A. Lincoln A Biography

Chapter 21
We Must Think Anew July 1862–December 1862

THE DOGMAS OF THE QUIET PAST, ARE INADEQUATE TO THE STORMY PRESENT

ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Second annual message to Congress, December 1, 1862

ON JULY 22, 1862, LINCOLN EMERGED FROM HIS SOLITARY BROODING AND writing at the Soldiers’ Home. “After much anxious thought,” he had come to the conclusion that it was not possible to return to the past, or even stand in the shifting sands of the present. He determined to step forward into an unknown future.
For Lincoln, using his largely undefined war powers as commander in chief to propose emancipation was contrary to much in his personal makeup. His intellectual roots were planted more in the reasonableness of the Enlightenment than in the sentiments of Romanticism. As a lawyer, he had grounded his legal briefs in precedent. In his religious pilgrimage, he had chosen to attend rational, nonpolitical Old School Presbyterian congregations over experiential, antislavery New School congregations in both Springfield and Washington. Although his heart had long been tormented by the immorality of slavery, his Enlightenment, precedent-based, Old School head had heretofore tethered him to what he believed to be the Constitution’s prohibition against eliminating slavery where it already existed in the South.
Lincoln had not set his sights on emancipation at the beginning of the war. His single goal was to save the Union. The subject of slavery was virtually absent in both his inaugural address and his special message to Congress on July 4, 1861. But now, sixteen months later, his developing ideas, the press of events, the military defeats, and his own sense of timing coalesced into a determination to redefine the war’s purpose.
On July 22, 1862, when Lincoln began to read to his cabinet a preliminary draft of a proclamation promising emancipation, he said he was not asking for their assent but informing them of his plan of action. None were prepared for his final sentence. Lincoln, “as a fit and necessary military measure,” declared that on January 1, 1863, “all persons held as slaves within any state or states, wherein the constitutional authority of the United States shall not then be practically recognized … shall then, thenceforward, and forever, be free.” The members of the cabinet sat stunned.
William Seward, who had known of Lincoln’s plan in advance, expressed his strong concern about the timing of Lincoln’s proclamation. To issue it at a time of continuing Union defeats might appear to many to be an act of desperation. Why not wait until a significant military victory would place the proclamation in a more positive light? Lincoln would say afterward, “The wisdom of the view of the Secretary of State struck me with very great force.”
LINCOLN STARTED THE SECOND SUMMER of the war dealing with a retreating army and a restless public. He had hovered over the telegraph operators on the second floor of the War Department during the anxiety of the Seven Days Battles from June 25 to July 1, 1862. He followed events in Tennessee and Kentucky, where guerrilla attacks by Confederate generals Nathan Bedford Forrest and John Hunt Morgan behind Union lines dispelled any lingering notions that widespread Unionist sentiment remained in the South. The Confederate tactics heightened anger in the North. Lincoln heard that Union soldiers were writing home about “bushwhackers,” insurgents hiding behind day jobs as farmers or shopkeepers, but harassing and killing Union bluecoats at night. Soldiers began to protest that what had begun as a “kid glove war” must now give way to a “hard war.”
The president decided the time had come to make changes in the military command. Discouraged by the inability of the armies of Irvin McDowell, Nathaniel Banks, and John C. Frémont to trap the wily Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley, Lincoln decided to consolidate these forces under a new army led by a new commander. He appointed General John Pope of Illinois to lead a newly designated Army of Virginia on June 26, 1862. Lincoln had practiced law under Pope’s father, Judge Nathaniel Pope, a gruff man appointed by President James Monroe to be the first U.S. district judge for Illinois. John, an 1842 West Point graduate, was a large man with piercing eyes. He had served in the military escort accompanying Lincoln from Springfield to Washington in February 1861, when the two exchanged humorous stories. Pope had served under Henry Halleck in the West and had won fame for his capture of Island Number Ten, fifty miles downriver from Columbus, Kentucky, on April 7, 1862.
Lincoln was just getting started. On July 11, 1862, only two days after his visit with General McClellan at Harrison’s Landing, Lincoln appointed Henry W. Halleck as general in chief. Lincoln’s decision to change commanding generals was not only a rejection of McClellan as a leader, but a decision to change the political and military strategy of the war.
Henry Halleck was born in 1815 on a farm in the Mohawk Valley of New York, and ranked third in the class of 1839 at West Point. At the military academy, he studied the “art of war” through the writings of Baron Henri Jomini, a Swiss military historian. Taking a different tack from his contemporary Carl von Clausewitz, Jomini argued that Napoleon’s success grew from rational principles that stressed movement rather than total destruction. The goal became to inflict damage to the enemy with the least risk to one’s own troops.
After serving in California during the Mexican War, Halleck retired from the army in 1854. In 1855, he married Elizabeth Hamilton, granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton. When the Civil War erupted, he left California, where he had accumulated an estate worth $500,000 in quicksilver mines, for an appointment as a major general. Two years later Lincoln named him his top general.
In a war where the public wanted their generals to look like heroes, Halleck did not fit the part. He appeared much older than his forty-seven years. Standing five feet nine inches tall and one hundred ninety pounds, he was paunchy, with flabby cheeks and a double chin. He had an annoying habit of constantly scratching his elbows. Because of his dull, fishlike eyes, some said he was an opium addict. He acquired the nickname “Old Brains,” not for his prowess as a military theorist, but for his high forehead and bulging eyes.
Lincoln looked forward to a partnership with a man he had admired from a distance. He had read Halleck’s Elements of Military Art and Science as part of his early tutorial in military strategy. In Lincoln’s recent visit to West Point, retired general Scott, who had recommended Halleck over McClellan as his successor in the summer of 1861, commended him to Lincoln once again. Lincoln wrote to Halleck on July 14, 1862, “I am very anxious—almost impatient—to have you here. … When can you reach here?”


Lincoln’s decision to appoint Henry Halleck, “Old Brains” to replace George McClellan as general in chief was about both a new leader and a new strategy.

That Lincoln felt more than anxious had become apparent to those closest to him. Orville Browning saw Lincoln frequently in June and July 1862, often at the Soldiers’ Home, where they enjoyed sitting together on the portico’s stone steps on summer evenings. On July 15, Browning visited Lincoln at the White House. When he entered the library, he observed that Lincoln “looked weary, care-worn and troubled.” They shook hands and Browning asked Lincoln how he was. “Tolerably well,” he replied. Browning, concerned, told Lincoln he “feared his health was suffering.” At that, Lincoln reached for Browning’s hand, “pressed it, and said in a very tender and touching tone—‘Browning I must die sometime.’ He looked very sad, and there was a cadence of sadness in his voice.” The two old friends parted, “both of us with tears in our eyes.”
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LINCOLN HAD HEARD the snide remarks about Halleck’s looks and mannerisms, but he never put stock in outward appearances. When the general finally arrived on July 23, 1862, Halleck and Lincoln traveled to McClellan’s headquarters, accompanied by Montgomery Meigs and Ambrose Burnside. Lincoln wanted Halleck’s recommendation on whether to retain “Little Mac” as commander of the Army of the Potomac, and whether his battered forces should be withdrawn from the Virginia peninsula.
McClellan told Halleck that he needed more men, because he was certain that Lee’s opposing army had 200,000 soldiers. Upon their return, Meigs, whom Lincoln trusted, told the president that by his calculations Lee had only 105,000 men. (The figure was closer to 75,000.)
On Friday evening, July 25, 1862, Orville Browning visited Lincoln at the Soldiers’ Home. The Illinois senator confided to his diary that Lincoln told him that McClellan would never fight. It was as “if by magic he could reinforce McClellan with 100,000 men to day he would be in an ecstasy over it, thank him for it, and tell him that he would go to Richmond tomorrow, but that when tomorrow came he would telegraph that he had certain information that the enemy had 400,000 men, and he could not advance without reinforcements.”
Tired of McClellan’s foot dragging, Lincoln decided to replace him with Ambrose E. Burnside, an Indiana native and a graduate of West Point in the class of 1847, as commander of the Army of the Potomac. On February 7 and 8, 1862, Lincoln had been heartened by Burnside’s leadership of an amphibious landing through the Hatteras inlet to attack Roanoke Island off the coast of North Carolina. Supported by gunboats, and fighting the fury of nature as much as the outnumbered Confederate defenders, Burnside secured a vital outpost in the Union’s effort to tighten the blockade of the Atlantic Coast.
Everyone who met Burnside liked him at once. Six feet tall and handsome, with a sturdy build and his face partially enclosed by bushy muttonchop whiskers, he was a skilled horseman with long buckskin gloves and a pistol that swung loosely from a holster on his hip. Sometime between July 22 and 27, 1862, Lincoln asked Burnside to relieve McClellan and assume command of the Army of the Potomac. Burnside, surprised, told the president he was not eager to command a large army. He turned down the president’s offer to replace his good friend McClellan who, he said, only needed more time to prove his leadership. Lincoln would not forget Burnside’s self-effacing manner.


Lincoln asked Ambrose E. Burnside to become the new commander of the Army of the Potomac in July 1862.

In Henry Halleck, Lincoln believed he had finally found someone who could relieve him of the burden of his responsibility for the supervision of the army. McClellan and Pope, who did not hide their dislike of each other, would now both report to Halleck. Lincoln quickly came to depend on “Old Brains” for technical military advice. A month later, McClellan was surely surprised when Lincoln answered a query by replying, “I wish not to control. That I now leave to Gen. Halleck.” With many tough decisions to be made, Lincoln would sometimes feign ignorance of military strategy and let Halleck be the public face of the Union forces. In responding to the multitude of questions coming his way, he began to offer a standard reply, “You must call on General Halleck, who commands.”
LONG BEFORE THE ADVENT of televised presidential press conferences, Lincoln mastered a new means of communication developing in the nineteenth century. As he struggled to find his footing in the second year of his presidency, this mastery would become a key to his emerging political leadership.
In his first debate with Stephen Douglas in Ottawa, Illinois, in 1858, Lincoln offered his insight into the role of public opinion in a democratic society. “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.”
But Lincoln offered this comment in an Illinois he knew well. How would he be able to keep his finger on the pulse of public opinion while he lived in Washington, often confined to the White House and consumed by his duties as commander in chief? In 1862, he worked hard to listen to the public and to find more ways to communicate his vision for the Union. He found the answer in newsprint.
Newspapers conveyed the immediacy of daily events to Americans as never before. At the time of Lincoln’s birth, there were approximately 250 American newspapers. By the beginning of the Civil War, there were more than 2,500 newspapers, both daily and weekly. In New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other larger cities, newspapers published multiple editions each day in order to keep up with people’s appetite for news. Many more people read newspapers than paid subscribers. At countless general stores and post offices, neighbors gathered to listen to someone read from “Uncle Horace’s Weekly Try-bune,” or the like.
Lincoln was a newspaper junkie. Francis B. Carpenter, an artist in residence in the White House in 1864, reported that he regularly saw in the secretary’s quarters the New York Tribune, Herald, Evening Post, World, Times, and Independent; the Boston Advertiser, Journal, and Transcript; the Philadelphia Press and North American; the Baltimore American and Sun; the Cincinnati Gazette and Commercial; the St. Louis Republican and Democrat; the Albany Evening Journal; and the Chicago Tribune and Journal.
Instead of letters to the editor, editors wrote letters to Lincoln. They offered their counsel on every political issue, but especially the war. More than three hundred letters from newspaper editors were received at the White House during Lincoln’s presidency. Editors not only wrote to Lincoln, they also traveled to Washington to speak to him in person.
And Lincoln also wrote letters. After his special message to Congress on March 6, 1862, in which he again advocated compensation to Southern states if they would put an end to slavery, he sent a letter to Henry Raymond to object that the New York Times got it wrong about how much the compensation would cost. He told the editor he was “grateful to the New-York Journals, and not less to the Times than to the others, for their kind notices of the late special Message to Congress.” Lincoln was not just playing up to Raymond, for he had cut out and saved editorials from six New York newspapers—the New York Times, Tribune, Evening Bulletin, Herald, World, and Evening Post, all written on March 7, all supporting compensated emancipation.
In the first months of the war, Lincoln had appreciated Horace Gree-ley’s central role among the newspaper generals. “Having him firmly behind me will be as helpful to me as an army of one hundred thousand men.” But the New York Tribune editor’s support for Lincoln began to vacillate in 1862 as he became more and more distressed by Lincoln’s silence about slavery. Greeley decided to speak straight to the president through the most public communication he knew—his newspaper.
On August 19, 1862, Greeley wrote a letter to Lincoln that he published the following day in the Tribune under the heading “The Prayer of Twenty Millions.” Greeley complained that the president was “strangely and disastrously remiss” in not proclaiming emancipation now.
On the face of this wide earth, Mr. President, there is not one disinterested, determined, intelligent, champion of the Union cause who does not feel that all attempts to put down the Rebellion, and at the same time uphold its inciting cause, are preposterous and futile—that the Rebellion, if crushed out to-morrow, would be renewed within a year if slavery were left in full vigor. … I close as I began, with the statement that what an immense majority of the loyal millions of your countrymen require of you is a frank, declared unqualified, ungrudging execution of the laws of the land.
Appearing toward the end of a long summer of Union dissatisfaction, Greeley’s letter created a commotion. Newspapers across the North reprinted his protest.
Lincoln notified the Washington National Intelligencer that he intended to write a response to Greeley, asking the paper to send one of its editors, James C. Welling, to the White House to assist him. Welling reviewed Lincoln’s reply word by word. He proposed one sentence be “erased,” in the third paragraph: “Broken eggs can never be mended, and the longer the breaking proceeds the more will be broken.” The young literary editor recalled that Lincoln acquiesced “with some reluctance.” Welling doesn’t expand upon Lincoln’s answer but did offer his own reason for removing it. This sentence “seemed somewhat exceptional, on rhetorical grounds, in a paper of such dignity.”


Horace Greeley, reforming editor of the New York Tribune, wrote a letter to Lincoln entitled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions,” challenging the president to move faster on emancipation.

Welling’s response sounded like printer John D. Defrees’s response to “sugar-coated” in Lincoln’s annual message to Congress in 1861. The editor and the printer wished to correct Lincoln about proper speech. They were telling the president of the United States that his humble American expressions did not fit the rhetorical etiquette of the occasion.
Lincoln’s response to Greeley was published in the National Intelligencer on August 22, 1862. The president’s “public letter,” addressed to an individual but understood to be meant for a larger public consumption, was also quickly republished in numerous newspapers. The meaning of the letter has been debated from the moment Lincoln penned it. Although he must have been disconcerted by Greeley’s imperious tone, he started his letter with a generosity of spirit.
I have just read yours of the 19th, addressed to myself. … If there be in it any statements, or assumptions of fact, which I may know to be erroneous, I do not now and here, controvert them. If there be in it any inferences which I may believe to be falsely drawn, I do not now and here, argue against them. If there be perceptible in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.
That beginning, which is often omitted in reprinting Lincoln’s reply, sets the tone for all that follows.
I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored, the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; I shall adopt new views so fast as they appear to be true views.
At the center of the letter Lincoln offers a thesis sentence that spells out his meaning: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery.” He then expanded on what he would save and what he would not save. The verb “save” pulsates twelve times through this central paragraph of the letter.
Lincoln wished to speak to three groups. First, most people in the South wanted to save slavery, and Lincoln knew that many Northern Democrats were also opposed to emancipation. In response to this position, Lincoln offered a resonant: “I do not agree with them.”
The second group were political abolitionists, represented by Charles Sumner in Congress and Horace Greeley in the press. Greeley presented himself as representing twenty million, which to Lincoln’s mind was clearly an overstatement.
Lincoln had become especially sensitive to a third group. Unnamed in his letter, he was thinking of the common soldier. He understood that the majority of soldiers had enlisted to save the Union, not to free the slaves. Even those soldiers who believed that blacks might be able to work at jobs behind the lines did not believe they were capable of fighting on the front lines. An astute Lincoln used his public letter to speak to all these groups at once.
He concluded with a disclaimer: “I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty, and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.” Understanding this final paragraph is imperative to appreciating the full meaning of Lincoln’s reply to Greeley. His final sentiment enunciated the continuing creative tension felt between the obligation of his office to abide by the Constitution and his personal wishes.
What did Lincoln accomplish with his public letter? An impatient Greeley was calling out a patient Lincoln. Lincoln’s reply did not really answer Greeley’s appeal, but that was not his purpose. The president made his own appeal—to save the Union. He had shrewdly outflanked the leading New York general of opinion, and on his own territory, the newspaper.
The reply to Greeley is misconstrued if interpreted as a simple declaration of support for the Union. As Lincoln crafted his reply, he held in his coat pocket his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln had become adroit at keeping his own counsel and moving forward on his own schedule.
A FEW DAYS AFTER Lincoln’s reply to Greeley, Union and Confederate forces fought a second furious battle around Manassas Junction. Thirteen months earlier, the Union army had suffered a devastating defeat at Bull Run. In the summer of 1862, the newly designated Union Army of Virginia, under General John Pope, vowed things would be different.
Pope told everyone who would listen that his headquarters would be in his saddle. His tough talk about leading an offensive war had a positive effect on the many politicians who were tired of McClellan’s delays.
Pope’s initial letter to the officers and soldiers of the Army of Virginia had the opposite effect. McClellan remained popular with many of the soldiers, but Pope minced no words. “I have come from the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies.” He told his men “to dismiss from your minds certain phrases, which I am sorry to find so much in vogue amongst you. I hear constantly of ‘taking strong positions and holding them,’ of ‘lines of retreat,’ and of ‘bases of supplies.’ Let us discard such ideas.” No one could mistake Pope’s words as anything but criticism of McClellan. The new commander’s men began calling him “boastful Pope” behind his back.
In the last week of August, Stonewall Jackson, commanding the leading edge of Robert E. Lee’s army, marched his “foot cavalry” fifty-six miles in two days on a wide swing around Pope’s right flank to attack the Union supplies at Manassas. Jackson could hardly believe what his men found in one hundred freight cars and countless warehouses. His hungry men feasted on the Union’s lobster salad and Rhine wine. Men strutted about in new shoes, wore women’s hats with elaborate ribbons, and carried off pickled oysters, molds of cheese, and candy. Jackson ordered all the whiskey poured on the ground (an order not completely obeyed). What the soldiers could not eat or carry with them they burned. Lincoln watched from the south lawn of the White House as black smoke rose in the sky above northern Virginia. Then Jackson’s troops disappeared.
The next day, August 28, 1862, Jackson’s troops drew Pope’s army into battle at Brawner Farm near Bull Run. On the following morning, Pope carried out disjointed attacks against Jackson along an uncompleted railroad grade. Although neither side gained an advantage, Pope reported he had Jackson on the run. He failed to recognize that reinforcements led by General James Longstreet’s troops had broken through Thoroughfare Gap and were fast arriving to support Jackson. A wary George Templeton Strong in New York wrote in his diary, “I am not prepared to crow quite yet. Pope is an imaginative chieftain and ranks with Cooper as a writer of fiction. Good news from Bull Run is suspicious.”
Lincoln, standing beside his new general in chief Henry Halleck, listened to updates helplessly in the telegraph office. McClellan, now at Alexandria, was responsible for reinforcing Pope. Halleck, unsure of himself, called again and again for McClellan to begin sending reinforcements. Over and over, McClellan responded that for one reason or another, the officers in his command could not move. “We are not yet in a condition to move.” “It would be a sacrifice to send them now.” “I still think that a premature movement in small force will accomplish nothing but the destruction of the troops.”
At 2:45 in the afternoon, McClellan telegraphed Lincoln. “I am clear that one of two courses should be adopted—1st To concentrate all our available forces to open communication with Pope—2nd To leave Pope to get out of this scrape & at once use all our means to make the Capital perfectly safe.” Lincoln was astonished by McClellan’s response. He was also disappointed in Halleck, who, standing beside him as if in shock, seemed unable to exercise command over McClellan.
On August 30, 1862, Pope, believing that Lee’s repositioning of forces was actually the beginning of a retreat, attacked, failing to wait until he had fully massed his own forces. Pope’s divisions, especially his all-Western “Iron Brigade” from Wisconsin and Indiana, fought bravely. But Longstreet, with twenty-eight thousand men, counterattacked and Pope’s troops began to fall back.
That same morning, Lincoln and John Hay had ridden in together from the Soldiers’ Home. As they talked about all that had happened in the previous several days, Lincoln “was very outspoken in regard to McClellan’s present conduct.” He said “it really seemed to him that McC wanted Pope defeated.”
At eight o’clock on August 30, 1862, Lincoln came into Hay’s room in the White House to say, “Well John we are whipped again.” Indeed, Pope’s Union troops gave ground in a retreat to Centreville. In the days that followed, beaten Union units fell all the way back to their defenses on the outskirts of Washington. In five days of fighting, the Union forces of 65,000 men suffered 13,830 casualties while Lee and Jackson’s 55,000 troops lost 8,350.
AT 7:30 ON TUESDAY MORNING, September 2, 1862, Lincoln and Henry Halleck walked to McClellan’s house on H Street. Lincoln knocked on the door, unannounced, and found the general at breakfast. Lincoln told McClellan “that the troubles now impending could be overcome better” by him “than anyone else.” Lincoln had decided to keep McClellan. In touch with the sentiment of the soldiers, Lincoln understood that whatever the newspaper generals or the senators might think, Little Mac remained immensely popular with the rank-and-file soldiers. The soldiers believed they had never been outgeneraled, certainly not outfought, but had been defeated by superior numbers. McClellan told his wife that when Pope’s troops fell back to Washington “everything is to come under my command again.” McClellan said he was being given “a terrible & thankless task—yet I will do my best with God’s blessing to perform it.”
When Lincoln walked into the regular Tuesday cabinet meeting, he found the members buzzing with conversation. After Pope’s predictions of a Union victory, the Northern press criticized the leadership of “boastful Pope;” of McClellan, for failing to come to Pope’s aid; and of the president, who, as commander in chief, allowed this debacle to develop on his watch. The Southern press and people were ecstatic.
Secretary of the Navy Welles captured the mood of the meeting and of the president. “There was a more disturbed and desponding feeling than I have ever witnessed in council; the President was greatly distressed.” Attorney General Bates recorded in his diary that the president was deeply discouraged after early predictions of victory had turned into reports of a disastrous defeat. Bates wrote that Lincoln “seemed wrung by the bitterest anguish—said he felt almost ready to hang himself.”
Lincoln then stunned the members of his cabinet by informing them that he had decided to place McClellan in charge of an army that would fold in the Army of the Potomac and Pope’s Army of Virginia. Secretary of War Stanton, who had prepared a petition already signed by several members of the cabinet, became indignant. Chase argued that McClellan’s “experience as a military commander had been little else than a series of failures.” Particularly upset with McClellan’s failure to come to Pope’s aid, Chase believed this “rendered him unworthy of trust.”
Later that day, Lincoln’s decision to reappoint McClellan was validated, if not by the cabinet, then by the soldiers. On a cold and rainy afternoon, as discouraged soldiers straggled back into Washington, they were met by a lone officer on a black horse, dressed in full military uniform, wearing a general’s yellow sash and dress sword. Brigadier General Jacob Cox saw McClellan first.
“Well, General,” McClellan said, “I am in command again.”
What followed would be talked about for years to come. As McClellan rode forward toward the soldiers, he saluted them with his cap, and they, suddenly encouraged, broke out in shouts and cheers “with wild delight.” The word spread along the columns of soldiers, “Little Mac is back!”
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AS JULY TURNED INTO AUGUST, and then into September, Lincoln waited for the military victory that would allow him to announce his Emancipation Proclamation. For months now, the most furious assault on Lincoln came not from Confederate troops besieging Washington, but from radical Republican senators assailing his leadership. Senators Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, along with Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, gave Lincoln no respite. Lincoln told a visitor that he would look out the White House window and see them coming, singly, as a pair, or all together to attack him for not making a more frontal assault on slavery. In these dire days, Lincoln often found refuge in his bottomless barrel of humor. He told a friend that the visits of these three reminded him of the boy in Sunday school, who, when asked to read from the Bible the story of the three men in the fiery furnace, struggled over the difficult names of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. The boy read on, mortified, until he looked down the page and saw their names coming again. This time, in agony, he cried out, “Look! Look there! Here comes them same three damn fellers again!”
Lincoln used this time to refine his thinking about emancipation. Sometime in early August, he telegraphed his old friend Leonard Swett in Bloomington, Illinois, asking him to come to Washington immediately. Lincoln ushered the tall, dark-eyed Swett into the cabinet room, where he pulled out several letters from a drawer in his desk. He first read one from William Lloyd Garrison, the New England abolitionist, then one by Garrett Davis, state senator from the border state of Kentucky, followed by one or two more letters about emancipation.
Without commenting on the quite different opinions, Lincoln began to debate the issue. First, he took one side, often using phrases from the letters but adding his own arguments. Then he argued the other side. Swett, who had traveled the Eighth Judicial Circuit with Lincoln, had observed this pattern in countless courtrooms. Lincoln could “state the case of his adversary better and more forcibly than his opponent could state it himself.” Lincoln went on for more than an hour with his one-man debate. Swett became impressed that Lincoln’s “manner did not indicate that he wished to impress his views upon the hearer, but rather to weight and examine them for his own enlightenment in the presence of the hearer.” Swett, so trusted by Lincoln, believed he was privileged to be “a witness of the President’s mental operations.”
When Lincoln finished, he asked for no comment from Swett. He thanked him for coming, wished him a pleasant trip home, and sent greetings to “mutual friends.” So evenhanded was Lincoln’s debate that Swett predicted to his wife, “He will issue no proclamation emancipating negroes.”
STILL WRESTLING OVER HOW TO PROCLAIM emancipation, Lincoln sent word to the black leadership in Washington that he wished to speak with them. On the afternoon of August 14, 1862, an American president did something that no one could remember: He welcomed to the White House a committee of five black leaders. The group did not include national figures such as Frederick Douglass. Lincoln told them that money “had been appropriated by Congress, and placed at his disposition” for the purpose of colonization. Lincoln asked, “Why should they leave the country?” He then answered his own question. “You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss.” Lincoln went on to clarify what he meant. “This physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence.”
Lincoln acknowledged that his guests were free men, probably free their whole lives. “Your race is suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people.” He went on to discuss how racial equality did not exist in the United States. “I cannot alter it if I would. It is a fact, about which we all think and feel alike, I and you.” With this comment, Lincoln uncharacteristically made an assumption he did not test. He then talked about the evil of slavery, for both blacks and whites. His conclusion: “It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”
Lincoln hoped these leaders would be the vanguard of a colonization project in Central America. He said he understood that of all the blacks in America these men had made the most of their opportunities, but he urged them to avoid “a selfish view of the case.” If they took the lead, he was confident others would follow. He concluded by asking them to study his proposal. “Take your full time—no hurry at all.” Lincoln, believing he was taking the lead in appealing to black leaders to think of their future, seemed to be closing the door to a future in the United States precisely at the moment he was revising his Emancipation Proclamation.
This episode is puzzling. Lincoln did not convene a dialogue. He did not say, “This I believe,” but rather offered his comments as the accepted thinking about race of the day. It has been suggested that Lincoln’s continuing remarks about colonization right up to the moment of his announcement of emancipation were calculated to make this bitter pill easier to swallow for moderates, if not conservatives. But there is no doubt that Lincoln had hit a low point in his public speech about slavery and race just as he was about to reach for the higher ground of emancipation.
Lincoln’s comments infuriated Frederick Douglass. In the September issue of Douglass’ Monthly, the abolitionist editor printed the full text of Lincoln’s remarks and offered his most abrasive criticism yet of the president. “Mr. Lincoln assumes the language and arguments of an itinerant Colonization lecturer.” He lambasted Lincoln’s “contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy.” Douglass was at pains to point out that Lincoln, “elected as an anti-slavery man by Republican and Abolition voters … is quite a genuine representative of American prejudice and Negro hatred and far more concerned for the preservation of slavery, and the favor of the Border Slave States, than for any sentiment of magnanimity or principles of justice and humanity.”
BY 1862, LINCOLN HAD BECOME accustomed to ministers and church officials coming to Washington to offer their advice on the management of the war. On September 13, he welcomed two Chicago ministers, William W. Patton and John Dempster, to the Red Room, one of three public parlors on the first floor of the White House. Mary Lincoln had installed a new red carpet in the room, which the Lincolns used as a family parlor and a place to entertain friends. The ministers from Lincoln’s home state represented a “meeting of Christians of all denominations” that had gathered in Bryan Hall in Chicago on September 7 to express their support for emancipation. They came to lobby Lincoln and present him with memorials in English and German.
Lincoln used this occasion to both affirm and question his visitors on the use and misuse of religion. Lincoln spoke of the dilemma he wrestled with day and night, and then spoke of his own desire.
I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally certain that they represent the Divine will. I am sure that either the one or the other class is mistaken in that belief, and perhaps in some respects both. I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me; for, unless I am more deceived in myself than I often am, it is my earnest desire to know the will of Providence in this matter.
Even as Lincoln was increasingly pondering the meaning and purpose of God in the war, he was growing impatient with religious people who came to him regularly to express their certainty that God was on the side of the North: “And if I can learn what it is I will do it!” Lincoln underlined his affirmation and then put an exclamation point to underscore his conviction.
Lincoln had been receiving a good deal of mail from church organizations regarding emancipation. He told the ministers from Illinois and others, “The subject is difficult, and good men do not agree.” He then asked, “What good would a proclamation of emancipation from me do, especially as we are now situated? I do not want to issue a document that the whole world will see must necessarily be inoperative, like the Pope’s bull against the comet!” He continued, “Would my word free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel states?” After his long disquisition on slavery, Lincoln concluded, “I can assure you that the subject is on my mind, day and night, more than any other.”
Some have commented that Lincoln toyed with these and other petitioners in this time period, fully aware that he intended to issue an Emancipation Proclamation. A better explanation may be, like Lincoln’s conversation with Leonard Swett, that he was still mulling over all sides of the issue, as much for his own ears as for the ears of his listeners. As people came to him with their certainties, he responded with his ambiguities. Yet for Lincoln, ambiguity did not mean inaction.
WITH BOTH THE UNION AND THE CONFEDERATE armies exhausted from the second battle of Bull Run, most were resting and resupplying their troops. This wasn’t the case for Robert E. Lee. Lee sensed this was the moment not to retreat, but to advance. Fresh from summer victories on the Virginia peninsula, and now at Bull Run, he nonetheless believed the South could never defeat the North in a long, drawn-out war, because it would always be outpaced in men and industrial resources. He understood that the Union’s momentary weakness was probably his best opportunity. An insatiable reader of newspapers, Lee read of the despair on the Northern home front and the low morale of Union troops. Back home, it was as if the Richmond Dispatch and Lee were reading each other’s minds. The Dispatch wrote on August 29, 1862, “Now is the time to strike the telling and decisive blows … and to bring the war to a close.”
Lee gambled he could invade Maryland and catch McClellan’s Army of the Potomac by surprise. He believed that in Maryland, a Union state but with slaves making up 35 percent of the population, he would find citizens ready to rally to the Confederate cause. His men would be able to live off the produce of friendly farmers. On the night of September 4, 1862, under the cover of darkness, Lee and his troops crossed the Potomac just forty miles upriver from Washington.
When word of Lee’s movements reached Maryland and Pennsylvania, the state leaders panicked. Lee was on Union soil. Pennsylvania governor Andrew Curtin telegraphed Lincoln on September 11, insisting the Confederate army numbered 120,000 men. He requested 80,000 federal troops to protect Philadelphia and Harrisburg. Curtin and McClellan rivaled each other in their estimates, for McClellan estimated that Lee’s army was 110,000 men. In fact, Lee’s army actually numbered 55,000 men. Losing stragglers by the mile, by the time it would finally engage Union troops, it would be down to 45,000 men.
If Governor Curtin saw Lee’s march northward as a danger, Lincoln saw it as an opportunity. Contrary to his leading generals, Lincoln had long believed that the best Union military strategy was not to attack cities or occupy territories but to defeat armies. He now thought that Lee’s army, stretched long and thin, in unfamiliar territory without its usual base of supplies, was vulnerable. On September 7, 1862, McClellan’s army moved north from Washington, while apprehension riveted the North.
Once in Maryland, the two armies experienced a surprising reversal of fortunes. The Confederate army, expecting that they would be treated as liberators, arrived looking more like beggars. The populace treated them coolly. The Union army began their march with depressed morale due to their recent defeats, but once in Maryland “the friendly, almost tumultuous welcome they received … boosted their spirits.” As the soldiers passed by farms, the daughters of the farmers greeted them at the roadside with buckets of cold water. In small villages and towns, and finally in Frederick, where McClellan had set up his field headquarters, they were welcomed by hundreds and often thousands of grateful citizens.
As McClellan’s reports were sparse in coming in, Lincoln worried in the War Department’s telegraph office. He considered traveling up to Frederick, but General in Chief Halleck talked him out it, even going so far as writing down his advice so that it would be part of the official record. He and other military leaders feared that Lincoln could be intercepted by Confederate cavalry.
On the morning of September 13, 1862, Corporal Barton W. Mitchell of the Twenty-seventh Indiana Infantry was relaxing in a field near Frederick when he found a copy of Lee’s Special Order Number 191, dated September 9, wrapped in an envelope around three cigars. One of nine copies of Lee’s order, this particular one had been mislaid by a never-to-be-identified Confederate courier. Delighted, McClellan telegraphed Lincoln, “I have the plans of the Rebels and will catch them in their own trap if my men are equal to the emergency.” The plans in McClellan’s hands told him that Lee had adopted the risky strategy of dividing his army into four or five parts, sending several detachments to capture Harpers Ferry and leaving his other divisions positioned several miles from one another.
McClellan waited six hours before issuing his own orders to his commanders. If McClellan had acted within the first hours, he might have exploited these gaps, but he moved warily and lost his advantage.
Within two days, Lee realized that McClellan had his orders and immediately began to reassemble his army. By hard marching and riding, they quickly reached the east side of Antietam Creek near the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland.
All through the day of September 14, 1862, Lincoln, Halleck, and Stanton waited apprehensively for any news. Halleck was suffering from hemorrhoids so painful that he could not even stand. A conventional medical treatment at the time was an opium suppository. This condition contributed to his lethargy, and his overall health was breaking down in the midst of this military crisis. For Lincoln, it seemed like Halleck was falling apart before his eyes in Washington, and he was not at all sure what McClellan was doing in Maryland.
At 9:40 p.m., Lincoln and Halleck received a telegram from McClellan: “It has been a glorious victory.” By eight the next morning, McClellan wired that the enemy had “disappeared during the night.” Later in the day, McClellan, euphoric with the prospect of victory over a retreating Confederate army, wired that the enemy is “in a perfect panic,” and that “Genl. Lee is reported wounded.”
Lincoln immediately wrote back to McClellan, “God bless you, and all with you. Destroy the rebel army, if possible.” Fifteen minutes later, departing from his usual skepticism about McClellan’s predictions, Lincoln sent an ecstatic telegram to his old friend Jesse Dubois, Illinois state auditor, in Springfield. “I now consider it safe to say that General McClellan has gained a great victory over the great rebel army in Maryland. He is now pursuing the flying foe.” Lincoln’s words traveled faster and farther than he may have thought possible, for at midnight he received a telegram from Illinois governor Richard Yates, “Your dispatch to Col. Dubois has filled our people with the wildest joy. Salutes are being fired & our citizens are relieved from a fearful state of suspense.” But McClellan, with his characteristic hyperbole, had once again misjudged the situation.
Lee was not retreating. Instead, the Confederate general was positioning his forces on a row of hills and ridges that ran through the rural countryside of pasture and farmland between Sharpsburg and Antietam Creek. Lee invited McClellan to attack his smaller but battle-tested veteran army.
McClellan spent much of September 16, 1862, planning his attack, which only allowed more time for Lee to consolidate his forces. In the late afternoon, he finally sent “Fighting Joe” Hooker across Antietam Creek to attack the Confederate left. He ordered Ambrose Burnside to also cross Antietam Creek and attack the Confederate right. These opening maneuvers were probing skirmishes for the fight everyone knew was coming the next day.
McClellan attacked on September 17, 1862, starting what became known as the battle of Antietam. In the most violent day of the whole Civil War, Union and Confederate soldiers attacked, counterattacked, and fought on. It was said that one thirty-acre cornfield was so covered with dead bodies that one could walk across it without ever touching the earth.
“We are in the midst of the most terrible battle of the war, perhaps of history,” telegraphed McClellan to Halleck and Lincoln at 1:25 p.m. This was the battle Lincoln had been waiting for. McClellan wrote, “It will be either a great defeat or a most glorious victory.”
McClellan ordered 60,000 of his 80,000 troops to assault 37,000 Confederates, but he could not push back an army that he assessed to be over 100,000. McClellan had more than twice as many men as Lee, but by attacking division after division, he afforded Lee the time to shift his troops to meet the Union attacks. McClellan, convinced that Lee had far more troops than he did, was unwilling to commit any of his 20,000 reserves to the battle. At one point, General John Sedgwick marched his division, with sixty-four-year-old E. V. “Bull” Sumner in the lead, through the cornfield, across the Hagerstown Pike, and into the West Woods, only to discover they were being fired upon from the rear. Once again, the Confederates, appearing to retreat, led the Union bluecoats into a trap. By the end of the day, Sedgwick would lose 1,700 men—killed, wounded, or missing.
The next day, September 18, 1862, both sides were exhausted; the battle came to a lull, not to be joined again. McClellan wrote to Halleck on September 19, “Our victory was complete. The enemy is driven back into Virginia.”
Lincoln had ordered McClellan to “destroy the rebel army,” but he did not. On the evening of September 18, 1862, Lee and his army crossed the Potomac again and returned to the safe haven of Virginia. McClellan sent a small detachment in pursuit, but it came to nothing.
For once, McClellan was not exaggerating the scope of the battle. Almost 6,500 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed in one day at Antietam. This staggering number was four times the number that would be killed in the landings at Normandy on June 6, 1944. The total for this one day was more than the deaths in all of the other wars of the nineteenth century—the War of 1812, the Indian wars, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War—combined.
ALTHOUGH THE VICTORY AT ANTIETAM was not decisive, it was enough for Abraham Lincoln. At the Soldiers’ Home, Lincoln wrote out a second draft of his Emancipation Proclamation. He returned to the White House, where he refused to meet any visitors. He worked alone in his office, editing the most important statement of his life yet.
Five days after the battle at Antietam, he convened a special cabinet meeting on Monday, September 22, 1862. Lincoln presented to the cabinet a new four-page document of just under one thousand words. What Lincoln said at this momentous cabinet meeting was recorded by both Salmon Chase and Gideon Welles, independently, in their diaries. Chase wrote that Lincoln told them that “when the rebel army was at Frederick,” he had “determined” that if they be “driven out of Maryland,” he would issue a “Proclamation of Emancipation.” Lincoln continued, “I said nothing to any one; but I made the promise to myself, and”—here Chase indicated that Lincoln hesitated a little—“to my Maker. The rebel army is now driven out, and I am going to fulfill that promise.”
Welles, who had been writing detailed entries in his diary almost every day since July 1862, recorded that the president began by informing the cabinet that regarding emancipation, “the question was finally decided, the act and the consequences were his,” but he wanted to invite the cabinet’s “criticism” of the paper he had prepared. In his explanation, Lincoln “remarked that he had made a vow, a covenant, that if God gave us the victory in the approaching battle, he would consider it an indication of Divine will, and that it was his duty to move forward in the cause of emancipation.”
Lincoln understood that his explanation of his actions would appear unusual to these shrewd politicians. He admitted as much. “It might be thought strange, he said, that he had in this way submitted the disposal of matters when the way was not clear to his mind what he should do.” Welles reported that Lincoln summed up his remarkable discourse by telling them, “God had decided this question in favor of the slaves.”
The members of the cabinet sat in silence. Lincoln broke it by picking up the text of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and beginning to read it aloud.
I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America, and Commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy thereof, do hereby proclaim and declare that hereafter, as heretofore, the war will be prosecuted for the object of practically restoring the constitutional relation between the United States, and each of the states, and the people thereof, in which States that relation is, or may be suspended, or disturbed.
Although the language was still legalistic, the fruit of Lincoln’s continual brooding and editing over the long summer of 1862 was evident in this newly revised second proclamation. Unlike the document he had presented in July, Lincoln knew this proclamation would soon become public. With keen insight into the range of possible public reactions, he anticipated and therefore sought to alleviate public criticism. He stressed at the outset that the war remained about preserving the Union, even though he knew that the press would emphasize the freeing of the slaves. He built in precedent with a reminder of two laws passed earlier in the year about the handling of escaped slaves. He had employed scissors and paste to insert these laws into his document.
At the heart of Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, he offered the language that reflected his change of heart. On the first day of January 1863, “all persons held as slaves within any state, or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
Lincoln concluded with generosity.
And the executive will in due time recommend that all citizens of the United States who shall have remained loyal thereto throughout the rebellion, shall (upon the restoration of the constitutional relation between the United States, and their respective states, and people, if that relation shall have been suspended or disturbed) be compensated for all losses by acts of the United States, including the loss of slaves.
Lincoln knew he was issuing a strong proclamation, solely based in his military powers as president, but he was determined to be fair and munificent to those who would be affected. Newspapers around the country published the Emancipation Proclamation, announcing that Lincoln would sign it into law on January 1, 1863.
However one might view the concrete results of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation—how many people were freed in which areas of the Union—the symbolic significance of Lincoln’s act was powerful. He had changed the purpose of the war from restoring the old Union to creating a new Union cleansed of slavery. His old nemesis Horace Gree-ley spelled it out in large letters in his Tribune. “god bless abraham lincoln!” Greeley predicted, “It is the beginning of the end of the rebellion; the beginning of the new life of the nation.”
ON OCTOBER 1, 1862, Lincoln traveled to Sharpsburg, Maryland, to visit McClellan. After the battle of Antietam, many questions remained. Why did McClellan not pursue and defeat Lee’s army when he had the opportunity? If McClellan needed time to recover from Antietam, why was he not planning to cross the Potomac and pursue Lee now?
The next day, as Lincoln prepared to review the troops, artillery officer Charles Wainwright observed the president riding in an ambulance wagon. Wainwright was not impressed. “Mr. Lincoln not only is the ugliest man I ever saw, but the most uncouth and gawky in his manners and appearance.” McClellan started to explain how the battle took shape, but Lincoln, seemingly not interested, turned away and asked to be driven back to the camp.
The next morning, Lincoln awakened Ozias M. Hatch, the Illinois secretary of state, who had accompanied him on his visit. They walked to an eminence from which they could survey the camp. Lincoln, gesturing with his long arms, asked, “Hatch, what do you suppose all these people are?”
“Why,” replied Hatch, “I suppose it be a part of the grand army.”
“No,” responded the President, “you are mistaken.”
“What are they then?” asked Hatch.
Lincoln paused, and then “in a tone of patient but melancholy sarcasm,” replied, “That is General McClellan’s body guard.”
LINCOLN’S PRELIMINARY EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION did not bring him the full backing of radical Republicans. Believing that he had waited too long already, they were not pleased to be asked to wait an additional one hundred days for the signing of the proclamation. Senators Charles Sumner, Benjamin Wade, Henry Wilson, and Lyman Trumbull welcomed Lincoln’s proposal, but also cast a critical eye on what the proclamation did not do. They criticized it as a wartime measure too limited in its scope. The ultimate goal of the radical Republicans, and their abolitionist allies, became a constitutional amendment that would abolish slavery forever.
Meanwhile, many moderate Republicans and border-state Unionists worried about the meaning of the proclamation for Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri. Democrats, who had opposed Lincoln from the start, were enraged at what they saw as presidential authoritarianism. After a while, however, some of them became convinced that the proclamation provided them with an opening to turn around their political fortunes by appealing to a nation growing weary of war and death.
Lincoln, who always followed election results like an accountant checking financial records, watched the biennial elections in 1862 with concern. Twenty-three states voted in elections held in April, June, August, September, October, and November. No national body oversaw the elections, so voters went to the polls in the spring in New England and in late summer and fall in the West. The inconclusive course of the war and the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation figured in differently as factors in various states according to the timing of their elections.


Lincoln, after the ambiguous victory at Antietam, traveled to Sharpsburg Maryland, to confer with General George B. McClellan.

By November, the election returns had given the Democrats a net increase of thirty-two seats in the House, reducing the Republican majority to twenty-five. Five vital states, where Lincoln had won every electoral vote in 1860—New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois—elected Democratic majorities in Congress. In the Senate, however, Republicans picked up five seats. Illinois elected nine Democrats and only five Republicans to the House of Representatives. Most painfully for Lincoln, in his home district, John Todd Stuart, Lincoln’s first law partner, now a Democrat, defeated the Republican candidate, Leonard Swett, Lincoln’s close friend.
In state contests the results were more dismal. New York and New Jersey elected Democrats as governors. Criticizing Lincoln as an abolitionist dictator, Democrats gained control of the state legislatures in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. The New York Times, usually a supporter of the president, summed up the total results as a “vote of want of confidence” in his leadership.
On November 5, the day after New Yorkers voted in the last mid term election, Lincoln asked Halleck to remove McClellan from his command of the Army of the Potomac. The next day Lincoln told Francis P. Blair that he had “tried long enough to bore with an auger too dull to take hold.” The president appointed Ambrose P. Burnside as the new commander.
“NEVER HAS SUCH a paper been delivered to the National Legislature under auspices so grave, and rarely, if ever, has one been awaited with equal solicitude by the people of the country.” The National Intelligencer underlined the import of Lincoln’s annual message to Congress on December 1, 1862. After a string of military setbacks, interrupted in September by an ambiguous victory at Antietam, the publication of his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, and the difficult 1862 elections, Lincoln delivered his annual message.
Listeners of the annual presidential message did not expect, nor did they usually receive, any rhetorical dessert at the end of the standard meat and potatoes of political fare. Lincoln’s annual message for 1862 covered a wide range of topics, with reports from a number of departments using words supplied by cabinet members. But unlike his first annual message in 1861, Lincoln decided to use this opportunity to educate citizens and to mobilize public opinion across the North.
One last time he spoke of the benefits of colonization. Next, after reminding Congress of his Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862, he called their attention to “compensated emancipation.” He even offered three constitutional amendments to augment his plan, the first amendment calling for each state where slavery existed to have until 1900 to abolish it. Another amendment called on Congress to appropriate money for colonization. Lincoln’s goal was to end slavery peacefully even while still in the midst of war. He summarized the meaning of these amendments by stating, “Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed; without slavery it could not continue.”
By the end of 1862, Lincoln was speaking openly of slavery as the cause of the war. He recognized, however, that “among the friends of the Union,” a diversity of opinion existed. Some would perpetuate slavery; some would abolish it suddenly without compensation; some would abolish it gradually with compensation; some would remove the freed people, and some would retain them. In Lincoln’s habit of validating all voices, he listed five options. He did so in the best words their proponents would use. However, Lincoln averred that “because of these diversities, we waste much strength in struggles among ourselves.” He then discussed how persons advocating each of the five positions could see strengths and weaknesses in his three amendments.
Lincoln took time toward the end of this second annual message to offer a remarkable tribute to his senior colleagues. “I do not … forget that some of you are my seniors, nor that many of you have more experience than I, in the conduct of public affairs.” Yet, he said, he hoped that “in view of the great responsibility resting upon me, you will perceive no want of respect to yourselves, in any undue earnestness I may display.” Lincoln won the right to be heard about his own ideas by first expressing respect for his audience.
If his message to this point seemed gradualist in tone, his audience was certainly not prepared for his finale. “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.” Although Lincoln appealed explicitly for support of his proposals, and implicitly for the Emancipation Proclamation, his conclusion expanded his appeal beyond any particular agenda to a willingness to embrace a new and better future.
In contrasting the “quiet past” with the “stormy present,” he tapped into his favorite metaphor to describe the Civil War. In this storm, Lincoln once again had been subjected to the voices of those who wished to define him and tell him what he should do.
Lincoln included himself when he said, “We must rise with the occasion.” Stung by criticism that he had underestimated the determination of the South to go its own way, he made no such misjudgments now about what was at stake or how long the war might go on. Lincoln replaced the studied, rational argument of his inaugural address with a more evocative rhetoric better able to resonate with the emotional fears and longings of his audience.
“As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.” These words have often been mislaid or forgotten because of the dramatic final words that follow. Presidential leadership comes from the ability to articulate a compelling vision for the nation. For the first year and a half of the war, Lincoln’s public rhetoric showed him acting with fidelity to the great ideals of the past, especially as they were enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. By the end of 1862, Lincoln became willing to change the definition of the war in terms of the future. In his concluding appeal, Lincoln joined together history and memory. From his first reading of Parson Mason Locke Weems’s biography of George Washington as a boy, to his first major speech, the address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield in 1838 as a young man, we find Lincoln always invoking history. He held himself accountable to the great ideals of both the founding fathers and the primary documents of the nation. Now he wanted Congress to join him in a new accountability, and asked them to unite behind him. He was aware of all the political divisions in Congress. To underscore their unified responsibility, he used the plural pronouns “we” and “us.”
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us.
The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.
When Lincoln spoke of a “fiery trial,” he borrowed an image from a recent visitor to the White House, Eliza P. Gurney, a Quaker minister from Philadelphia. Ten weeks earlier, Mrs. Gurney and three women had sought a meeting with the president to comfort and encourage him. Following her sermon about the necessity to seek divine guidance, Gurney convened a prayer meeting in the president’s office, kneeling and offering a prayer “that light and wisdom might be shed down from on high, to guide our President.”
Lincoln, reticent to speak about his deepest feelings, especially religious ones, became surprisingly open in a correspondence he subsequently began with Mrs. Gurney. In his first letter, on October 26, 1862, he thanked her for her “sympathy and prayers.” He then declared, “We are indeed going through a great trial—a fiery trial.” The “indeed” indicated that he was responding to her sermon, in which she had commended Lincoln for the steadfastness of his leadership in such a difficult time. Lincoln’s image of “a fiery trial” was surely drawn from 1 Peter 4:12, a letter written to a people undergoing persecution: “Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you.”
Lincoln now underlined the key words in his concluding sentences, which balanced each other almost musically: “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.”
In this remarkable message to Congress, Lincoln was crafting for his audience an alternative vision of reality. He asked his listeners to move beyond their limited worldviews and embrace a future that could not be fully known.
Lincoln’s new commander of the Army of the Potomac, Ambrose Burnside, after so many of McClellan’s delays, intended to attack. He set his sights on the well-fortified town of Fredericksburg. The boyhood home of George Washington and a center of activity in the Revolutionary War, Fredericksburg was about to become the site of one of the crucial battles of the Civil War.
Lincoln expressed skepticism of Burnside’s operational plans, but on November 14, Halleck wrote Burnside, “The President had just assented to your plan. He thinks it will succeed if you move rapidly; otherwise not.” Still not satisfied, Lincoln traveled down the Potomac to meet Burnside for a long conference. The president told Burnside that he needed to be sure his troops could cross the river “free from risk” and be sure that “the enemy … be prevented from falling back, accumulating strength as he goes, into his intrenchments at Richmond.”
Burnside did not proceed rapidly. A full one month later, at 3 a.m. on the morning of December 11, engineers finally began putting pontoon bridges in place over the frigid waters of the Rappahannock River directly across from the town. Ice glazed the river and fog obscured the view of the historic political and economic center that once numbered five thousand people. Burnside, who knew his army of one hundred fifteen thousand men outnumbered Lee’s eighty thousand, believed he would be victorious by sheer force of numbers. With plenty of advance notice of Burnside’s intentions, Lee ordered General James Longstreet’s forces into place on the heights of the south side of the town.
On December 13, Burnside, turning aside advice from senior officers that he cross the Rappahannock River south and north of Fredericks-burg, instead mounted a direct assault on the town. General George G. Meade made an initial advance against “Stonewall” Jackson’s Corp, but when Union forces attempted to storm Mayre’s Heights on the south side of the town, they were repelled with heavy losses. By December 15, the Union army was in full retreat back across the pontoon bridges, thereby admitting a devastating defeat. The loss of more than thirteen thousand casualties to the less than five thousand casualties of the Confederates told the grim story.
Many blamed Lincoln for compelling Burnside to fight, but “Old Burn” accepted responsibility for the defeat, something George McClellan would not have done. Lincoln, ever conscious of the morale of the troops, issued a proclamation hoping to take the edge off the defeat. “Although you were not successful, the attempt was not in error,” the President stated. “The courage with which you, in an open field, maintained the contest against an entrenched foe … shows that you possess all the qualities of a great army.”
THE MILITARY DEFEAT at Fredericksburg quickly became a flashpoint for smoldering political grievances. Radical Republicans in Congress believed the administration ought to be pursuing a more vigorous military policy or risk conservative Democratic pleas for a peace that would scuttle Lincoln’s plans for emancipation. Unable yet to lay a hand on the president, Radical Republicans took aim at Lincoln’s cabinet.
On Tuesday afternoon, December 16, Republican senators caucused for five hours. Illinois senator Lyman Trumbull, once Lincoln’s ally but increasingly his critic, started the discussion by arguing that “the recent repulse at Fredericksburg” called for Congressional action. Minnesota senator Morton Wilkinson decried that “the country was ruined and the cause was lost.” The agitation of the senators quickly focused on William Henry Seward, secretary of state, who they viewed as “President de facto.” One senator after another blamed Seward for the postponement in discharging General McClellan, the slowness in making the war a campaign against slavery, and the resurgence of conservatives in the 1862 elections. Tough-talking Maine senator William Pitt Fes-senden summarized the sentiment of many when he said he had been informed by a member of the cabinet that “there was a back-stairs influence which often controlled the apparent conclusions of the Cabinet itself.” It was common knowledge that the source of Fessenden’s remark was Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase. Old Ben Wade of Ohio proposed that the Senate “go in a body and demand of the President the dismissal of Mr. Seward.” At this point, Iowa Senator James W. Grimes offered a resolution expressing “a want of confidence in the Secretary of State, and that he ought to be removed from the Cabinet.”
In the midst of rising emotions, New York senator Preston King left the caucus early to proceed to Seward’s home and apprise him of what was afoot. Seward responded to King’s news: “They may do as they please about me, but they shall not put the President in a false position on my account.” The secretary of state wrote a letter of resignation, and King and Seward’s son Frederick walked to the White House to deliver it to the president.
Lincoln read Seward’s resignation “with a face full of pain and surprise” as King recounted the charges in the emotional Republican caucus. After reading Seward’s letter, Lincoln immediately walked to the secretary of state’s home on Lafayette Square. The president exerted all of his persuasion to talk his friend out of resigning. But it was no use. Seward told Lincoln he would be relieved to be freed of the burden and criticism stalking him day and night. Lincoln responded, “Ah, yes, Governor, that will do very well for you, but I am like the [caged] starling in [Laurence] Sterne’s story, ‘I can’t get out.’ ”
What was Lincoln to do? He understood that he was the real object of the radicals’ wrath. He also knew that if Seward’s imperious ways could be off-putting, he valued his enormous abilities and steadfast loyalty. Lincoln knew that even though the caucus involved only senators, behind their recriminations darts were being thrown at Seward and himself by Treasury Secretary Chase. Lincoln decided not to be put on the defensive, but to get out front in this cabinet crisis of leadership.
On December 17, the Republican senators met again, passed a slightly revised resolution, appointed a committee of nine, and re quested a meeting with the president. Not wishing to cause the wound at the heart of his cabinet to fester, Lincoln did not want delay and proposed that they meet with him the next evening at 7 p.m.
Shortly before the meeting on December 18, Senator Orville Browning, not a member of the committee, called on Lincoln at the White House. “I saw in a moment that he was in distress.” When Browning said that things could have been worse, Lincoln replied, “They wish to get rid of me, and I am sometimes half disposed to gratify them.”
Lincoln, keeping his distress under his green shawl, received the committee at 7 p.m. “with his usual urbanity” and listened to their litany of complaints. Ohio senator Ben Wade charged that the reason for the recent defeats of Republicans was because “the President had placed the direction of our military affairs in the hands of bitter and malignant Democrats,” a reference to George McClellan. But the real target was Seward, who the Committee of Nine impugned “was not in accord with the majority of Cabinet and exerted an injurious influence upon the conduct of the war.” Senator Charles Sumner complained about Seward’s handling of foreign affairs, singling out one memo where he seemed to put the mentality of the Congress and the Confederates on a similar plane. Lincoln mostly listened for three hours and told the committee he would respond to the paper they prepared which itemized their complaints. Lincoln’s goal was to calm some of the irritation which he did by his own open spirit to the senators.
Lincoln now moved to act quickly. He sent notices to each cabinet officer, except Seward, for a special meeting the next morning, December 20, at 10:30 a.m. He told the Cabinet the Senate movement to reconfigure his cabinet “had shocked and grieved him.” He informed them of Seward’s resignation. He told the cabinet, “While they seemed to believe in my honesty, they also appeared to think that when I had in me any good purpose or intention Seward contrived to suck it out of me unperceived.” Lincoln seemed particularly upset at the charge, obviously fomented by Chase that the cabinet did not work well together. Lincoln expressed his belief was that “the members had gone on harmoniously, whatever had been their previous feelings and associations.” He told them that in the midst of “the overwhelming troubles of the country, which had borne heavily upon him, he had been sustained and consoled by the good feeling and the mutual and unselfish confidence and zeal that pervaded the Cabinet.” Lincoln concluded the meeting by asking the Cabinet to join him for a scheduled meeting with the Committee of Nine that very evening. Everyone assented to his request except Chase, who, telling his colleagues “he had no movement whatever of the movement” against Seward, strongly objected to the joint meeting but reluctantly agreed to attend.
Lincoln’s decision to have the Committee of Nine and the Cabinet meet face to face and “discus their mutual misunderstanding under his own eye” exhibited his political genius. It was no longer possible to play the game of “he said,” no “he said.” Lincoln began this remarkable meeting by reading the resolutions of the Committee. Lincoln acknowledged that perhaps he should have called more cabinet meetings, but parried the charges of the Committee by affirming “the unity of his Cabinet.” He declared that “though they could not be expected to think and act alike on all subjects, they acquiesced in measures when decided.” The subtext of Lincoln’s remarks was that Seward made no decisions without the assent of the president and the Cabinet. The focus of many eyes was on Chase, not long before the haughty accuser of Seward, but now under Lincoln’s watchful eye suddenly cowed into silence and embarrassment. In the end Lincoln asked for a vote. “Do you, gentlemen, still think Seward ought to be excused?” Only four Senators—Grimes, Trumbull, Sumner, and Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas—voted yes. Secretary of the Navy Welles captured Lincoln’s leadership, confiding to his diary that “the President managed his own case, speaking freely, and showed great tact, shrewdness, and ability.” After five hours of discussion lasting until 1 a.m., Lincoln, having confronted the senators with the Cabinet, emerged as the strong conciliator of both groups.
But how was Lincoln to deal with Seward and Chase? The news of Seward’s resignation was spreading throughout Washington. The duplicitous behavior of Chase infuriated even those senators who had been his allies.
The next morning, December 20, Lincoln sent for Chase. When the secretary of the treasury arrived, Welles and Stanton were calling upon Lincoln on their own accord. When Chase entered, Lincoln said, “I sent for you, for this matter is giving me great trouble.” Chase replied that he “had been painfully affected” by the meeting the previous evening and now told the president he had “prepared his resignation.” “Where is it?” Lincoln asked, reaching out his hand to get hold of it. Chase, taken aback by Lincoln’s eagerness, held on momentarily to the sealed envelope. He surrendered the resignation, and Lincoln opened the envelope with a pleased expression on his face while Chase, usually filled with self-confidence, left Lincoln’s office deeply perplexed.
Later that morning Lincoln met with his Cabinet, minus Seward and Chase. After acknowledging Seward’s resignation, he held up Chase’s resignation. He then announced, “Now I have the biggest half of the hog. I shall accept neither resignation.”
That same day Lincoln wrote a letter to both Cabinet secretaries. He told them that for the sake of “the public interest” he had decided not to accept their resignations and “I therefore have to request that you will resume the duty of your Departments respectively.”
Lincoln emerged from this grave crisis in his inner government the conciliatory victor. He had listened with respect to the radicals, he had affirmed his cabinet, and he secured his own presidential prerogative. Welles, whose appreciation of Lincoln was growing, said it well. “Seward comforts him,—Chase he deems a necessity.” In the end he decided to continue with the service of two of his most talented cabinet secretaries.


This chromolithograph from 1863 portrays a homespun Lincoln working in an office cluttered with a bust of President James Buchanan and texts of states’ rights theories by John C. Calhoun and John Randolph. Lincoln rests his left hand on the Bible while heeding the injunction of President Andrew Jackson: “The Union Must & Shall Be Preserved.”