The victory of Lee’s Confederates at Second Manassas left the way open to the first Rebel advance into the North. Lincoln was delighted to hear that Lee and Jackson’s forces had crossed the Potomac and were somewhere in western Maryland, on the flank of the capital. He saw it as a great chance for McClellan to get between them and their bases, cut them off, and fight them on ground of the Union’s choosing. McClellan was not seized by any such excitement and, moving edgily west to cut off the Rebels, got an extraordinary advantage when two of his soldiers found a copy of Lee’s orders wrapped around two cigars under a tree near Frederick, Maryland. Typically, however, he did not quite believe his luck, and still marched slowly. In dispatches he estimated that Lee’s army consisted of one hundred twenty thousand men, which proved to be nearly three times its actual size.
As Abraham haunted the telegraph office at Stanton’s War Department, the two armies encountered each other along a creek called Antietam and in front of the little town of Sharpsburg, forty miles northwest of Washington. McClellan authorized his first attack in the early predawn of September 17. It was all unutterably savage, a battle fought in intimate, cramped venues—in the thickets of the East and West Woods, in the Cornfield, around the plain chapel and in the fields of a German Pacifist sect named the Dunkers, along Bloody Lane, and across two little bridges which spanned the creek and led into Sharpsburg. Masses of men engaged each other at close range. The opposing artillery corps blew clumps of men out of the lines. By nine-thirty in the morning, twelve thousand men had been killed and wounded, and by late afternoon that figure mounted to some twenty-three thousand.
By twilight, although it could be said that both sides had fought to a standstill, the Union had Lee’s men caught in a pocket around Sharpsburg, with the Potomac at their back. Lincoln knew that the enemy could have been obliterated the next day, but McClellan made his troops sit where they were, and on the night of September 18, the Confederates crossed the Potomac and returned south with only the lightest interference. Lincoln urged McClellan to cross the Potomac and get between Lee and the Rebel capital:
If we cannot beat him when he bears the wastage of coming to us, we never can when we bear the wastage of going to him. . . . As we must beat him somewhere, or fail finally, we can do it, if at all, easier near to us than far away. . . . It is all easy if our troops march as well as the enemy; and it is unmanly to say they cannot do it.
Visiting McClellan and walking around the immense Federal camp with his old friend from Illinois, Orville Browning, Abraham pointed to the vast array of tents and bivouacs and said, in a tone of patient but melancholy sarcasm, “That is General McClellan’s bodyguard.” McClellan claimed that he could not pursue Lee because his cavalry horses were “broken down from fatigue.” Lincoln wired back, “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigue anything?”
But, ever cooperative, by October 27 Lincoln recorded that he had sent nearly eight thousand new cavalry horses and remarked with his usual incisiveness in a memorandum to McClellan that if they were not rested now, when would they ever be?
Despite the fact that McClellan would not pursue and destroy Lee, Lincoln still had the rare Union victory of Antietam, which would serve as the basis for his first Emancipation Proclamation. He called a cabinet meeting for September 21 to discuss and find new means to alleviate anguish in the homes of the North, and to raise the often-canvassed matter of emancipation.
When, in July 1862, Secretary of War Stanton and his young wife lost an infant child, James, Lincoln attended the funeral, and on the way back to the White House in a carriage with Seward and Welles, told them that he had “come to the conclusion that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.” The war had taken away the constitutional restrictions regarding freeing the slaves in Rebel communities. They could be freed as a matter of military necessity under the president’s war powers.
Soon after that discussion Montgomery Blair had warned Lincoln that the troops would resent any move to turn the war to save the Union into a war to free slaves, while Salmon Chase thought the proclamation Lincoln had in mind was far too soft. Lincoln had to reconcile and temper these opinions into cabinet approval of a final document. The September 21 cabinet meeting began interestingly and with a typical Lincoln flourish, part cunning, part naïveté. The president started off by reading the perplexed cabinet a chapter out of A High Handed Outrage in Utica by his favorite comic writer and performer, Artemus Ward. Many in the cabinet were more bemused than amused, and in that atmosphere, Lincoln presented his draft Emancipation Proclamation for comment.
The document offered the border states a scheme of compensated emancipation, followed by an “effort to colonize persons of African descent, with their consent, upon this continent or elsewhere.” Apart from that it declared that if the Rebels did not return to the Union by January 1, 1863, Lincoln would free “thenceforward and forever” all slaves in the Rebel states. The army and navy would recognize the freedom of slaves in the South. Most of the cabinet supported Lincoln, even though some of them thought the proclamation might have a dangerous impact on groups of people in the North, in the army, and in the border states. It was published the following day.
While some abolitionists applauded the proclamation as an opening gambit, and Ralph Waldo Emerson called it “an event worth the dreadful war,” others mocked it, for all that Lincoln had done was to liberate the slaves his armies had not so far encountered. He realized that this could leave the proclamation open to mockery, and some abolitionists at one end of the scale, and many Democratic newspapers and orators at the other, obliged him. He was accused too of inciting slave uprisings in the South.
One of the effects of the proclamation, however, was to put paid to any plan the British Cabinet had of recognizing the South. Lincoln had given the war a moral dimension the British could not gainsay. Thus Antietam had had its double impact—a military and a moral victory. This did not stop McClellan from reminding his soldiers in a grudging order to his army that any mistakes by the executive (he meant the proclamation) could be corrected at the polls in the coming midterm elections. McClellan felt outraged at being the unwitting catalyst of the proclamation.
Harrowed and hollowed out by the weight of decision and blood, Lincoln had, in the two years since Brady had taken his photograph in New York, aged ten. A number of witnesses mention how stooped he was. The grief in his eyes had taken on an irremediable depth. He was “hypo” ravaged. And yet, despite his agnosticism, he had come to believe in God as a historic force. “In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, but one must be wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party; and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are the best adaptation to effect his purpose.”
On November 7 Lincoln at last relieved McClellan of command. Though, as the president had feared, a number of officers told him to march on Washington and make himself dictator, McClellan did not do so. He believed that he would become the Democratic presidential candidate in 1864, by which time he expected the Republicans to be in such bad odor that he could be elected as a national savior. In fact he went so far as to urge his men to give his successor the same loyalty they had given him. That successor was Gen. Ambrose Burnside, a robust six-footer with ferocious “sideburns,” as people had begun to call those flourishes of facial hair in whimsical regard for the general. He had been approached earlier to replace McClellan, and had pleaded not to be given the job. Underneath his West Point braggadocio, he possessed an edgy, haunted soul.
The North punished the administration for emancipation, and for the terrible casualties of the war, in the elections of 1862. The North’s five big states—New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana—went to the Democrats, as did New Jersey. The Republicans
were forced into coalition with border Unionists and so retained control of Congress by a slim edge. The political tide was bitterly set against Lincoln, and he looked set for defeat in 1864, even if he managed to get the Republican nomination, which seemed unlikely. Despite his gesture of the Emancipation Proclamation, the radical, abolitionist wing of his party disliked his reticence on slavery and his failed pursuit of the war. And in the North now were an army of vocal opponents of the war whom Republicans called Copperheads. They urged immediate peace negotiations, and in the dour winter of 1862-63, when the Union could not find a general to win in Virginia, a negotiated peace seemed an attractive proposition.
In that December’s annual message to Congress, Lincoln held out to the battered Union the prospect of a population equal to that of Europe by 1930, in which year he believed, based on projections, the American population could reach 251 million. “And we will reach this, too, if we do not ourselves relinquish the chance, by the folly and evils of this Union, and by long and exhausting war springing from the only great element of national discord among us.” This coming glory—he saw it unambiguously as such—was a further justification for emancipation. Increasing population would make it easier for the United States to pay compensation for the emancipation of the slaves. He attacked the argument that “free colored persons” would injure and “displace white labor and white laborers.” “Is it true, then, that colored persons can displace any more white labor, by being free, than by remaining slaves?” In shortening the war, emancipation would pay for the future colonization of the blacks. The resonating end of that December speech was classic Lincoln oratory. It seems to belong to another age, to the late twentieth, early twenty-first century, say, when speeches have come to be crafted for their one or two memorable, easily quotable sentences. For compared with the oratory of the day, it had qualities of chaste simplicity. “In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”
December, like the previous December, brought no end to the anguish of Lincoln and the Union. The army had set up its winter quarters on the Rappahannock opposite the town of Fredericksburg, a river port backed by an escarpment. General Burnside permitted the Confederates two or three weeks to dig in on this high ground before he sent the army across to attack Marye’s Heights above the town. Division after division was launched piecemeal against the stone walls at the top of the bluff. Men went forward in the certainty of death, some of them—having made arrangements with undertakers in the town for their corpses to be shipped home—with their names pinned to their backs. The Union casualties outnumbered the Confederates by more than three to one. It was a frightful slaughter, and brought grievous news to the hearths of the North just when people thought the year’s dangers were over. Burnside broke down weeping at the mayhem he had caused, and Lincoln was again oppressed by the profoundest “hypo.”
And besides that, the cabinet was bickering, the florid and rather pietistic Salmon P. Chase encouraged in his own ambitions by the fact that, as one American said, “Nobody believes in him [Lincoln] anymore.” As his opening gambit Chase was trying to undermine Seward by having documents and opinions circulated to Republican senators claiming that Seward was not zealous in the prosecution of the war, that he improperly interfered in the business of other cabinet members, and that he did not allow important issues to get a full discussion in cabinet. By depicting Seward in these terms, Chase also cast Lincoln as a man who had no control over Seward. It was a message the Radical Republicans, who believed Lincoln wasn’t pursuing the war in the right way, or wasn’t sufficiently thoroughgoing about abolition, were willing to accept. Lincoln told his friend Browning, “They wish to get rid of me, and I am half disposed to gratify them.” The senators, many of them convinced of Chase’s picture of things, were already relaying their complaints to Lincoln.
Lincoln could sometimes look so sheepish and lugubrious that people forgot he was a man of potent political skills. Chase himself had done so. On the evening of December 18, Lincoln invited the Republican senators and the cabinet to his White House office, and put to his entire cabinet, in front of these senatorial witnesses, the questions that had been raised about Seward. Chase was embarrassed when all his fellow cabinet members said they were not aware of Seward’s strangling debate or interfering. When asked, Chase himself had to admit that Seward was not the evil genius the senators feared, and of course, as a corollary, affirmed that Lincoln was the leader of his own cabinet. Lincoln typically declared afterward, “If there were any worse Hell than he had been in for two days, he would like to know it.” He would frequently make this reference to the sufferings of hell—it was a recurrent image the “hypo” and vicious events forced on him.
Lincoln slept badly on the cold last night of an appalling year. In the morning, since none of the Rebel states had returned to the Union, he would need to issue a confirmatory proclamation, freeing their slaves. There was no victory to reinforce its validity. Out on the Mississippi, U. S. Grant had run into troubles in his plan to take Vicksburg. On all fronts there seemed to be delay and bewilderment. Lincoln knew from early messages received in the War Department telegraph office that a savage battle had just begun at Murfreesboro in Tennessee, at an important crossroads of the Nashville & Chattanooga Railroad.
The president woke early, lit the fire and gaslights in his office, and worked on the final version of the definitive Emancipation Proclamation. There were exemptions to emancipation.
“For the present,” parts of Louisiana under Union control; some occupied places in Virginia; areas of West Virginia (in which slave ownership was at a low level in any case); border states such as Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, which had remained in the Union; and Tennessee—which was now under Union control and whose people had in large part supported the Union or repented of their secession—were exempt. There the end of slavery would come a little more gradually. As for the rest, all slaves in the Rebel states were now “forever free. . . . I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.” Lincoln urged “the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence.” Former slaves “of suitable condition” would be admitted into the armed service of the United States. The idea of the black Union soldier, frequently promoted by abolitionist Northerners, was now given reality.
Mary liberated herself by giving a White House reception—her first public event since Willie had died. She was in exultant if shaky form. Despite her many Confederate relatives, she was elated at the proclamation, and her favorite son, Robert, had come down from Harvard to be with the family throughout the holidays. Mary survived the reception in a dress of gray silk. She had still not lost her faith in séances and charlatans, some of them genial, some of them vicious. According to Lizzie Keckley, Lincoln had had to point out to Mary the Washington mad-house and warn her gently that if she could not accommodate her grief, that was where she would end. So, even domestically, Lincoln was fighting an uncertain battle.
On the afternoon of New Year’s Day, a group of former slaves who had had the proclamation read to them came in joy to the White House lawn, a black preacher related, and called for the president to emerge, so that they could hug him to death. But Lincoln spent considerable time in the telegraph office in the next few days, waiting for news from Murfreesboro, where Gen. William Rosecrans’s army, driven north along the banks of Stone’s River, yet managed to hold their position and exhaust the enemy’s attack. The Rebels withdrew to Chattanooga, and Lincoln, who had been preparing to absorb and explain another Union defeat, was saved that trouble.
Close to home, along the Rappahannock, as Burnside attempted a maneuver against Lee, his wagons bogged axle-deep in mud. It was yet another dispiriting mistake. In the army along the Rappahannock, absenteeism, if not desertion, was now at a prodigious level—even some generals overstayed leave in northern cities. But no one cou
ld have shown such certainty and endurance as Lincoln. On January 26 the president invited Joe Hooker, a volatile, boozy, profane West Pointer, whose nickname was Fightin’ Joe, to the White House and handed him a letter:
I have placed you at the head of the Army of the Potomac. . . . I think it best for you to know that there are some things in regard to which, I am not quite satisfied with you. . . . I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a dictator. Of course, it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.
This tone was characteristic of Lincoln’s frankness with generals. He was pleased that Hooker was full of ideas not only about how to defeat Lee but about what he would do once Richmond was captured. But Lincoln would have to wait until the earth dried out in the spring to find out if he had made a good choice.
13
BY THE LATE WINTER of 1863, Lincoln’s administration had already transformed the American economy and given it its modern cast. This had been a matter of necessity. At the start of 1862 Lincoln said, “Chase has no money, and he tells me he can raise no more. The bottom is out of the tub.” Union defeats in 1861 had caused banks to panic, suspend specie payment, and issue notes of questionable value that left the Treasury short of the means to pay contractors. Lincoln and Chase now initiated measures that, in the old days, with Southern Democrats to deal with, would not have been approved by the House. Indeed, in seceding, the South gave up its domination of policy making. Up to the start of the war, in the seventy-two years of the existence of the United States, a series of Southern slaveholders had occupied the White House for a total of just under fifty years. (After the war it would be a hundred years before a Southerner was elected president.) The South and its upholders also dominated the House and Senate for huge swaths of time, and designed policies to favor the plantation gentry.