a general that one day during the battle, he went into a room at the White House, got down on his knees, and asked God to avert another Fredericksburg or Chancellorsville. According to the general, Lincoln told him, “I then and there made a solemn vow to Almighty God that if he would stand by our boys at Gettysburg I would stand by him. And he did, and I will.”36
The president allegedly had another religious experience when he visited Gettysburg in November. He was so moved by the signs of human self-sacrifice on the battlefield, the story went, that he responded to a question about his religion by saying that he embraced Christ.37 The report got into the papers, prompting an Iowan to write Lincoln expressing “my joy, (& I doubt not the joy of every Christian heart throughout our land), at the statement recently made in the religious press that you have sought & found the Saviour, that you ‘do love Jesus.’”38 The story of Lincoln’s Gettysburg “conversion,” however, is unsubstantiated and probably apocryphal. A more measured assessment came from Mary Lincoln, who said that the death of Willie and the emotions surrounding Gettysburg turned his mind to the spiritual. Mary said, “he felt religious More than Ever about the time he went to Gettysburg: he was not a technical Christian: he read the bible a good deal about 1864.”39
There are conflicting accounts of the crowd’s immediate reaction to the Gettysburg Address. A few papers reported that the audience maintained a reverent silence during Lincoln’s speech, while others, such as the New York Times, said that applause broke out several times as he spoke. Benjamin French, who helped organize the ceremony, wrote in his diary, “Anyone who saw & heard as I did, the hurricane of applause that met his every movement at Gettysburg would know that he lived in every heart. It was no cold, faint, shadow of a kind reception—it was a tumultuous outpouring of exultation, from true and loving hearts, at the sight of a man whom everyone knew to be honest and true and sincere in every act of his life, and every pulsation of his heart. It was the spontaneous outburst of heartfelt confidence in their own President.”40
Edward Everett realized he had lost the battle of the speeches. He wrote Lincoln, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”41
After the ceremony, Lincoln attended a luncheon at David Wills’s house, followed by a public reception, with lots of hand shaking. French wrote, “He received all who chose to call on him, and there were thousands that took him by the hand.”42
Among those he greeted was a local celebrity he had asked to meet, John L. Burns, a seventy-year-old Gettysburg shoemaker who had spontaneously joined the Battle of Gettysburg. When the Confederates attacked his town in July, Burns, a veteran of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, ventured forth in his old-fashioned clothing carrying his flintlock musket. He came upon a wounded Union soldier who gave him an Enfield rifle. He then approached an officer, asking to join the battle. He was placed in a relatively safe place in the woods, from which he served as a sharpshooter. He received several wounds in the battle but managed to survive by convincing Confederates he was a noncombatant.
Burns met up with the president at the reception, and the two walked to the town’s Presbyterian church, where they heard an address on the war delivered by Ohio lieutenant governor-elect Charles Anderson, the brother of Robert Anderson, the hero of Fort Sumter.
When Lincoln left that evening on the train to Washington, he was feverish and headachy. He stretched out on chairs arranged to hold his long body. It turned out that he had a mild case of smallpox, which laid him up for two weeks in the White House. He remarked that people were always asking him for something, and “now he has something he can give them all.”43
The quip unwittingly applied to the speech he had given that day at Gettysburg. He had indeed given something to all: a gem of political wisdom—one approached in beauty and cultural meaning only by the speech he would give sixteen months later, at his second inauguration.
THE MILITARY BUILDUP TO THE SECOND INAUGURAL
If the Gettysburg Address made enduring statements about human equality and American democracy, the Second Inaugural Address proclaimed that war, no matter how vigorously pursued, was just if its goal was awarding human rights to all. Lincoln made the transition to the open antislavery militancy of the Second Inaugural by participating in a major shift toward hard war between 1863 and 1865.
The Battle of Gettysburg had been a great victory for the North, but it was also, in some ways, a painful lesson of how not to fight the Civil War. The negatives in Lincoln’s address—“we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground”—offer humble praise to the fallen but, at the same time, may have reflected his underlying frustration with the Union performance at Gettysburg.
Lincoln’s chief disappointment was with his generals. Leading up to the battle, he was exasperated when Joseph Hooker failed to stop Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania. After the battle, when George Meade allowed Lee to cross the Rappahannock and head back to Virginia, Lincoln was reminded of “an old woman trying to shoo her geese across the creek.”44
Lincoln now turned to his “bulldog,” U. S. Grant, who had proved himself at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and Vicksburg. In recognition of Grant’s battlefield prowess, Lincoln in March 1864 promoted Grant to lieutenant general, a high post that had not been held by anyone since George Washington. Over the next six months, Grant tenaciously pursued Lee in Virginia, sometimes with disappointing results, as in the Battle of the Wilderness, a bloody slugfest that left a total of 28,000 killed, wounded, or missing. But Grant’s stubborn declaration “I propose to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer” inspired Lincoln to repeat it publicly.45 Lincoln’s faith in Grant was amply repaid when the disheveled general, aided by the cocky, foul-mouthed general Philip Sheridan, hounded Lee in Virginia, leading finally, in April 1865, to the fall of the Confederate capital, Richmond.
In the meantime, William Tecumseh Sherman was advancing confidently through Georgia. By September 1864 Sherman had captured Atlanta, a central supply hub, where his army burned many public buildings, businesses, and private residences. His victory came on the heels of the Union victory at Mobile, Alabama, by a fleet that braved enemy mines in Mobile Bay, reportedly inspired by Admiral David Farragut’s words: “Damn the torpedoes! . . . Full speed! . . . Go ahead!”46 The triumphs strengthened the North’s support of the war and helped Lincoln get elected to a second term.
Shortly after the election, Sherman and his army of 60,000 began their famous March to the Sea. Sherman recalled, “Behind us lay Atlanta smoldering and in ruins, the black smoke rising high in the air and hanging like a pall over the ruined city.” A band struck up “John Brown’s Body,” which the soldiers sang loudly. “Never before or since,” Sherman wrote, “have I heard the chorus of ‘Glory, glory, hallelujah!’ done with more spirit, or in better harmony of time and place.”47 Sherman took Savannah the next month. He followed up with a campaign through the Carolinas that, in combination with Grant’s victories in Virginia, shattered the Confederacy.
The hard-nosed military approach of Grant and Sherman matched that of Lincoln and Francis Lieber, the Union’s leading military theorist.
But Lieber also brought an extra dimension that he shared with Lincoln: antislavery commitment. Lieber’s code supported military emancipation and included a concise statement of antislavery doctrine, distinguishing between things/property and humans, between local law and natural law: “Slavery, complicating and confounding the ideas of property, (that is of a thing,) and of personality, (that is of humanity,) exists according to municipal or local law only. The law of nature and nations has never acknowledged it.”48 Giving an abolitionist twist to Clausewitz’s famous principle that war is an extension of politics, Lieber aligned the Civil War directly with emancipation.
Which brings us back to Puritanism and Lincoln’s pathway to the Second Inaugural Address. The address’s religiosity, combined with its militant demand for human rights, was commonly said to recall the spirit of the Puritan warriors Oliver Cromwell and his American successor John Brown. We’ve seen that Lieber revered Cromwell and his followers and that Lincoln had John Brown on his mind in the final phase of the Civil War, as expressed in his White House interviews with Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany.
Having pointed the principles of 1776 toward civil rights in the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln now aimed to channel the moral energy of Puritanism in the same direction.
FACING TWO NATIONS
He showed how he intended to redirect this energy when in November 1864 he was asked to attend a Forefathers’ Day festival to celebrate the New England Pilgrims. The politician and philanthropist Joseph Hodges Choate invited him to the event, which was to be held the next month by the New England Society of New York. Lincoln declined the request. He wrote Choate that he was honored by “your kind invitation to be present at the annual festival of the New England Society to commemorate the landing of the Pilgrims.” He explained that his duties prevented him from attending, but he congratulated “you and the country . . . upon the spectacle of devoted unanimity presented by the people at home, the citizens that form our marching columns, and the citizens that fill our squadrons on the sea—all animated by the same determination to complete and perpetuate the work our fathers began and transmitted.” He told Choate that he recognized the nation’s debt to the New England forefathers but concluded his letter by saying, “The work of the Plymouth emigrants was the glory of their age. While we revere their memory, let us not forget how vastly greater is our opportunity.”49
The spirit of liberty, Lincoln was saying, must be constantly updated to accord with evolving concepts of human rights. The destruction of slavery and the unification of the nation were “vastly greater” aims than those sought by the New England Puritans.
Having proposed at Gettysburg that the egalitarian ethos of 1776 should become the unifying spirit of the nation, Lincoln hoped to put the Puritan/Cavalier conflict completely in the past. That was no easy task. The hoary conflict persisted during the Civil War, and even intensified. The actual separation of the South from the Union impelled each side to rally around its long-standing cultural traditions.
The North’s belief that it was fighting a holy war against the slave power in the spirit of the Puritan rebellion yielded many cultural offshoots, including the Cromwell Bible, the ubiquitous John Brown song, and popular poems like “The Stolen Stars,” by General Lew Wallace. The future author of Ben-Hur struck a chord with his often-reprinted poem, which pictures Uncle Sam as having two sons: “The name of one was Puritan; / The other Cavalier.” Uncle Sam had a flag whose original thirteen stars increased to thirty-four before eleven of them were wickedly stolen by Cavalier (the South) from Puritan (the North). This crime by Cavalier—a would-be aristocrat who has “A thousand niggers up aloft, / And a thousand down below”—creates a fight with Puritan, who sends “a million Northern boys” to fetch the pilfered stars.50
Pro-Northern pamphlets appeared, such as William H. Whitmore’s The Cavalier Dismounted, which debunked the idea that settlers of the Southern colonies were of “nobler blood” than the Puritans or formed what the Confederate leader Robert Toombs called “a nation of gentlemen.” Whitmore argued that “so far as there was any superiority of character, purpose and impulse, the advantage at the outset was with the Puritan stock of New England.”51
Southern propagandists promoted the opposite view. A Louisville journalist wrote, “The Norman cavalier cannot brook the vulgar familiarity of the Saxon Yankee, while the latter is continually devising some plan to bring down his aristocratic neighbor to his own detested level.”52 Similarly, a Georgia newspaper announced in 1863 that Confederates would “see to it that no terms are made with the enemy that pollutes our soil, save only the unconditional independence of our land, and the perpetual separation of the Cavalier and Puritan races of this continent.”53 Samuel S. Cox’s speech “Puritanism in Politics,” which described Puritanism as a “reptile” that had eroded the mound of the Constitution and let loose a horde of intrusively moralistic higher-law fanatics, was issued as a popular pamphlet, priced at four cents.54 Clement Vallandigham’s statement that the Civil War was actually between “different types of civilization,” between “the Cavalier and the Roundhead . . . Puritan,” ricocheted in the press.55
The Cavalier myth helped synthesize the Confederate states under words like “civilization” and “nation.” The South’s leading journal, DeBow’s Review, announced: “No civil strife is this; . . . but a war of alien races, distinct, nationalities, and opposite, hostile, and eternally antagonistic governments. Cavalier and Roundhead no longer designate parties, but nations.”56
This historically defined distinction influenced the Confederacy’s president, Jefferson Davis, who was known as “the model cavalier.”57 One newspaper noted “the contrast between Lincoln and Davis—the Puritan and the Cavalier.”58 The February 1865 Hampton Roads peace conference between Lincoln and three of Davis’s commissioners can be best understood when placed against the background of Davis’s acceptance of the Cavalier myth. In Davis’s view, Southerners were refined gentlemen, while Northerners were lowly money seekers and meddling moralists. As he expressed it, Confederate people were “essentially aristocratic, their aristocracy being based on birth and education; while the men of the North were democratic in the mass, making money the basis of their power and standard to which they aspired.”59 He argued that the North’s ethos stemmed from “the hard, grasping, money-grubbing, pitiless and domineering spirit of the New England Puritans.”
Davis believed that the profound cultural dissimilarities between the North and the South would forever prevent their reunion. He declared, “We can never, never reunite with the North, the people whose ascendants Cromwell had gathered from the bogs of Scotland and Ireland.”60 Given his culturally defined hostility to the North, it is no wonder that peace efforts late in the Civil War proved fruitless. Lincoln foresaw the failure of any negotiations. In his December 6, 1864, annual message to Congress, he declared that “no attempt at negotiation with the insurgent leader could result in any good,” because Davis “would accept nothing short of severance of the Union.” Lincoln stated flatly, “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
Lincoln’s words proved accurate, as was shown when the seventy-three-year-old political veteran Francis P. Blair Sr. took it upon himself to go to Richmond, Virginia, where on January 12, 1865, he negotiated informally with Jefferson Davis. Trying to establish terms for peace, Blair proposed that the South join up with the North to enforce the Monroe Doctrine by expelling France from Mexico, where Napoleon III had made incursions. Although Davis showed little interest in the idea, he remained hopeful about achieving an armistice with the North. The South was in disarray: its military effort was flagging, its economy was in shambles, and its people were demoralized. An attempted peace deal would at least allow Davis to stall for time
However, Davis remained firm about the South’s not reuniting with the North. Through Blair, he sent Lincoln a message stating that he was willing to start negotiations “with a view to secure peace to the two countries.”62 Southern independence, as Lincoln had predicted, was Davis’s sine qua non for peace. Lincoln sent Davis a carefully worded reply saying that he would discuss ways of “securing peace to the people of our one common country.”63
When Lincoln, along with Secretary of State William Seward, met with Davis’s three representatives—Alexander Stephens, John A. Campbell, and Robert M. T. Hunter—in the steamer River Queen at Hampton Roads, Virginia, on February 3, he made the South’s reunion with the North one of his three demands. His other demands were the disbanding of all forces hostile to the federal government and the South’s acceptance of all presidential proclamations and congressional legislation on slavery up to the president’s December 1864 address to Congress.
On January 31, three days before the Hampton Roads conference, Congress took decisive action on slavery by passing the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude—the nation-changing goal that Lincoln had now reached. The amendment proceedings and the Hampton Roads peace efforts were closely related. When rumors flew that Confederate peace commissioners were in Washington, ready to talk with the North, Lincoln wrote a canny and perhaps deceitful note to the Republican congressman James M. Ashley: “So far as I know, there are no peace commissioners in the city, or likely to be in it.”64 The key words were “in the city.” Had the three Confederate representatives been permitted to go to Washington, as they had requested, the Thirteenth Amendment may not have won the two-thirds majority of votes required for House approval. Wavering congressmen may have withheld support for the amendment to see what came of the negotiations, though they probably would have passed the amendment once the peace talks had failed.
Fail they did, in an atmosphere that was amicable, even jovial, though ultimately glum for the Southerners. On the River Queen, Lincoln talked about old times with his erstwhile congressional Whig colleague Alexander Stephens, whose short, thin body looked smaller than ever. Lincoln later joked about the diminutive Stephens emerging from his ample overcoat. “Was there ever such a nubbin after so much shucking?” the president asked.65 For nearly four hours, the two sides discussed terms for peace, to no avail because the Confederates rejected Lincoln’s three stipulations. Although Lincoln said he would explore securing federal money to compensate the South for its enslaved people he would not retreat on emancipation or reunion with the South under the Constitution.
One of the Southerners, R. M. T. Hunter, reportedly tried to make the Confederate case by citing the English civil wars, when King Charles I had agreed to negotiate with the Puritan rebels who had taken up arms against him. Why couldn’t Lincoln do the same? The president replied, “Upon questions of history I must refer you to Mr. Seward, for he is posted in such things, and I don’t pretend to be bright. My only distinct recollection of the matter is, that Charles lost his head.”66 Not only was this a witty comeback to the Confederates, but it may have been a gentle slap to his friend Seward, who had once said in a New England Society speech, “I know no better rule of conduct than the Puritans,” whose rebellion had led to the execution of Charles I.67
It was this kind of section-specific partisanship that Lincoln was determined to overcome. After Congress’s approval of the Thirteenth Amendment and the Hampton Roads conference, he was in a stronger position than ever to achieve the political and cultural unity he had long sought. At the request of Congress, on February 10 he issued a record of the peace negotiations, including all relevant documents. His handling of the negotiations won enthusiastic approval throughout the North. Just before the conference, Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens and Benjamin Wade had feared that he would be too lenient with the South. His unyielding insistence on his three main terms pleased the Radicals, as did his instructions to Grant to continue the war even as the peace talks proceeded. Copperheads such as Samuel Cox and Fernando Wood, for their part, were encouraged by the talks, which at least showed Lincoln’s willingness to discuss peace with the rebels. Even the New York Herald, known to be harsh on Lincoln, now praised him as “one of the shrewdest diplomats of the day,” commenting that at Hampton Roads “Old Abe . . . was a giant among the pigmies.”68 Another paper noted the unifying effect of Hampton Roads, whose effect “will be to unite the North and to divide the South.”69
Indeed, there seemed to be justification for the congratulatory note Henry Ward Beecher sent Lincoln on February 4. “No man on earth,” Beecher wrote, “was ever before so impregnably placed, as you are.” Beecher pointed to “the facts.” First, “The south is exhausted and defeated. The military result is sure.” Second, every step Lincoln had taken “toward emancipation & national liberty is now confirmed beyond all change.” Last, Lincoln had ended “the most dangerous and extraordinary rebellion in history . . . without sacrificing republican government.”70
But Lincoln, who had long known the wisdom of humility, was not as ready as Beecher was to exult in success. Although he saw the same positive signs Beecher did, he had a sense of unfinished business. What was going to happen with the Thirteenth Amendment? He called the amendment “a King’s cure for all the evils,” but it would not take effect until it was ratified by three quarters of the states.71 For this reason, in February he took John Brown–like action to speed up emancipation by appointing Martin Delany as the army’s highest-ranking black officer, with the plan of infiltrating behind rebel lines into the Deep South and liberating enslaved blacks through military action. Also, he continued to urge the armies under Grant, Sherman, and others, and the fleets under naval commanders like William A. Parker and David Porter, not to let up the military pressure now that peace was in sight.
