Nor was Lincoln an effective leader of his party in the Congress, where

after secession the Republicans had overwhelming majorities. Long a Whig,

vigilant against executive "usurpation," he earnestly felt that as

president he ought not to exert even "indirect influence to affect the

action of congress." In consequence there was poor rapport between Capitol

Hill and the WHITE HOUSE. Even those measures that the President earnestly

advocated were weakened or defeated by members of his own party. But on

important issues relating to the conduct of the war and the restoration of

the Union, Lincoln followed his own counsel, ignoring the opinions of

Congress.

More than counterbalancing these deficiencies, however, were Lincoln's

strengths. Foremost was his unflinching dedication to the preservation of

the Union. Convinced that the United States was more than an ordinary

nation, that it was a proving ground for the idea of democratic government,

Lincoln felt that he was leading a struggle to preserve "the last, best

hope of earth." Despite war-weariness and repeated defeats, he never

wavered in his "paramount object." To restore national unity he would do

what was necessary, without regard to legalistic construction of the

CONSTITUTION, political objections in Congress, or personal popularity.

Partly because of that single-minded dedication, the American people, in

time, gave to Lincoln a loyalty that proved to be another of his great

assets. Making himself accessible to all who went to the White House,

Lincoln learned what ordinary citizens felt about their government. In

turn, his availability helped create in the popular mind the stereotype of

"Honest Abe," the people's president, straightforward, and sympathetic.

Lincoln's mastery of rhetoric further endeared him to the public. In an age

of pretentious orators, he wrote clearly and succinctly. Purists might

object when he said that the Confederates in one engagement "turned tail

and ran," but the man in the street approved. Lincoln's 268-word address at

the dedication of the national cemetery at Gettysburg meant more than the

preceding two-hour oration by Edward Everett.

Another of Lincoln's assets was the fact that he was a genius at the game

of politics. He astutely managed the patronage at his disposal,

distributing favors so as to bind local politicians to his administration

and to undermine potential rivals for the presidency. He understood the

value of silence and secrecy in politics and refrained from creating

divisive issues or causing needless confrontations. He was extraordinarily

flexible and pragmatic in the means he employed to restore the Union. "My

policy," he frequently said, "is to have no policy." That did not mean that

his was a course of drift. Instead, it reflected his understanding that, as

president, he could only handle problems as they arose, confident that

popular support for his solutions would be forthcoming.

Lincoln believed that the ultimate decision in the Civil War was beyond

his, or any other man's, control. "Now, at the end of three years

struggle," he wrote, as the war reached its climax, "the nation's condition

is not what either party, or any man, devised or expected. God alone can

claim it."

Sumter Crisis

In 1861, Lincoln's weaknesses were more evident than his strengths.

Immediately after his inauguration he faced a crisis over Fort Sumter in

the Charleston (S. C.) harbor, one of the few remaining U.S. forts in the

seceded states still under federal control. Informed that the troops would

have to be supplied or withdrawn, the inexperienced President anxiously

explored solutions. Withdrawal would appear a cowardly backdown, but

reinforcing the fort might precipitate hostilities. Lincoln painfully

concluded that he would send supplies to Sumter and let the Confederates

decide whether to fire on the flag of the Union. Historians differ as to

whether Lincoln anticipated that hostilities would follow his decision, but

they agree that Lincoln was determined that he would not order the first

shot fired. Informed of the approach of the federal supply fleet,

Confederate authorities at Charleston during the early hours of April 12

decided to bombard the fort. Thus, the Civil War began.

Because Congress was not in session, Lincoln moved swiftly to mobilize the

Union by executive order. His requisition to the states for 75,000

volunteers precipitated the secession of Virginia, North Carolina,

Tennessee, and Arkansas. Kentucky tried to adopt an official policy of

"neutrality," while secession sentiment in Maryland was so strong that for

a time Washington, D.C., was cut off from communication with the North. In

order to restore order, Lincoln directed that the privilege of the writ of

habeas corpus be suspended, at first along the line between Washington and

Philadelphia and later throughout most of the North, so that known

secessionists and persons suspected of disloyalty could be held without

trial. At the same time the President, without congressional authorization--

and thus in direct violation of the Constitution--ordered an increase in

the size of the regular Army and Navy. Doubting the loyalty of certain

government officials, he also entrusted public funds to private agents in

New York to purchase arms and supplies.

When the 37th Congress assembled in special session on July 4, 1861, it was

thus confronted with a fait accompli. The President, acting in his capacity

as commander in chief, had put himself at the head of the whole Union war

effort, arrogating to himself greater powers than those claimed by any

previous American president. His enemies termed him a dictator and a

tyrant. In fact, his power was limited, partly by his own instincts, partly

by the knowledge that his actions would be judged in four years at the

polls, and chiefly by the inadequacy of the federal bureaucracy.

Nevertheless, the role of Congress was sharply defined: it could

appropriate money to support the war, it could initiate legislation on

issues not related to the war, it could debate questions relating to the

conflict. But direction of the Union war effort was to remain firmly in

Lincoln's hands.

Military Policy

The first responsibility of the President was the successful

prosecution of the war against the Confederate States. In this duty he was

hampered by the lack of a strong military tradition in America and by the

shortage of trained officers. During the early months of the conflict the

War Department was headed by Simon Cameron, and corruption and inefficiency

were rife. Not until January, 1862, when Lincoln replaced Cameron with the

imperious but efficient Edwin M. Stanton, was some semblance of order

brought to the procurement of supplies for the federal armies. Navy

secretary Gideon Welles was above suspicion, but he was inexperienced in

nautical affairs and cautious in accepting innovations, such as the

ironclad monitors.

Even more difficult was the task of finding capable general officers. At

first the President gave supreme command of the Union forces to the elderly

Gen. Winfield Scott. After the Confederate victory at the first battle of

Bull Run (July 21, 1861), Lincoln increasingly entrusted power to George B.

McClellan, a brilliant organizer and administrator. But McClellan's

caution, his secretiveness, and his willingness to strip the defenses of

Washington the better to attack Richmond led Lincoln to look elsewhere for

military advice. Borrowing "a large number of strategical works" from the

Library of Congress, he attempted to direct the overall conduct of the war

himself by issuing a series of presidential general war orders. Gen. Henry

W. Halleck, whom Lincoln brought to Washington as a strategic planner,

served more as a glorified clerk, and the President repeatedly exercised

personal supervision over the commanders in the field.

Not until the emergence of Ulysses S. GRANT, hero of Vicksburg and

Chattanooga, did Lincoln find a general to whom he could entrust overall

direction of the war. Even then, the President kept a close eye on military

operations, advising and even occasionally overruling the general, but

mostly supporting and encouraging him.

Emancipation

Strongly opposed to slavery, Lincoln made a sharp distinction between

his personal views and his public responsibilities. He had been elected on

a platform that pledged not to interfere with the "peculiar institution" in

states where it already existed and had sworn to uphold a Constitution that

protected Southern rights. From the first day of the war, however, he was

under pressure from the more extreme antislavery men in his own party to

strike at slavery as the mainspring of the rebellion. Counterbalancing this

pressure was the need to conciliate opinion in the border states, which

still recognized slavery but were loyal to the Union. Any move against

slavery, Lincoln feared, would cause their secession.

Wartime pressure inescapably forced the president toward emancipation.

Foreign powers could not be expected to sympathize with the North, when

both the Union and the Confederate governments were pledged to uphold

slavery. As the war dragged on, more and more northerners saw the absurdity

of continuing to protect the "peculiar institution," which, by keeping a

subservient labor force on the farms, permitted the Confederates to put

proportionately more of their able-bodied white men into their armies. When

Union casualties mounted, even racist northerners began to favor enlisting

blacks in the Union armies.

As sentiment for emancipation mounted, Lincoln was careful to keep complete

control of the problem in his own hands. He sharply overruled premature

efforts by two of his military commanders, Frйmont in Missouri and David

Hunter in the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, to declare

slaves in their military theaters free. At the same time, the President

urged the border states to accept a program of gradual emancipation, with

federal compensation.

By midsummer of 1862, however, it was evident that these efforts would not

be successful. Still troubled by divided Union sentiment and still

uncertain of his constitutional powers to act, Lincoln prepared to issue an

emancipation proclamation. Secretary of State William H. Seward, however,

persuaded him that such an order, issued at the low point of Union military

fortunes, would be taken as evidence of weakness. The President postponed

his move until after the Battle of Antietam. Then, on Sept. 22, 1862, he

issued his preliminary proclamation, announcing that after 100 days all

slaves in states still in rebellion would be forever free. This was

followed, in due course, by the definitive Emancipation Proclamation of

Jan. 1, 1863.

Because the proclamation exempted slavery in the border states and in all

Confederate territory already under the control of Union armies and because

Lincoln was not certain that his action would be sustained by the Supreme

Court, he strongly urged Congress to adopt the 13th Amendment, forever

abolishing slavery throughout the country. Congressional action on this

measure was completed in January 1865. Lincoln considered the amendment

"the complete consummation of his own work, the emancipation proclamation."

Foreign Relations

Never having traveled abroad and having few acquaintances in the

courts of Europe, Lincoln, for the most part, left the conduct of foreign

policy to Seward. Yet, at critical times he made his influence felt. Early

in his administration, when Seward recklessly proposed to divert attention

from domestic difficulties by threatening a war against Spain and perhaps

other powers, the President quietly squelched the project. Again, in 1861,

Lincoln intervened to tone down a dispatch Seward wrote to Charles Francis

Adams, the U.S. minister in London, which probably would have led to a

break in diplomatic relations with Britain. In the Trent affair, that same

year, when Union Capt. Charles Wilkes endangered the peace by removing two

Confederate emissaries from a British ship and taking them into custody,

Lincoln took a courageous but unpopular stand by insisting that the

prisoners be released.

Wartime Politics

Throughout the war Lincoln was the subject of frequent, and often

vitriolic, attacks, both from the Democrats who thought he was proceeding

too drastically against slavery and from the Radicals in his own party--men

like Charles Sumner, Benjamin F. Wade, and Zachariah Chandler--who

considered him slow and ineffective. Partisan newspapers abused the

President as "a slangwhanging stump speaker," a "half-witted usurper," a

"mole-eyed" monster with "soul ... of leather,""the present turtle at the

head of the government." Men of his own party openly charged that he was

"unfit," a "political coward," a "dictator,""timid and

ignorant,""shattered, dazed, utterly foolish."

A minority president in 1861, Lincoln lost further support in the

congressional elections of 1862, when Democrats took control of the crucial

states of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. As the 1864

election approached, it was clear that Lincoln would face formidable

opposition for reelection, not merely from a Democratic candidate but from

rivals within his own party. Republican anti-Lincoln sentiment centered on

treasury secretary Salmon P. Chase, who was working with the Radical

critics of Lincoln in Congress. The Chase boom failed, however, chiefly

because Lincoln insisted upon keeping the ambitious secretary in his

cabinet. At the same time, Lincoln's own agents were working quietly to sew

up the state delegations to the Republican national convention. Even

Chase's own state of Ohio pledged to vote for Lincoln. Facing certain

defeat, Chase withdrew from the race, but Lincoln kept him in the cabinet

until after the Republican national convention, which met in Baltimore in

June 1864.

Lacking a prominent standard bearer, some disgruntled Republicans gathered

in Cleveland in May 1864 to nominate Frйmont, but the movement never made

much headway. Radical pressure was powerful enough, however, to persuade

Lincoln to drop the most outspokenly conservative member of his cabinet,

Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, and Frйmont withdrew from the race.

Lincoln's Republican critics continued to hope they could summon a new

national convention, which would replace the President with a more Radical

candidate, but this scheme died with news of Union military victories.

For a time Democratic opposition in 1864 to Lincoln's reelection also

appeared to be formidable, for people were tired of the endless war and

disinclined to fight for the liberty of black men. But the Democrats found

it impossible to bring together the two major groups of Lincoln's critics--

those who wanted the President to end the war, and those who wanted him to

prosecute it more vigorously. Meeting at Chicago in August, the Democratic

national convention nominated a candidate, Gen. George B. McClellan,

pledged to the successful conclusion of the war on a platform that called

the war a failure. McClellan's repudiation of this peace plank showed how

fundamentally split were the Democrats.

Whatever chance the Democrats had in 1864 was lost when the war at last

began to favor the Union cause. By the late summer of 1864, Grant had

forced Lee back into the defenses of Richmond and Petersburg. In the West,

Sherman's advancing army captured Atlanta on September 2. At the same time,

Admiral Farragut's naval forces closed the key Confederate port of Mobile.

When the ballots were cast in November, the results reflected both these

Union triumphs and the rift among the opposition. Lincoln carried every

state except Kentucky, Delaware, and New Jersey. He polled 2,206,938

popular votes to McClellan's 1,803,787 and won an electoral vote victory of

212 to 21. It must be remembered, however, that voters in the seceded

states, the strongholds of the Democratic party, did not participate in the

election.

Life in the White House

Beset by military, diplomatic, and political problems, the President

tried to keep his family life as normal as possible. The two youngest

Lincoln boys, Thomas (Tad) and William Wallace (Willie), were high spirited

lads. Their older brother, the sober Robert Todd Lincoln, was less

frequently in Washington, because he was first a student at Harvard and

later an aide to General Grant. Despite the snobbishness of Washington

society and criticisms from those who wanted all social affairs suspended

because of the war, the Lincolns continued to hold receptions in the White

House. But the President found these affairs costly and tiring. He would

slip away late at night after a White House party to visit the telegraph

room of the War Department to read the latest dispatches from the front. He

never took a vacation, but in summer he moved his family to the cooler and

more secluded Soldier's Home in Washington.

Lincoln visibly aged during the war years, and by 1865 he appeared almost

haggard. His life was made harder by personal trials. Early in 1862, Willie

died of typhoid. His mother, always high-strung and hysterical, suffered a

nervous breakdown, and Lincoln had to watch over her with careful

solicitude. But Lincoln emerged from his public and private agonies with a

new serenity of soul. Any trace of vanity or egotism was burned out by the

fires of war. In his second inaugural address, his language reached a new

level of eloquence. Urging his countrymen to act "with malice toward none;

with charity for all," he looked beyond the end of the war toward binding

up the nation's wounds, so as to "achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting

peace."

Reconstruction

From the start of the Civil War, Lincoln was deeply concerned about

the terms under which the Southern states, once subdued, should be restored

to the Union. He had no fixed plan for reconstruction. At the outset, he

would have welcomed a simple decision on the part of any Southern state

government to rescind its ordinance of secession and return its delegation

to Congress. By 1863, however, to this war aim of union he added that of

liberty, for he now insisted that emancipation of the slaves was a

necessary condition for restoration. By the end of the war he was beginning

to add a third condition, equality, for he realized that minimal guarantees

of civil rights for blacks were essential. Privately, he let it be known

that he favored extending the franchise in the Southern states to some of

the blacks--"as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those

who have fought gallantly in our ranks."

As to means by which to achieve these goals, Lincoln was also flexible.

When Union armies advanced into the South, he appointed military governors

for the states that were conquered. Most notable of these was the military

governor of Tennessee, Andrew JOHNSON, who became Lincoln's running mate in

1864. In December 1863, Lincoln enunciated a comprehensive reconstruc tion

program, pledging pardon and amnesty to Confederates who were prepared to

swear loyalty to the Union and promising to turn back control of local

governments to the civil authorities in the South when as few as 10% of the

1860 voting population participated in the elections. Governments operating

under this 10% plan were set up in Louisiana and Arkansas and soon were

petitioning for readmission to Congress.

Inevitably Lincoln's program ran into opposition, both because it

represented a gigantic expansion of presidential powers and because it

appeared not to give adequate guarantees to the freedmen. Defeating an

attempt to seat the senators from the new government in Arkansas, Radical

Republicans in Congress in July 1864 set forth their own terms for

restoration in the far harsher Wade-Davis Bill. When Lincoln pocket-vetoed

this measure, declaring that he was "unprepared to be inflexibly committed

to any single plan of reconstruction," Radicals accused him of "dictatorial

usurpation."

The stage was set for further conflict over reconstruction when Congress

reassembled in December 1864, just after Lincoln's reelection. Assisted by

the Democrats, the Radicals forced Lincoln's supporters to drop the bill to

readmit Louisiana. Lincoln was deeply saddened by the defeat. "Concede that

the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is

to the fowl," he said, "shall we sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg

than by smashing it?" On April 11, 1865, in his last public address, the

President defended his reconstruction policy.

Death

Three days later, the President was shot by the actor John Wilkes

Booth while attending a performance at Ford's Theater in Washington. He

died at 7:22 the following morning, April 15, 1865. After lying in state in

the Capitol, his body was taken to Springfield, Ill., where he was buried

in Oak Ridge Cemetery.

Benjamin P. Thomas,

Author of "Abraham Lincoln: A Biography" and

David Herbert Donald

Harry C. Black Professor of History and Director of the Institute of

Southern History, The Johns Hopkins University

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Source

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