Never Call Retreat (57 page)

Montgomery Blair was trying to make a deal with the Democrats. He wanted Mr. Lincoln re-elected and he wanted slavery destroyed, but he also most passionately wanted the radicals beaten. He was trying to put together a conservative coalition that would accept emancipation and yet keep America a white man's country, and if his proposal was somewhat Byzantine it would be copied (now with success and now without it) for a century or more. He put it bluntly in a letter to S. L. M. Barlow: "By giving up the past, conceding slavery to be extinct, you can make an issue upon which not only the Democrats of the North and South may unite against the Republicans, but on which the larger portion of the Republicans will join in sustaining this exclusive right of Government in the white race."
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Blair had a specific plan. Believing McClellan the strongest candidate the Democrats could name, he wanted him out of the way, and all through the winter and spring he had been calling for action: let McClellan take himself out of the presidential race, make his peace with President Lincoln, and accept once more some command in the army. For McClellan, Blair confessed, this might be a wrench: "He is young and there is a great future opening to one of his genius and antecedents. But you must bear with me when I tell you that it does not lie in the direction of waging a war against the chief magistrate, who is waging a war for the liberties of this continent at home and also will soon have to do it against despots abroad." The renunciation need not be permanent: "You must not understand that when I object to his being a candidate for the presidency that I would call upon him to remove such pretensions for all time. I mean only that
now
is not the proper time for indulging such thoughts—we have on hand a Rebellion."
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It was a curious proposal, all in all, and it was supported not long after the Baltimore convention when Francis P. Blair, Sr.—redoubtable Old Man Blair, in person—went to New York to talk to General McClellan. The Old Man repeated what Montgomery had said, urging McClellan to ask President Lincoln for reassignment to the army with the express proviso that this was not a step toward the Democratic nomination; and he added, "In case the President should refuse this request he would then be responsible for the consequences." McClellan listened courteously, nodded, said he would let him know—and that was that.
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McClellan was unmoved, and so was Barlow, who told Montgomery Blair that although a hot election campaign probably would be bad, its evils would be nothing compared to those that would follow a victory for President Lincoln, "whose re-election will be claimed to be, and will in fact be, an endorsement by the people of every fallacy and monstrosity which the folly and fanaticism of the radicals may invent, including miscegenation, Negro equality, territorial organization and subjugation, all to end in bankruptcy, dishonor and disunion." But Barlow's recital of the catalog of horrors showed that he had not got Blair's point—which was that it really ought not to matter much, either to Northern Democrats or to actually embattled Confederates, if Mr. Lincoln won both the war and the election, so long as nothing more than slavery died. Unadorned emancipation, all naked and defenseless, need not be feared because it could be handled. Blair believed that what had frightened Congressman Pendleton was the phantom that had driven Southerners to war in the first place, and in another letter he became most explicit:

"The people of the South have not been aroused against the people of the North by the love of slavery. I am to the manner born and know whereof I speak—it is Negro equality, not slavery, that they are fighting about, and it is necessary to demonstrate that the North is not fighting for Negro equality. The late vote on the Montana question in the House of Representatives, on which the Democrats voted in the majority for the first and only time this winter, shows how important it is to get rid of the slavery question in order that we may get at the Negro question which lies immediately behind it. My object is, if possible, to make this the Presidential issue, with a view to a restoration of the Union. If we can dispose of the slave question, and not without, we shall have the miscegenators in a party to themselves and can beat them easily, but whilst they can cover themselves behind the slave question they will prevail."
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. . . Dig down far enough and one always found it: the old terror, coiling and uncoiling in the dark, demanding an everlasting wall to protect one race from intimacy with another. The only wall so far devised was slavery, and it was high enough but so fragile that it had begun to crumble on the plains of Kansas where it did not even exist; and now its final fall was certain. What Blair was saying was that another barrier could be built if men who dreaded equality were appealed to properly. It was merely necessary to understand where the real issue lay.

One man who understood this more and more clearly, although he did not hear what Blair was saying, was the very executive who in Blair's opinion needed to be re-elected and neutralized: Abraham Lincoln. Mr. Lincoln was beginning to see and say that a barrier built against one is built against all, and that freedom has the magical property of being indivisible. Not long ago he had told a group of politically minded New York working men "that the existing rebellion means more, and tends to more, than the perpetuation of African slavery—that it is in fact a war upon the rights of all working men." More recently, when a new Ohio regiment stopped at the White House for a word of encouragement, he remarked that in free America "every man has a right to be equal with every other man," and he went on to say that in this war "every form of human right is endangered if our enemies succeed . . . There is involved in this struggle the question whether your children and my children shall enjoy the privileges we have enjoyed."
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Blair's argument was undoubtedly persuasive, but the Democrats ignored it. They believed they were going to win the election without making a deal with anyone. To them, as to almost everyone in the North, the war itself had become the dominant factor. It would determine how the election came out, and the Democrats were becoming more and more convinced that it would drive the election their way.

As far back as February, Barlow told his Washington aide, Barnett: "We shall nominate McClellan unless events bring up some new man. In any case we mean to run the strongest candidate, and unless there are greater successes in the field than now seem probable we shall win." He had already told Reverdy Johnson that "if the war drags its slow length along another summer I have no doubt of the success of the opposition"—that is, of the Democrats. He appraised Republican prospects by confessing that "if Grant wins, all will go well" —go well, that is, for the Republicans—and he played on the same theme by telling Blair: "If the Army of the Potomac is strong enough to defeat Lee without McClellan, all is well. If it should prove otherwise, is there anyone who will forgive Mr. Lincoln for the monstrous crime in permitting the great fight of the war to take place without the benefit of his personality?"
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Barlow to be sure was not the Democratic party, but he was McClellan's closest confidant and he unquestionably spoke for the conservative party leaders—the men who were not Copperheads, and who sincerely wanted the Union restored, but who felt certain that Mr. Lincoln could never restore it and who shuddered to think what might happen if he did. They had given the party a vested interest in military failure, and if this was a risky position for a political party to take it can only be said that by mid-summer military failure seemed very real.

The war was in its fourth year, death and agony were familiar shapes, casualty lists were reaching out to every city and village in the land, day after heartbreaking day, all spring and all summer, and it was hard to see that victory was any nearer now than it had been in the spring. Grant had indeed forced Lee all the way from the Rapidan to the Petersburg trenches, and Sherman had driven Johnston from the Tennessee line to the suburbs of Atlanta; but the cities did not fall, the armies defending them had not been overpowered . . . and Grant and Sherman between them had lost more than 90,000 men in less than four months. Never before had the North had to bear anything like this, and when in the middle of July the President signed a call for 500,000 more men it looked as if it might go on and on forever.

To make it worse, there was General Jubal Early, whose muscular Confederate army had driven David Hunter away from Lynchburg. Forced to retreat, Hunter felt himself compelled to flee westward across the mountains, leaving the old Stonewall Jackson trail down the Shenandoah Valley wholly undefended. Early promptly marched on that trail in the old Jackson style, crossed the Potomac, knocked aside a hastily collected Federal force that tried to stop him, and moved boldly toward Washington. He got to Silver Spring, half a dozen miles north of the capitol dome, and his soldiers unfeelingly burned the home of Montgomery Blair; for a haunting moment on July 12 it looked as if he might upset everything by capturing Washington. This was a little beyond him; Grant sent General Horatio Wright and the VI Corps up just in time, after a brief skirmish Early withdrew, and by the end of July he was back below the Potomac again. He was not far below it, to be sure; he lingered in the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley, ready to strike again if he saw an opening, but at least he was no longer tapping at the back door of Washington.

He had made a raid, not an outright invasion, and although it was done in the old Jackson manner it did not have the old effect. President Lincoln and Secretary Stanton were not as ready to take alarm now as they used to be, and it had not been possible for Lee to give Early enough force to turn this fencer's thrust into a hard blow. But the operation greatly damaged the administration's prestige. After the high hopes of the spring, when men told one another that Grant would soon march into Richmond, to find Lee still able to send off a detachment that apparently could come within inches of seizing the Federal capital was more than anyone cared to think about.

An unrelated setback intensified the gloom. Late in July Grant's army got its one chance to break the Petersburg lines when a regiment of Pennsylvania coal miners in Burnside's corps dug a long tunnel and planted four tons of black powder beneath a Confederate fort. Exploded at dawn on July 30, this mine blew a huge gap in the otherwise impregnable trench system, and for about one hour the way was open for the Army of the Potomac to march straight through and bring Lee's army to destruction. But Burnside, who had arranged this stratagem with intelligence, was incredibly clumsy in his attempt to execute it. He entrusted the all-important assaulting column to a division commander who turned out to be a drunken coward and who huddled in a dugout and let his soldiers lead themselves. Nobody could ever beat Robert E. Lee fighting that way; the Confederates repaired their line before Burnside's men could apply heavy pressure, and the Federal attack failed, with substantial loss. There was of course a court of inquiry, and Burnside's corps got some new officers, starting at the top; but about the most anyone in the North could see was that Grant had lost nearly 3800 more men in another meaningless head-on attack.
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These episodes had not actually changed the military picture materially, but they helped to create massive war-weariness in the North. Republican leaders fell into a panic, scurrying to and fro to see if they could not call a new convention and find a new nominee. Secretary Seward's political mentor, canny Thurlow Weed of New York, told Lincoln early in August that his re-election was an impossibility, and a little later he wrote to Seward: "Nobody here doubts it; nor do I see anybody from other states who authorizes the slightest hope of success. . . . The people are wild for peace." Henry Raymond of the New York
Times,
chairman of the Republican National Committee, told Mr. Lincoln that "the tide is setting strongly against us." Made desperate by the rising argument that peace could never be had under Mr. Lincoln because of his inflexible stand against slavery, Raymond made a desperate proposal, urging the President to appoint a commission "to make distinct proffers of peace to Davis as the head ¹⁸

This pessimism briefly infected Mr. Lincoln himself, and on August 23 he wrote a memorandum, folded and sealed it, asked his cabinet members to sign their names on the outside so that it could be identified later, and put it in his desk. Opened after the election, the memorandum read: "This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate 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 afterward." The somber final clause reflected his analysis of the problem that confronted the Democrats, and Mr. Lincoln bluntly stated the case to the reporter, Noah Brooks: "They must nominate a Peace Democrat on a war platform, or a War Democrat on a peace platform; and I personally can't say that I care much which they do." The day after he wrote the memorandum, when Brooks came to say goodbye before leaving for Chicago to cover the Democratic convention, the President shook his hand and said: "Don't be discouraged. I don't believe that God has forsaken us yet."
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The President's prediction about the inevitable contrast between the party's nominee and its platform was accurate. The Democratic convention, which opened on August 29, was unquestionably going to nominate General McClellan; equally without question it was going to take the rest of its tone from Clement Vallandigham, who was on hand as a delegate, avoiding the limelight but most effectively busy behind the scenes. (McClellan saw the problem as clearly as the President did, and before the convention he wrote: "I wish they had left Vallandigham down south when they had him there!")
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Vallandigham had his way, and the only part of the platform anyone remembered was a plank he himself wrote and shepherded through to adoption: "After four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war, during which, under the pretense of a military necessity, or war power higher than the Constitution, the Constitution itself has been disregarded in every part, and public liberty and private right alike trodden down and the material prosperity of the country essentially impaired—justice, humanity, liberty and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an ultimate convention of the states, or other peaceable means, to the end that at the earliest practicable moment peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of the States."
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