Themes of the American Civil War

Election returns offered a series of snapshots of political opinion. On average a significant congressional or state election occurred in the North every other month during the four years of war. Lincoln, whose grasp of electoral topography and arithmetic was second to none, spent many an hour in the telegraph office (located in the War Department, just a short walk from the White House) awaiting and analyzing outcomes. Broadly speaking,
election results allowed the administration to plot the course and strength of Union opinion throughout the war. Thus Republicans success in New
England in spring, 1861, appeared to endorse the new administration’s policy of coercion of the Confederacy. Winning various state contests outside New
England later that year only with the support of War Democrats seemed to vindicate its conciliatory approach towards border-state conservatives.
In the congressional and state contests in the fall of 1862, the most serious electoral test of the war to date, Lincoln’s administration suffered a serious popular rebuff, especially in the Midwest and the lower North, though the extent to which this represented the electorate’s hostility to the policy of emancipation and the assault on the South’s social system, as opposed to a critical commentary on the Union army’s lack of energy and success, was not so easy to gauge.
12
Using voting figures as a commentary on matters of national policy could be like reading Braille with a gloved hand.
Dealings with political leaders at national and state level held out for
Lincoln opportunities for more nuanced analyses of popular mood. From his deliberately broad-based and inclusive cabinet he heard often dissonant voices advancing a range of views which ran the gamut of Unionist opinion—disharmony, in this case at least, acting as a source of presidential strength not weakness. More sensitive still to public feeling were those in elective office, notably state governors and US. Congressmen, whom Lincoln considered his eyes and ears in each constituency. From Andrew G. Curtin of Pennsylvania, Richard Yates of Illinois, Oliver P. Morton of Indiana, John
A. Andrew of Massachusetts, and other loyal governors, the President received commentaries on the general management of the war, on electoral prospects, and on the public’s view of particular administration policies across a range of salient issues confiscation, colonization, emancipation,
black troops, the draft, reconstruction. But, as Lincoln discovered to his cost, though they were closer than he to the grassroots, their judgments were not infallible. Thus, taking William Dennison’s advice in the spring of to heed popular will and convert the ninety-day militiamen into three-year volunteers, Lincoln was forced into retracting his approval in the face of the men’s anger and threat of mutiny.
13
Governors and other state politicians had their own axes to grind, of course, and Lincoln had always to remain on the lookout for self-interested pleading disguised as objective testimony.
His grasp on the slippery confusion of events in Missouri, for instance,
was undoubtedly weakened by the ambiguities and defectiveness of his
Lincoln and the Union
•
129

information. Unsurprisingly, he sent his own White House secretaries, John
G. Nicolay and John Hay, on a variety of missions to establish the state of local political feeling.
Newspapers, the lifeblood of the American political system, provided
Lincoln with another means of keeping his finger on the pulse of opinion.
In his days as an aspiring Illinois politician he had been an insatiable reader of the party political press, but the rigors of office gave the harassed President far less time to indulge this appetite. Francis Carpenter, the portrait painter who observed his daily routine over a six-month period, recalled only one instance when he saw Lincoln casually browsing through a newspaper.
Actually, papers abounded in the White House. In addition to the three
Washington dailies (the Morning Chronicle, National Republican, and Star)
which were laid out on Lincoln’s study table, a variety of the Union’s leading papers provided his secretaries with the materials from which they could mine the interesting editorial matter and items of political importance they judged they should bring to the President’s attention. When fora brief interlude early in the war events conspired to interrupt the daily flow of papers, a sense of isolation and even desperation seized the occupants of the executive mansion. Lincoln had a healthily skeptical attitude to press criticism, which rarely moved him to anger and which he commonly dismissed as noise and gas generated by ignorance and editorial self- importance. Still, he could not afford to ignore editors as conduits of opinion.
When, in the dark days of the summer of 1864, those whom he trusted anxiously brought him reports of opinion hardening against the administration, he came as close as he ever did to abandoning the high ground of antislavery Unionism.
14
Loyal editors also bombarded the President with unsolicited advice in hundreds of private letters. These represented only a small fraction of the mail that at times threatened to submerge the White House secretariat.
Nicolay handled Lincoln’s huge correspondence before his inauguration;
subsequently the responsibility fell on Hay’s young shoulders. As the volume rose, to reach a peak of two mailbags (some 500 letters) daily during the midpoint of Lincoln’s reelection year, an additional secretary was required.
Much of the correspondence comprised requests for civil jobs and military commissions. There were diatribes and hate mail, too, from which Lincoln was generally shielded. But many letters came from those whom one secretary described as good and true men often unlettered and humble,
pouring out their deepest heart sorrows and offering their advice on the conduct of affairs. Of course, Lincoln had time to handle only a fraction of what arrived, perhaps a dozen or so letters a day according to Hay, the
President personally read no more than one letter in fifty. But those he did review, together with the summaries and annotations provided by his secretaries, gave him a chance literally to read public opinion. Each phase of
130
•
Richard Carwardine

the conflict prompted earnest suggestions about the best policies and strategy for victory.
15
Many wrote to the President as an alternative to paying the personal call that the constraints of geography, time, and expense prevented. Yet the most remarkable feature of Lincoln’s tenure of office was the throngs of ordinary citizens who came to the capital to pour through the White House doors,
intent on a private interview on one of the President’s regular public days.
Lincoln never lost his determination to remain accessible—to be the attorney of the people, not their ruler William H. Seward remarked that
“there never was a man so accessible to all sorts of proper and improper persons the President himself described his office hours as the Beggars’
Opera.” He never lost his keen sense of his own ordinariness and his kinship with common folk. He cherished republican simplicity, shunned the imperial style, and protested strongly when the general-in-chief, Henry W.
Halleck, detailed a cavalry detachment, clattering along with sabers and spurs, to guard the presidential carriage.
16
In consequence of what Henry J. Raymond called Lincoln’s utter unconsciousness of his position ordinary men and women regarded him more as a neighbor to be dropped in upon than as a remote head of state.
“Mr Lincoln is always approachable and this is greatly in his favor explained the Washington correspondent of the New York Independent. The people can get at him and impress upon him their views without difficulty Though his visitors included, in the words of one observer, loiterers, contract- hunters, garrulous parents on paltry errands, toadies without measure, and talkers without conscience Lincoln was adamantly opposed to restricting access. I feel—though the taxon my time is heavy—that no hours of my day are better employed than those which bring me again within the direct contact and atmosphere of the average of our whole people Each meeting,
he maintained, served to renew in me a clearer and more vivid image of that great popular assemblage out of which I sprung. . . . I call these receptions my ‘public-opinion baths’; for I have but little time to read the papers and gather public opinion that way Sometimes he felt himself bombarded and besieged but, even so, these encounters with ordinary folk worked to invigorate his perceptions of responsibility and duty.”
17
Probably more than any other single agency, they provided the down-to-earth oxygen lacking in the rarefied political air of wartime Washington.

Download 2.25 Mb.

Share with your friends: