Themes of the American Civil War

CHAPTER
Abraham Lincoln, the Presidency,
and the Mobilization of
Union Sentiment
RICHARD CARWARDINE
To experience war is to experience force, and Americans of the Civil War era knew that raw truth better than any other generation in their nation’s history. If the Confederacy was subject to the greater devastation of its physical landscape, and the greater proportionate loss of life, the Union suffered its own grievous human agonies. Victory, the Lincoln administration gradually learned, would come only as the North’s superiority in manpower and material resources expressed itself in the force of bullet, bayonet, and shell, and in the physical destruction of the enemy—and that would mean unprecedented bloodshed on both sides.
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Military coercion of the Confederacy demanded political coercion on the Union home front. Few aspects of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency have attracted more discussion than his use of emergency executive powers.
Responding swiftly to the Confederates attack on Fort Sumter in April, he called up the militia, proclaimed a blockade, and ordered the use of
Treasury funds for war supplies, all before he called Congress into special session in July. He subsequently suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus and sanctioned arbitrary arrests throughout the country, abolished slavery by presidential proclamation, and began his own program of national reconstruction. Here was an agenda sufficient to elicit cries of dictatorship both from Confederates and from Northern political foes. Whatever the justice of that charge—and recent scholarship has not wholly exonerated the sixteenth President
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—there is universal agreement that the nation’s unprecedented crisis spurred Lincoln and the executive branch into forceful,
interventionist, and even coercive leadership. Earlier generations had
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expressed fears for the future of republicanism—whether from the executive
“usurpation” of federalists in the s or from the tyranny of “King
Andrew” Jackson four decades later—but no previous administration had deployed political and military power as energetically as did the Union government during the Civil War. Moreover, the earnestness with which the civilian and military agents of the administration set about their task suggests how far they believed Union success depended upon coercion. These included government control of the telegraph, suppressing newspapers careless with confidential military information, seizing presses, arresting deserters, detaining those who encouraged opposition to the draft, prosecuting and banishing pro-Confederate editors, and deploying provost marshals and troops to police the polls or intimidate opponents. Maryland and other contested border areas were transformed into armed camps, while
Peace Democrat (Copperhead) strongholds in the Northwest and Middle
Atlantic states felt the firm hand of Union commanders behind the lines.
But for all that, what is remarkable about Lincoln’s success in sustaining support for the Union’s formidable four-year war effort is just how little it depended on executive coercion, repression, and the long arm of the War
Department. The main task facing the Union administration was not how to coerce or dragoon an unwilling population into an unwanted conflict;
rather it was how best to encourage, nurture, and sustain a potent Union patriotism. The North’s superiority over the Confederacy in manpower and matériel gave hope of eventual victory, but this would count only if the enthusiasm for war that immediately followed the bombardment of Fort
Sumter were consolidated into a longer-term appetite for the fight. Given that Lincoln secured a handsome reelection in 1864, and that Union voluntary enlistments remained extraordinarily high throughout the conflict, it might seem that a resilient popular Unionism needed little nurturing from above. But without clear articulation of the war’s purpose by the Union leadership in general, and the President in particular, it is doubtful whether the people of the North would have retained their collective will to continue so grueling and expensive a conflict. Neither James Madison in the War of 1812 nor James K. Polk in the conflict with Mexico had been entirely successful in harmonizing national sentiment behind his leadership, and by definition these had been less divisive struggles than an internecine civil war. The burden of what follows is that one of Lincoln’s greatest achievements was his articulation of a rationale for the war and its sacrifices that its formulation and reformulation were shaped in terms which, from his shrewd reading of public opinion, he judged would resonate with mainstream Unionists and cement the war coalition that for its dissemination he and his administration imaginatively exploited a formidable network of governmental and voluntary agencies and that the keynote of his presidential leadership of the Union was persuasion, not coercion.
Lincoln and the Union
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