Never Call Retreat (56 page)

5.
Vested Interest in Failure

THE WAR WAS an exercise in violence bounded by two presidential elections; one had brought it on, and another would help to end it. The election of 1860 indicated that great change was coming to a society that could endure no change, and there had been an appeal to arms from that finding; now, in 1864, there was going to be a new election to determine whether the appeal should be sustained or denied. No matter what the election said, the mere fact that it was being held was significant. It was an act of faith, an affirmation that even war itself must at last be subject to a decision reached at the polls. Perhaps the strangest thing about this strangest of all elections was that it never occurred to anyone not to have it. Whether any nation so conceived and so dedicated could long endure . . . well, they would vote.

How they would vote was unpredictable because the appeal to war had wondrously clouded all matters of politics.

By mid-summer it was clear that the opposing candidates would be Abraham Lincoln and General George B. McClellan, with Pathfinder John Charles Fremont hovering on the fringe as a third-party candidate. The issues were mixed. The war was an issue, and the way to win the war, and the course to be taken in respect to the Negro. Also there was a point Mr. Lincoln had raised in his first inaugural, more pressing now than when he said it: "Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides, and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions as to terms of intercourse are again upon you." These identical old questions were an issue, their weight resting on every voter; the nation must presently face what it tried to avoid four years earlier.

Confederates of course could not vote in this election. Yet it was everlastingly to their interest that the election be held, because this proved that constitutional government still functioned; and the future offered them no other safeguard. Grim General Sherman had recently warned them that when they appealed to war they put themselves utterly at the mercy of the rules of war—which, he asserted (and he was a rising authority on the subject), were altogether merciless. When the Southern states seceded, he said, they made it possible for the Federal government to do literally anything it wanted to do with them because "war is simply power unrestrained by constitution or compact."

Sherman put these thoughts in a letter to his brother, Senator John Sherman of Ohio, suggesting that to publish the letter "would do no harm except turn the Richmond press against me as the prince of barbarians." He did not understand democracy, he had nothing against slavery, and he certainly belonged to no political faction; he was, in fact, that most unpredictable of persons, a completely radical arch-conservative, and his footnote to the pending election deserved attention. It was almost as if this election was an appeal from war back to the ballot. As Sherman said, war was power unrestrained; here was the restraint coming back into play again—a restraint which unhappily could be applied only in the atmosphere created by war.
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This disturbed Governor Horatio Seymour of New York, a devout Democrat whose appeals for restraint were so unrestrained that some Republicans considered him a Copperhead. Seymour now was raising a perfectly valid point. "The rights of the states were reserved, and the powers of the general government were limited, to protect the people in their persons, property and consciences in time of danger and civil commotion."
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Yet because the war had been fought so long and so hard, neither the rights of the states nor the powers of the general government would ever again look quite as they had looked in 1860, and with an election approaching this colored everything men did. Congress discovered this early in the spring when it found that it could not provide a temporary government for the new territory of Montana without first arguing hotly about the Dred Scott decision.

Montana was empty and faraway, and so was the Dred Scott case, but the two were fused by the heat of an election year. It began when the House sent to the Senate a territorial bill providing in a routine way that "any white male inhabitant" could vote in Montana; whereupon Senator Morton S. Wilkinson of Minnesota moved to amend the bill by giving the vote to "any male citizen of the United States." This was an avowed attempt to let Negroes vote in Montana, and Senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland protested that in the Dred Scott case Chief Justice Taney had held that a Negro was not a citizen. But the Senate liked Wilkinson's amendment, and after Senator Sumner cried that Congress should no longer "wear the strait-jacket of the Dred Scott decision" the amendment was adopted.

When the amended bill went back to the House it was quickly apparent that in this chamber the radicals were not in control. The Ohio Democrat, George H. Pendleton, asserted that the amendment was nothing less than an attempt to reverse a ruling of the Supreme Court, and he pointed out that in addition it was a bold leap into the dark. He wanted everyone to understand "that now, for the first time in the history of the government, one of the branches of Congress has attempted to establish Negro political equality." A majority felt as he did, and by a vote of 75 to 67 the House refused to accept the amendment and instructed its conferees to agree to no bill that did not limit the franchise to white men.

The whole business was somewhat unreal, inasmuch as Montana then contained no Negroes at all and it seemed unlikely that it would ever have very many. Yet the war itself was based on a similar bit of unreality, because it had developed out of a furious demand for a slave code for territories almost equally devoid of Negroes; possibly the abstract principle governing the granting of human rights ran roughly parallel to the one that governed their denial. At the moment, however, the question hardly seemed worth developing, and Senator James Doolittie of Wisconsin protested earnestly against interjecting this disturbing element— "I mean the issue of Negro suffrage"—into an election campaign. The Senate finally backed down, saving face slightly by agreeing that the government in Montana should be organized by the class of persons previously authorized to organize the territory of Idaho: that is, by white male citizens.

Ben Wade, one of the toughest of the radicals, said that this was all right because the non-existence of Negroes in Montana made the case inconsequential; but he served notice that "whenever this question shall be raised in such sort as to affect the rights of any man, I shall take the broad principle of right and stand by it as firmly as anyone else."
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The Dred Scott decision had been controlling, once, and it had helped to create the conditions that brought on a war, but now it was nearing the end of its existence. So was its author, Chief Justice Taney, a frail man living out the summer, sere and shrunken as an oak leaf in February. Senator Wade made a rough joke about him, and General Halleck, who loved to collect bits of Washington gossip, passed it along in a chatty letter to his friend Francis Lieber:

"You speak of Chief Justice Taney's health. Did you ever hear of Ben Wade's joke about the Chief Justice? Ben (who is probably the most profane man in Congress) says that he used to pray for Taney every night during Buchanan's administration, that his life might be spared till a new president could appoint his successor; but he over-did the business & his prayers were likely to carry him through this administration also! 'If the Lord will forgive me this time, I will never pray for a Chief Justice again!' "
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Wade had stopped praying—possibly the exercise was unfamiliar and exhausting—and in mid-July he was denouncing the President in a fine fury. Mr. Lincoln had applied a pocket veto to the Wade-Davis bill, which held that Congress rather than the President must control the process of reconstruction, but he had refused to make an issue of it and had said that any Southern state wishing to be rebuilt by the Wade-Davis formula, which was most restrictive, could have its way. Now Wade and Davis were out with an angry manifesto, making the issue Mr. Lincoln had refused to make, warning the President that "if he wishes our support he must confine himself to his executive duties—to obey and execute, not make, the laws—to suppress by arms armed rebellion and leave political reorganization to Congress." The manifesto sounded ferocious, and it led Mr. Lincoln to remark that "to be wounded in the house of one's friends is perhaps the most grievous affliction that can befall a man"; yet it was a warning for the future rather than a real and present danger.
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Proof of this lies in what did not happen in connection with the presidential candidacy of General Fremont.

Fremont was nominated at the end of May by a group styling itself the party of the Radical Democracy, meeting in Cleveland and drawing some four hundred delegates of whom a scant handful had national reputations. It listened to oratory, received a letter from Abolitionist Wendell Phillips denouncing the President's ten percent plan, "which puts all power in the hands of the unchanged white race, soured by defeat, hating the laboring classes, plotting constantly for aristocratic institutions"; and after nominating Fremont it adopted a platform which seemed to express the fullest desires of the Republican radicals. The platform called for reunion, a Constitutional amendment to end slavery, limitation of presidential tenure to one term, Congressional control of reconstruction, and confiscation and redistribution of all lands held by Rebels. This caused rejoicing among Democrats, who were delighted to see a split in the opposition, but it failed to win the support of the principal radicals, including the impassioned Senator Wade and Congressman Davis.
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One reason may have been that Fremont failed to be as fierce as he was expected to be. He quickly disavowed the plank on confiscation, saying that such a program was neither practical nor wise and that "in the adjustments that are to follow peace no considerations of vengeance can consistently be admitted." A bigger reason was that if the radicals defeated Mr. Lincoln by throwing their strength to Fremont they would certainly cause the election of a Democrat, which was the last thing on earth they wanted. After all, they could live with President Lincoln. What he wanted most, they wanted: reunion on terms imposed in Washington, and abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment. They were just warning him.

For that matter Mr. Lincoln could issue warnings of his own. He issued one on June 30 when he abruptly dropped Salmon P. Chase from his cabinet, replacing him as Secretary of the Treasury with Senator William P. Fessenden of Maine.

Chase was a radical, tried and true; the senatorial bloc considered him too erratic and too self-righteous, but he was unquestionably thoroughly sound on the essentials. For months he had done all he could do to win the presidential nomination, and when at last he failed—his political ineptitude was almost as unlimited as his political ambition—Mr. Lincoln quietly waited for an opening. It came when the two men differed about a Treasury appointment. Chase sent in a resignation, as he had done several times before, meaning only to put on a little heat, and immediately got a starchy note accepting the resignation. . . "you and I have reached a point of mutual embarrassment in our official relation which it seems cannot be overcome, or longer sustained, consistently with the public service."
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Chase was out.

For the moment Mr. Lincoln was leading from strength. In the winter and spring there had been sporadic attempts to find another nominee, but the hard fact was that the Republicans had no other man of comparable stature, and by the time the party convention opened in Baltimore—officially it was the National Union Party now, to prove that it welcomed war Democrats—the opposition was helpless. David Davis, who had managed Mr. Lincoln's candidacy at the Wigwam in Chicago in 1860, did not even bother to attend, and he wrote to Mr. Lincoln to explain his course: "If there had been a speck of opposition I would have gone to Baltimore. But the opposition is utterly beaten. The fight is not even interesting, and the services of no one is necessary."
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Davis was correct. Mr. Lincoln was renominated on June 8 without trouble, and although the Missouri delegation did vote for U. S. Grant it swung into line as soon as the ballot ended and successfully moved that a unanimous vote for Mr. Lincoln be recorded. Without visible guidance from the White House, the convention discarded Vice-President Hannibal Hamlin in favor of an anti-slavery war Democrat from the South, nominating Andrew Johnson, military governor of Tennessee, for the vice-presidency.
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Mr. Lincoln warmly endorsed the party platform, emphasizing his support of the plank that called for a constitutional amendment to end slavery, and for the moment the party was in harmony.
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The platform was straight war-party doctrine. It was not, actually, very different from the one the Cleveland convention had given Fremont. It endorsed the President, whereas the Clevelanders wanted him out, and instead of demanding confiscation of Rebel lands it recommended undefined "punishment"; and where the Cleveland platform specifically asserted that reconstruction was a matter for Congress, the Baltimore platform avoided this issue and simply called on the administration to demand unconditional surrender, without compromise. At Cleveland the radicals had laid their demands on the line; at Baltimore they had been flexible, accepting harmony in the belief that they could control what would follow. They risked little, for if the President grew soft on secession during the summer they could swing over to Fremont; Fremont's candidacy was, in effect, the fine type buried in the contract reached at Baltimore.

The platform had one plank that seemed pointless but was not: a declaration that harmony must prevail in national councils and that "we regard as worthy of public confidence and official trust only those who cordially endorse the principles proclaimed in these resolutions, and which should characterize the administration of the government." This shaft was aimed at Montgomery Blair, the Postmaster General—at him, at the Blair family in general, and through them at all of the conservative Republicans who might backslide from the true faith. The radicals wanted Blair out of the cabinet and this was their way of saying so.
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