alph Waldo Emerson, the Civil War era’s leading thinker, and Walt Whitman, its preeminent poet, understood Lincoln and his relationship to the Civil War better than most commentators of the time. Both had personal contact with Lincoln: Emerson twice visited the White House while on a lecture tour that took him to Washington in early 1862; and Whitman later that year moved from Brooklyn to Washington, where he worked for several years as a volunteer nurse in the war hospitals and frequently saw Lincoln riding about. Sometimes the president and the poet exchanged bows.
Emerson and Whitman observed that Lincoln, through his character and his actions, successfully balanced the competing forces of the individual and the mass, powerful leadership and democratic outreach, and a belief in a strong central government along with a respect for the rights of states and individuals.
Emerson, having long preached self-reliance, admired the president for speaking “in his own thought and style”—an impression confirmed when Lincoln greeted him at the White House by exclaiming, “O Mr. Emerson, I once heard you say in a lecture, that a Kentuckian seems to say by his air & manners, ‘Here am I; if you don’t like me, the worse for you.’”1
Frontier toughness characterized many of Lincoln’s actions. In the months before the war, he once became so angry about the South’s secession that a visitor reported that Lincoln’s “Kentucky blood is up, he means fight.”2 A sculptor who made a bust of Lincoln noted that as chief executive he acted “as he did in all his rough-and-tumble encounters in the West.”3 The president showed his strength in his sheer endurance of the prolonged agony of Civil War, which caused periodic depression but not physical collapse, as noted by a friend who remarked that “a man of less iron frame would have sunk under the enormous burdens laid upon him during four years, marked by Executive cares that have no parallel in history.”4 In a famous incident, while on a ship carrying him to meet General McClellan on the Virginia Peninsula, he seized a heavy axe and held it out horizontally with one hand for a long time—a feat that no other man on board could match.
More significant than Lincoln’s physical strength, in Emerson’s view, was his mental sturdiness, which grew from his immersion in the lives of ordinary Americans. Emerson pointed out that Lincoln—“Kentuckian born, working on a farm, a flatboatman, a captain in the Black Hawk War, a country lawyer, a representative in the rural legislature of Illinois”—had “what farmers call a long head; was excellent in working out the sum for himself; in arguing his case and convincing you fairly and firmly.”5
Whitman saw in Lincoln a special combination of individualism and averageness. On the one hand, Whitman wrote, Lincoln “went his own lonely road, disregarding all the usual ways—refusing the guides, accepting no warnings—just keeping his appointment with himself every time.” While “flexible, tolerant, almost slouchy” on “minor matters,” he exhibited “great firmness (even obstinacy) . . . involving great points.”6 At the same time, Whitman noted, Lincoln was the everyday American, with his barnyard humor, his carelessness about niceties, his “somewhat rusty and dusty” appearance.7
Whitman and Emerson believed that the Civil War brought meaning and order to an America that had previously been corrupt, fragmented, and demoralized. Taking a comprehensive view of the era, they sometimes came close to romanticizing the war. Whitman wrote that the government had previously been full of “the meanest kind of bawling and blowing office-holders, office-seekers, pimps, malignants, conspirators, slave catchers, pushers of slavery, . . . bribers, compromisers, . . . policy backers, money dealers, . . . crawling, serpentine men.”8 The war, in Whitman’s view, was a cleansing storm. He wrote in a poem, “War! an arm’d race is advancing! The welcome for battle, no turning away; / War! be it weeks, months, or years, an arm’d race is advancing to welcome it.”9 Later, Whitman immortalized Lincoln in his poem “O Captain! My Captain!,” hailing the president as the principled leader who guided “the victor ship” through its “fearful trip.”
For Emerson, the war did not just cleanse the nation: it reorganized it. In Emerson’s words, “War ennobles the Country; searches it; fires it; acquaints it with its resources; . . . concentrates history into a year, invents means; systematizes everything. We began the war in vast confusion; when we end it, all will be in system.”10 Leading this escape from confusion was Lincoln. Emerson said in his eulogy to Lincoln after the assassination, “His mind mastered the problem of the day; and, as the problem grew, so did his comprehension of it. Rarely was man so fitted to the event.”11
Since his youth, Lincoln had been accustomed to taming the wild; as president, he handled confusion or wildness on many levels. In the early part of the war, Lincoln faced disorder of many varieties: conflicts within his administration, threatening signs from other nations, an unstable economy, Indian uprisings, and widespread corruption. Lincoln confronted these problems with great inventiveness. He was like a tremendous funnel, open fully to anarchic currents that he channeled, condensed, and redirected in positive ways.
By flexing his centripetal muscles at the right moments, Lincoln greatly increased the central government’s strength, organizational structure, and commitment to human rights.
CONTROLLING THE CABINET
One of Lincoln’s accomplishments was corralling the energies of his cabinet. In creating what Doris Kearns Goodwin calls his “team of rivals”—a cabinet made up largely of former political opponents—he fashioned a balanced slate politically and geographically.12 He chose three former Democrats: Gideon Welles of Connecticut for the Navy Department, Montgomery Blair of Maryland as postmaster general, and Pennsylvania’s Simon Cameron as secretary of war. Former Whigs included New York’s William H. Seward as secretary of state, Salmon P. Chase of Ohio at the Treasury, Edward Bates of Missouri as attorney general, and Caleb Blood Smith of Indiana as secretary of the interior.
It was a motley group. Salmon Chase—tall, broad-shouldered, with regular features and blue eyes—was pious, cold, and steady; he harbored resentment for not having won the nomination for president, and, while he liked Lincoln, he felt superior to him and wanted to take his place. Montgomery Blair, well read but cantankerous, offended many with his abrasive personality; tall and thin, he had deep-set eyes that gave him “a rat-like expression,” as a reporter described it.13 The sixty-eight-year-old Edward Bates, whose white-bearded, rugged face gave him a Mosaic look, was a dour, reticent man who would work behind the scenes as attorney general to enforce Lincoln’s policies on slavery and civil liberties. The stodgy Gideon Welles looked so odd in his curled, flowing wig and long white beard that cartoonists and journalists gave him nicknames—most commonly Father Neptune, but also Grandmother Welles, Rip Van Winkle, and Marie Antoinette.14 The derisive names belied his energetic leadership of the Navy Department. The balding, stocky Caleb Smith, appointed for having helped Lincoln win Indiana at the 1860 convention, proved to be an inefficient secretary of the interior; he mishandled Indian affairs, led the failed effort to transport blacks to Panama, and opposed Lincoln’s plans for emancipation. Sickly, he left the government in December 1862 because of his opposition to the Emancipation Proclamation. He was replaced at Interior by John Palmer Usher, another thickset Indianan with receding hair. Simon Cameron, like Caleb Smith, was a poor choice for the cabinet. Thin-lipped and gray-haired, with close-set eyes and a prominent nose, Cameron had a record of alleged corruption, but Lincoln awarded him the War Department in order to repay him for bringing Pennsylvania to Lincoln’s side at the Chicago Wigwam convention. In January 1862, Lincoln removed Cameron for mismanagement and replaced him with Edwin M. Stanton of Ohio, a highly disciplined but nervous and irritable man with a long dark beard and gold-rimmed glasses that magnified his large eyes.
Jealousies, infighting, and self-promotion abounded. The former Jacksonian Democrat Welles loathed the ex-Whig Seward, who also had rocky relationships with Bates, Blair, and, particularly, Chase. Seward told Lincoln that “there were differences between himself and Chase which rendered it impossible for them to act in harmony.”15 At one point, Lincoln was reported to be “very much agitated” by the different opinions hurled at him from various quarters.16 When an Ohio congressman asked him if he did not think “the elements of the Cabinet are too strong and in some respects too conflicting,” Lincoln replied, “it may be so, but I think they will neutralize each other.”17 “I have been pulled this way and that way,” he remarked. “I have poised the scales, and it is my province to determine, and now I’m going to be master.”18
His comment about the cabinet members neutralizing one another suggests that he saw the cabinet as a whole forming a Blondin-like group that was ideologically balanced. While everyone in the cabinet opposed slavery and its extension, there was a range of outlooks, from the conservatism of Blair to the radicalism of Chase. In general, Lincoln succeeded in keeping the group in balance. As Nicolay and Hay wrote, “In weaker hands, such a Cabinet would have been a hotbed of strife; under him it became a tower of strength.
Lincoln dealt with his cabinet self-reliantly. He weathered the feuds among the various department chiefs. He listened to their advice, but he alone made final decisions. He was self-reliant enough to put up with one-upmanship or disagreement. He judged each cabinet member according to his contribution to saving the Union and ensuring social justice.
A strong call for social justice came, surprisingly, from one of the formerly conservative cabinet members, Edward Bates. Once a staunch Old Whig, Bates, apparently inspired by Lincoln’s antislavery war, wrote a pamphlet in late 1862 that argued for black citizenship in wording that refuted the Dred Scott decision and anticipated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments
Presented in the form of a letter from Bates to Salmon Chase, the pamphlet asked, “Is a man legally incapacitated to be a citizen of the United States by the sole fact that he is a colored, and not a white man?”20 Bates answered his own question: “The Constitution says not one word, and furnishes not one hint, in relation to the color or to the ancestral race of the ‘natural-born citizen.’” Bates paraphrased the Citizenship Clause of the Constitution by affirming that “every person born in the country at the moment of birth is prima facie a citizen,” regardless of race. Then Bates made a radical assertion: “I give it as my opinion that the free man of color, . . . if born in the United States, is a citizen of the United States.” “Color,” by implication, extended to people of all ethnicities.
This remarkably forward-looking argument was, predictably, sharply attacked, as in a Missouri newspaper that said it would “produce regret and disappointment in the minds of those who revere the Constitution as our fathers made it.”21 But it boldly anticipated later constitutional amendments and Supreme Court decisions. Significantly, Bates’s radical opinion was understood to be Lincoln’s as well. A leading journal, averring that Bates’s pamphlet had “a legal and a moral significance that can hardly be overestimated,” said that it carried “the moral weight of the Administration—for it is constructively the opinion of the President.”22
If Bates moved from conservatism to uncharted territory on race, Montgomery (“Monty”) Blair remained stuck in a reactionary position. To be sure, as postmaster general, Blair performed well. He regularized the postal system by issuing a standard postage stamp, improving registered mail, introducing the return receipt to verify delivery, pioneering the money-order system through the post office, and establishing rules for international postal service. Also, along with his father, the veteran politician Francis Blair Sr. of Maryland, and his brother, the Missouri senator Francis (Frank) Blair Jr., Monty Blair helped keep the border states of Missouri and Maryland in the Union.
But the Blairs’ racial views clashed with Lincoln’s increasing progressiveness. The Blairs were Negrophobes who clung to the belief that black people had no place in American society. The elder Blair, whose twenty-some enslaved workers served him at his estate in Silver Spring, Maryland, until they were emancipated by the Thirteenth Amendment, called for “the deportation or extermination of the African race from among us.”23 Monty Blair, an ardent colonizationist, declared in October 1863 that the continued presence of blacks in America would produce “a hybrid race,” “a hybrid government,” and “abortive generations.”24 There is no record of Lincoln’s response to this statement by his postmaster general. But he had moved beyond viewing colonization as a viable option for African Americans. Nor did he share Blair’s fear of miscegenation. In 1864, he fired Blair and replaced him with Ohio governor William Dennison Jr., a strongly abolitionist Republican who had led his state’s anti-Copperhead coalition.
While Lincoln gave the cabinet members great latitude in supervising their departments, he put his foot down at key moments. When Simon Cameron in 1861 proposed arming blacks to fight in the war, Lincoln thought it was too early to do so and said, “That is a question that belongs exclusively to me!”25 In August 1862, when several cabinet members planned to resign should Lincoln reinstate General McClellan, the president reappointed him anyway, stating, “[T]he order was mine; and I will be responsible for it to the country.”26 Later, when Radical Republicans in Congress tried to gain domination of the government by causing the dismissal of everyone in the cabinet except Chase and Stanton, he handled the situation with aplomb. He received the resignation of Seward and arranged a White House meeting with the disgruntled congressmen and the rest of the cabinet. Salmon Chase, exposed as a participant in the revolt against the administration, was so abashed that he also handed Lincoln a letter of resignation. The president refused to accept it, and he called back Seward, who reassumed his position in the State Department. Lincoln knew that it was important to maintain a Blondin cabinet, with both Chase and Seward kept in place. The frontier custom of riding to market with two pumpkins evenly balanced on the horse came to Lincoln’s mind. “I can ride on now,” he quipped; “I’ve got a pumpkin in each end of my bag!”27
He kept the pumpkins adroitly balanced. Under his direction, Seward and Chase made important contributions to the Union effort, even though they posed formidable challenges: Seward initially acted as though he were the rightful president, and Chase schemed to take Lincoln’s place in 1864. Lincoln handled these talented but self-important politicians with firmness and judgment.
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