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Abraham Lincoln, 1863.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-13016 DLC).
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Lincoln, Abraham
(12 Feb. 1809-15 Apr. 1865),
sixteenth
president of the United States, was born in Hardin
County, Kentucky, the son of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy
Hanks, farmers. Thomas Lincoln had come to Kentucky
from Virginia with his father Abraham in 1782. He acquired
only enough literacy to sign his name but gained modest
prosperity as a carpenter and farmer on the Kentucky
frontier. He married Nancy Hanks, also illiterate,
in 1806. Abraham was born in a log cabin on "Sinking
Spring Farm" three miles south of Hodgenville.
When he was two years old the family moved to another
farm on Knob Creek about seven miles northeast of Hodgenville.
On this farm of 230 acres (only thirty of which were
tillable) Abraham lived for five years, helped his
parents with chores, and learned his ABCs by attending
school for a few weeks with his older sister Sarah.
In
December 1816 the Lincolns again moved, this time to
the newly admitted state of Indiana. The tradition
that the Lincolns moved because of dislike of slavery
may have some truth; they belonged to a Baptist denomination
that broke from the parent church on the slavery issue.
However, the main reason for the move was Thomas's
uncertainty of Kentucky land titles. Indiana offered
secure titles surveyed under the Northwest Ordinance.
The Lincolns lived in a rude, three-sided shelter on
Pigeon Creek sixteen miles north of the Ohio River.
There Abraham learned the use of axe and plow helping
his father carve a house and farm out of the hardwood
forest. The growing youth also snatched a few more
months of schooling in the typical one-room schoolhouses
of the frontier. In late 1817 or 1818 the Lincolns
were joined by Nancy's aunt Elizabeth Hanks Sparrow
and her husband, Thomas Sparrow, and Abraham's
cousin Dennis Hanks. In the fall of 1818 the Sparrows
and Nancy Hanks Lincoln all died of "milk
sick," probably caused by drinking the
milk of cows that had grazed on white snakeroot.
After
a year of rough homemaking, Thomas Lincoln returned
to Kentucky, where on 2 December 1819 he wed the widow
Sarah Bush Johnston and brought her and her three children
to Pigeon Creek. His stepmother provided the teenage
Abraham with more affection and guidance than his natural
mother or his father ever did. With a desire for learning
and ambition for self-improvement, he devoured every
book he could borrow from the meager libraries of friends
and neighbors. Thomas Lincoln neither understood nor
encouraged his son's intellectual ambition; quite
the contrary, he chastised Abraham's "lazy"
preference for reading over working.
Abraham's
thinly veiled disdain for the life of a backwoods farmer
doubtless irritated his father. Abraham in turn resented
the requirement of law and custom that any wages he
earned before he came of age--by hiring out to
neighbors to split rails, for example--must be
given to his father. One historian has suggested that
Abraham Lincoln's hatred of chattel slavery,
which denied to slaves the "fruits of
their labor," may have originated in Thomas
Lincoln's expropriation of the teenage Abraham's
earnings (Burlingame, pp. 37-42). In any event,
relations between Abraham and his father grew increasingly
estranged. When Thomas lay dying in January 1851, he
sent word that he wanted to say goodbye to his son.
Abraham refused to make the eighty-mile trip, stating,
"If we could meet now, it is doubtful
whether it would not be more painful than pleasant"
(Basler, vol. 2, p. 97). He did not attend his father's
funeral.
In 1828 Lincoln and a friend took a flatboat
loaded with farm produce down the Ohio and Mississippi
rivers to New Orleans. He repeated the experience in
1831. These trips widened his horizons and, by tradition,
shocked him with the sight of men and women being bought
and sold in the slave markets of New Orleans. Although
he came of age in 1830, he did not immediately strike
out on his own. Once more his father sold the farm
and set forth to greener pastures, this time in central
Illinois. After helping his father clear land, Abraham
hired out to split rails for other farmers, and he
kept his earnings. In the summer of 1831 he settled
in New Salem, a village on the Sangamon River bluff
about twenty miles northwest of Springfield.
Lincoln's Formative Years in New Salem, Illinois (1831-1837)
Lincoln's
six years in New Salem were a formative period. For
a time he drifted from one job to another: store clerk,
mill hand, partner in a general store that failed,
postmaster, surveyor. Six feet four inches tall with
a lanky, rawboned look, unruly coarse black hair, a
gregarious personality, and a penchant for telling
humorous stories, Lincoln made many friends. Among
them were Jack Armstrong and his gang of young toughs,
"the Clary Grove boys." As
the new boy in town with a reputation for great physical
strength, Lincoln had to prove his mettle in a wrestling
match with Armstrong. Winning the match, Lincoln also
won the loyalty of the Clary Grove boys despite his
refusal to participate in their drinking and hell-raising.
In
1832 the Sac and Fox Indians under Chief Black Hawk
returned to their ancestral homeland in Illinois, precipitating
the short-lived Black Hawk War. Lincoln volunteered
for the militia and was elected captain of his company,
which included the Clary Grove boys. They saw no action,
but Lincoln later recalled his election as captain
as the most gratifying honor of his life.
Another
side of Lincoln's complex personality was a deeply
reflective, almost brooding, quality that sometimes
descended into serious depression. Lincoln described
this condition as "the hypo,"
for hypochondria, as medical science then termed it.
This recurring ailment, coupled with Lincoln's
almost morbid fondness for William Knox's lugubrious
poem "Mortality" (1824) and
his later self-reported dreams in which death figured
prominently, may have resulted from the deaths of loved
ones: his mother, his sister Sarah in childbirth in
1828; and Ann Rutledge in 1835. Lincoln met Rutledge
at her father's tavern in New Salem, where he
boarded in 1833. Their story has taken on so many layers
of myth and antimyth that the truth is impossible to
determine. For half a century, until the 1990s, professional
historians discounted the notion of their love and
engagement, but new scholarship revived the credibility
of a Lincoln-Rutledge romance (Walsh, The Shadows
Rise). In any event, Rutledge died in August 1835,
probably of typhoid fever, and Lincoln apparently suffered
a prolonged spell of "hypo"
after her death.
During the New Salem years Lincoln
developed new purpose and direction. The local schoolmaster,
Mentor Graham, guided his study of mathematics and
literature. Lincoln joined a debating society, and
he acquired a lifelong love of William Shakespeare
and Robert Burns. He also acquired a passion for politics
and in 1832 announced his candidacy for the legislature.
Although he failed of election, he received 92 percent
of the vote in the New Salem district, where he was
known. When he ran again in 1834, he campaigned throughout
the county and won decisively.
Election to the Illinois Legislature
Lincoln was a Whig,
a devotee of Henry Clay, whom Lincoln described as
his "beau ideal of a statesman."
Clay's American System, with its emphasis on
government support for education, internal improvements,
banking, and economic development to promote growth
and opportunity, attracted him. In the legislature
Lincoln came under the wing of John T. Stuart, a Springfield
lawyer and Whig minority leader in the house. Stuart
encouraged Lincoln to study law and guided him through
Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the
Laws of England (1765-1769) and other books
whose mastery was necessary to pass the bar examination
in those days. On 9 September 1836 Lincoln obtained
his license. In 1837 he moved to Springfield and became
Stuart's partner.
Lincoln won reelection to
the legislature in 1836, 1838, and 1840. He became
floor leader of the Whigs and a prominent member of
the "Long Nine," Whig legislators
from Sangamon County who averaged more than six feet
in height. Legislative logrolling enabled the Long
Nine to get the state capital moved from Vandalia to
Springfield in 1837. During the same session Lincoln
and one colleague from Sangamon County entered a protest
against a resolution passed overwhelmingly by the legislature
that denounced antislavery societies in such a way
as to imply approval of slavery. Declaring slavery
to be "founded on both injustice and bad
policy," Lincoln and his colleague nevertheless
criticized the abolitionists, whose doctrines tended
"rather to increase than to abate [slavery's]
evils" (Basler, vol. 1, pp. 74-75).
Although
ill at ease with women, Lincoln in 1836 began a half-hearted
courtship of Mary Owens, whose sister lived in New
Salem. A year later she broke off the relationship,
to the probable relief of both parties. In 1839 Lincoln
met Mary Todd (Mary Todd Lincoln), who had come from Kentucky to live with
her married sister in Springfield. Despite the contrast
between the educated, cultured, and socially prominent
daughter of a Lexington banker and the socially awkward,
rough-hewn son of an illiterate farmer, Mary and Abraham
fell in love and became engaged in 1840. What happened
next remains uncertain. Lincoln seems to have developed
doubts about his fitness for marriage and broke the
engagement. In January 1841 he succumbed to the worst
case of hypo he had yet experienced. "I
am now the most miserable man living,"
he wrote to Stuart on 23 January. "If what I feel were
equally distributed to the whole human family, there
would not be one cheerful face on earth"
(Basler, vol. 1, p. 229).
After a series of twists
and turns, the courtship revived. Lincoln's closest
friend, Joshua Speed, married in 1842; Speed's
assurance that matrimony was not so frightening after
all seems to have encouraged Lincoln. On 4 November
1842 he and Mary were wed. The quality of their marriage
has been much debated. It produced four sons. Mary
shared Abraham's lively interest in public affairs,
he often sought her advice, and she encouraged his
political ambition. In personality, however, they were
in many ways opposites. He was disorganized, careless
in dress, and indifferent to social niceties; she was
quick-tempered, sometimes shrewish, dressed expensively,
and lived by the strict decorum of Victorian conventions.
He got along with almost everybody; she quarreled with
servants, workmen, merchants, and some of Lincoln's
friends. He was absent from home on the legal or political
circuit for weeks at a time, leaving her to cope with
the trials of household management and child rearing.
His moodiness sometimes clashed with her fits of temper.
Over time her mental stability became more fragile.
A Successful Law Practice and One Term in Congress (1847-1849)
After
retiring from the legislature in 1841, Lincoln devoted
most of his time to his law practice. In 1841 he formed
a partnership with Stephen T. Logan, who helped him
become more thorough and meticulous in preparing his
cases. The Springfield courts sat only a few weeks
a year, requiring Lincoln to ride the circuit of county
courts throughout central Illinois for several months
each spring and fall. Most of his cases involved damage
to crops by foraging livestock, property disputes,
debts, and assault and battery, with an occasional
murder trial to liven interest. By the time of his
marriage Lincoln was earning $1,200 a year, income
equal to the governor's salary. In 1844 he bought
a house in Springfield--the only home he ever
owned. In 1844 he also dissolved his partnership with
Logan and formed a new one with 26-year-old William
H. Herndon, to whom Lincoln became a mentor.
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Abraham Lincoln, c. 1846-1847. Daguerreotype attributed to Nicholas H. Shepherd.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZC4-2439).
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Lincoln's
ambitions were not fulfilled by a successful law practice.
He wanted to run for Congress from this safe Whig district,
but the concentration of Whig hopefuls in Springfield
meant that he had to wait his turn under an informal
one-term rotation system. When his turn came in 1846,
Lincoln won handily over Democratic candidate Peter
Cartwright, a well-known Methodist clergyman who tried
to make an issue of Lincoln's nonmembership in
a church (Mary later joined Springfield's First
Presbyterian Church, which Abraham also occasionally
attended).
Lincoln's congressional term (1847-1849)
was dominated by controversies over the Mexican War.
He took the standard Whig position that the war had
been provoked by President James K. Polk. On 22 December
1847 Lincoln introduced "spot resolutions"
calling for information on the exact "spot
of soil" on which Mexicans shed American
blood to start the war, implying that this spot was
actually Mexican soil. Lincoln also voted several times
for the Wilmot Proviso, declaring that slavery should
be prohibited in any territory acquired from Mexico.
On these issues Lincoln sided with the majority in
the Whig House of Representatives. In addition, Lincoln
introduced a bill (which was buried in committee) for
compensated abolition of slavery in the District of
Columbia if approved by a majority of the District's
voters.
Lincoln's opposition to the Mexican
War was not popular in Illinois. "Spotty
Lincoln," jibed Democratic newspapers,
had committed political suicide. "What
an epitaph: 'Died of Spotted Fever' "
(Thomas, p. 120). When Lincoln campaigned in 1848 for
the Whig presidential nominee Zachary Taylor, the "Spotty
Lincoln" label came back to haunt him.
The Whig candidate for Congress who succeeded Lincoln
under the rotation system, his former partner Stephen
T. Logan, went down to defeat--perhaps because
of voter backlash against the party's antiwar
stance. Taylor nevertheless won the presidency, but
Lincoln did not get the patronage appointment he expected
as commissioner of the General Land Office.
Lincoln
returned to Springfield disheartened with politics
and gave full time to his law practice. During the
1850s he became one of the leading lawyers in the state.
His annual income reached $5,000. The burst of railroad
construction during the decade generated a large caseload.
Lincoln at various times represented railroads. In
two of his most important cases he won exemption of
the Illinois Central from county taxation and successfully
defended the Rock Island from a suit by a shipping
company whose steamboat had hit the Rock Island's
bridge over the Mississippi (the first such bridge
ever built). Yet it would be misleading to describe
Lincoln as a "corporation lawyer"
in the modern sense of that term, since he opposed
corporations with equal frequency. In one important
case he represented a small firm in a patent infringement
suit brought against it by the McCormick Reaper Company.
Lincoln continued to ride the circuit each spring and
fall; the great majority of cases handled by Lincoln
and Herndon (some 200 each year) concerned local matters
of debt, ejectment, slander and libel, trespass, foreclosure,
divorce, and the like.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act and Its Effect on Lincoln
In 1854 a seismic political
upheaval occurred that propelled Lincoln back into
politics. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, rammed through Congress
under the leadership of Illinois senator Stephen A.
Douglas (an old acquaintance of Lincoln and once a
rival for Mary Todd's affections), revoked the
ban on slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territory
north of 36° 30'. This repeal of a
crucial part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 opened
Kansas Territory to slavery. It polarized the free
and slave states more sharply than anything else had
done. It incited several years of civil war between
proslavery and antislavery forces in Kansas, which
became a prelude to the national Civil War that erupted
seven years later, and it gave birth to the Republican
party, whose principal plank was exclusion of slavery
from the territories.
Before 1854 Lincoln had said
little in public about slavery, but during the next
six years he delivered an estimated 175 speeches whose
"central message" was the
necessity to exclude slavery from the territories as
a step toward its ultimate extinction everywhere (Waldo
W. Braden, Abraham Lincoln: Public Speaker [1988],
pp. 35-36). That had been the purpose of the
Founding Fathers, Lincoln believed, when they adopted
the Declaration of Independence and enacted the Northwest
Ordinance of 1787, barring slavery from most of the
existing territories; that was why they did not mention
the words "slave" or "slavery"
in the Constitution. "Thus, the thing
is hid away, in the constitution," said
Lincoln in 1854, "just as an afflicted
man hides away a wen or cancer" (Basler,
vol. 2, p. 274). By opening all of the Louisiana Purchase
territory to slavery, the Kansas-Nebraska Act had reversed
the course of the Founding Fathers. That was why Lincoln
was "aroused," he later recalled,
"as he had never been before"
(Basler, vol. 4, p. 67).
Lincoln ran for the state
legislature and took the stump for other "anti-Nebraska"
Whigs. The fullest exposition of Lincoln's philosophy
occurred in a speech at Peoria on 16 October 1854.
Slavery was a "monstrous injustice,"
he said, that "deprives our republican
example of its just influence in the world--enables
the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility,
to taunt us as hypocrites." With the Kansas-Nebraska
Act, "our republican robe is soiled, and
trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. . . . Let
us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with
it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with
it" (Basler, vol. 2, pp. 247-83).
These sentiments were Lincoln's lodestar for
the rest of his life.
That same year a coalition
of anti-Nebraska Whigs and Democrats, including Lincoln,
appeared to have gained control of the legislature.
Their first task in February 1855 was to elect a U.S.
senator, and Lincoln resigned from the legislature
to become the Whig candidate. Through six ballots he
led other candidates but fell short of a majority.
To prevent the election of a regular Democrat, Lincoln
then threw his support to Lyman Trumbull, an anti-Nebraska
Democrat, who was elected on the tenth ballot.
Deeply
disappointed, Lincoln picked up his law practice again.
In 1856 he helped found the Republican party in Illinois.
With his speech at the new party's state convention
in Bloomington on 29 May (the famous "lost
speech"--so called because newspaper
reporters were supposedly so entranced by its eloquence
that they neglected to take it down), Lincoln emerged
as the state's Republican leader. At the party's
national convention he received 110 votes in a losing
bid for the vice presidential nomination. Lincoln campaigned
for the Republican ticket headed by John C. Frémont,
giving more than fifty speeches in all parts of Illinois.
However, while Frémont won a plurality of the
northern popular vote in the three-party contest, he
lost Illinois and the other crucial lower North states
of Pennsylvania and Indiana, which the Democrat, James
Buchanan, added to the Solid South to win the presidency.
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates
By
the time Senator Douglas came up for reelection in
1858, he had broken with the Buchanan administration
over the Lecompton constitution in Kansas and thus
appeared vulnerable to a Republican challenge. The
party nominated Lincoln (an almost unprecedented procedure
in that time, when state legislatures elected U.S.
senators), who set the theme for his campaign with
his famous "House Divided"
speech at Springfield on 16 June 1858. " 'A
house divided against itself cannot stand,' "
said Lincoln, quoting the words of Jesus recorded in
the Gospel of Mark. "I believe this government
cannot endure, permanently half slave and half
free. . . . It will become all one thing,
or all the other." The Dred Scott
decision in 1857 had legalized slavery in every territory
on a principle that Lincoln feared would legalize it
in every state as well if the southern-dominated Supreme
Court had its way. But when Republicans gained national
power and had a chance to reconstitute the Court, they
would ban slavery from the territories, thus stifling
its growth and placing it "where the public
mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course
of ultimate extinction" (Basler, vol.
2, p. 461).
Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series
of debates. Douglas accepted, and the two met in seven
three-hour debates in every part of the state. Why
could the country not continue to exist half slave
and half free as it had for seventy years? asked Douglas.
Lincoln's talk about the "ultimate
extinction" of slavery would drive the
South into secession. Douglas also upbraided Lincoln
for his alleged belief in "negro equality."
Sensing a winning issue in Illinois, Douglas shouted
questions to the crowd: "Are you in favor
of conferring upon the negro the rights and privileges
of citizenship?" Back would come the response,
"No, No!" "Do
you desire to turn this beautiful state into a free
negro colony ('no, no') in order that when
Missouri abolishes slavery she can send one hundred
thousand emancipated slaves into Illinois, to become
citizens and voters on an equality with yourselves?
('Never,' 'no')"
(Basler, vol. 3, p. 9).
Douglas's demagoguery
put Lincoln on the defensive. A "Black
Republican" would have no chance of election
in Illinois. Lincoln replied with cautious denials
that he favored the "social and political
equality" of the races, but he preferred
the higher ground of principle. The problem with Douglas
was that he "looks to no end of the institution
of slavery," said Lincoln. "That
is the issue that will continue in this country when
these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall
be silent" (Basler, vol. 3, p. 315).
The
popular vote for Republican and Democratic legislators
was virtually even in 1858, but because apportionment
favored the Democrats, they won a majority of seats
and reelected Douglas. Lincoln once again swallowed
his disappointment and continued to speak for Republican
candidates in the off-year elections of several midwestern
states in 1859.
In retrospect, Lincoln was the real
winner of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. His famous question
at Freeport forced Douglas to enunciate the "Freeport
Doctrine" that settlers could keep slavery
out of a territory despite the Dred Scott decision
by refusing to enact and enforce a local slave code.
The Freeport Doctrine further alienated Douglas from
southern Democrats and kindled their demand for a federal
slave code in the territories. This issue split the
Democratic party in 1860, virtually assuring the election
of a Republican president. The national visibility
achieved by Lincoln in the debates caused his name
to be increasingly mentioned as the possible Republican
nominee.
Preparing for the Presidency
While deprecating his qualifications for
the presidency, Lincoln admitted privately, "The
taste is in my mouth a little"
(Basler, vol. 4, p. 45). Lincoln's prospects
were enhanced by the favorable impact of his speech
on a large crowd, including several prominent eastern
Republicans, at Cooper Union in New York City on 27
February 1860. On the basis of thorough research, Lincoln
explicated the parallels between the Republican position
on slavery and that of the Founding Fathers. His success
at Cooper Union brought Lincoln numerous invitations
to speak in New England on his way to visit his oldest
son Robert (Robert Todd Lincoln), who had enrolled at Phillips Exeter Academy
for a year of preparatory work before entering Harvard.
Lincoln
used these occasions to focus on what has been called
the "free labor ideology,"
which was at the core of the Republican value system.
All work in a free society was honorable. Slavery degraded
manual labor by equating it with bondage. Free men
who practiced the virtues of industry, thrift, self-discipline,
and sobriety could climb the ladder of success. "I
am not ashamed to confess," Lincoln said
in New Haven, "that twenty-five years
ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on
a flat-boat--just what might happen to any poor
man's son." But in the free states
an ambitious man "can better his condition"
because "there is no such thing as a freeman
being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a
hired laborer." The lack of hope, energy,
and progress in the slave states, where most laborers
were "fatally fixed" in the
condition of slavery, had made the United States a
house divided. Republicans wanted to keep slavery out
of the territories so that white workers and farmers
could move there to better their condition without
being "degraded . . . by forced rivalry
with negro slaves." Moreover, said Lincoln,
"I want every man to have the chance--and
I believe a black man is entitled to it--in which
he can better his condition" (Basler,
vol. 4, pp. 24-25; vol. 3, p. 478). The symbolism
of Lincoln, the "poor man's son,"
visiting his own son at New England's most elite
school was not lost on his audiences.
Lincoln returned
from his eastern tour to find Illinois friends mounting
a concerted effort for his nomination as president.
As the 16 May opening date approached for the Republican
National Convention in Chicago (a fortunate location
for Lincoln's cause), circumstances converted
him from a favorite son to a serious contender. The
leading candidate was William H. Seward of New York.
Seward's long and prominent public career was
a source of both strength and weakness. His chief liability
was a reputation as an antislavery radical who could
not carry the crucial lower North states of Illinois,
Indiana, and Pennsylvania that the Republicans had
lost in 1856. Though Seward's current position
was in some respects more conservative than Lincoln's,
he suffered from the image created by his Higher Law
speech of 1850 and Irrepressible Conflict speech of
1858. Lincoln's campaign managers worked feverishly
to persuade delegates that Lincoln was more electable
than Seward and to line up second-choice commitments
to Lincoln from several states. Lincoln's promoters
also skillfully exploited the "rail-splitter"
image to illustrate the party's free labor theme.
The strategy worked. Seward led on the first ballot;
Lincoln almost caught up on the second and won on the
third.
The ensuing four-party campaign was the most
fateful in American history. The Democrats split into
northern and southern parties, while a remnant of Whigs,
mostly from the border states, formed the Constitutional
Union party. Lincoln carried every free state except
New Jersey, whose electoral votes he divided with Douglas,
and thereby won the election despite garnering slightly
less than 40 percent of the popular votes--no
popular votes at all in ten southern states. Seven
of those states enacted ordinances of secession before
Lincoln's inauguration.
A Divided Nation
Between the election
and his inauguration, Lincoln remained in Springfield,
putting together an administration. He made no public
statements despite panicky advice that he say something
to reassure the South. He was already on record many
times saying that he had no constitutional power and
no intention to interfere with slavery in the states
where it existed. "I could say nothing
which I have not already said. . . . If I thought a
repetition would do any good I would make it"
(Basler, vol. 4, pp. 139-40).
Lincoln gave
private assurances to southern moderates and Unionists
of his purpose to go no further against slavery than
the Republican platform's pledge to keep it out
of the territories. To Alexander Stephens of Georgia,
who opposed secession until his state went out, Lincoln
wrote in December that the slave states had nothing
to fear, but he added: "I suppose, however,
this does not meet the case. You think slavery is right
and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong
and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub"
(Basler, vol. 4, p. 160).
It was indeed the rub.
Southerners had read Lincoln's House Divided
speech, in which he had said that restriction of slavery
was a first step toward "ultimate extinction."
Whether ultimate or imminent, the demise of slavery
portended by the South's loss of the national
government to an antislavery party was the reason for
secession. For most secessionists there was no turning
back.
Nevertheless, a host of compromise proposals
emerged during the 1860-1861 session of Congress.
The most important were embodied in constitutional
amendments sponsored by Senator John J. Crittenden
of Kentucky. The centerpiece of the Crittenden Compromise
was a proposal to allow slavery south of 36° 30'
in all territories "now held, or hereafter
acquired" (italics added). Such a
compromise would not only negate the chief plank of
the Republican platform but would also step up the
drive to acquire Cuba and other tropical territories
suitable for slavery. Seward (whom Lincoln had designated
as secretary of state) and some other Republicans seemed
prepared to tilt toward compromise, but from Springfield
came admonitions to stand firm. "Entertain
no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension
of slavery," Lincoln wrote to Seward and
to other key Republican leaders. "We have
just carried an election on principles fairly stated
to the people. . . . If we surrender, it is the end
of us. . . . A year will not pass, till we shall have
to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay
in the Union" (Basler, vol. 4, pp. 150,
172).
The Crittenden Compromise went down to defeat,
but there is no reason to believe that the seven seceded
states would have returned even if it had passed. These
states had seized all federal property within their
borders except Fort Pickens on an island off Pensacola
and Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. A month before
Congress adjourned (and before Lincoln was inaugurated),
delegates from the seven seceded states met at Montgomery,
Alabama, and formed the Confederate States of America.
As he departed Springfield for Washington on 11 February
1861, "with a task before me greater than
rested upon Washington," Lincoln faced
the reality of a divided nation (Basler, vol. 4, p.
190).
Lincoln's Inauguration (1861)
Lincoln's inaugural address offered both
a sword and an olive branch. The sword was an unconditional
affirmation of the illegality of secession and his
intention to execute the laws in all states, to "hold,
occupy and possess" federal property,
and to "collect the [customs] duties and
imposts." The olive branch was a reiteration
of Lincoln's pledge not "to interfere
with slavery where it exists" and to enforce
the constitutional provision for the return of fugitive
slaves. Wherever "in any interior locality"
hostility to the federal government was "so
great and so universal, as to prevent competent resident
citizens from holding the Federal offices,"
Lincoln would suspend federal operations "for
the time." In an eloquent peroration suggested
by Seward, Lincoln spoke of the "mystic
chords of memory," which he hoped would
"yet swell the chorus of the Union, when
again touched, as surely they will be, by the better
angels of our nature" (Basler, vol. 4,
pp. 262-71).
Lincoln hoped that his inaugural
address would buy time for passions to cool in the
South and enable the seven states to "reconstruct"
themselves back into the Union. This hope was founded
on an erroneous but widely shared assumption in the
North that a silent majority of southerners were Unionists
who had been swept along by the passions of the moment.
But time was running out. The day after his inauguration,
Lincoln learned that Major Robert Anderson, commander
of the besieged federal garrison at Fort Sumter in
Charleston harbor, had only supplies enough to last
a few more weeks.
Fort Sumter was the flash point
of tension. Charleston was proud of its reputation
as the cradle of secession. Insisting that a sovereign
nation could not tolerate a foreign fort in one of
its harbors, Confederate leaders demanded the transfer
of Fort Sumter to the Confederacy. For a month Lincoln
endured sleepless nights and conflicting advice on
what to do. To give it up would constitute de facto
if not de jure recognition of the Confederacy. On the
other hand, it would preserve peace and keep the upper
South in the Union. On 15 March a majority of the cabinet,
with Seward as the strongest voice, counseled Lincoln
to yield Fort Sumter. Lincoln explored the possibility
of pulling out in return for an assurance from Virginia
that it would remain in the Union. Playing an independent
role as the putative "premier"
of the administration, Seward informed Confederate
commissioners that Lincoln would withdraw the garrison.
By the end of March, however, Lincoln had made the
opposite decision. He let Seward know in no uncertain
terms that he would be premier of his own administration.
A
majority of the cabinet now supported Lincoln's
decision to resupply Fort Sumter (as well as the less
controversial Fort Pickens). The problem was how to
do it. To send reinforcements prepared to shoot their
way into the bay would surely provoke a war that Lincoln
would be blamed for starting. Lincoln hit upon an ingenious
solution. Instead of sending reinforcements, he would
send only provisions--"food for hungry
men"--and he would notify southern
authorities in advance of his peaceful intention. On
6 April Lincoln sent a message to the governor of South
Carolina, "An attempt will be made to
supply Fort Sumpter [sic] with provisions only;
. . . no effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition,
will be made, without further notice, or in case of
an attack upon the Fort" (Basler, vol.
4, p. 323).
Civil War
With this message Lincoln in effect flipped
a coin and told Confederate president Jefferson Davis,
"Heads I win; tails you lose."
If the Confederates allowed the supplies to pass, the
American flag would continue to fly over Fort Sumter
as a symbol of sovereignty. If the Confederates attacked
the supply ships or the fort, they would suffer the
onus of starting a war and would unite a divided North.
Davis did not hesitate; he ordered the Confederate
guns to fire on Sumter. They did so on 12 April. And
the war came.
On 15 April Lincoln called out 75,000
militia to quell the rebellion, prompting four more
states to secede. On 19 April Lincoln proclaimed a
naval blockade of the Confederate coastline. From there
the war escalated step by step on a scale of violence
and destruction never dreamed of by those who fired
the guns at Sumter.
On the Union side Lincoln was
the principal architect of this escalation. He insisted
on a policy of unconditional surrender. Sovereignty,
the central issue of the war, was not negotiable. As
Lincoln put it late in the war, Davis "cannot
voluntarily reaccept the Union; we cannot voluntarily
yield it. Between him and us the issue is distinct,
simple, and inflexible. It is an issue which can only
be tried by war, and decided by victory"
(Basler, vol. 8, p. 151).
Because "all
else chiefly depends" on "the
progress of our arms," as Lincoln said
in 1865, he devoted more attention to his duties as
commander in chief than to any other function of the
presidency and spent vast amounts of time in the War
Department telegraph office. He borrowed books on military
history and strategy from the Library of Congress and
burned the midnight oil mastering them. Eleven times
he visited troops at the front in Virginia or Maryland.
The greatest frustrations he experienced were the failures
of Union generals to act with the vigor and aggressiveness
he expected of them. Perhaps one of the greatest satisfactions
he experienced was the ultimate victory of commanders
who had risen to the top in large part because Lincoln
appreciated their vigor and aggressiveness.
In 1861
Union armies achieved limited but important successes
by gaining control of Maryland, Missouri, part of Kentucky,
and also much of western Virginia, which paved the
way for the later admission of West Virginia as a new
state. Union naval forces gained lodgments along the
South Atlantic coast. But in the year's biggest
battle, at Bull Run (Manassas), 21 July 1861, the Union
suffered a dispiriting defeat. Lincoln then appointed
34-year-old George B. McClellan commander of the Army
of the Potomac and, from 1 November, general in chief
of all Union armies. McClellan's minor victories
in western Virginia had given him a newspaper reputation
as the "Young Napoleon."
He proved to be a superb organizer and trainer of soldiers
but a defensive-minded and cautious perfectionist in
action. He repeatedly exaggerated enemy strength as
an excuse for postponing offensive operations.
Lincoln
grew impatient with McClellan's inaction during
the eight months after he took command, while Republicans
in Congress grew suspicious that McClellan, a Democrat,
did not really want to strike the "rebels"
a hard blow. When McClellan finally began a glacial
advance up the Virginia peninsula toward Richmond in
the spring of 1862, Lincoln admonished him on 9 April:
"Once more let me tell you, it is indispensable
to you that you strike a blow. . . . I have
never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness
of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain
you. . . . But you must act" (Basler,
vol. 5, p. 185).
Lincoln already had his eye on a
commander who had proved he could act. His name was
Ulysses S. Grant, and he had captured Forts Henry and
Donelson on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers and
then beat back a Confederate counteroffensive in the
bloody battle of Shiloh, 6-7 April 1862. Other
Union forces in the West also scored important victories
in the spring of 1862, capturing New Orleans and Memphis
and gaining control of most of the Mississippi River.
In the East McClellan finally advanced to within five
miles of Richmond by the end of May. The Confederacy
seemed doomed.
Then the Union war machine went into
reverse. By September 1862 Confederate counteroffensives
in Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky took southern
armies across the Potomac into Maryland and almost
north to the Ohio River. This inversion stunned the
northern people and caused home-front morale to plummet,
but Lincoln did not falter. He issued a new call for
volunteers and declared, "I expect to
maintain this contest until successful, or till I die,
or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or
the country forsakes me" (Basler, vol.
5, p. 292).
The Confederate tide ebbed after the
limited Union victories at Antietam in Maryland on
17 September 1862 and Perryville in Kentucky on 8 October.
But the failure of Union commanders to follow up these
victories caused Lincoln's frustration to boil
over. He could not "understand why we
cannot march as the enemy marches, live as he lives,
fight as he fights" (Complete Works
of Abraham Lincoln, ed. John G. Nicolay and John
Hay [1905], vol. 8, pp. 63-64). On 24 October
he replaced sluggish General Don Carlos Buell with
William S. Rosecrans as commander of the Army of the
Ohio (renamed the Army of the Cumberland). A week later
he removed McClellan from command of the Army of the
Potomac. McClellan had "the slows,"
the president told one of the general's supporters
(Elbert B. Smith, Francis Preston Blair [1980],
p. 328).
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