AS SPRING GAVE WAY to the stifling heat of a Washington summer, Lincoln began work on the message he would deliver to Congress when the House and Senate assembled in special session on July 4. Needing time to think, he placed an “embargo” on all office seekers, “so strict” that they were not even allowed entry into the White House. As he labored in his newfound quiet, congressmen and senators gathered at Willard’s and Brown’s hotels, exchanging greetings and trading stories. They all anticipated, one reporter stated, that they would “soon ascertain the exact intentions of the Administration, through the medium of the President’s message.”
Lincoln worked long hours on the text, shifting words, condensing, deleting sentences. Even Senator Orville Browning, his old friend from Illinois who had come to see him, was told he was busy, but Lincoln overheard Browning talking and sent for him. It was after 9 p.m. on July 3, and he had just that moment finished writing. “He said he wished to read it to me, and did so,” Browning recorded in his diary. “It is an able state paper and will fully meet the expectations of the Country.”
Lincoln did not personally deliver his address on Capitol Hill. President Thomas Jefferson had denounced presidential appearances before Congress, considering them a monarchical remnant of the English system where kings personally opened parliamentary sessions. Since Jefferson, presidents had submitted their written messages to be read by a clerk. Yet, if the practice lacked theatricality, Lincoln’s arguments against secession and for the necessity of executive action in the midst of rebellion left an indelible impression. He traced the history of the struggle and called on Congress to “give the legal means for making this contest a short, and a decisive one.”
He asked for “at least four hundred thousand men, and four hundred millions of dollars…a less sum per head, than was the debt of our revolution.” A “right result, at this time, will be worth more to the world, than ten times the men, and ten times the money,” he assured Congress. For “this issue embraces more than the fate of these 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….
“This is essentially a People’s contest,” the president asserted. “On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” As evidence of the capacity of free institutions to better the “condition” of the people, “beyond any example in the world,” he cited the regiments of the Union Army, in which “there is scarcely one, from which could not be selected, a President, a Cabinet, a Congress, and perhaps a Court, abundantly competent to administer the government itself.”
Northern newspapers generally praised the message, though some failed to appreciate the rigor of Lincoln’s appeal and the clear grace of his language. “In spite of obvious faults in style,” the New York Times correspondent conceded, “I venture to say it will add to the popularity of the Rail-splitter. It is evidently the production of an honest, clear-headed and straightforward man; and its direct and forcible logic and quaint style of illustration will cause it to be read with peculiar pleasure by the masses of the people.” More important, the Congress responded with alacrity. Its members authorized more money and an even larger mobilization of troops than the president had requested. In addition, they provided retroactive authority for nearly all of Lincoln’s executive actions taken before they convened, remaining silent only on his suspension of habeas corpus. With the Southern Democrats gone, the Republicans had a substantial majority. And, for the moment, Northern Democrats also acceded, their dislike of Republicans overshadowed by patriotic fervor.
Not everyone was pleased. Abolitionists and radical Republicans found the message disheartening. “No mention is, at all, made of slavery,” Frederick Douglass lamented. “Any one reading that document, with no previous knowledge of the United States, would never dream from anything there written that we have a slaveholding war waged upon the Government…while all here know that that is the vital and animating motive of the rebellion.”
Radicals tended to blame Seward for Lincoln’s reluctance to emphasize the role of slavery. “We have an honest President,” Wendell Phillips, the abolitionist editor, proclaimed before a celebratory crowd on the Fourth of July, “but, distrusting the strength of the popular feeling behind him, he listens overmuch to Seward.” Men like Phillips, Thaddeus Stevens, and Charles Sumner could never forgive Seward for apparently lowering the antislavery banner he had once carried so triumphantly. Seward was accustomed to criticism, however, and while he had the president beside him, he remained secure in his position.
Meanwhile, the events of the war itself began to reshape the old order in ways few realized. At Fort Monroe, at the tip of the peninsula in Virginia, a bold decision by General Benjamin Butler proved a harbinger of things to come. One night, three fugitive slaves arrived at the fort after escaping from the Confederate battery that their master had ordered them to help build. When an agent of their owner demanded their return, Butler refused. The rebels were using slaves in the field to support their troops, Butler argued. The slaves were therefore contraband of war, and the federal government was no longer obliged to surrender them to their masters.
Coming from Butler, a conservative Democrat from Massachusetts who had run for governor on the Breckinridge ticket in 1860, the decision delighted Republican stalwarts who had previously objected to Butler’s high position. Butler himself would soon be equally delighted by Lincoln’s magnanimity in making him a brigadier general. “I will accept the commission,” Butler gratefully told Lincoln, but “there is one thing I must say to you, as we don’t know each other: That as a Democrat I opposed your election, and did all I could for your opponent; but I shall do no political act, and loyally support your administration as long as I hold your commission; and when I find any act that I cannot support I shall bring the commission back at once, and return it to you.”
Lincoln replied, “That is frank, that is fair. But I want to add one thing: When you see me doing anything that for the good of the country ought not to be done, come and tell me so, and why you think so, and then perhaps you won’t have any chance to resign your commission.” Had Butler known Lincoln, he would have been less astonished. The president commissioned officers with the same eye toward coalition building that he displayed in constructing his cabinet.
Butler’s order was approved by both Lincoln and Cameron, and eventually, the Congress passed a confiscation law ending the rights of masters over fugitive slaves utilized to support the Confederate troops. Even conservative Monty Blair applauded Butler. “You were right when you declared secession niggers contraband of war,” he told his fellow Democrat. “The Secessionists have used them to do all their fortifying.”
Blair’s approval of Butler’s measure as an act of war did not mean that he advocated emancipation. On the contrary, he advised Butler to “improve the code by restricting its operations to working people, leaving the Secessionists to take care of the non working classes.” The Union should provide safe harbor only to the “pick of the lot,” the strong-bodied slaves who were helping the rebels in the field. Women and children and other “unproductive laborers” should be left for their Southern masters to house and feed.
Lincoln, as usual, was slowly formulating his own position on the slavery question. He told Blair that Butler’s action raised “a very important subject…one requiring some thought in view of the numbers of negroes we were likely to have on hand in virtue of this new doctrine.” Indeed, in the weeks that followed, hundreds of courageous slaves worked their way into Union lines. The situation worried Lincoln; at this juncture, he still favored compensated emancipation
and voluntary colonization, allowing blacks who wished to do so to return to their original homeland in Africa. Most important, he knew that any hint of total, direct emancipation would alienate the border states, whose continued loyalty was essential for victory, and would shatter the Republicans’ fragile alliance with Northern Democrats.
By shying from emancipation in these early months of the war, Lincoln aligned himself with the majority of the Northern people, the Republican Congress, and the whole of his cabinet. Two weeks into its session, the House passed a resolution declaring that the purpose of the war was “to preserve the Union,” not to eliminate slavery. Even Chase, the most fervent antislavery man in the cabinet, agreed that at this time the “sword” of total abolition should be left “in the sheath.” If the conflict were drawn out, however, he told the historian John Motley, if “we find it much more difficult and expensive in blood and treasure to put it down than we anticipated,” then the sword would be drawn. “We do not wish this, we deplore it, because of the vast confiscation of property, and of the servile insurrections, too horrible to contemplate, which would follow. We wish the Constitution and Union as it is, with slavery, as a municipal institution, existing till such time as each State in its wisdom thinks fit to mitigate or abolish it…but if the issue be distinctly presented—death to the American Republic or death to slavery, slavery must die.”
BY MID-JULY, the outcry in the North for some form of significant action against the rebels reached fever pitch. “Forward to Richmond!” blared the headline in the New York Tribune. Senator Trumbull introduced a resolution calling for “the immediate movement of the troops, and the occupation of Richmond before the 20th July,” the date set for the Confederate Congress to convene. General Scott hesitated, believing the army still unprepared for a major offensive, but Lincoln feared that without action, the morale of both the troops and the general public would diminish. European leaders would interpret Northern inaction as a faltering resolve in the Union.
General Irvin McDowell, a brigadier general from Ohio, devised a plan to engage the rebel forces under command of General Beauregard at Manassas, twenty-six miles southwest of Washington. It was an intelligent plan. Many Northerners had come to see Manassas as “a terrible, unknown, mysterious something…filled by countless thousands of the most ferocious warriors,” poised to attack Washington, D.C. “Foreigners do not understand,” Bates confided to a friend, “why we should allow a hostile army to remain so long almost in sight of the Capitol, if we were able to drive them off.” With 30,000 Union troops at his disposal, McDowell could overrun Beauregard’s forces so long as Union general Robert Patterson prevented the 9,000 Confederate troops under General Joseph Johnston at Winchester, Virginia, from joining Beauregard. On June 29, Lincoln and his cabinet approved McDowell’s plan.
The Battle of Bull Run, as it later became known in the North, began in the early-morning hours of Sunday, July 21. As the “roar of the artillery” reached the White House, Elizabeth Grimsley recalled, “the excitement grew intense.” As far away as the Blair estate in Silver Spring, Monty’s sister, Elizabeth, took a walk in the woods to “stop the roar in [her] ears,” but the sound of the guns only increased. As soldiers on both sides of the battlefield were discovering the gruesome carnage of war, hundreds of Washingtonians hastily prepared picnic baskets filled with bread and wine. They raced to the hill at Centreville and the fields below to witness what most presumed would be an easy victory for the North. Senators, congressmen, government employees, and their families peered through opera glasses to survey the battlefield. After “an unusually heavy discharge,” the British journalist William Russell overheard one woman exclaim: “That is splendid. Oh, my! Is not that first-rate? I guess we will be in Richmond this time to-morrow.”
While Lincoln attended church, the Union troops pressed forward, forcing the rebels farther south into the woods. At midday, news of what seemed a complete Union victory reached Lincoln and the members of his cabinet at the telegraph office in the War Department. In the crowded space that housed the telegraph instruments, operators found it hard to focus on their responsibilities. Each new dispatch, the New York Times noted, was posted and read aloud to hundreds of people gathered in front of the Willard Hotel. The jubilant throng “cheered vehemently, and seemed fairly intoxicated with joy.”
Even as the crowds celebrated in the streets, the fiercest stage of the fighting was just beginning. The Confederates refused to give up, rallied by the steadfast General Thomas Jackson. “There is Jackson with his Virginians, standing like a stone wall,” General Barnard Bee reportedly shouted to inspire his troops, and both Confederate and Union soldiers thereafter referred to Jackson as “Stonewall” Jackson. The two sides fought valiantly in the blazing sun as the line of battle shifted back and forth. At 3 p.m., Lincoln was in the telegraph office studying the maps on the wall and waiting anxiously for the updated bulletins, which arrived in fifteen-minute intervals. The telegraph line stretched only as far as the Fairfax Court House. News from the battlefront farther south was relayed to Fairfax by a troupe of mounted couriers established by the young Andrew Carnegie, who then worked with the U.S. Military Telegraph Corps. Noting some confusion in the battlefield reports, Lincoln crossed over to General Scott’s headquarters, “a small three-storied brick house” jammed with officers and clerks. Waking Scott from a nap, Lincoln expressed his concern. Scott, Nicolay reported, simply confirmed “his confidence in a successful result, and composed himself for another nap when the President left.”
Succeeding dispatches became uniformly positive, conveying assurances that the Confederate lines had broken. At about 4:30, the telegraph operator proclaimed that “the Union Army had achieved a glorious victory.” Lincoln decided to take his usual carriage ride, accompanied by Tad, Willie, and Secretary Bates. As they rode together to the Navy Yard to talk with John A. Dahlgren, one of Lincoln’s favorite naval officers, Bates confided his anxiety for his son, Coalter, who was soon to be sent into battle. When young Coalter departed to join his regiment, Bates wrote, it was “the first time he ever left home.” The carriage ride came to a close with Bates feeling a new intimacy with his president.
As Lincoln relaxed with Bates in his carriage, the tide of battle turned against the Union. Confederate general Johnston’s forces had escaped General Patterson’s grasp, and by midafternoon, nine thousand fresh Confederate troops arrived to reinforce Beauregard. McDowell had no reserve troops left. “A sudden swoop, and a body of [Confederate] cavalry rushed down upon our columns,” Edmund Stedman reported from the battlefield. “They came from the woods…and infantry poured out behind them.”
Exhausted Union infantrymen, including Sprague’s First Rhode Island Regiment, broke ranks. An uncontrolled retreat toward Washington began, further confused by the panicked flight of horrified spectators. Indeed, an acquaintance of Chase’s who had witnessed the battle “never stopped until he reached New-York.” Young Stedman was appalled by the raging scene: “Army wagons, sutlers’ teams, and private carriages, choked the passage, tumbling against each other, amid clouds of dust, and sickening sights and sounds.” Muskets and small arms were discarded along the way. Wounded soldiers pled for help. Horses, running free, exacerbated the human stampede.
The shocking news reached Washington in Lincoln’s absence. “General McDowell’s army in full retreat through Centerville,” the dispatch read; “the day is lost. Save Washington and the remnants of the Army.” Seward grabbed the telegram and ran to the White House. With “a terribly frightened and excited look” on his face, he asked Nicolay for the latest news. Lincoln’s secretary read him an earlier exultant dispatch. “Tell no one. That is not so. The battle is lost,” Seward revealed. “Find the President and tell him to come immediately to Gen. Scott’s.”
When Lincoln returned, his young aides relayed Seward’s message. “He listened in silence,” they later reported, “without the slightest change of feature or expression, and walked away to army headquarters.
” He remained there with Scott and his cabinet until a telegram from McDowell verified the loss. Immediate reinforcements were summoned to defend the capital. With no further recourse, the disconsolate team dispersed.
“Oh what a sad long weary day has this sabbath been,” Elizabeth Blair told her husband. For Simon Cameron, the day brought a sharper personal grief. His brother James, in the service of Colonel William Sherman’s brigade, was among the nearly nine hundred soldiers killed. “I loved my brother,” Cameron wrote Chase, “as only the poor and lonely can love those with whom they have toiled & struggled up the rugged hill of life’s success—but he died bravely in the discharge of his duty.”
Seward stayed up past midnight composing a letter to Frances. “Every thing is being done that mortal man can do. Scott is grieved and disappointed…. What went out an army is surging back toward Washington as a disorganized mob. They fought well, did nobly, and apparently had gained the day, when some unreasonable alarm started a retreat. If the officers had experience and the men discipline, they could be rallied, and could be marched clear back to the field.”
Lincoln returned to the White House, where he watched the returning soldiers straggle down the street, listened to the mournful sounds of ambulances, and sat for hours with various senators and congressmen who had witnessed the battle from the hill. Early the following morning, with rain pouring down, General Scott arrived, urging Mary to take the children to the North until Washington was deemed safe from capture. Elizabeth Grimsley recollected the exchange as Mary turned to her husband: “Will you go with us?” she asked. “Most assuredly I will not leave at this juncture,” he replied. “Then I will not leave you at this juncture,” she answered with finality.