The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville (163 page)

Since then, a good many high-placed men—including Bates, who had seen Cameron banished and the bricks applied to Stanton—had had occasion to learn better: though not all. The poet Whittier, for example, saw victory only through a haze of
ifs
. “The worst of the
ifs
is the one
concerning Lincoln,” he privately declared. “I am much afraid that a domestic cat will not answer when one wants a Bengal tiger.” His fellow poet William Cullen Bryant agreed. “The people after their gigantic preparation and sacrifice have looked for an adequate return, and looked in vain,” he editorialized in the New York
Evening Post
. “They have seen armies unused in the field perish in pestilential swamps. They have seen their money wasted in long winter encampments, or frittered away on fruitless expeditions along the coast. They have seen a huge debt roll up, yet no prospect of greater military results.” Wendell Phillips, bitter as ever, continued to aim an indignant finger at the White House. “The North has poured out its blood and money like water; it has leveled every fence of constitutional privilege,” he declaimed, “and Abraham Lincoln sits today a more unlimited despot than the world knows this side of China. What does he render for this unbounded confidence? Show us something,” he cried in the direction he was pointing, “or I tell you that within two years the indignant reaction of the people will hurl the Cabinet in contempt from their seats.”

Confronted with such judgments handed down by public men, who thus came between him and his purpose of unification, Lincoln kept his temper and his poise. If he failed in his attempts to win these critics over by means of personal discussion, face to face in his office—“What is he wrathy about? Why does he not come down here and have a talk with me?”—he went beyond them to the people. Sometimes he did so in cold print, as in the case of his answer to Greeley’s “Prayer of Twenty Millions,” but generally he proceeded in a manner that was strangely intimate in its effect, acting on a larger stage the role he had played in Illinois. In Washington, as in Springfield, he received all comers, and for the most part he received them with a sympathy which, by their own admission, equaled or exceeded their deserving. He shook their hands at frequent public receptions held in the White House, which was his home and yet belonged to them; he attended the theater, a form of relaxation which kept him still within their view; he drove or rode, almost daily, through the spokelike streets of the hive-dense city, returning the looks and salutes of men and women and children along the way. Thousands touched him, heard him, saw him at close range, and scarcely one in all those thousands ever forgot the sight of that tall figure, made still taller by the stovepipe hat, and the homely drape of the shawl across the shoulders. Never forgotten, because it was unforgettable, the impression remained, incredible and enduring, imperishable in its singularity—and, finally, dear.

Millions who did not see him saw his picture, and this too was a part of the effect. Widely broadcast as it was—the result of recent developments in photography and the process of reproduction—his had become, within two crowded years, the most familiar face in American history. At first sight this might appear to be a liability. The Paris
correspondent of the
New York Times
, for example, sent home a paragraph titled “Lincoln’s Phiz in Europe,” in which he suggested the wisdom of declaring an embargo on portraits of the President, at least so far as France was concerned: “The person represented in these pictures looks so much like a man condemned to the gallows, that large numbers of them have been imposed on the people here by the shopkeepers as Dumollard, the famous murderer of servant girls, lately guillotined near Lyons. Such a face is enough to ruin the best of causes.… People read the name inscribed under it with astonishment, or rather bewilderment, for the thing appears more like a hoax than a reality.” Yet here, too, something worked in his favor. It was as if, having so far overshot the mark of ugliness, the face was not to be judged by ordinary standards. You saw it not so much for what it was, as for what it held. Suffering was in it; so were understanding, kindliness, and determination. “None of us to our dying day can forget that countenance,” an infantryman wrote on the occasion of a presidential visit to the army. “Concentrated in that one great, strong, yet tender face, the agony of the life and death struggle of the hour was revealed as we had never seen it before. With a new understanding, we knew why we were soldiers.”

Herein lay the explanation for much that otherwise could not be understood—by Jefferson Davis, for one, who had expressed “contemptuous astonishment” at seeing his late compatriots submit to what he called “the mere edict of a despot.” They did not see their submission in that light. “I know very well that many others might … do better than I can,” Lincoln had told the cabinet in September, “and if I were satisfied that the public confidence was more fully possessed by any one of them than by me, and knew of any constitutional way he could be put in my place, he should have it. I would gladly yield it to him. But … I do not know that, all things considered, any other person has more [of the confidence of the people]; and, however this may be, there is no way in which I can have any other man put where I am. I am here. I must do the best I can, and bear the responsibility of taking the course which I feel I ought to take.” Though these words were spoken in private, their import carried over: with the result that such power as he seized—and it was much, far more in fact than any President had ever had before, in peace or war—was surrendered by the people in confidence that the power was not being seized for its own sake, or even for Lincoln’s sake, but rather for the sake of preserving the Union. They gave him the power, along with the responsibility, glad to have a strong hand on the reins.

This fear of weakness had been the source of their gravest doubt through the opening year of conflict, as well as the subject of the editors’ most frequent complaint—Lincoln was lacking in “will and purpose.” Now they knew that their fears had been misplaced. A Kentucky
visitor, turning to leave the White House, asked the President what cheering news he could take home to friends. By way of reply, Lincoln told him a story about a chess expert who had never met his match until he tried his hand against a machine called the Automaton Chess Player, and was beaten three times running. Astonished, the defeated expert got up from his chair and walked slowly around and around the machine, examining it minutely as he went. At last he stopped and leveled an accusing finger in its direction. “There’s a man in there!” he cried. Lincoln paused, then made his point: “Tell my friends there is a man in here.”

Something else he was, as well—a literary craftsman—though so far this had gone unrecognized, unnoticed, and for the most part would remain so until critics across the Atlantic, unembarrassed by proximity, called attention to the fact. Indeed, complaints had been registered that he wrote “like a half-educated lawyer” with little or no appreciation for the cadenced beauties latent in the English language, awaiting the summons of the artist who knew how to call them up. That there was such a thing as the American language, available for literary purposes, had scarcely begun to be suspected by the more genteel, except as it had been employed by writers of low dialog bits, which mainly served to emphasize its limitations. Lincoln’s jogtrot prose, compacted of words and phrases still with the bark on, had no music their ears were attuned to; it crept by them. However, an ambiguity had been sensed. Remarking “the two-fold working of the two-fold nature of the man,” one caller at least had observed the contrast between “Lincoln the Westerner, slightly humorous but thoroughly practical and sagacious,” and “Lincoln the President and statesman … seen in those abstract and serious eyes, which seemed withdrawn to an inner sanctuary of thought, sitting in judgment on the scene and feeling its far reach into the future.”

Here was a clew; but it went uninvestigated. Apparently it was miracle enough that a prairie lawyer had become President, without pressing matters further to see that he had also become a stylist. In fact, so natural and unlabored had his utterance seemed, that when people were told they had an artist in the White House, their reaction was akin to that of the man in Molière who discovered that all his life he had been speaking prose. “I am here. I must do the best I can,” Lincoln had said, and that best included this. Natural perhaps it was; unlabored it was not. Long nights he toiled in his workshop, the “inner sanctuary” from which he reached out to the future, and here indeed was the best clew of all. For he worked with the dedication of the true artist, who, whatever his sense of superiority in other relationships, preserves his humility in this one. He knew, as a later observer remarked, “the dangers that lurk in iotas.” There were days when callers, whatever their importance, were
turned away with the explanation that the President was at work: which meant writing.

A series of such days came in November, and the occasion was the preparation of a message to Congress, which would convene December 1. Lincoln saw already what would later become obvious, but was by no means obvious yet: that the war had ended one phase and was about to enter another. This message was intended to signal that event, bidding farewell to the old phase and setting a course for the new. Basically it was dedicatory, for there was need for dedication. The fury of Perryville, the blood that had stained the Antietam and sluiced the ridge in front of Sharpsburg, had reëmphasized the fact disclosed on a smaller scale at First Bull Run and Wilson’s Creek, then augmented at Shiloh and the Seven Days, that both armies were capable of inflicting and withstanding terrible wounds. Though it was incredible that the ratio of increase would be maintained, there would be other Shilohs, other Sharpsburgs, other terrors. Men in their thousands now alive would presently be dead; homes so far untouched by sorrow would know tears; new widows and new orphans, some as yet unmarried or unborn, would be made—all, as Lincoln saw it, that the nation might continue and that men now in bondage might have freedom. In issuing the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation he had made certain that there would be no peace except by conquest. He had weighed the odds and made his choice, foreseeing the South’s reaction. “A restitution of the Union has been rendered forever impossible,” Davis said. Lincoln had known he would say it; the fact was, he had been saying it all along. What he meant, and what Lincoln knew he meant, was that the issue was one which could only be settled by arms, and that the war was therefore a war for survival—survival of the South, as Davis saw it: survival of the Union, as Lincoln saw it—with the added paradox that, while neither of the two leaders believed victory for his side meant extinction for the other, each insisted that the reverse was true.

On the face of it, Davis had rather the better of his opponent in this contention, since the immediate and admitted result of a southern defeat would be that the South would go out of existence as a nation, however well it might survive in the sense that Lincoln intended to convey. The threat of national extinction was a sharper goad than any the northern leader could apply in attempting the unification he saw was necessary; therefore he determined to try for something other than sharpness. It was here that his particular talent, though so far it had gone unrecognized in general, could most effectively be brought to bear. As he had done against Douglas in the old days, so now in his long-range contest with Davis he shifted the argument onto a higher plane. Douglas had wanted to talk about “popular sovereignty,” the right of the people of a region to decide for themselves the laws and customs under which
they would live, but Lincoln had made slavery the issue, to the Little Giant’s unavoidable discomfort. Similarly, in the present debate, while Davis spoke of self-government, Lincoln—without ever dropping the pretense that Davis was invisible, was in fact not there at all—appealed to “the mystic chords of memory” and “the chorus of the Union,” then presently moved on to slavery and freedom, which Davis could no more avoid than Douglas had been able to do. Lincoln tarred them both with the same brush, doing it so effectively in the present case that the tar would never wear off, and managed also to redefine the Davis concept of self-government as destructive of world democracy, which was shown to depend on survival of the Union with the South as part of the whole. In thus discounting the claims of his opponent, he rallied not only his own people behind him, but also those of other lands where freedom was cherished as a possession or a goal, and thus assured nonintervention. Davis in time, like other men before and since, found what it meant to become involved with an adversary whose various talents included those of a craftsman in the use of words.

A case in point was this December message. It was a long one, nearly fifty thousand words, and it covered a host of subjects, all of them connected directly or indirectly with the war. “Fellow-Citizens of the Senate and House of Representatives,” it opened. “Since your last annual assembling another year of health and bountiful harvest has passed, and while it has not pleased the Almighty to bless us with a return of peace, we can but press on, guided by the best light he gives us, trusting that in his own good time and wise way all will yet be well.… The civil war, which has so radically changed, for the moment, the occupations and habits of the American people, has necessarily disturbed the social condition and affected very deeply the prosperity of the nations with which we have carried on a commerce that has been steadily increasing throughout a period of half a century. It has at the same time excited political ambitions and apprehensions which have produced a profound agitation throughout the civilized world.… We have attempted no propagandism and acknowledged no revolution; but we have left to every nation the exclusive conduct and management of its own affairs. Our struggle has been, of course, contemplated by foreign nations with reference less to its own merits than to its supposed and often exaggerated effects and consequences resulting to those nations themselves. Nevertheless, complaint on the part of this government, even if it were just, would certainly be unwise.”