A. Lincoln A Biography

Chapter 18
A People’s Contest April 1861–July 1861

THIS ISSUE EMBRACES MORE THAN THE FATE OF THESE UNITED STATES.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Message to Congress in special session, July 4, 1861

ON THE MORNING OF APRIL 15, 1861, THE CITY OF WASHINGTON SHUDDERED with panic. Everywhere citizens looked, they found streets barricaded and buildings blocked by police and soldiers. The navy commandeered boats on the Potomac and set up pickets along the river. Many businesses were closed.
In the White House, Lincoln paced his second-floor office above the East Room, visibly concerned about the security and safety of the city. His secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, found Lincoln in a state of “nervous tension.” The president reached for his telescope, climbed out on the roof of the Executive Mansion, and scanned the Potomac, looking for any boats conveying Union troops. He then turned his lens toward Alexandria, where, in the midst of church steeples and chimneys, he could see Confederate flags flying in the breeze.
In the days after the fall of Fort Sumter, residents of the capital struggled to comprehend the unfolding political turmoil. On April 17, 1861, came a report from Richmond that Virginia would schedule a vote in May. The next day, a small company of Union soldiers set fire to Harpers Ferry, where the states of Maryland and Virginia met, before the Union installation could be overrun by a larger Confederate force. On April 19, Baltimore erupted in riot as Southern sympathizers tried to stop New England troops from passing through their city on their way to Washington. By April 20, federal authorities at the immense Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, Virginia, were burning buildings and scuttling eleven ships in anticipation of a takeover by Confederate troops. And on Sunday evening, April 21, rioters seized the telegraph office in Baltimore, cutting off all communications from Washington to the North. The next day, Horatio Nelson Taft wrote in his diary, “We are in a beleaguered City with enimies on every side and at our doors.”
Lincoln wondered aloud: Who would defend Washington? The national army, commanded by seventy-four-year-old General Winfield Scott, comprised only sixteen thousand men, the majority spread across seventy-nine outposts on the Western frontier. Almost one-third of its officers were leaving their commissions to join the Confederacy. To make up for the shortage of troops in or near Washington, Scott was forced to organize a few new regiments of old regulars, who called themselves the Silver Grays. Cassius M. Clay, wearing three pistols, organized a group of Kentuckians, while Senator-elect Jim Lane, a veteran of the Kansas border wars, organized his Frontier Guards, who set up headquarters in the East Room of the White House to the delight of Tad and Willie Lincoln. More vigilantes than military men, Clay’s battalion was stationed at the Willard Hotel while Lane’s Frontier Guards stood guard around the Executive Mansion.
SCOTT WAS TOO OLD and obese to command the Union forces, but Lincoln did seek his counsel for recommendations for the post. Without hesitation, Scott suggested Virginian Colonel Robert E. Lee.
Lee, the son of Revolutionary War hero “Light Horse” Harry Lee, graduated from West Point in 1829, earning the distinction as the first cadet to graduate from the academy without a single demerit. In 1831, Lee married Mary Anna Randolph Custis, the great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, at her parents’ home, Arlington House, just across the Long Bridge from Washington. Posted to the Corps of Engineers, Lee served on General Scott’s staff in the Mexican War, where he distinguished himself for his leadership of troops. After the war, Lee became superintendent of the military academy at West Point. He achieved further recognition for leading the force of marines that captured Harpers Ferry in the raid against John Brown in 1859.
Lincoln asked Francis Blair, Sr., a fellow Southerner, to approach Lee about commanding the Union forces. Lee, who had been undergoing a deep internal struggle about where his loyalty lay, told Blair that he deprecated secession, but he could not take up arms against his native state of Virginia. After speaking with Blair, Lee went to see Scott, a Virginian who had been a father figure to him, to deliver the same message. Lincoln was disappointed to learn that Lee quickly accepted an invitation from Governor John Letcher of Virginia one week later, April 25, 1861, to become a major general in command of all of Virginia’s forces.
WAR FEVER SPREAD quickly across the North. Lincoln issued a proclamation calling up seventy-five thousand troops from state militias to serve as three-month volunteers to suppress what he called an insurrection “by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” For his authority, Lincoln relied upon a provision of a 1795 militia law.
In the North and Northwest, the response to Lincoln’s proclamation was overwhelming. Maine governor Israel Washburn, Jr., wired his guarantee: “The people of Maine of all parties will rally with alacrity to the maintenance of the government.” Ohio’s governor William Denni-son assured Lincoln that he “will furnish the largest number you will receive.” Governor Oliver P. Morton of Indiana promised ten thousand men “for the defense of the nation and to uphold the authority of the Government.”
Lincoln’s request for troops from the border states elicited replies that ranged from evasive to defiant. William Burton, governor of Delaware, delayed his answer but finally replied that his state had no militia law. Governor Beriah Magoffin of Kentucky replied brusquely, “Kentucky will furnish no troops for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern States.” Claiborne Fox Jackson, the new governor of Mssouri, replied, “Your requisition, in my judgment, is illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary in its object. … Not one man will the state of Missouri furnish to carry on any such unholy crusade.”
Massachusetts governor John A. Andrew, one of a coterie of radical Northern leaders, had begun assembling regiments in January, long before Lincoln even took office. As Lincoln’s call to arms raced across the telegraph in April, the Massachusetts troops, with new rifles, were marching in a sleet storm on the Boston Common. Andrew responded, “Dispatch received. By what route should I send?”
Governor Andrew asked a troubling question. As the troops from the North proceeded toward Washington, they came upon the same problem that Lincoln had encountered nearly two months earlier: how to pass through the narrow neck of Maryland, which commanded the only railroad links to Washington. Maryland, a border state, was filled with Southern sympathizers. Baltimore, located at the top of the Chesapeake Bay, was the center for three major railroads to the West and the North.
The Sixth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry was the first military unit to approach Washington. The seven hundred men arrived in Baltimore on the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad at the President Street Station at noon on April 19, 1861. Immediately, horse-drawn cars began to transport the troops through the city so that their cars could be hooked up to a Baltimore and Ohio engine at Camden Station, one mile away, for the trip to Washington. Word spread quickly that troops from the abolitionist stronghold of Massachusetts had arrived in Baltimore. The soldiers had not gone far along Pratt Street before an angry crowd jeered and then began throwing bricks and stones at them. Panicking, some soldiers fired into the crowd. Twelve civilians and four soldiers died in the riot; scores were injured. The unrest in Baltimore inflamed secessionist passions in the South even as the editors of several Northern newspapers called for Baltimore to be burned to the ground. The riot helped galvanize both Union and Confederate commitments. With no casualties at Fort Sumter, the Baltimore riot of April 19 drew the first blood of the Civil War.
Through these fearful days, authorities in Maryland pressured the president. Unionist governor Thomas Hicks and Baltimore mayor George W. Brown wired Lincoln, “Send no more troops here.” In Lincoln’s reply on April 20, 1861, he thanked the governor and the mayor for their attempts to preserve the peace, but declared, “Now, and ever, I shall do all in my power for peace, consistently with the maintenance of government.” That evening, John Hay wrote in his diary, “The streets were full of the talk of Baltimore. … The town is full tonight of feverish rumours about a meditated assault upon this town.”
On April 22, 1861, a Baltimore committee of fifty called on Lincoln at the White House to acknowledge the independence of the Southern states and to ask that no more troops be sent through Baltimore. Lincoln’s patience had run out. He reminded the Baltimore delegation, “Your citizens attack troops sent to the defense of the Government, and yet you would have me break my oath and surrender the Government without a blow.” In Lincoln’s answer he sought to remind his audience of presidential precedent: “There is no Washington in that—no Jackson in that—no manhood or honor in that.” He asked the representatives how the troops were supposed to get to Washington. “Our men are not moles, and can’t dig under the earth; they are not birds, and can’t fly through the air.” This abrasive challenge by Maryland authorities stiffened Lincoln’s resolve to defend the capital and the Union.
Lincoln was looking out of the upstairs windows of the Executive Mansion on April 24, 1861, when the troops of the Sixth Massachusetts Volunteers finally reached Pennsylvania Avenue. Clara Barton, a thirty-nine-year-old U.S. Patent Office clerk from Massachusetts, organized a relief program for the soldiers of her home state, beginning on that day a lifetime of nursing and philanthropy. Seeing the troops, Lincoln felt a momentary sense of relief, but he worried that secessionists from Maryland might use the same Baltimore and Ohio tracks to assault the capital. Lincoln hosted some of the wounded officers and men at the Executive Mansion. He commended their courage and wondered aloud about what had happened to the regiments from other states, none of which had arrived in Washington. “I began to believe that there is no North. The Seventh regiment is a myth. Rhode Island is another. You are the only real thing.”
But two days later, the Seventh Regiment of the New York State Mlitia arrived in Washington after bypassing Baltimore, sailing down the Chesapeake Bay to Annapolis, Maryland, and traveling by train the thirty miles to the capital. In the spring sunshine, Lincoln waited outside the White House as the soldiers, with their splendid regimental brass band, marched up the entire length of Pennsylvania Avenue. Their arrival “created much enthusiasm and relief.” The gloom of the ten days following Fort Sumter disappeared as windows were opened and people took to the streets to meet the young Union soldiers. Lincoln waved his welcome to the troops.
“WANTED—A LEADER!”
Even as Lincoln enjoyed reviewing the Seventh New York Regiment, the criticism of his leadership grew louder. He had long since learned to discount condemnation from opposition Democratic newspapers, but it became more difficult to ignore criticism from his friends. On April 25, 1861, he read an editorial in the New York Times, opining, “In every great crisis, the human heart demands a leader that incarnates its ideas, its emotions and its aims. Till such a leader appears, everything is disorder, disaster, and defeat. The moment he takes the helm, order, promptitude and confidence follow as the necessary result. When we see such results—we know that a hero leads.” Something about this particular article compelled Lincoln to clip and save it, including its final charge: “No such hero at present directs affairs.”
Lincoln faced another challenged when Southern sympathizers in Maryland started cutting telegraph wires, burning bridges, and doing everything in their power to disrupt communications between the North and the capital. Maryland, a state noted for its crabs, was situated geographically like one, with claws pinching in on the capital from three sides.
On April 27, 1861, Lincoln gave an order to his top commander, General Scott, authorizing him “to suspend the writ of habeas corpus” if “an insurrection against the laws of the United States” erupted anywhere along a line from Philadelphia to Baltimore to Washington. The president instructed Scott to make arrests without specific charges. The right of habeas corpus, which protects citizens from illegal detention, requires that a prisoner be brought before a court to decide the legality of his arrest.
The responses to the suspension of habeas corpus created another predicament for Lincoln. Since the termination of the Revolutionary War seventy-eight years before, Americans had sailed upon a remarkably peaceful sea, with brief interruptions for the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. Unlike Europeans and Latin Americans, Americans had become accustomed to living in an open society. The nation was a society of small towns, where most citizens never saw a national army, never encountered a national police force, and encountered little federal intrusion. Authority was vested in the town mayors or constables. Now, in 1861, the arrest of citizens by a national army created a sensation. It caused people to consider, many for the first time, the vessel—the Constitution—in which they were sailing. Fortunately, the person at the helm was an astute lawyer and adroit politician.
A test case of habeas corpus came one month later when John Mer-ryman was arrested on May 25, 1861, at his home in Cockeysville, Maryland, for allegedly drilling troops to aid the secessionist movement. Merryman was imprisoned at Fort McHenry, the star-shaped brick fort best known for its defense of Baltimore harbor in the War of 1812. Merryman’s lawyer petitioned the federal court in Baltimore to look at the charges against him under the writ of habeas corpus.
The federal judge who heard the case just happened to be Chief Justice Roger Taney, who had offered the majority opinion in the Dred Scott case in 1857. Merryman obtained a writ from Taney ordering that he be either tried before a regular court or released. When Taney sent his order to Fort McHenry to be served, the officer in charge refused to receive it, citing Lincoln’s order.
The Constitution, article 1, section 9, specifies that the right of habeas corpus “shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” The Constitution does not say who is authorized to suspend the privilege, but most legal experts, up until 1861, believed the power belonged to Congress, because the suspension clause was found in article 1, which enumerated congressional power. The framers of the Constitution, working against the background of resistance to the powers of a king, George III, placed the habeas corpus clause under congressional power because they were wary of an American president someday assuming monarchical powers.
Habeas corpus became the only principle of English common law that found its way into the Constitution. In the years leading up to the Civil War, habeas corpus, and corollaries to it, was not studied in law schools nor was it a part of the curriculum at West Point. When habeas corpus was discussed, the debate arose over the contentious fugitive slave law. The writ of habeas corpus came to symbolize America’s commitment to individual freedom. While Lincoln believed that secession went against the Constitution, many argued that arbitrary arrest did as well. Lincoln understood that he had defied the mainstream of judicial opinion in his actions.
In the end, Lincoln chose a course of no action: He did not respond, appeal, or order the release of Merryman. Chief Justice Taney, on May 28, 1861, ruling in Ex parte Merryman, gladly delivered a sermon to Lincoln and the nation about the true meaning of the Constitution. Taking care to strike his title as presiding judge of the U.S. Circuit Court, Baltimore, in favor of chief justice, he argued that Lincoln was usurping the role of both Congress and the judicial branches of government in his employment of the military to carry out his purposes. Taney warned that Lincoln was on the road to becoming a military dictator. Nevertheless, the president’s decisive action was applauded by the Republican press.
ON MAY 3, Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for an additional 42,034 three-year volunteers and 18,000 sailors, as well as expanding the regular army by 22,714 men. By the end of May, the war was beginning to achieve a human face, for no one more than Lincoln.
Somehow during the first confusing days of the Civil War, Lincoln found time to correspond with a young soldier named Elmer E. Ellsworth. Born in Saratoga County, New York, in 1837, Ellsworth had moved to Springfield, Illinois, in August 1860, to read law in Lincoln’s office. Boyish in appearance, only five feet six, with clean-cut features, Ellsworth quickly became like a son to Lincoln. He accompanied the Lincolns on the Presidential Special to Washington. With Robert away at Harvard, Ellsworth became like an older brother to the two younger Lincoln boys, even catching the measles from them.
Ellsworth, after meeting a French Zouave veteran, Charles A. DeVillier, reorganized the Sixtieth Regiment of the Illinois State Militia into a Zouave unit. Ellsworth led his fifty young American men, dressed in bright red, blue, and gold uniforms with jaunty red caps with orange or gold decoration. In city after city, Ellsworth’s Zouaves mesmerized audiences as they went through their military routines: marching, retreating, parrying and thrusting their bayonets, and loading and firing their Sharps rifles in every possible position, even kneeling and on their backs.
After Fort Sumter, Ellsworth hurried to New York City, where he organized the New York Zouaves, an 1,100-man volunteer regiment made up of New York firemen. Returning to Washington on April 29, 1861, he paraded his disciplined troops up the “Ave,” the locals’ name for Pennsylvania Avenue. Thereafter, almost daily, Ellsworth paraded his men in front of the Executive Mansion, and sometimes on the South Lawn, for Lincoln to review with pride.
When Virginia formally seceded on May 23, 1861, Ellsworth prepared his men to march on Alexandria. Landing at the Alexandria waterfront early on the morning of May 24, Ellsworth led his men to the telegraph office to cut all communication to the South. Spying a Confederate flag flying from the Marshall House, a three-story hotel, Ellsworth crossed the street and went inside. He took down the flag, but as he was coming back down the stairs, James W. Jackson, the hotel owner, shot and killed him with a double-barrel shotgun. Elmer Ellsworth was the first commissioned officer to die in the Civil War.
An officer brought news of Ellsworth’s death to the White House. The young captain found Lincoln in the library and told him the sad news. At that moment, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts and a reporter entered the library. Lincoln, stunned and heartbroken, turned to the visitors, extended his hand, and said simply, “Excuse me, but I cannot talk.”


Elmer Ellsworth almost like a son to Abraham Lincoln, was the first Union officer to die in the Civil War. This illustration depicts the deed of the first hero killed in battle.

Abraham and Mary went down to the Washington Navy Yard to view Ellsworth’s body. The president ordered it to lie in state in the East Room. A funeral service took place in the White House on May 26, 1861. Throughout the North, Ellsworth became a symbol of courageous young men willing to give their lives for the Union. His death also helped shake off any remaining complacency in the Northern public.
Overcome with grief, Lincoln wrote a letter to Ellsworth’s parents on the day before the funeral. “In the untimely loss of your noble son, our affliction here, is scarcely less than your own.” He described Ellsworth’s sterling qualities, “a fine intellect, an indomitable energy, and a taste altogether military, constituted in him, as seemed to me, the best natural talent, in that department, I ever knew.” Lincoln then turned to his own relationship with the young man—“as intimate as the disparity of our ages, and my engrossing engagements, would permit.” He added, “What was conclusive of his good heart, he never forgot his parents. … In the hope that it may be no intrusion upon the sacredness of your sorrow, I have ventured to address this tribute to your brave and early fallen child. May God give you that consolation which is beyond all earthly power.” Lincoln’s letter, the first of hundreds he would write to the parents or spouses of fallen soldiers, is remarkable in both its affection and eloquence—written by a man consumed in grief.
THE MOST PUBLIC MAN in America lived in a White House that served as both home and office. The West Wing, which houses the current White House offices, would not be added until 1902 by President Theo dore Roosevelt. This arrangement became the setting of an odd mixture of politics and pomp.
William Howard Russell, correspondent of the Times of London, described the White House as “the moderate mansion.” He and other visitors from abroad compared it unfavorably to London’s Buckingham Palace or Paris’s Tuileries. Abraham and Mary Lincoln, on the contrary, were impressed with a home that had thirty-one rooms set amid twenty-two acres of woodlands. To try to add to the dignity of the residence, President James K. Polk had placed a bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson on the North Lawn in 1848. President Buchanan had built a conservatory to replace a greenhouse, but admittedly much of the surrounding woodlands were untidy and contained old, unused buildings and sheds. There was also the marshy Ellipse that slanted down to the Potomac River. The White House had obtained city water just two years before the Lincolns arrived.


Mathew Brady took this photograph of Mary Lincoln sometime in 1861. She is proud of her role as the hostess of the White House and is seen here in a beautiful gown with a floral headdress.

Inside, the Executive Mansion—as it was called on official stationery until the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt—boasted the large elegant East Room, the ornate Red Room with a piano, and the lovely Blue Room, on the main floor. On their first evening in their new home, Mary Lincoln led a tour of inspection and was surprised to find the upstairs family quarters in shabby condition, with cracked wallpaper, worn carpets, dilapidated draperies, and furniture that looked like it had belonged to the first residents, John and Abigail Adams. Rather than an Executive Mansion, most of the private residence had the appearance of a run-down hotel.
Mary Lincoln believed she was prepared, by family background and education, to be “First Lady,” a title that had been conferred for the first time in 1857 upon Harriet Lane, the orphaned daughter of bachelor James Buchanan’s much-loved sister. At age forty-two, Mary eagerly set out to take responsibility for the public life in the White House.
She welcomed her new position. If her husband was the new commander in chief in the masculine public sphere of the nation, she wanted to be the commander in chief in the feminine sphere of the home. As her husband took the lead in building a ragtag army into a modern, well-equipped military, she became determined to turn the run-down White House into a modern, well-furnished public place for the people.
Mary found herself living a difficult “semiprivate” life, a space in between the customary private lives of women in the nineteenth century, and the public life of the new First Lady of the White House. She had always taken pleasure in the political aspects of public life. In Illinois, she had grown accustomed to being a part of her husband’s inner circle, offering him counsel and advice. In Washington, she expected to do the same.
But Mary was not prepared for the cold reception she would receive in Washington. She found herself excluded from Washington society by various cliques of women. Although Mary was a Southerner by birth, the Southern women who remained in Washington rebuffed her because they deemed her husband the “Black Republican.” On the other hand, Eastern women snubbed her because they saw her as an uncivilized frontier woman from the West.
Soon after arriving in Washington, Mary decided to restore the Executive Mansion both as a personal home and as a public space. Not since Dolly Madison, a half century earlier, had a First Lady approached her task with such resolve. Ever since 1841, Congress had provided twenty thousand dollars annually for refurbishing the White House. Few of her predecessors had spent the full allowance. Harriet Lane, Buchanan’s niece, had focused her attention on social events on the main floor and spent nothing on the living quarters on the second floor. Mary Lincoln got busy spending the allowance on furniture, wallpaper, rugs, and china.
In early May, Mary set off for New York and Philadelphia. Accompanied by her cousin Lizzie Grimsley and William Wood, who had been in charge of the Lincolns’ travel arrangements from Springfield to Washington, she attacked the finest stores in New York and Philadelphia. Alexander T. Stewart, known as “the Merchant Prince” of New York, hosted Mary at a dinner party and she returned the favor by buying two thousand dollars’ worth of rugs and curtains at his marble emporium on Broadway. This would be the first of eleven buying trips by the First Lady.
CONGRESS RETURNED ON the first days of July 1861 to prepare for the special session. George Templeton Strong, who traveled to the capital during these same days, observed that Washington in early July was not for the fainthearted. “For all the detestable places, Washington is the first—in July, and with Congress sitting.” He described his experiences: “Crowd, heat, bad quarters, bad fare, bad smells, mosquitoes, and a plague of flies transcending everything within my experience.” Strong invoked Old Testament imagery to express his impressions of Washington and its best hotel. “Beelzebub surely reigns there, and Willard’s Hotel is his temple.”
Lincoln had begun to compose his July 4 message to Congress in May. He had never written an executive report to a legislative body before. As the day approached, the president changed his open-door policy and would not see anyone except for members of the cabinet or high officials. He worked in his office alone, often speaking words aloud before he put pencil to paper.
While writing and revising, Lincoln would sometimes look up and, in a brooding mood, gaze through the window, past the South Lawn, at the red sandstone Smithsonian Institution, which had only been completed in 1855, and beyond to the unfinished Washington Monument. Lincoln had been present when the cornerstone for the monument was laid in a grand patriotic ceremony on July 4, 1848. In the intervening years, work on the monument had stalled and then stopped. Improper management and a lack of funds dampened public support. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the monument still stood at 176 feet high, only about one-third of its final 555% feet. The grounds surrounding the monument had been turned into an open grazing pen for cattle, sheep, and pigs, giving it the name “the Washington National Monument Cattle Yard.” One of Lincoln’s heroes was George Washington, and the stoppage of work on the monument, coupled with the suspension of the completion of the dome of the Capitol, symbolized the fragile condition of the Union in the early summer of 1861.


Lincoln could look through the south window of his office at the Washington Monument. As a congressman, he was present on July 4, 1848, for the laying of the cornerstone, but the monument remained unfinished in 1861.

As Lincoln moved from the first to the second draft of his July 4 address, he invited his cabinet to look over the proof sheets. Secretary of State Seward again became an editor, offering more than twenty revisions. Once more, his editing was aimed at “softening the expression and eliminating potential problems,” but his revisions did not have the same impact as they had on Lincoln’s inaugural address. In the end, Lincoln’s chief editor was Lincoln himself; he revised again and again, making nearly a hundred revisions in the several versions of the text.
After the secession of eleven states, the new Thirty-seventh Congress comprised 105 Republicans and 43 Democrats in the House of Representatives and 31 Republicans and 10 Democrats in the Senate. Democrats had lost almost half their representation in Congress. A new force in Congress were the “War Democrats,” those from the South who supported Lincoln’s efforts to preserve the Union, such as Senator Andrew Johnson from Tennessee, whose home state was the last Southern state to secede.
There was also a deeply felt absence. Stephen Douglas, Lincoln’s longtime opponent, had died on June 3, 1861, in Chicago, probably of cirrhosis of the liver. He was only forty-eight years old. To the end, Douglas had gone far out of his way to express his support for President Lincoln. At Douglas’s death, Lincoln ordered the White House and government buildings draped in bereavement bunting. Department offices closed.
In 1861, the president did not deliver an annual message to Congress in person. George Washington and John Adams, the nation’s first two presidents, had personally delivered their annual messages, but Thomas Jefferson changed this tradition. Jefferson held a deep aversion to the monarchical configuration from which the colonies freed themselves. He believed the symbol of the president speaking to Congress smacked of the old order, in which the king or queen spoke from on high to Parliament. He declared a clean break from his two Federalist predecessors by saying he would not address Congress in person, but rather send up a written message. Jefferson’s practice lasted more than one hundred years, all the way into the early twentieth century. Woodrow Wilson broke with this precedent in his first year as president when he spoke in person to Congress about the State of the Union in 1913.
On July 4, 1861, all the members of Congress gathered for a chief ceremonial occasion in the young republic: the reading of a presidential message. The clerk read Lincoln’s words in a dull monotone.
At the outset, Lincoln restated the policy he had announced in his inaugural address: to pursue “all peaceful measures” to avoid war, reminding friend and foe that the policy of his administration was to rely on the peaceful measures of “time, discussion, and the ballot box.” He continued, “And 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.”
In Lincoln’s opening paragraphs, he signaled that his audience was to be more than Congress. He directed his remarks to the people of the South and the North, as well as to foreign governments who were making up their minds about their posture toward the Union and the new Confederate government.
Lincoln introduced his discussion of the suspension of habeas corpus by acknowledging that “the attention of the country has been called to the proposition that one who is sworn to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed,’ should not himself violate them.” After addressing the ramifications of his actions, he asked a question that anyone in his audience could understand: “To state the question more directly, are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” In the end, Lincoln went out of his way to offer assurance. “Whether there shall be any legislation upon the subject, he was content to rely on the better judgment of Congress.” In his discussion of habeas corpus, he wanted Congress to know he believed he had acted “very sparingly,” but would act decisively in the future to preserve the Union.
At the center of the address, Lincoln acted as a political guide eager to lead the way through a thicket of thorny definitions. For Lincoln, definitions mattered. It mattered most that this was not a war between the government of the United States and the government of the Confederate States of America. To use such terms would be to cede to the Southern states the constitutional prerogative of secession.
This is essentially a People’s contest. 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.
The Civil War has been interpreted as a war to preserve the Union, but at the beginning of the war Lincoln declared the Union not an end, but a means to an end that was more than a particular system of political organization. For Lincoln, the Union was an ecology of political, social, and economic life that could nourish the common person’s opportunity to pursue their dreams, unrestricted by artificial obstacles.
This address demonstrates Lincoln’s ability to combine both homely and high language in a new kind of American presidential communication. In his extended discussion of secession, he referred initially to its proponents by saying “they commenced by an insidious debauching of the public mind.” He continued his assault by arguing that “they invented an ingenious sophism,” an argument ultimately invalid, even if correct in form. After this high level of oratory—albeit in a communication read by a clerk—Lincoln suddenly exclaimed, “With rebellion thus sugar-coated, they have been drugging the public mind of their section for more than thirty years.”
The government printer John D. Defrees, when he received Lincoln’s draft before July 4, objected to Lincoln’s phrase “sugar-coated.” Defrees had served as a member of the Indiana state legislature and had led the Indiana delegation at the Republican convention in Chicago. A politician and a printer, he informed Lincoln that sugar-coated “lacked the dignity proper to a state paper.” Lincoln replied, “Well, Defrees, if you think the time will come when people will not understand what ‘sugar-coated’ means, I’ll alter it; otherwise, I think I’ll let it go.”
One of Lincoln’s greatest gifts was his ability to give voice to the war aspirations of the Union in compelling prose. On July 4, he did so by combining conservative and liberal goals. Lincoln’s ideas were conservative as he spoke of defending a deep-rooted, established order; they were liberal when he spoke of promoting and extending the rights of all people.
In his message to the special session of Congress, Lincoln told his critics that he was, indeed, in charge. As he had answered Seward’s challenge in private, he now spoke in public. The speech was as much about establishing Lincoln’s political and moral authority to lead as anything else. In answer to the New York Times and other newspapers and politicians, Lincoln offered a policy that would be acted upon in the more than seventy provisions Congress would pass in the remaining twenty-eight days of the session.
THE RESPONSE TO LINCOLN’S MESSAGE signified that at the beginning of the war almost all sides were willing to support the president. Politicians from both parties supported Lincoln’s proposal that Congress appropriate $400,000 to support an army of 400,000 men. Once in session, Congress boosted the amounts to $500,000 for an army of 500,000 men.
George Curtis, an editorial writer for Harper’s Monthly and Harper’s Weekly, read Lincoln’s address with great interest. Living on Staten Island, Curtis had gone to Chicago to support his fellow New Yorker William Seward for the Republican nomination for president. After Lincoln was elected, Curtis expressed doubts about Lincoln’s capacity to lead the nation.
The July 4 address changed his appraisal of Lincoln. In a letter to a younger friend, he offered his assessment. Curtis thought Lincoln’s “message was the most truly American message ever delivered.” As a literary critic, he believed Lincoln’s words were “wonderfully acute, simple, sagacious, and of antique honesty!” Curtis concluded, “I can forgive the jokes and the big hands, and the inability to make bows. Some of us who doubted were wrong.”
In the midst of all of the accolades for Lincoln’s address, African-American abolitionist editor Frederick Douglass offered a lonely but prescient commentary. “In the late Message of our honest President, which purports to give an honest history of our present difficulties, no mention is, at all, made of slavery. … Any one reading that document, with no previous knowledge of the United States, would never dream from anything there written that a slaveholding war was waged upon the Government, determined to overthrow it.” Douglass gave voice to millions when he declared, “The proclamation goes forth at the head of all our armies, assuring the slaveholding rebels that slavery shall receive no detriment from our arms.”
Indeed, Lincoln made no mention of slavery in his address, for in July 1861, the war was solely about preserving the Union. Lincoln understood this to be the sentiment of the Northern people. Elected by a minority of the citizenry, he needed the loyalty of Democrats, who remained distrustful of the intentions of Republicans. Lincoln believed he must continue to reiterate this message of fighting solely to preserve the Union if he was to hold on to the border states.
PARTISAN POLITICS WERE QUIETED briefly after Lincoln’s July 4, 1861, message to Congress, but throughout April, May, and June, volunteers had streamed into both the Union and Confederate armies. The presence of troops from almost every Northern state, visible in daily parades in and around Washington, increased the call of politicians and newspaper editors to begin marching south. When the Confederate Congress announced they would convene on July 20 in Richmond, their new capital, only one hundred miles south of Washington, the pressure on Lincoln and his generals grew. One question dominated the daily conversations of the Northern public: “When would the army march toward Richmond?”
Starting on June 26, 1861, managing editor Charles A. Dana placed this aggressive caption at the top of the editorial columns of the New York Tribune in bold italics.
Forward to Richmond! Forward to Richmond!

The Rebel Congress must not be allowed to meet there
on the 20th of July.

By that date the place must be held by the National Army!

The same headline ran every day for eleven straight days.
While Lincoln sought the right generals to lead the Union troops, he also had to contend with the so-called newspaper generals of New York. Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times, James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, and William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Evening Post, saw their jobs as not only reporting but shaping public opinion from their offices on newspaper row in New York City. Immediately after Fort Sumter, they began demanding action. Throughout late April, May, and June, the newspaper generals counseled and cajoled the president. They advised that the war should be carried to Baltimore, Richmond, Charleston, Atlanta, and Montgomery. They made the case that if the border states did not respond immediately to a call to arms, their citizens should be treated as traitors.
In the special session of Congress, the question about Richmond dominated deliberations. All around Washington, the capital regiments assembled, drilled, and paraded, but nearly three months had passed since Lincoln’s April 15, 1861, proclamation and still there was no major military engagement. Most of the soldiers were ninety-day militia, everyone well aware that their obligations of service would be up in the later part of July.
Behind the scenes, Lincoln was shocked to learn the army was unprepared for war. He watched, in disappointment, as the War Department and the Navy Department struggled to become effective. The military bureaucracy was frustratingly inefficient. Seventy-two years after the inauguration of its first president, the United States boasted no professional military literature and thus an absence of critical military theory in the preparation of army officers at West Point. The Bureau of Topographical Engineers owned few accurate maps of the South.
Rivalries broke out between Cameron and Welles over the preparation for and conduct of the war, with both men complaining that Seward was constantly interfering with their authority and jurisdiction. Lincoln believed the public wanted the military to move soon, or he ran the risk of cooling the ardor of war fever.
Lincoln asked General Scott; Irvin McDowell, commander of the Union forces in Virginia; Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs; and other senior military leaders to attend a special cabinet meeting to discuss a summer offensive. He directed everyone’s attention to a map on the wall of his office and said he wanted McDowell to attack a Confederate force at Manassas, Virginia, a rail junction thirty miles southwest of Washington. Scott dissented, arguing that the army could not possibly be ready to fight until the fall.
Scott then presented to the full cabinet his own plan. He would tighten the blockade on the East Coast and then, with sixty thousand troops, sail down the Mississippi River from Cairo, Illinois, to the Gulf of Mexico, establishing a string of forts along the way: his so-called “boa constrictor” plan. The South thus sealed, the Union would wait for calmer voices to drown out the fire-eaters, as Union sentiment in the South rose. The press, when hearing of this plan, named it for a different snake, the anaconda, the largest and most powerful snake in the Western Hemisphere, who lived in water and killed its prey by constriction or squeezing. Scott’s “Anaconda Plan” failed to consider what the Southern troops would be doing while the Northern troops took several months to travel to and sail down the Mississippi. Lincoln knew that the public would never have the patience for Scott’s plan. In listening to his daily visitors, he came to understand that his Northern audience needed to see some results if he and the Union would retain their support.
After this, Lincoln focused on finding a leader to produce real results. He believed he found this man in Brigadier General McDowell. Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1818, McDowell grew up in France before returning to study at West Point. Six feet tall, square and strong, he had put on considerable weight by the summer of 1861. He had a reputation as a gargantuan eater—at one time consuming a whole watermelon for dessert—yet he abstained from alcohol, tobacco, and coffee. McDowell had served on Scott’s staff in the campaign from Veracruz to Mexico City. His career had been pushed along in Washington by influential Ohio senator John Sherman and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase. Honest and upright, McDowell could also be stern and inflexible. Now, at age forty-two, he was about to become the first general in America to lead an army of thirty thousand men into battle.


Irvin McDowell became the first American general to lead an army of thirty thousand men into battle. He also suffered the ignominy of the Union defeat at Bull Run at the end of July 1861.

But it was now McDowell’s turn to demur. He told Lincoln and the cabinet that his men could not possibly be ready to march in July. He had an undersized staff, his men were untrained volunteers, and he did not even possess a map of Virginia that showed anything beyond the main roads. Scott rallied to the defense of McDowell, saying he agreed that the army was unprepared.
But Lincoln believed it was time to act, and countered McDowell’s objections. “You are green, it is true; but they are green, also; you are all green alike.” As commander in chief, Lincoln ordered McDowell to prepare for his men to march by July 9.
LINCOLN ROSE EARLY ON a warm, muggy Sunday morning, July 21, 1861, as McDowell, twelve days behind schedule and unsure of his inexperienced troops, began his march to the meandering, tree-lined Bull Run River, several miles north of Manassas Junction. McDowell’s plan was straightforward: He would lead his army of thirty thousand recruits in three columns against a Confederate force of twenty thousand re cruits, commanded by Brigadier General Pierre G. T. Beauregard, who had been in charge of the Confederate forces that shelled Fort Sumter. Although outnumbered, Beauregard, making his headquarters at the farmhouse of Wilmer McLean, believed he could take advantage of the lay of the land and the bends in the river.
McDowell’s movements caught no one by surprise. Confederate operatives in Washington conveyed his plans to General Beauregard, but there was no need to do so. McDowell’s march became a spectator sport as politicians, ladies with picnic baskets, and a ragtag assembly of onlookers traveled south from Washington to witness the great victory that would prelude the march on Richmond.
McDowell crossed the Bull Run River and started to turn the Confederate left. Men on both sides, who had never before been in battle, fought fiercely. McDowell believed he had the Confederates outnumbered. Union troops quickly forced the Confederates into retreat up Henry House Hill. Telegraphs of the initial successes were sent to the War Department in Washington every fifteen minutes from Fairfax, ten miles from the battle. But the Union attacks were too uncoordinated, and attack and counterattack swelled back and forth. McDowell held on to his two reserve brigades instead of using them strategically in battle.
One Confederate general held his ground. Thomas Jackson, a West Point graduate and a devout Presbyterian layman, had begun the day on his knees in prayer in his tent. When other Confederate forces were falling back before Union artillery and troops, Jackson’s West Point friend Barnard Bee pointed his sword toward the crest of Henry Hill and called out, “Look, men, there is Jackson standing like a stone wall.” The little-known Jackson, wearing his blue faculty member’s uniform from the Virginia Military Institute, pointed his left hand to the sky and rallied his men. When McDowell brought forward more artillery pressure, a New York regiment that had moved toward the pines where Jackson was located suddenly found themselves overrun by James E. B. “Jeb” Stuart and his First Virginia Cavalry.
LINCOLN ASKED SCOTT on the morning of July 21, 1861, for his assessment of the prospects of the battle. The general assured the president that everything was going well. Lincoln, as was becoming his custom, went off to church.
After lunch, he walked over to the War Department’s telegraph office to read some of the telegrams coming from the battle. Mounted couriers, coordinated by twenty-five-year-old Andrew Carnegie, sustained telegraph communication with General McDowell’s headquarters. At 3 p.m., as Lincoln pored over maps, the telegraph spelled out in Morse code, “Our army is retreating.”
Alarmed, Lincoln walked to Scott’s office, only to find the general fast asleep. Awakened, the general counseled the president that there was always an ebb and flow in battles and not to worry. Reassured, the president went for a carriage ride to the Naval Yard.
When Lincoln returned, Secretary of State Seward handed him a telegram from McDowell. “The day is lost. … Save Washington and the remnants of this army. … The routed troops will not reform.” Lincoln returned to the telegraph office at intervals until after midnight, when all telegraph messages ceased.
How did this calamitous defeat happen? As Jackson held his ground for nearly three hours, Confederate reinforcements had arrived from the South. Although the Southern army would quickly develop a reputation for lightning-like cavalry, the use of the railroad helped change the Battle of Bull Run. Nine thousand men in the Shenandoah Valley loaded themselves and their horses into freight and cattle cars and traveled on the Manassas Gap Railroad, sometimes as slowly as four miles per hour because of the weight of the horses, toward Manassas and Bull Run. Their arrival and counterattack stunned the Union forces, which began to retreat in panic. McDowell tried to regroup north of Bull Run, but it was no use.
Soldiers retreated all the way back to Washington, sometimes overtaking the surprised spectators. Senators Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, who had ridden out to enjoy the fruits of victory with rifles in hand, now were aghast as soldiers, horses, and wagons hurried back to Washington. Wade, enraged, leapt from the wagon, shouting, “Boys, we will stop this damned run-away.” Brandishing his rifle, along with Chandler and several others, he blocked the road and “commanded an immediate halt” to the retreating soldiers.
In the middle of the night, Lincoln learned that after ten hours of fighting, almost nine hundred men, including five hundred Union soldiers, lay dead on the fields of Henry House Hill, Matthews Hill, and Chinn Ridge. The hopes of both North and South for a quick war were shattered. A spiral of violence was just beginning. The South had won a great tactical victory, but even more important, the Confederacy stalled any march into Virginia until 1862.
For Lincoln, Bull Run was an alarming defeat. He pulled his cabinet together for an emergency late-night meeting at the War Department. Afterward, Lincoln could not sleep. He lay on a lounge all night, but from time to time talked with soldiers and spectators returning from the battle. Senator Chandler arrived at midnight to give Lincoln his report of the disastrous battle. The President was shaken.
In the South, they were jubilant. An unknown Southern poet wrote:
Yankee Doodle, near Bull Run
Met his adversary,
First he thought the fight he’d won,
Fact proved quite contrary.
Panic-struck he fled, with speed
Of lightning glib with unction,
Of slippery grease, in full stampede,
From famed Manassas Junction.
In the wake of the defeat at Bull Run, political leaders put aside their partisanship in order to rally to the Union cause and restate the purpose of the war. On Monday, July 22, 1861, John J. Crittenden from Kentucky and Andrew Johnson from Tennessee introduced identical resolutions in the House and Senate “which gave expression to the common sentiment in the country,” that the war was not being waged “for the purpose of interfering with the rights of established institutions of those States, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution, and to preserve the Union.” The resolution passed in the House on July 22 and in the Senate on July 25. After the defeat at Bull Run, even most of those who wanted the war to be about ending slavery voted for this resolution.
“Today will be known as black monday.” Diarist George Templeton Strong in New York City captured the mood in the North. “We are utterly and disgracefully routed, beaten, whipped by secessionists.” After such a defeat, charges and allegations were leveled at the military. General McDowell, who had not counted on the arrival of Confederate reinforcements, became the initial focus of the criticism. A teetotaler, McDowell was even accused of being drunk in battle. But quickly the censure targeted his boss, General in Chief Winfield Scott. He may have been a hero of the Mexican War, but public opinion said he was far past his prime and ought to retire.
Two days later, Lincoln found himself in conversation with four Illinois congressmen and Scott when the old general exclaimed, “Sir, I am the greatest coward in America! I will prove it. I have fought this battle, sir, against my judgment; I think the President of the United States ought to remove me for doing it.”
Lincoln, taken aback, replied, “Your conversation seems to imply that I forced you to fight this battle.”
Lincoln’s remark seemed to throw Scott off balance. He responded, “I have never served a President who has been kinder to me than you have been.”
As accusations swirled in Congress, the press, and the public, Lincoln refused to indulge in any finger pointing. If there would be any responsibility for defeat, he would bear it upon his broad shoulders. He knew it was not a time for looking backward but forward. Lincoln had learned some valuable lessons and he was preparing to act upon them. After the disastrous defeat at Bull Run, Lincoln knew he needed to find military leadership he could rely upon. In the late summer and fall of 1861, this was his most urgent priority.


This photograph perhaps taken by Mathew Brady toward the end of 1861, may have captured Lincoln in a candid moment. The photographer, sensing he had caught Lincoln deep in reverie, asked him to retain this reflective pose.