Before leaving for Chicago to report the Democratic national convention, Noah Brooks heard Lincoln: “They must nominate a Peace Democrat on a war platform, or a War Democrat on a peace platform; and I personally can’t say that I care much which they do.”
In the same Wigwam in Chicago where Lincoln had been nominated in 1860, the convention met August 29, a boiling kettle of partisans that included Peace Democrats, War Democrats, Whigs, Know-Nothings, Conservatives, states’ rights extremists who endorsed secession, millionaires in broad-cloth, run-down politicians in paper collars, men who had braved mobs and suffered for the rights of free speech and a free press, and a remnant of Confederate loyalists who could not be open about their efforts. The delegates were called to order by August Belmont.
On taking the gavel as permanent chairman, Governor Seymour said the present administration could not now save the Union if it would, but “If the administration cannot save this Union, we can. (Loud applause.) Mr. Lincoln values many things above the Union; we put it first of all.” The platform then adopted declared for the Union, the Constitution, civil liberty, and “care, protection, and regard” for the soldiers of the country.
Against persistent opposition Vallandigham in the resolutions committee carried through a straight-out peace plank declaring “that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an ultimate convention of the States.”
The measures of immediate action on taking power, directly pledged in the platform, were: (1) the armies would be ordered to cease hostilities and go home; (2) the Southern States would then be asked to join a convention
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to restore the Union; (3) free speech and a free press would be allowed and no matter what the opposition to the Government there would be no arbitrary arrests, while habeas corpus and trial by jury would return.
Delegate Stambaugh of Ohio believed “they might search hell over and they could not find a worse candidate than Abraham Lincoln.” Delegate Alexander, a circuit court judge from Kentucky, made public, according to the Chicago Times , his favorite anecdote “of a Kentucky gentleman who thought that as Mr. Lincoln was so fond of the negro, he should have one of the slain ones skinned and made into a pair of moccasins for his daily wear. ” The Honorable W. W. O’Brien, a Peoria delegate, was certain that the convention’s candidate for President would on the next fourth of March “apply his boot to ’Old Abe’s posterior’ and kick him out of the Presidential chair.”
Vallandigham on the streets was cheered. As a delegate he was a presence. John J. Van Alen of New York early intimated that he and others would not accept the nomination of McClellan for President, nor any candidate “with the smell of war on his garments.” These anti-McClellan peace men were given a free hand in writing a peace plank.
On the final showdown George B. McClellan had 2021A votes as against little more than one-tenth of that number for one T. H. Seymour of Connecticut. Vallandigham amid cheers moved that the nomination of McClellan for President be made unanimous, which was done with further cheers. Senator George H. Pendleton of Ohio, on his record entirely satisfactory to the peace men, was named for Vice-President. The politicians went home fairly well satisfied. Was not victory in the air? In that week did not everyone know that the leading prophets and weather vanes of the Republican party were conceding defeat?
Then fate stepped in. Like a moving hour hand on a clock of doom came news flung world wide, news setting crowds of Northern loyalists to dancing with mirth and howling with glee, news centering about one little dispatch from Sherman September 3. Lincoln read a flimsy saying: “So Atlanta is ours and fairly won . . . Since May 5th we have been in one constant battle or skirmish, and need rest.”
The dull ache of defeat and failure in many hearts took a change. In all news sheets the first item, the one story overwhelming all others, was around Sherman’s words: “Atlanta is ours and fairly won.” A strategic crossroads, supply depot and transportation center of a pivotal Cotton State in the Deep South was gone. Vicksburg, New Orleans and the Mississippi River gone, Kentucky, lennessee and Nashville gone, Mobile gone. Lee and his army penned between Grant and Richmond for how long? Bells rang again, guns boomed.
The President requested thanksgiving to be offered in all places of worship the following Sunday and announced: “The national thanks are herewith
tendered by the President to Major General William T. Sherman, and the gallant officers and soldiers of his command before Atlanta . . . The marches, battles, sieges . . . must render it famous in the annals of war . .
A few days later the country read McClellan’s acceptance of the nomination for President in a letter throwing no light on what he would do about slavery except let it alone. “The Union is the one condition of peace—we ask no more.”
As gently as McClellan could put it to those favoring immediate peace on any terms—and they were an influential fraction of his party—he seemed to be saying with a finality, hesitant yet final, that if the states out of the Union refused to come back on his invitation if he were President, then he would fight them. He hoped for peace “without the effusion of another drop of blood” but possibly there might have to be more fighting if the Union were to be saved. The General wrote: “Let me add, what I doubt not was, although unexpressed, the sentiment of the Convention, as it is of the people they represent, that when any one State is willing to return to the Union, it should be received at once, with a full guarantee of all its constitutional rights . . . the Union must be preserved at all hazards. I could not look in the face my gallant comrades of the army and navy who have survived so many bloody battles, and tell them ... we had abandoned that Union for which we have so often periled our lives. A vast majority of our people, whether in the army and navy or at home, would, as I would, hail with unbounded joy the permanent restoration of peace, on the basis of the Union under the Constitution, without the effusion of another drop of blood. But no peace can be permanent without Union.” Having thus deftly and gently thrown out the most labored point of the Chicago platform, McClellan closed in a belief “that the views here expressed are those of the Convention and the people you represent.”
Vallandigham for the Peace Democrats scoffed at McClellan’s repudiation. “The Chicago platform enunciated its policy and principles by authority and was binding upon every Democrat, and by them the Democratic Administration must and should be governed.”
Now in this September of ’64 Phil Sheridan was heard from. For the first time in the war the Shenandoah Valley saw a destroyer with a system. Whatever would nourish man or provide fodder for beast was to be taken or burned or spoiled. When Grant’s order should be met, then a crow would have to carry its own rations flying over the valley. At Harrisonburg from Gibbs Hill, residents counted 20 barns in the same hour lighting the dark night of the valley as the flames roared upward.
Four days’ fighting at Winchester and Fisher’s Hill followed Grant’s order “Go in!” and Sheridan’s telegram to Grant the night of September 19 had
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
first place in all news sheets of the country: “I attacked the forces of General Early . . . completely defeated him, and driving him through Winchester, captured about 2,500 prisoners, 5 pieces of artillery, 9 army flags, and most of their wounded.” To his army next day Sheridan read a telegram signed “A. Lincoln”: “Have just heard of your great victory. God bless you all, officers and men. Strongly inclined to come up and see you.”
A Harper’s Weekly writer had noticed a man at a news bulletin board reading one of Sheridan’s dispatches to Grant and commenting, “A few more such victories and Abe Lincoln will be elected in November.” They were what Lincoln had wanted. No campaign speeches could equal them. The least he could do was appoint Sheridan a brigadier general in the Regular Army and place him in permanent command of the Middle Division, which he did.
A committee appointed by the Rockingham County Court later estimated $25,000,000 worth of property had been destroyed by Sheridan’s troops, itemizing 50,000 bushels of corn, 100,000 bushels of wheat, 450 barns, one furnace, three factories, 30 dwelling houses, 31 mills, besides livestock. Grant’s order had said: “If the war is to last another year we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.”
In a Washington dispatch Whitelaw Reid voiced those who had sought to replace Lincoln with another candidate. “The general apathy and discontent and the apparent certainty of Mr. Lincoln’s defeat” had all changed. Greeley announced that the Tribune would “henceforth fly the banner of Abraham Lincoln for President.” Chase spoke likewise and prepared to go on the stump with speeches alongside Ben Wade and Henry Winter Davis. Gloomy August became a September edged with a few splinters of dawn.
On September 22 a letter was published of Fremont dropping his third party and coming out for Lincoln. And next day Lincoln asked Blair to leave the Cabinet and Blair did. Whether Lincoln made a deal for Fremont’s return to the fold on condition of Blair’s being ushered out of the Cabinet was anybody’s guess. It came as a necessary piece of work for Lincoln to write in his letter to Blair: “You very well know that this proceeds from no dissatisfaction of mine with you personally or officially. Your uniform kindness has been unsurpassed by that of any friend . .
Welles asked Blair what had led up to it. Blair said he had no doubt he was “a peace-offering to Fremont and his friends.” The secretaries Nicolay and Hay would not stress any one factor as bringing the President to oust his Postmaster General. Blair “wearied the President by insisting upon it that all the leading Republicans were Lincoln’s enemies.” Lincoln lost the fine edge of his patience, once saying to Blair in the hearing of John Hay, “It is much
better not to be led from the region of reason into that of hot blood by imputing to public men motives which they do not avow.”
“The union of the Republican party has become a paramount necessity,” ran Fremont’s letter withdrawing his candidacy in favor of “the Republican candidate pledged to the reestablishment of the Union without slavery . . . however hesitating his policy may be.” Fremont could have said too that fate was playing hard with him in his 44,000-acre Mariposa estate in California, once valued at $10,000,000, that debts on it had reached a total of $1,250,000 with interest charges of $13,000 monthly, that one fee of $200,000 had been charged him by David Dudley Field for attorney’s services, that by frauds not strictly illegal and by mismanagement and bad turns of luck he was slowly being eased out of an almost fabulous fortune in land and gold. His brown- stone mansion in New York and his summer home north of Tarrytown, the big gray-stone house that commanded a beautiful view of Tappan Zee, were to go in pawn and then fail to meet the demands.
Some newspapers made much of a remark dropped by Simon Cameron that in the event of re-election the President would call around him fresh and earnest men. Hay referred to this. Lincoln said: “They need not be especially savage about a change. There are now only 3 left of the original Cabinet.”
William Dennison, lawyer, president of the Exchange Bank of Columbus, governor of Ohio the first two years of the war, a cordial friend of the Blair family, was in Lincoln’s mind to fill the vacant Cabinet office. On September 24 the President telegraphed Dennison: “Mr. Blair has resigned and I appoint you Postmaster-General. Come on immediately.”
For campaign purposes both parties now made use of the long letter McClellan had handed to Lincoln at Harrison’s Landing more than two years before. The Democrats offered it as a modest self-portrayal of a Christian gentleman, a soldier and a statesman. The Republicans picked at it in editorials and squibs, the more radical editors saying its ego and covert insolence should have brought instant removal of a general stepping so completely out of the military field into politics.
On one point the Republicans and Democrats seemed to agree: that on July 7, 1862, when he dated that letter, and for some time before, McClellan had the definite notion in his head that he might make a good President and had carefully studied what he would announce as his policies if he were a candidate. Whether or not Fernando Wood had seduced McClellan into politics, as some believed, it was now in McClellan’s favor that Wood announced in view of McClellan’s repudiation of the Chicago platform he, Wood, could not support McClellan for President.
When this September swing into party unity had been accomplished Lincoln was in “a more gleeful humor,” according to Lamon, who found him alone one evening and met the greeting, “I am glad you have come in. Lamon, do you know that ‘we have met the enemy, and they are ourri ? I think the cabal of obstructionists ‘am busted’! ... I now am inspired with the hope that our disturbed country further requires the valuable services of your humble servant. ‘Jordan has been a hard road to travel,’ but I feel now that, notwithstanding the enemies I have made and the faults I have committed, I’ll be dumped on the right side of that stream.”
Of the few “obstructionists” still unyielding was Wendell Phillips, writing as late as September 27 to Elizabeth Cady Stanton: “I would cut off both hands before doing anything to aid Abraham Lincoln’s election . . . Justice is still more to me than Union.” This was September. October was to see Phillips on the stump for Lincoln, and Thad Stevens commending “the firm grasp of the pilot at the helm,” who had risen above “Border State seductions and Republican cowardice.”
Collections for the campaign went on, among government employees and elsewhere. Leonard Swett wrote to his wife that he and Congressman Washburne had managed to get a campaign fund of $100,000, assuring her: “Don’t think it is for improper purposes. It is not . . . Innumerable expenses have to be incurred.”
John Hay noted September 23: “Senator Harlan thinks that Bennett’s support [with the New York Herald\ is so important, especially considered as to its bearing on the soldier vote, that it would pay to offer him a foreign mission for it.” Lincoln, it seemed, definitely promised to appoint James Gordon Bennett U.S. Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to France. An associate, confidant and go-between of Bennett’s, W. O. Bartlett, wrote to Bennett November 4, 1864:
1 am from Washington, fresh from the bosom of Father Abraham. I had a full conversation with him, alone, on Tuesday evening, at the White House, in regard to yourself, among other things.
1 said to him: “There are but few days now before the election. If Mr. Bennett is not certainly to have the offer of the French Mission, I want to know it now. It is important to me.”
We discussed the course which the Herald had pursued, at length, and I will tell you, verbally, at your convenience, what he said; but he concluded with the remark that in regard to the understanding between him and me, about Mr. Bennett, he had been a “ shut pan , to every body”; and that he expected to do that thing (appoint you to France) as much as he expected to live. He repeated: “/ expect to do it as certainly as I do to be re-elected myself?'
It carried Lincoln’s lingo. Bennett and his Herald were of moment for the election a week away. And far more in the labors to follow a re-election would it count for Lincoln to have good will and co-operation from that most humanly interesting newspaper in the Western Hemisphere.
Marshaled solidly behind McClellan were powerful forces, the banking and transportation interests linked with August Belmont, Dean Richmond, Aspinwall, the industrialist churchman seen pre-eminently in Cyrus H. McCormick of Chicago, an array of respectably wealthy, intellectual or aristocratic types embodied in Horatio Seymour of New York and Robert C. Winthrop of Boston. Marching along were two-fisted and riotous elements, joined by those to whom the race issue was uppermost, fearful the Emancipation Proclamation might bring political and social equality. The recoil over McClellan’s repudiation of the peace platform came in some of the most vocal sections of the party. The Metropolitan Record and the Daily News in New York announced they could not go along with McClellan. The Crisis at Columbus, Ohio, held that “fraudulent sale is not binding in law” and the “sell-out’’ in Chicago was treachery. With Vallandigham these organs continued their attacks on Lincoln, pouted disapproval of McClellan, and seemed to be saying they hoped McClellan could be elected, after which they could force him into respect for the Chicago demand for peace through “cessation of hostilities.” This too seemed to be the position of McClellan’s running mate, Senator George H. Pendleton.
A letter of the Reverend Dr. Moncure Conway in the Boston Commonwealth reported Conway, with antislavery associates, interviewing the President. And the careful and scrupulous Conway recorded the President as saying: “Gentlemen, it is generally the case that a man who begins a work is not the best man to carry it on to a successful termination. I believe it was so in the case of Moses, wasn’t it? He got the children of Israel out of Egypt, but the Lord selected somebody else to bring them to their journey’s end. A pioneer has hard work to do, and generally gets so battered and spattered that people prefer another, even though they may accept the principle.” Conway commented: “Under him [Lincoln] the war was begun; he had to deal with the disaffected; is it not possible that he has become so battered and spattered as to make it well for him to give up the leadership to some Joshua?”
The printing press worked overtime. The electorate saw literature hauled by the ton. Pamphlets, leaflets, brochures, cards, tracts, envelopes colored with party emblems, in quantity lots came to voters. The Republicans seemed to outdo the Democrats in the amount of educational material, but no voter went hungry who wanted reading matter that lambasted Lincoln and sang the praises of McClellan. A list of horrors, including rhe debauchery of young
women and the jailing of boys in foul and dismal cells for two years, filled a fearsome Democratic brochure titled Mr. Lincolns Arbitrary Arrests.
In one leaflet was an anecdote from General Schenck in an Ohio speech. The Chicago peace platform with a war candidate reminded Schenck of an old lady selling apples at the courthouse door in Cincinnati. On a customer asking, “Are they sweet or sour?” she would lead on into finding out what might be wanted by the assurance, “Why, sir, they are rather acid; a sort of low tart, inclined to be very sweet.”
A speech of Carl Schurz at Philadelphia, September 16, was an extraordinary effort in persuasion. The Union Congressional Committee circulated it among all groups, with emphasis on the Germans. Schurz had grown restless in command of a corps of instruction at Nashville and had taken to the stump after a conference with Lincoln. Undoubtedly they had one of their long talks again. And probably Lincoln wrote parts of Schurz’s speech or Schurz, with his remarkably acute literal memory, incorporated something of the flair and wording of Lincoln’s conversation into a speech. “The mouth of the Mississippi in the hands of a foreign power? Let it be so and half our independence is gone . . . The people of the United States have bought the mouth of the Mississippi, once with their money, and twice with their blood. To give it away would be merely to produce the necessity of buying it a fourth time. Can the South yield it? No. Can the North do without it? No. And then?”
The vote for the platform at Chicago was far more unanimous than the vote for the candidate, in which connection Schurz would speak from experience: “There is no American who does not know that a President’s policy is not made by him alone, but by those who have made him.” In closing Schurz let the American Eagle scream. In 50 years the country would have 100,000,000 people, in another century 500,000,000, and the purpose of the North was a free republic “so strong that its pleasure will be consulted before any power on earth will undertake to disturb the peace of the world."
In a Union party pamphlet Professor Edouard Laboulaye spoke for French liberals. “The world is a solidarity, and the cause of America is the cause of liberty.” So long as a society of 30,000,000 people across the Atlantic lived “under a government of their choice, with laws made by themselves,” Europe could hope. “But should liberty become eclipsed in the New World, it would become night in Europe,” and power would go to “the whole school which believes only in violence and in success.” Therefore Laboulaye and his associates were “praying God that the name which shall stand on the ballot [of November] shall be that of honest and upright Abraham Lincoln.” From the English liberal leader John Bright in a letter to Greeley came the wish that
Lincoln be re-elected because it would over Europe “and indeed throughout the world" deepen men’s faith in republican institutions.
Three speeches of Lincoln to Ohio regiments, “three months men” going home, gave his attempt to tell in a few simple words what the shooting and crying, the war, was about. “A free government where every man has a right to be equal with every other man” was endangered. “Nowhere in the world is presented a government of so much liberty and equality. To the humblest and poorest amongst us are held out the highest privileges and positions. The present moment finds me at the White House, yet there is as good a chance for your children as there was for my father’s. I happen, temporarily, to occupy this White House. I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has.”
A committee of McClellan Democrats carrying an elaborate document of protest arrived at the White House and John Lellyet of Nashville read the recital of their wrongs to Lincoln. Lincoln was brusque. “May I inquire how long it took you and the New York politicians to concoct that paper?” Lellyet replied that none but Tennesseans had had a hand in it. Lincoln: “I expect to let the friends ol George B. McClellan manage their side of this contest in their own way, and I will manage my side of it in my way.” Adding that he might make some further answer in writing, Lincoln closed. They saw he was abrupt and filed out.
Mingled flamboyance and romance of democracy as it moved in Andrew Johnson came to the fore one October night as he rose to address the torch lighted faces of a crowd that included practically the entire Negro population of Nashville. He had a proclamation to make: “Standing here upon the steps of the Capitol, with the past history of the State to witness, the present condition to guide, and its future to encourage me, I, Andrew Johnson, do hereby proclaim freedom, full, broad and unconditional, to every man in Tennessee.” A roar of rejoicing and a wild clamor of gladness broke from Negro throats, drums and trumpets added jubilation, and banners waved over circling torches. Johnson’s voice rang again. “This damnable aristocracy should be pulled down. No longer should the wives and daughters of the colored men of Tennessee be dragged into a concubinage compared to which polygamy was a virtue.” Radicals who had found Lincoln a poor instrument for their measures began saying, “Johnson is our man, one of us."
Singing “Blow ye the trumpet, blow,” 144 Negro delegates met in Syracuse, New York, four October days. They spoke for the free Negroes of 18 states, including seven Slave States, and organized the National Equal Rights League, petitioning Congress to remove “invidious distinctions, based upon color, as to pay, labor, and promotion” among Negro troops. Thanks
were accorded the President and Congress for opening the way to colored mail carriers, for abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, for recognition of the Negro republics Liberia and Haiti, for a retaliatory military order invoked because of “barbarous treatment of the colored soldiers of the Union army by the rebels.” Further and special thanks were accorded Senator Sumner and General Butler.
On October 11 the stump speakers and the tub thumpers paused slightly, the torchlights and the transparencies halted a moment, and there was less fury in the pamphlets blown loose as wild geese across the autumn sky. The electorate went to the polls that day in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. At eight o’clock in the evening the President with Hay walked over to the War Department.
The telegraph keys clicked. Governor Morton and the entire Republican ticket in Indiana were elected by 20,000 majority, with a gain of four Congressmen. Pennsylvania’s Congressmen, equally divided between two parties, changed to 15 Republicans against 9 Democrats. The Union ticket carried Ohio by 54,000 and the 14 Democrats and 5 Republicans of ’62 shifted now to 17 Republicans and 2 Democrats in Congress. The defamatory Peace Democrat “Sunset” Cox lost his seat to Samuel Shellabarger. Not least was the news from Maryland and her adoption of a new state constitution abolishing slavery; the majority was slim, the soldier vote giving emancipation its day.
On October 12 Roger Brooke Taney died and the President must name a new Chief Justice. Spheres of influence formed and sought to have Lincoln name Montgomery Blair, Bates, Fessenden, Salmon P. Chase or some other one. And Lincoln was to hear them and to wait and to consider carefully and hold his patience.
Browning sounded Fessenden on whether he would permit his friends to mention Browning to the President for Chief Justice and heard Fessenden’s refusal. To the War, Treasury and State Departments in the morning, to his room in the afternoon, went Mr. Browning, ex-U.S. Senator Browning, holder of the seat vacated by Steve Douglas until Illinois had gone Democratic again. He was the one old-time Illinois lawyer associated with Lincoln who most often was seen at the White House. “At the Departments in the forenoon, and at work at my room in the afternoon” ran the most frequent item of his diary, though the next most frequent seemed to be “At night went to the President’s.” And unless the President was over at the War Department Browning was let in. The President liked his company, though it seemed that along in the fall of ’64 the President came to look at Browning as one of the most peculiarly befuddled individuals that had come out of
the war, and he became less free in outpourings of mind and spirit to Browning.
When Smith had retired as Secretary of the Interior, Browning had hoped the President would agree with Mrs. Lincoln that he should have the place. When Browning brought to the President the matter of the vacant Chief Justiceships, he was not without faint hope he might be the man. Known as a familiar of the President, for him doors swung open when he sent his card in at the departments. He rode with the President and navy heads’ to the navy yards to witness the throwing of rockets and signals from 6- and 12-pound guns. He worked in his office till night “then went and saw the President about fees in the Phillips cases, about Adml Wilke’s case, and about appointment of Eben Moore to Montano.”
Browning refused the request of Seward and the President that he take the appointment of commissioner for claim adjustments of the Hudson Bay and Puget Sound agricultural companies. “I find the duties will be very arduous, and the compensation $5000 inadequate.” When the hay contractors Covert & Farlin had been arrested and put on trial before a court-martial charged with fraud, the hay contractors hired the two lawyers in Washington nearest to the President in confidence and longest in acquaintance, Orville H. Browning and Leonard Swett. To the War Department, to the Quartermaster General, to the Judge Advocate went Browning, sometimes in company with Swett, with the result that the hay contractors got “an extension of 30 days to enable them to fill their contracts—They discharged from arrest and proceedings in Court Martial suspended,” according to Browning’s diary.
Wearing a serenity bland and colorless, almost empty of humor, precise in the forms and manners, overly vain about his scruples, Browning went here and there, saw everybody who was anybody, made the entries in his diary, two lines, ten lines, without elation or melancholy, earnest and careful. When a band of serenaders came to his Quincy home the night of McClellan’s nomination for President, Browning was earnest and scrupulous enough to tell them he was not a Democrat, yet sufficiently careful to repeat that McClellan was “a great general” and would have his support if elected President. In like manner he would support Fremont or any other administration. The name of Browning’s intimate personal friend and political benefactor, then a candidate for re-election, escaped his mention. He may have wished that Lincoln might be President another four years, but the wish did not reach his tongue. It was likewise when Browning spoke before a crowd jubilating over the capture of Atlanta. Then too, as he wrote in his diary, “I carefully avoided subjects of a merely partizan character, and made no allusion to the Presidential candidates.” On September 16, 1864, his entire diary entry read: “Honorable
C. B. Lawrence dined with me today. Has urged me earnestly to declare myself in favor of the re election of Mr. Lincoln.”
The days ran on through the campaign and Browning was to hold back from any word that he would vote for Lincoln. His calls on the President seemed to increase and nearly always the favor he asked was granted. “At night went to the Presidents and got order for release of Capt Sami Black.” “At Presidents and got order for Judge Advocate Burnett to examine & report on cases . . . and of Captain Black.” Nothing less than “an interview of three hours” with the President was accorded him one evening “in regard to Capt Blacks case.” Or again one Sunday: “At night went to the Presidents, and got an order for the release of Ludwell Y. Browning, a rebel prisoner at Camp Douglas.”
Only once in his diary did Browning record an open rebuff from the President. Browning possibly omitted some points of circumstance in the entry:
At night went to see the President on behalf of Mrs Fitz, a loyal widow of Mississippi owning a cotton plantation there, and from whom the U S Army had taken all her slaves amounting to 47, and 10,000 bushels of corn—She is now a refugee in St Louis, reduced to indigence She asks no compensation for her slaves, but wishes the government to give her a sufficient number of negroes out of those accumulated upon its hands to work her farm the ensuing season, and enable her to raise a crop of cotton, she to pay them out of the proceeds the same wages which the government pays those it employs. 1 made the proposition to the President thinking it reasonable and just, and worthy at least of being considered.
He became very much excited, and did not discuss the proposition at all, but said with great vehemence he had rather take a rope and hang himself than to do it. That there were a great many poor women who had never had any property at all who were suffering as much as Mrs Fitz—that her condition was a necessary consequence of the rebellion, and that the government could not make good the losses occasioned by rebels. I reminded him that she was loyal, and that her property had been taken from her by her own government, and was now being used by it, and I thought it a case eminently proper for some sort of remuneration, and her demand reasonable, and certainly entitled to respectful consideration. He replied that she had lost no property—that her slaves were free when they were taken, and that she was entitled to no compensation.
I called his attention to the fact that a portion of her slaves, at least, had been taken in 1862, before his proclamation, and put upon our gun boats, when he replied in a very excited manner that he had rather throw up, than to do what was asked, and would not do anything about it. I left him in no very good humor.
All the numerous past incidents of trust, affection and benefits bestowed on him did not bring out Browning in favor of Lincoln for President. He
said nothing for or against a second term for Lincoln. To that extent Browning helped the McClellan ticket and cause.
Unionist serenaders from Baltimore arrived at the White House in late October, and facing them, Lincoln made reference to Democratic newspaper clamor that the Lincoln administration aimed to keep its power whatever the verdict at the polls in November. Lincoln told the serenaders that in contrast “others regard the fact that the Chicago Convention adjourned, not sine die , but to meet again, if called to do so by a particular individual, as the intimation of a purpose that if their nominee shall be elected, he will at once seize control of the government.” He hoped the people would suffer no uneasiness on either point, delivering himself of momentous words:
“I am struggling to maintain government, not to overthrow it. I am struggling especially to prevent others from overthrowing it. I therefore say, that if I shall live, I shall remain President until the fourth of next March; and that whoever shall be constitutionally elected therefor in November, shall be duly installed as President on the fourth of March; and that in the interval I shall do my utmost that whoever is to hold the helm for the next voyage, shall start with the best possible chance to save the ship. This is due to the people both on principle, and under the constitution . . .
“I may add that in this purpose to save the country and it’s liberties, no classes of people seem so nearly unanamous as the soldiers in the field and the seamen afloat. Do they not have the hardest of it? Who should quail while they do not? God bless the soldiers and seamen, with all their brave commanders.”
A call signed by eminent and influential Democrats of the past endorsed the Lincoln-Johnson ticket. The call asked what kind of a Democratic party it was that excluded John A. Dix, Alexander T. Stewart, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., R. B. Roosevelt, Peter Cooper, John A. Logan, John M. Palmer and many others who till now had had no political home except the Democratic party. “If these men are not Democrats, who are?”
“Should the soldier in the field have the right to vote in elections?” Two Union party pamphlets called the roll on the various states. Harper’s Weekly summarized the points. In New York the Union men passed a soldier-vote bill by 65 Yeas to 59 Copperhead Nays; Governor Seymour vetoed the bill, but the Unionists went over his head and against prolonged Copperhead opposition procured a soldier-vote amendment to the state constitution. In New Hampshire the law passed the legislature by 175 to 105. In Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maine, Michigan, Ohio and other states the only opposition was from McClellan-for-President men. In New Jersey 31 Copperhead Nays against 19 Union Yeas defeated the soldier vote, and likewise in Delaware. In Michigan the soldiers in the field were accorded the ballot over the opposition of the
“Detroit Free Press and the entire Copperhead press.’’ In California, Iowa, Minnesota and Missouri it was Union men against Copperheads that won the soldiers right to vote. In Indiana a Copperhead legislature naturally refused it. In Ohio in the October election, out of 55,000 soldier votes a majority of 48,000 were for the Union party candidates.
In more than one case officious army politicians refused a pass, previously promised, to a soldier wearing a McClellan campaign badge. Friends of one such soldier brought his case before Lincoln, who investigated, sent for the soldier, and then handed him a pass in the President’s own handwriting along with a handshake and “God bless you, my boy. Show them that. It’ll take you home.”
The draft meanwhile proceeded. The relentless dragnet moved. Grant and Sherman wanted men. “Leading Republicans all over the country,” noted Nicolay and Hay, “fearing the effect of the draff upon the elections, begged the President to withdraw the call or suspend operations under it.” Cameron advised against it in Pennsylvania. Chase telegraphed from Ohio urging a three weeks’ suspension. To an Ohio committee earnestly requesting suspension until after the November elections, Lincoln quietly answered, “What is the Presidency worth to me if I have no country?”
Twice came Governor Morton of Indiana, whose soldiers could not vote in the field, applying for the return of all Indiana soldiers possible on Election Day. And at Lincoln’s refusal to go over the heads of his generals and order the soldiers home to vote, it was suggested that if Indiana went Democratic she could give no more help to the Government. Lincoln met this point: “It is better that we should both be beaten than that the forces in front of the enemy should be weakened and perhaps defeated on account of the absence of these men.” Morton suggested that no Indiana troops be kept in hospitals outside his state and that all troops unfit for service be sent home. On these points Lincoln got action. And Stanton had Lincoln’s approval in ordering home from Sherman’s army for campaigning in Indiana six prominent Hoosier officers, along with Major Generals Logan and Frank Blair to stump Indiana and nearby states. In fact, Logan later wrote to Sherman that “when I left on leave after the Atlanta campaign, to canvass for Mr. Lincoln, I did it at the special and private request of the President. This I kept to myself and never made it public.”
“There was a constant succession of telegrams from all parts of the country,” wrote Dana of the War Office, “requesting that leave of absence be extended to this or that officer, in order that his district at home might have the benefit of his vote and political influence. Furloughs were asked for private soldiers whose presence in close districts was deemed of especial importance, and there
was a widespread demand that men on detached service and convalescents in hospitals be sent home. All the power and influence of the War Department, then something enormous from the vast expenditure and extensive relations of the war, was employed to secure the re-election of Mr. Lincoln. The political struggle was most intense, and the interest taken in it, both in the White House and in the War Department, was almost painful.”
Along the Canadian border and the shore lines of the Great Lakes there were in the summer and fall of ’64 plots, adventures, explosions, robberies, espionage, propaganda. From the dwindling hoard of Confederate gold, Jacob Thompson of Mississippi, formerly Secretary of the Interior under Buchanan, passed money to Sons of Liberty for armed revolts to be started in various states. “Lincoln had the power and would certainly use it to reelect himself,” wrote Thompson later in a report to Judah P. Benjamin at Richmond, “and there was no hope but in force. The belief was entertained and freely expressed, that by a bold, vigorous and concerted movement . . . Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio could be seized and held.” Plans were laid in detail for a general uprising on an appointed day, seizure of arsenals at Indianapolis, Springfield, Chicago and Columbus, release of Confederate prisoners at four camps, arming of prisoners, overthrow of the state governments in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, formation of a Northwestern Confederacy. Then they would dictate peace.
The uprising collapsed. The Confederate operations from Canada annoyed the North but they were more noisy than effective. Thompson, who was Jeff Davis’ personal choice for the work of embroiling the Northwestern States in an uprising, lacked the required touch; he moved at cost and found the result was a rubber dagger limp on the hide of a rhinoceros.
Again Sheridan, his men and horses, were heard from. When the hour cried for it Sheridan had the genius of a daredevil who could make other men in the mass want to be daredevils. At ten o’clock the night of October 19 Sheridan telegraphed Grant: “My army at Cedar Creek was attacked this morning before daylight, and ... in fact, most of the line . . . driven in confusion with the loss of twenty pieces of artillery. I hastened from Winchester, where I was on my return from Washington, and found the armies between Middletown and Newtown, having been driven back about four miles. I here took the affair in hand . . . formed a compact line of battle, just in time to repulse an attack of the enemy, which was handsomely done at about 1 P.M. At 3 P.M., after some changes of the cavalry from the left to the right flank, I attacked, with great vigor, driving and routing the enemy, capturing, according to the last report, forty-three pieces of artillery, and very many prisoners . . . Affairs at times looked badly, but by the gallantry of our brave officers and men disaster has been converted into a splendid victory.”
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Lincoln telegraphed Sheridan October 22: “With great pleasure I tender to you and your brave army, the thanks of the Nation, and my own personal admiration and gratitude, for the month’s operations in the Shenandoah Valley; and especially for the splendid work of October 19, 1864.”
Twenty days before the November elections Sheridan gave the North one of the most dramatic victories of the war, following a methodical devastation of the Shenandoah Valley, with the result soon to come that his own army and the shattered forces of Early would be transferred to operations before Richmond. From innumerable platforms of the North were recited the verses of “Sheridan’s Ride” by Thomas Buchanan Read. As a campaign tract it was fetching. As he heard this piece many and many a time Sheridan said he believed that what people liked best in the poem was the horse.
Soon now, on November 8, the American electorate would choose between Lincoln and the Baltimore platform and McClellan and the Chicago platform as revised by McClellan. That day of ballots would fix a momentous decision in the life of the American peoples.
CHAPTER XXXIV
LINCOLN’S AND HIS
LAUGHTER
RELIGION
Lincoln was the first true humorist to occupy the White House. No other President of the United States had come to be identified, for good or bad, with a relish for the comic. This had brought him to folk masses as a living man they could feel and picture. The Saturday Review of London said: “One advantage which the Americans now have in national joking is the possession of a President who is not only the First Magistrate, but the Chief Joker, of the land. Collections of American jests are advertised as containing ‘Mr. Lincoln’s latest jokes,’ and some of his stories are certainly good . . . The Puritan familiarity without intention of irreverence we have in the camp story of the Colonel (reprinted in all American papers), who, hearing from his Baptist chaplain that there had been ten conversions in a rival regiment, exclaimed, ‘Do you say so? Sergeant Jones! detail fifteen men of my regiment for immediate baptism.’”
Before Lincoln’s renomination at Baltimore the New York Herald did its best to attach infamy to Lincoln as a jester, “a joke incarnated, his election a very sorry joke, and the idea that such a man as he should be the President of such a country as this a very ridiculous joke.”
In one little mock biography, originally intended to wrap up Lincoln as entirely ridiculous, a genius of nonsense let himself go: “Mr. Lincoln stands six feet twelve in his socks, which he changes once every ten days. His anatomy is composed mostly of bones, and when walking he resembles the offspring of a happy marriage between a derrick and a windmill. WJien speaking he reminds one of the old signal-telegraph that used to stand on Staten Island. His head is shaped something like a rutabago, and his complexion is
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that of a Saratoga trunk. His hands and feet are plenty large enough, and in society he has the air of having too many of them. The glove-makers have not yet had time to construct gloves that will fit him. In his habits he is by no means foppish, though he brushes his hair sometimes, and is said to wash. He swears fluently. A strict temperance man himself, he does not object to another man’s being pretty drunk, especially when he is about to make a bargain with him. He is fond of fried liver and onions, and is a member of the church. He can hardly be called handsome, though he is certainly much better looking since he had the small-pox.”
An Illinois cavalry colonel, John F. Farnsworth, quoted Lincoln on his storytelling: “Some of the stories are not so nice as they might be, but I tell you the truth when I say that a funny story, if it has the element of genuine wit, has the same effect on me that I suppose a good square drink of whiskey has on an old toper; it puts new life into me.” Lamon said the President used stories as a laugh cure for a drooping friend or for his own melancholy, yet also to clinch an argument, to lay bare a fallacy, to disarm an antagonist, but most often the stories were “labor-saving contrivances.”
“I am glad to take the hand of the man, who, with the help of Almighty God will put down this rebellion,” said an earnest citizen in line at a reception. The answer flashed, “You are more than half right, sir.” To one asking whether the town of Lincoln, Illinois, was named after him, Lincoln said: “Well, it was named after I was.”
Perhaps one-sixth of the stories credited to him were old acquaintances, Lincoln told Noah Brooks. The other five-sixths came from other and better storytellers than himself. “I remember a good story when I hear it, but I never invented anything original. I am only a retail dealer.”
Many yarns, anecdotes and puns credited to Lincoln were definitely inventions of others who took Lincoln as a handy peg on which to hang them. His own admitted stories might number a hundred, noted Nicolay. On the flyleaf of a replete book of Anecdotes of Abraham Lincoln , Isaac N. Arnold wrote that in his judgment about half were probably stories Lincoln had actually told.
Sometimes, noted Sumner, Lincoln insisted that he had “no invention, only a good memory” for anecdotes. And Sumner, it seemed, cultivated a manner of keeping some actual sense of humor hidden, or he could not have managed one of the best metaphors coined about the way Lincoln used stories to support argument. “His ideas moved,” noted Sumner, “as the beasts entered Noah’s ark, in pairs.”
And of Lincoln’s humor operating with iron and without anecdote, Sumner had an instance of the President saying to him of a political antagonist indifferent to slavery: “I suppose the institution of slavery really looks small
to him. He is so put up by nature, that a lash upon his back would hurt him, but a lash upon anybody else’s back does not hurt him.” Fearful lashes on the back had been taken by Sumner, and any study of the relations of Lincoln and Sumner could not leave out Lincoln’s awareness of the long-drawnout suffering Sumner had borne. Lincoln possibly even suspected what Sumner’s best friend Longfellow had written in a diary, that the spinal lacerations from the cane of Preston Brooks had not left the brain unaffected.
In the telegraph office one evening Lincoln confessed to David Homer Bates that his storytelling was a habit formed in his younger days and his case was like that of an old colored man on a plantation, who let his work slide to preach to the other slaves. His master rebuked him, but the old man had the spirit of the gospel in him, kept on preaching, even when he knew the lash might be waiting for him. At last one day he was ordered to report at the Big House. There the master scolded, told him he would get hard punishment next time he was caught preaching. Tears came to his eyes:
“But, marsa, I jest cain’t help it; I alius has to draw infrunces from de Bible textes when dey comes into my haid. Doesn’t you, marsa?” “Well, uncle, I suspect I do something of that kind myself at times, but there is one text I never could understand, and if you can draw the right inference from it, I will cancel my order and let you preach to your heart’s content.” “What is de tex, marsa?” ‘“The ass snuffeth up the east wind. Now, uncle, what inference do you draw from such a text?” “Well, marsa, I’s neber heerd dat tex’ befo’, but I ’spect de infrunce is she gotter snuff a long time befo’ she git fat!”
Carpenter after his six months in the White House could not recollect a Lincoln story “which would have been out of place uttered in a ladies’ drawingroom.” Isaac N. Arnold endorsed this as his own observation of Lincoln over a 20-year period. These friends, however, were neither the crony familiars nor the bores and nuisances to whom Lincoln told his stories questioned as “not in good taste.”
Lincoln’s transition from mood to mood impressed Andrew D. White, educator and a member of the New York State senate. White saw Lincoln in the White House “dressed in a rather dusty suit of black,” resembling “some rural tourist who had blundered into the place.” Lincoln entered the room and approached White’s group. He seemed, to White, “less at home there than any other person present” as he “looked about for an instant as if in doubt where he should go.” Others had seen and written of the same thing. And White’s impression recorded itself: “As he came toward us in a sort of awkward, perfunctory way his face seemed to me one of the saddest I had ever seen, and when he had reached us he held out his hand to the first stranger, then to the second and so on all with the air of a melancholy automaton.
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But suddenly someone in the company said something which amused him and instantly there came in his face a most marvelous transformation. I have never seen anything like it in any other human being. His features were lighted, his eyes radiant, he responded to sundry remarks humorously, then dryly, and thenceforward was cordial and hearty."
By mid-1863 several large editions of Lincoln joke books had been printed and sold. Old Abe’s Jokes—Fresh from Abraham’s Bosom ran the title of one and Old Abe’s Joker, or Wit at the White House another. One page had a bad- tempered old fellow calling to a noisy boy, “What are you hollering for when I’m going by?” The boy: “What are you going by for when I’m hollering?" This had its parallels when one day Lincoln came into the telegraph office, found Major Eckert counting greenbacks, and Lincoln said it seemed the Major never came to the office any more except when he had money to count. Eckert said it was just a coincidence, but it reminded him of Mansfield, Ohio, where a certain tailor was very stylish in dress and airy in manner. A groceryman, seeing the tailor passing one day, puffed himself up and gave a long blow. The tailor snorted, “I’ll learn you not to blow when I’m passing,” the groceryman answering, “And I’ll learn you not to pass when I’m blowing.”
Lincoln found this very good—like the man in an open buggy caught at night on a country road in a heavy downpour of rain. He was hurrying to shelter, passing a farmhouse where a man somewhat drunk put his head out of a window and yelled, “Hullo! hullo!” The traveler stopped his buggy in the rain and asked what was wanted. “Nothing of you,” came the voice at the window. “Well, what in the damnation do you yell hullo for when people are passing?” “Well, what in the damnation are you passing for when people are yelling hullo?”
Lincoln heard from Alexander Stephens when they were in Congress, and may have retailed, the incident of an undersized lawyer in an acrimonious stump debate with the massive Robert Toombs. Toombs called out, “Why, I could button your ears back and swallow you whole.” The little fellow retorted, “And if you did, you would have more brains in your stomach than you ever had in your head.”
A current quip was adapted as personal to the President. “I feel patriotic,” said an old rowdy. “What do you mean by feeling patriotic?” inquired the President, standing by. “Why, I feel as if I wanted to kill somebody or steal something. Under the heading “Old Abe’s Story of New Jersey”—politically more anti-Unionist than any other of the Northern States—was the tale of a shipwrecked sailor drifting toward land, where friendly hands flung him a rope. He took hold of the rope, asking, “What country is this?” and hearing “New Jersey” let go the rope and moaned, “I guess I’ll float a little farther!”
A man visiting a hospital in Washington noticed a soldier in one bed “laughing and talking about the President.” The visitor was educated, drew fine distinctions, and said to the soldier, “You must be very slightly wounded.” “Yes,” said the soldier. “Very slightly—I have lost only one leg.”
The joke books, with like published material, were giving a large mass of people an impression of a plain, neighborly, somewhat droll man, nobody’s fool, at home to common folks. He could refer to a soprano voice so high that it had to be climbed over by a ladder or a German worried because “somebody tied my dog loose.” A Boston man wished information. “You never swear, Mr. President, do you?” And Lincoln laughed, not loud but deep, the Bostonian noted. “Oh, I don’t have to. You know I have Stanton in my Cabinet.”
Grown-up men and women, even nations, at times were like the little girl Lincoln told Gustave Koerner about. She asked her mother if she could run out and play. The mother refused, and the girl begged harder, kept teasing till the mother gave her a whipping. When that was over the girl said, “Now, ma, I can surely run out and play.”
A newly elected Congressman came in, Lincoln knowing him to have a sense of humor, for the gay greeting was: “Come in here and tell me what you know. It won’t take long.”
To illustrate a shifting political policy, Lincoln told of a farm boy whose father instructed him in plowing a new furrow. “Steer for that yoke of oxen standing at the further end of the field.” The father went away. The boy followed instructions. But the oxen began moving. The boy followed them around the field, furrowed a circle instead of a line!
An ex-governor brought up the case of a woman named Betsy Ann Dougherty. “She did my washing for a long time. Her husband went off and joined the rebel army, and I wish you would give her a protection paper.” Lamon was looking on, noted the President masked his humor and with inimitable gravity inquired, “Is Betsy Ann a good washer-woman?” She was indeed, said the ex-governor. “Is your Betsy Ann an obliging woman?” She was certainly very kind, the ex-governor responded soberly. “Could she do other things than wash?” the President asked without batting an eyelash. Oh, yes, she was very kind—very. “Where is Betsy Ann?” It came out she was in New York, wanted to come back to Missouri, but was afraid of banishment. “Is anybody meddling with her?” “No; but she is afraid to come back unless you give her a protection paper.” Thereupon, noted Lamon, Lincoln turned to his desk and wrote on a card, which he signed: “Let Betsy Ann Dougherty alone as long as she behaves herself.” Handing over the card, he said it should be given to Betsy Ann. “But, Mr. President, couldn’t you write a few words to
the officers that would insure her protection?” “No, officers have no time now to read letters. Tell Betsy Ann to put a string to this card and hang it around her neck. When the officers see this, they will keep their hands off your Betsy Ann.”
Lamon gave this as an instance of Lincoln using “mirth-provoking trifles” out of the day’s routine for relaxation. When the ex-governor, accompanied by a committee from Missouri, had left with his card for Betsy Ann, Lincoln had a laugh about it, and then, said Lamon, “relapsed into his accustomed melancholy, contemplative mood, as if looking for something else—looking for the end.” He sat in thought for a time at the desk and turned to Lamon. “This case of our old friend, the governor, and his Betsy Ann, is a fair sample of the trifles I am constantly asked to give my attention to. I wish I had no more serious questions to deal with. If there were more Betsy Anns and fewer fellows like her husband, we should be better off. She seems to have laundered the governor to his full satisfaction, but I am sorry she didn’t keep her husband washed cleaner.”
During the Trent Affair Lincoln urged, “The less risk we run the better,” and mentioned a recent battle where amid furious fire of shot and shell an officer drew his revolver and ordered a running soldier: “Go to the front with your regiment or I’ll shoot you.” The private yelled, “Shoot and be damned— what’s one bullet to a whole hatful?!” Once when the interference of foreign nations with American affairs was under discussion, the President was quoted in a reminiscence of early Indiana days when he had called at a farmhouse overrun with children managed by a redheaded mother who kept a whip and made everyone come to time at her orders. “There’s trouble here, and lots of it,” she blurted, “but I kin manage my own affairs without the help of outsiders. This is jest a family row, but I’ll teach these brats their places ef I have to lick the hide off every one of them. I don’t do much talkin’, but I run this house, an’ I don’t want no one sneakin’ round tryin’ to find out how I do it, either.” Lincoln ended: “That’s the case with us. We must let the other nations know that we propose to settle our family row in our own way.”
At a mention of some persons’ not capitalizing the name of the Deity, the President was reminded of a Confederate soldier’s letter saying the Yankees would be licked in the next battle “if goddlemity spares our lives.”
Brigadier General John Gross Barnard, chief engineer to the Army of the Potomac in the Peninsula campaign, told of the President asking General McClellan why such heavy embankments and gun emplacements had been located to the north of Washington. McClellan replied: “Why, Mr. President, if under any circumstances, however fortuitous, the enemy, by any chance or freak, should in a last resort get in behind Washington in his efforts to capture
the city, why, there is the fort to defend it.” The precaution, said the President, reminded him of a lyceum in Springfield. “The question was, ‘Why does man have breasts?' and after long debate was submitted to the presiding judge who wisely decided ‘that if under any circumstances, however fortuitous, or by any chance or freak, no matter what the nature or by what cause, a man should have a baby, there would be the breasts to nurse it.’”
One anecdote Nicolay heard in use by Lincoln was of a backwoods housewife in her messed-up log cabin, many ragtag children running around. A wandering Methodist preacher tried to sell her a Bible and she didn’t like the way he pushed some questions. Shouldn’t every home have a Bible? Did they have a Bible in this home? Her sharp answer came that of course they owned a Bible. If so, where was it? the man asked. She began a hunt, finding no Bible. She called the children and they joined in the hunt. At last one of them dug up from some corner and held up in triumph a few torn and ragged pages of Holy Writ. The man tried to argue this was no Bible, and how could they pretend it was? The woman stuck to her claims. Of course they had a Bible in the house. “But I had no idea we were so nearly out!”
The seizure early in the war of all copies of dispatches in the major telegraph offices of the country uncovered names, individuals, disloyalties, to an extent shocking. Lincoln told of an Illinois farmer who for years had prized and loved a soaring elm tree that spread its branches near his house. One day, the farmer saw a squirrel scurry up the giant elm’s trunk and suddenly disappear in a hole. Looking farther, he found the great tree hollow, the whole inside rotten and ready to fall. The farmer moaned to his wife, “My God! I wish I had never seen that squirrel!” Lincoln pointed to the piles of telltale dispatches: “And I wish we had never seen what we have seen today.”
Hay heard Lincoln tell of a conscript recruit unable to name his father, explaining, “Captain, sir, I guess I’m just a camp-meetin’ baby.” More longspun was one Lincoln told Lamon, in connection with current turmoil between North and South. A man chased around a tree by a bull gained on the bull and got it by the tail. The bull pawed, snorted, broke into a run, the man after it still holding to the tail and bawling, “Darn you, who commenced this ffiss?”
Governor Yates gave to the 10th Illinois Cavalry, according to the Chicago Tribune of February 4, 1864, a message brought by “my friend Bill Green of Menard County.” Green before leaving Washington had asked, “Mr. Lincoln, what shall I say to the people of Illinois?” “Say to them,” replied the President, “that I have Jeff Davis by the throat.” And from the 10th Illinois Cavalry applause and cheers roared.
A California Republican, Cornelius Cole, called on business so tangled that it reminded Lincoln of a young Universalist preacher who came to
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Springfield. Three ministers of orthodox churches agreed “to take turns and preach this young fellow down.” A Methodist preached the first sermon. “He commenced by telling his large congregation how happily they were all situated in Springfield. Launching into his sermon the Methodist shouted, ‘And now comes a preacher preaching a doctrine that all men shall be saved. But, my brethren, let us hope for better things.’” This one Seward too had heard, repeating it as a sample of Lincoln humor.
Another caller told about a friend, early in the war, ordered out of New Orleans as a Unionist. He asked to see the writ by which he was expelled, and the Confederate committee told him their government was issuing no illegal writs, and he would have to get out of his own free will. Lincoln then told of a St. Louis hotelkeeper who claimed a record no one had ever died in his hotel. “Whenever a guest was dying in his house, he carried him out to die in the street.”
A general was being outmaneuvered in West Virginia. At the high danger point Lincoln said the general was like a man out west who put his boy inside a barrel to hold up the head while the father pounded down the hoops. When the job was done the father saw he hadn’t figured on how to get the boy out again. “Some people can succeed better in getting themselves and others corked up than in getting uncorked.”
Of a Union and a Confederate army maneuvering as if they might soon be fighting, though not reaching the combat stage, Welles noted the President’s remark they were like “two dogs that get less eager to fight the nearer they come to each other.” Fears were telegraphed by Burnside’s command, lost down in Tennessee and not heard of for some time. Lincoln told of Sally Ward on an Illinois farm with 14 children. Sometimes one of them got hurt and let out a loud cry somewhere in the cornfield or the timber. Then Sally Ward would sing out, “Thank Heaven there’s one of my children that ain’t dead yet.”
Signing a brigadier general’s commission for Napoleon Jackson Tecumseh Dana, Lincoln pronounced the name; it would “certainly frighten the enemy.” Wishing to check a newspaper Biblical reference, Lincoln asked for a copy of the Bible. A polite offer to get a Bible came from Albert Johnson, Stanton’s secretary, described by David Homer Bates as “a very obsequious, dapper little man.” Johnson soon brought in and laid before the President a Bible. Lincoln looked up the reference he wanted. Johnson meantime had left the room. Then, according to Bates, Lincoln arose with a smile. I am always interested in the movements of Johnson. Now let me show you how he did that.” Then in mimicry, Lincoln took the Bible in his hands, presented it in a very obsequious style to Major Eckert and said, “That is the way Johnson did that.”
This, noted Bates, created a laugh among those looking on. An odd little functionary, a curious and incessant yes-man to Stanton, Lincoln impersonated in a funny little errand with a Bible.
Lincoln’s tough hide, or lack of fine sensibilities, in Donn Piatt’s view, was traced tersely by the Wendell Phillips expression that Lincoln was “the white trash of the South spawned on Illinois.” Educated men troubled themselves with attempts to reduce to simple points the shifting lights and glooms of the Lincoln personality.
Galusha Grow told of his taking a Pennsylvania infantry company to see the President, who stepped out of the White House, looked around, put his hand behind him. “When I get this handkerchief out of this coat-tail pocket I intend to shake hands with you boys!”
To illustrate the petty jealousies and bickerings among Congressmen and army generals, James M. Scovel said Lincoln told the story of two Illinois men, one Farmer Jones, a churchman gifted in prayer, the other Fiddler Simpkins, welcome at every country merry-making. At one prayer meeting Brother Jones made a wonderful prayer which touched the hearts of all. And Brother Simpkins felt called on to rise and say, “Brethring and sistring, I know that I can’t make half as good a prayer as Brother Jones, but by the grace of God I can fiddle the shirt off of him.”
“Can this man Lincoln ever be serious?” wrote Richard Henry Dana in a letter. For the President would tell, in the midst of tremendous efforts to draft a new army, of the boy under fire whose commanding officer called, “You are crying like a baby,” getting the answer, “I knows it, Ginral. I wish I was a baby, and a gal-baby, too, and then I wouldn’t have been conscripted.”
The telegrapher Bates heard of Lincoln telling about a man going into an asylum and meeting a little old fellow who demanded a salute. “I am Julius Caesar.” The salute was given, the man went on his errand, returned soon, and again the little fellow demanded a salute. “I am Napoleon Bonaparte.” “Yes, Napoleon, but a while ago you told me you were Julius Caesar.” “Yes, but that was by another mother!” And there was the man who asked a friend to lend him a clean boiled shirt, getting the answer, “I have only two shirts, the one I have just taken off, and the one I have just put on—which will you have?”
Lincoln heard the telegrapher Bates tell of a man who enters a theater just as the curtain goes up. So interested is the man in looking at what is happening on the stage that he puts his tall silk hat, open side up, on the seat next to him, without noticing a very stout woman who is nearsighted. She sits down. There is a crunching noise. The owner of the flattened hat reaches out for it as the stout woman rises. He looks at his hat, looks at her: “Madam, I could have told you my hat wouldn’t fit you before you tried it on.” Dozens of such
stories in the repetitions came to be told as though these things had happened to Lincoln.
On the day after Fredericksburg the staunch old friend, Isaac N. Arnold, entered Lincolns office, was asked to sit down. Lincoln then read from Artemus Ward. One spring he got “swampt in the exterior of New York State, one dark and stormy night, when the winds Blue pityusly, and I was forced to tie up with the Shakers.” He knocked at a door. “A solum female, looking sumwhat like a last year’s beanpole stuck into a long meal bag, axed me was I athurst and did I hunger? to which I urbanely ansered ‘a few.’” That Lincoln should wish to read this nonsense while the ambulances were yet hauling thousands of wounded from the frozen mud flats of the Rappahannock River was amazing to Congressman Arnold. As he said afterward he was “shocked.” He inquired, “Mr. President, is it possible that with the whole land bowed in sorrow and covered with a pall in the presence of yesterday’s fearful reverse, you can indulge in such levity?” Then, Arnold said, the President threw down the Artemus Ward book, tears streamed down his cheeks, his physical frame quivered as he burst forth, “Mr. Arnold, if I could not get momentary respite from the crushing burden I am constantly carrying, my heart would break!” And with that pent-up cry let out, it came over Arnold that the laughter of Lincoln at times was a mask.
Possibly only a crony from the old Eighth Circuit could have called out the peculiar humor Leonard Swett met one gloomy day of the summer of ’64. Grant was pounding toward Richmond, the ambulances groaned with their loads, hospitals filled beyond capacity. Men should be rushed to the front. This and much else Swett poured out to Lincoln, with a flood of suggestions on what should be done and immediately. “The President was sitting by an open window,” noted Swett. “And as I paused, a bird lit upon a branch just outside and was twittering and singing joyously. Mr. Lincoln, imitating the bird, said: 'tweet, tweet, tweet ; isn’t he singing sweetly?’ I felt as if my legs had been cut from under me. I rose, took my hat, and said, ‘1 see the country is safer than I thought.’ As I moved toward the door, Mr. Lincoln called out in his hearty, familiar way, 'Here, Swett, come back and sit down. I hen he went on: 'It is impossible for a man in my position not to have thought of all those things. Weeks ago every man capable of bearing arms was ordered to the front, and everything you suggested has been done.’”
Far and wide through newspaper reprints went an eyewitness account of Lincolns pertinence, bordering on horseplay, during a spiritualist seance in the White House arranged by Mrs. Lincoln. Curiously enough there was little or no hostile comment on this procedure. It was one of a series of odd
incidents that built up a portrait of an American in the White House who could be keen, possibly wise, amid the ludicrous, the shallow, the bottomless.
Though paper was costly in ’64 and its newspaper size diminished, the Charleston Mercury went on reprinting occasional Lincoln wit from Northern newspapers, one incident going far. A minister in a delegation meeting the President “hoped the Lord is on our side.” The President: “I don’t agree with you.” There was amazement. The President continued: “I am not at all concerned about that, for we know that the Lord is always on the side of the right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord’s side.”
“Lincoln is called the American Aesop,” said the New York Herald , November 21, 1863, a week later taking the liberty of inventing a comic insidious anecdote as from the President’s mouth.
To run down all the suspicions, insinuations, inveracities, innuendoes, uttered against a man in his place, said Lincoln, “would be a perpetual flea hunt.”
The foremost funnymen of the age, the leading American comics, understood Lincoln. They shaded their foolery and colored their jests as if in the White House was one of their own. Artemus Ward, Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby, Orpheus C. Kerr, Miles O’Reilly, the young burblers of the satirical weekly Vanity Fair , all wrote with a gay though covert affection for the President. And it came to them that the President was one of their faithful readers, seemed to believe they were important voices of democracy in a living republic.
Forty thousand copies had been sold of Artemus Ward: His Book published in May ’62. The author, Charles Farrar Browne, was only 28 years old. Born in Waterford, Maine, his father was a justice of the peace, his mother of Puritan stock, the son writing, “I think we came from Jerusalem, for my mother’s name was Levi, and we had a Moses and a Nathan in the family, but my poor brother’s name was Cyrus so, perhaps, that makes us Persians.” He learned typesetting on the Skowhegan Clarion. Drifting west as a tramp printer, Browne finally took a $12-a-week job as reporter on the Cleveland Plain- Dealer , going then to the staff of Vanity Fair in New York.
One Ward sketch “In Washington” had a mock interview with Lincoln:
I called on Abe. He received me kindly. I handed him my umbreller, and told him I’d have a check for it if he pleased. “That,” sed he, “puts me in mind of a little story. There was a man out in our parts who was so mean that he took his wife’s coffin out of the back winder for fear he would rub the paint off the doorway. Wall, about this time there was a man in a adjacent town who had a green cotton umbreller.”
“Did it fit him well? Was it custom made? Was he measured for it?”
“Measured for what?” said Abe.
“The umbreller?”
“Wall, as 1 was sayin,” continnerd the President, treatin the interruption with apparent contempt, “this man sed he’d known that there umbreller ever since it was a parasol. Ha, ha, ha!”
“Yes,” sed I, larfin in a respectful manner, “but what has this man with the umbreller to do with the man who took his wife’s coffin out of the back winder?”
“To be sure,” said Abe—“what was it? I must have got two stories mixed together, which puts me in mind of another lit—”
“Never mind. Your Excellency. I called to congratulate you on your career, which has been a honest and a good one—unscared and unmoved by Secesh in front of you and Abbolish at the back of you—each one of which is a little wuss than the other if possible!
“Tell E. Stanton that his boldness, honesty, and vigger merits all prase, but to keep his under-garmints on. E. Stanton has appeerendy only one weakness, which it is, he can’t alius keep his under-garmints from flyin up over his head. I mean that he occasionally dances in a peck-measure, and he don’t look graceful at it.”
I took my departer. “Good bye, old sweetness!” sed Abe, shakin me cordgully by the hand.
“Adoo, my Prahayrie flower!” I replied, and made my exit. “Twenty-five thousand dollars a year and found,” I soliloquised, as I walked down the street, “is putty good wages for a man with a modist appytite, but I reckon that it is wurth it to run the White House.”
David R. Locke’s letters dated at “Confederate X Roads which is in the State of Kentucky,” had their signer, the Reverend Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby, set up as pastor of a church and a seeker of office. Lincoln kept a pamphlet of these Nasby letters in a desk drawer. Locke was a year older than Ward, and like Ward had been a tramp printer, learning to set type on the Cortland, New York, Democrat , serving on the Pittsburgh Chronicle , having a hand in running newspapers in Plymouth, Mansfield, Bucyrus and Bellefontaine, Ohio. In April ’62, in a Findlay, Ohio, newspaper he ran the first of the Nasby letters, dating it at Wingert’s Corners, a village in Crawford County where the citizens almost to a man were secessionists.
Fifteen Negroes had arrived at the place, “yisterday another arrove,” and P. V. Nasby, alarmed, prepared resolutions: “Wareas, we vew with alarm the ack- shun uv the President uv the U. S., in recommendin the immejit emansipashun uv the slaves uv our misgided Suthern brethrin, and his evident intenshun uv kolonizin on em in the North, and the heft on em in Wingert’s Corners; and Wareas, Eny man hevin the intellect uv a brass-mounted jackass kin easily see that the 2 races want never intendid to live together; and Wareas, Bein in the
magority, we kin do as we please and ez the nigger haint no vote he kant help hisself; therefore be it Resolved, That the crude, undeodorized Afrikin is a dis- gustin obgik. Resolved, That this Convenshun, when it hez its feet washed, smells sweeter nor the Afrikin in his normal condishun, and is there4 his sooperior.”
One Nasby piece Lincoln carried a clipping of in his vest pocket and memorized. And Noah Brooks told of an evening at Soldiers’ Home when visitors came and talk fell on freed slaves in the Border States. Lincoln stood before the fireplace and recited from the Wingert’s Corners piece: “Arouse to wunst! Rally agin Conway! Rally agin Sweet! Rally agin Hegler’s family! Rally agin the porter at the Reed House! Rally agin the cook at the Crook House! Rally agin the nigger widder in Vance’s Addishun! Rally agin Missis Umstid! Rally agin Missis Umstid’s children by her first husband! Rally agin Missis Umstid’s children by her sekkund husband! Rally agin all the rest uv Missis Umstid’s children! Rally agin the nigger that cum yisterday! Rally agin the saddle-culurd girl that yoost 2 be hear! Ameriky for white men!” Lincoln at intervals used to quote these mock rallying cries, said Brooks, long after other men had read and forgotten them.
Sometimes before reading aloud from the pamphlet of Nasby papers taken from his desk drawer, Lincoln made such remarks as one to Sumner, “For the genius to write these things, I would gladly give up my office,” or as he told several officials and private citizens one evening, “I am going to write Petroleum ro come down here, and I intend to tell him if he will communicate his talent to me, I will swap places with him.” These javelins of horselaugh journalism Lincoln welcomed. They fought for his cause. It was not strange he got out of bed and paraded around the White House past midnight to find someone else awake to share his reading of Nasby.
Robert H. Newell, creator of Orpheus C. Kerr (Office Seeker), was under 30, of Scotch-Welsh stock, a New York City boy; his father was the inventor of a sewing machine that had won gold medals at the London and Vienna world expositions. While young Newell served as assistant editor of the New York Sunday Mercury , he wrote letters dated at Washington or in the field with the Army of the Potomac. He opened one with “not wishing to expire prematurely of inanity.” On the face of them his sketches were an escape from inanity. Of the national capital he alleged: “The most interesting natural curiosity here, next to Secretary Welles’ beard, is the office of the Secretary of the Interior. Covered with spider-webs, and clothed in the dust of ages, sit the Secretary and his clerks, like so many respectable mummies in a neglected pyramid.”
While this humorist steadily upheld Lincoln and the Union cause, and directed ridicule at the South and the Copperheads, he also kept on with sarcasm and irony aimed at the pretenses and pomps of war, at showy military
heroes, at loud-mouthed statesmen. Kerr burlesqued McClellans careful instructions for the return of slaves to their owners, with the order: “If any nigger comes within the lines of the United States Army to give information, whatsomever, of the movements of the enemy, the aforesaid shall have his head knocked off, and be returned to his lawful owner, according to the groceries and provisions of the Fugitive Slave Ack.”
In the month that Lincoln finally removed McClellan, Kerr argued that as the army had marched 15 miles in six weeks, they were going up steep hills and Lincoln had a choice of removing either the Blue Ridge or McClellan. To have removed the Blue Ridge would have been “construed into proof that the Honest Abe had yielded to the fiendish clamor of the crazy Abolitionists.” Also it would occasion heartburnings among the Democrats. “Hence our Honest Abe has concluded to leave the Blue Ridge where it is, and remove the idolized General.”
A letter of Kerr published in early ’63 led off with a deep-toned psalm of praise to Lincoln: “Standing a head and shoulders above the other men in power, he is the object at which the capricious lightnings of the storm first strike; and were he a man of wax, instead of the grand old rock he is, there would be nothing left of him but a shapeless and inert mass of pliable material by this time. There are deep traces of the storm upon his countenance, but they are the sculpture of the tempest on a natural block of granite . . . Abused and misrepresented by his political foes, alternately cajoled and reproached by his other foes,—his political friends,—he still pursues the honest tenor of the obvious Right, and smiles at calumny. His good-nature is a lamp that never goes out, but burns, with a steady light, in the temple of his mortality . . .”
Hours of easy reading for two years prepared Lincoln’s reply to General Meigs’ query who this person Orpheus C. Kerr might be. “Why, have you not read those papers? They are in two volumes; any one who has not read them is a heathen.” The Kerr papers were uneven and sporadic in production as compared with those of Nasby and Ward, this possibly resulting from his adventures in search of a wife. He married in September ’61 the actress-poet Adah Isaacs Menken, who had divorced Alexander Isaacs Menken, a wealthy Cincinnati dry-goods merchant, her first husband, and John C. Heenan, a famous prize fighter, her second husband. Dazzling stage success in Baltimore after her marriage to Kerr brought her a gift of diamonds worth $1,500; she announced herself a secessionist, was arrested and released on parole, while her husband went merrily along writing for the Union. He sailed with her in July ’63 to San Francisco, where she won the plaudits of a group including Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Artemus Ward, Joaquin Miller and others. Kerr in April ’64 sailed with her from San Francisco down to the Isthmus. There she
embarked for London, where her poetry and acting met higher praise than ever before—and her husband in New York never saw her again. While his beautiful and insatiably ambitious wife pursued her career, Kerr followed his bent toward nothing in particular. He would have been heartbroken except for the balance wheel that once enabled him to write, “Our President, my boy, has a tail for every emergency, as a rat-trap has an emergency for every tail.”
Thus the three most eminent American comic writers favored Lincoln and generated good will and affection for him and his cause.
Two Quakeresses in a railway coach were overheard in a conversation: “I think Jefferson will succeed.” “Why does thee think so?” “Because Jefferson is a praying man.” “And so is Abraham a praying man.” “Yes, but the Lord will think Abraham is joking.”
This in newspapers added the information that Lincoln said it was the best story about himself he had “ever read in the papers.” Lincoln let this story spread. Nevertheless his most deliberate public appearances and utterances encouraged no one to take him for a trifler. The series of photographs by Brady, Gardner and others without exception portrayed a man sober, solemn, grim.
Continuously Lincoln gave no definite impression that he belonged to any particular church or endorsed any special faith or doctrine. That he was a man of piety and of deep religious belief was conveyed to large numbers of people by unmistakable expressions in his speeches and messages. The President and his wife usually drove to the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church but sometimes walked, accompanied by a guard, arriving punctually and never delaying Dr. Gurley’s opening of the services, wrote the guard Crook. The President and his wife would walk down the center aisle, and on the right take the eighth pew from the pulpit. During this proceeding, wrote Crook, “out of respect for the great office he occupied, those in the church when the President arrived would rise from their seats and remain standing.”
The good, upright, usually well-tempered Fessenden, it was told over Washington, in a rage over some unjust distribution of patronage turned loose a flow of “intemperate language” on Lincoln one morning. Lincoln kept cool. The fury of his Maine friend spent itself. Lincoln inquired gently, “You are an Episcopalian, aren’t you, Senator?” “Yes, sir. I belong to that church.” “I thought so. You Episcopalians all swear alike. Seward is a Episcopalian. But Stanton is a Presbyterian. You ought to hear him swear.’ Then Lincoln went on telling about several varieties of profanity, and he and Fessenden settled down to an even-toned conversation.
The press in October ’63 reported a call paid Lincoln by members of the Baltimore (Old School) Presbyterian Synod. The Moderator, the Reverend
Dr. Septimus Tustin, said the synod wished as a body to pay their respects, and that each member “belonged to the Kingdom of God, and each was loyal to the Government.” The Presidents reply, in the Associated Press report, read in part: “I have often wished that I was a more devout man than I am. Nevertheless, amid the greatest difficulties of my Administration, when I could not see any other resort, I would place my whole reliance in God, knowing that all would go well, and that He would decide for the right. I thank you, gendemen, in the name of the religious bodies which you represent, and in the name of the Common Father, for this expression of your respect. I cannot say more.”
To Methodist and Baptist delegations of ministers the President had spoken with rich praise. His speech one May day in ’62 began: ‘I welcome here the representatives of the Evangelical Lutherans of the United States. I accept with gratitude their assurances of . . . sympathy and support ... in an important crisis which involves, in my judgment, not only the civil and religious liberties of our own dear land, but in a large degree the civil and religious liberties of mankind in many countries and through many ages.” That he had a creed of some religious faith, which he might be able to amplify in extenso if required, he would have them know by his closing statement to them: “I now humbly and reverendy, in your presence, reiterate the acknowledgment of that dependence, not doubting that, if it shall please the Divine Being who determines the destinies of nations that this shall remain a united people, they will, humbly seeking the Divine guidance, make their prolonged national existence a source of new benefits to themselves and their successors, and to all classes and conditions of mankind.”
Bishop Ames as chairman headed a large Methodist delegation that came to the White House in May ’64 to present an address. The President read to them his reply:
In response to your address, allow me to attest the accuracy of it’s historical statements; indorse the sentiments it expresses; and thank you, in the nation’s name, for the sure promise it gives.
Nobly sustained as the government has been by all the churches, I would utter nothing which might, in the least, appear invidious against any. Yet, without this, it may fairly be said that the Methodist Episcopal Church, not less devoted than the best, is, by it’s greater numbers, the most important of all. It is no fault in others that the Methodist Church sends more soldiers to the field, more nurses to the hospital, and more prayers to Heaven than any. God bless the Methodist Church—bless all the churches—and blessed be God, Who, in this our great trial, giveth us the churches.
After handshaking, the delegates took leave amid a general smile over one saying, Mr. President, we all hope the country will rest in Abraham’s bosom for the next four years.”
In proclamations, in recommendations of thanksgiving or of fasting and prayer, in numerous references to God, Providence, the Almighty, the Common Father, sometimes having their meaning colored by special events or conditions, Lincoln had given the impression to a multitude that he might have a creed. At a later time a clergyman sought to formulate such a creed from Lincoln’s own words, changing the text merely to the extent of transposing pronouns from plural to singular, making other slight modifications, and prefixing the words “I believe.” These were parts of such a creed:
I believe in national humiliation, fasting, and prayer, in keeping a day holy to the Lord, devoted to the humble discharge of the religious duties proper to such a solemn occasion.
... I believe in Him whose will, not ours, should be done.
I believe the people of the United States, in the forms approved by their own consciences, should render the homage due to the Divine Majesty for the wonderful things He has done in the nation’s behalf, and invoke the influence of His Holy Spirit to subdue anger.
... I believe in His eternal truth and justice.
I believe the will of God prevails; without Him all human reliance is vain; without the assistance of that Divine Being I cannot succeed; with that assistance I cannot fail.
I believe I am a humble instrument in the hands of our Heavenly Father; I desire that all my works and acts may be according to His will; and that it may be so, I give thanks to the Almighty and seek his Aid.
I believe in praise to Almighty God, the beneficent Creator and Ruler of the Universe.
Among steadfast loyal friends of Lincoln, keenly attuned to the Lincoln personality, was Jesse Fell who wrote it was a “well-known fact” that on religion “Mr. Lincoln seldom communicated to anyone his views.” After free and familiar talks on religion, Fell had presented to Lincoln Channing’s sermons, printed entire, and Fell wrote that Lincoln’s beliefs were “derived from conversations with him at different times during a considerable period.” Of those beliefs the scrupulous recorder, Jesse Fell, wrote:
On the innate depravity of man, the character and office of the great head of the Church, the Atonement, the infallibility of the written revelation, the performance of miracles, the nature and design of present and future rewards and punishments (as they are popularly called) and many other subjects, he held opinions utterly at variance with what are usually taught in the Church. I should say that his expressed views on these and kindred subjects were such as, in the estimation of most believers, would place him entirely outside the Christian pale. Yet to my mind, such was not the true position, since his principles and practices and the spirit of his whole life were of the very kind we universally agree to call Christian; and I think this conclusion is in no wise affected by the circumstance that he never attached himself to any religious society whatever.
His religious views were eminently practical and are summed up, as I think, in these two propositions: “the fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood of man.” He fully believed in a superintending and overruling Providence that guides and controls the operations of the world, but maintained that law and order, not their violation or suspension, are the appointed means by which this Providence is exercised.
Noah Brooks, out of his close and continuous friendship with the President, wrote of “something touching in his childlike and simple reliance upon Divine aid,” especially in extremities of fateful events. Then, “though prayer and reading of the Scriptures was his constant habit, he more earnestly than ever sought that strength which is promised when mortal help faileth.” Brooks said Lincoln could quote whole chapters of Isaiah, and the New Testament and the Psalms were fixed in his memory. He would sometimes correct a misquotation of Scripture and give chapter and verse where it could be found. Once in regard to his own age and strength he quoted, “His eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.” He found meaning in the Scriptural phrase, “the stars in their courses fought against Sisera.”
To Joshua Speed’s mother the President sent a photograph of himself inscribed: “For Mrs. Lucy G. Speed, from whose pious hand I accepted the present of an Oxford Bible twenty years ago.”
Months after the Battle of Fredericksburg came word of the Massachusetts soldier who had carried over his heart a pocket Bible that stopped and held a rifle ball. The President sent the boy another Bible, with a personal inscription.
Out of the Cold Harbor slaughter emerged Carter E. Prince of the 4th Maine Volunteers. A bullet hit his suspender buckle and carried it through the New Testament in the pocket of his blouse. Pushed by the bullet, the buckle went through all the chapters between Revelation and St. Mark and came to rest at Mark 12:36, where is recorded the saying of the Lord: “Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool.”
With such incidents, and with men who could speak at firsthand of them, Lincoln became familiar.
A distinct trend toward a deeper religious note, a piety more assured of itself because more definitely derived from inner and private growths of Lincoln himself, this could be seen as the President from year to year fitted himself more deeply and awarely into the mantle and authorities of Chief Magistrate.
To others besides Alexander H. Stephens, Lincoln had a “mystic” zeal for the Union cause. In one sense Lincoln saw himself as a crusader and a holiness preacher for an indissoluble unity of one common country. To the sacred devotions of his own cause he would join any others of capacity for sacred devotions.
He could not be impervious to the Reformed Presbyterian Church (“Scotch Covenanters”), through a committee in dark months of 1863, “by every consideration drawn from the Word of God” enjoining him “not to be moved from the path of duty on which you have so auspiciously entered, either by the threats or blandishments of the enemies of human progress.” Nor could he have been unmoved by the New School Presbyterians in 1862 through their General Assembly sending word: “Since the day of your inauguration, the thousands of our membership have followed you with unceasing prayer, besieging the throne of Heaven in your behalf.”
The German Reformed Synod, the Lutheran General Synod, the Moravian Synod, had passed resolutions of varied texts declaring themselves in favor of the war. In the autumn of ’64 the Congregational churches of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania placed themselves squarely in favor of Lincoln’s re-election through the declarations of their General Association: “Make the decision of the people on the 8th of November final and fatal to the hopes of traitors in arms and conspirators in political councils.”
The Roman Catholic church was less demonstrative and vocal than the Protestants. But it was a Roman Catholic, General William S. Rosecrans, who had resisted the pressure of Greeley to place him at the head of the Union ticket instead of Lincoln. And General Rosecrans’ brother, a Catholic bishop in Cincinnati, had continuously approved of Lincoln’s progressive antislavery policy. Archbishop John Hughes, despite his tardiness of action during his illness while the New York antidraft riots raged, had kept in close touch with Secretary Seward and rendered important loyalist service. In the ranks and among the shoulder straps of the Union armies Catholics of several nationalities, and particularly the Irish, had records for gallant and distinguished service.
As a Chief Magistrate having a common bond with all of these faiths and churches that moved toward a national unity beyond any future breaking, Lincoln’s piety was manifest. A blood fellowship of death and suffering moved him.
Answering a kindly letter from Rhode Island Quakers, Lincoln acknowledged that he expected no reputation as a peace man while up to his armpits in war blood. “Engaged as I am, in a great war, I fear it will be difficult for the world to understand how fully I appreciate the principles of peace inculcated in this letter and everywhere by the Society of Friends.” That such true and perfect lovers of peace as the Quakers could send him from their Iowa organization, through Senator Harlan, an address voicing accord with him, was deeply moving.
According to an interview reported by the Iowa Congressman, James F. Wilson, in June ’62, when Jeb Stuart had taken his gray horsemen in a
circle around McClellan’s army and cut the communications, Lincoln had remarked there was no news: “Not one word ... I don’t know that we have an army.” One member of the delegation with which Wilson called urged a more resolute policy on slavery. “Slavery must be stricken down wherever it exists,” this radical emphasized. “If we do not do right I believe God will let us go our own way to our ruin. But if we do right, I believe He will lead us safely out of this wilderness, crown our arms with victory, and restore our now dissevered Union.”
Wilson saw that this trend of speech affected the President deeply, and expected “from the play of his features and the sparkle of his eyes” there would be a response. The listless Lincoln slowly arose to full height, “his right arm outstretched towards the gentleman who had just ceased speaking, his face aglow like the face of a prophet,” saying to his admonisher, “My faith is greater than yours,” agreeing fully with what had been said of the role of God and Providence. Then he proceeded: “But I also believe He will compel us to do right in order that He may do these things, not so much because we desire them as that they accord with His plans of dealing with this nation, in the midst of which He means to establish justice. I think He means that we shall do more than we have yet done in furtherance of His plans, and He will open the way for our doing it. I have felt His hand upon me in great trials and submitted to His guidance, and I trust that as He shall further open the way I will be ready to walk therein, relying on His help and trusting in His goodness and wisdom.”
Wilson added that Lincoln, with his dejection gone, resumed his seat and in a reassured tone continued. “Sometimes it seems necessary that we should be confronted with perils which threaten us with disaster in order that we may not get puffed up and forget Him who has much work for us yet to do.”
John W. Widney of Piqua, Ohio, a sergeant wounded at the Wilderness, starting a furlough home for complete recovery before return to duty, saw Lincoln on the White House walk from the War Office, “dressed in black, with frock coat, stove-pipe hat, walking slowly, shoulders bent forward, hands folded behind his back.” Lincoln asked the Sergeant, “What State and regiment?” Widney answered, and Lincoln, with a “God bless you and I hope you will get home safe,” passed into the White House while Widney stood gazing and feeling a “burden of sorrow” on the shoulders under the stovepipe hat. Widney was a churchman who favored his Bible and said that no other words fitted the moment for him like those of (to use his words) an old prophet: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered thee beneath my wings, as a hen gathers her chicks, but ye would not.”
CHAPTER XXXV