscious of his own rectitude, Chase could not, in front of the President and his colleagues, brand himself a disloyal member of the official family by repeating here the complaints he had made elsewhere. He was hopelessly trapped between duplicity and integrity, and now he could only agree lamely that the President's account was correct, adding that he did think there might perhaps have been fuller discussion on some points. One after another the others confirmed the President's story. Stony-faced, the Senators listened.

Having polled his cabinet, the President then asked the Senators if they still thought that he ought to dismiss Secretary Seward.

The Senators had been both outmaneuvered and let down, the support they relied on most having failed them. In addition, it was all too clear by now that if the President dismissed his Secretary of State he would also dismiss his Secretary of the Treasury, which was not at all what anybody wanted. Only four Senators, at last, said that they still thought that Seward ought to go. The meeting ended. As people began to leave, Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois—an old acquaintance who could speak bluntly—stopped by the President's side and said angrily: "Lincoln, somebody has lied like hell!" Mr. Lincoln replied: "Not tonight."
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It remained for the President to pick up the loose ends, and the next morning he picked up the only one that mattered. Secretary Chase came to see him, remarked that the evening's conference had given him much pain, and hesitantly produced, or began to produce, a letter, saying that he had written his resignation. This of course was a gesture: Chase did not want to leave the cabinet, but if he put a resignation on paper and then waved the paper about it might have good effect. But this was no morning for gestures by Chase. To his dismay, Mr. Lincoln promptly took the letter away from him, saying with undisguised elation that at last his problem was solved; after which he permitted Chase to go back to his office.