Foreign powers could not be expected to sympathize with the North, when
both the Union and the Confederate governments were pledged to uphold
slavery. As the war dragged on, more and more northerners saw the absurdity
of continuing to protect the "peculiar institution," which, by keeping a
subservient labor force on the farms, permitted the Confederates to put
proportionately more of their able-bodied white men into their armies. When
Union casualties mounted, even racist northerners began to favor enlisting
blacks in the Union armies.
As sentiment for emancipation mounted, Lincoln was careful to keep complete
control of the problem in his own hands. He sharply overruled premature
efforts by two of his military commanders, Frйmont in Missouri and David
Hunter in the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, to declare
slaves in their military theaters free. At the same time, the President
urged the border states to accept a program of gradual emancipation, with
federal compensation.
By midsummer of 1862, however, it was evident that these efforts would not
be successful. Still troubled by divided Union sentiment and still
uncertain of his constitutional powers to act, Lincoln prepared to issue an
emancipation proclamation. Secretary of State William H. Seward, however,
persuaded him that such an order, issued at the low point of Union military
fortunes, would be taken as evidence of weakness. The President postponed
his move until after the Battle of Antietam. Then, on Sept. 22, 1862, he
issued his preliminary proclamation, announcing that after 100 days all
slaves in states still in rebellion would be forever free. This was
followed, in due course, by the definitive Emancipation Proclamation of
Jan. 1, 1863.
Because the proclamation exempted slavery in the border states and in all
Confederate territory already under the control of Union armies and because
Lincoln was not certain that his action would be sustained by the Supreme
Court, he strongly urged Congress to adopt the 13th Amendment, forever
abolishing slavery throughout the country. Congressional action on this
measure was completed in January 1865. Lincoln considered the amendment
"the complete consummation of his own work, the emancipation proclamation."
Foreign Relations
Never having traveled abroad and having few acquaintances in the
courts of Europe, Lincoln, for the most part, left the conduct of foreign
policy to Seward. Yet, at critical times he made his influence felt. Early
in his administration, when Seward recklessly proposed to divert attention
from domestic difficulties by threatening a war against Spain and perhaps
other powers, the President quietly squelched the project. Again, in 1861,
Lincoln intervened to tone down a dispatch Seward wrote to Charles Francis
Adams, the U.S. minister in London, which probably would have led to a
break in diplomatic relations with Britain. In the Trent affair, that same
year, when Union Capt. Charles Wilkes endangered the peace by removing two
Confederate emissaries from a British ship and taking them into custody,
Lincoln took a courageous but unpopular stand by insisting that the
prisoners be released.
Wartime Politics
Throughout the war Lincoln was the subject of frequent, and often
vitriolic, attacks, both from the Democrats who thought he was proceeding
too drastically against slavery and from the Radicals in his own party--men
like Charles Sumner, Benjamin F. Wade, and Zachariah Chandler--who
considered him slow and ineffective. Partisan newspapers abused the
President as "a slangwhanging stump speaker," a "half-witted usurper," a
"mole-eyed" monster with "soul ... of leather,""the present turtle at the
head of the government." Men of his own party openly charged that he was
"unfit," a "political coward," a "dictator,""timid and
ignorant,""shattered, dazed, utterly foolish."
A minority president in 1861, Lincoln lost further support in the
congressional elections of 1862, when Democrats took control of the crucial
states of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. As the 1864
election approached, it was clear that Lincoln would face formidable
opposition for reelection, not merely from a Democratic candidate but from
rivals within his own party. Republican anti-Lincoln sentiment centered on
treasury secretary Salmon P. Chase, who was working with the Radical
critics of Lincoln in Congress. The Chase boom failed, however, chiefly
because Lincoln insisted upon keeping the ambitious secretary in his
cabinet. At the same time, Lincoln's own agents were working quietly to sew
up the state delegations to the Republican national convention. Even
Chase's own state of Ohio pledged to vote for Lincoln. Facing certain
defeat, Chase withdrew from the race, but Lincoln kept him in the cabinet
until after the Republican national convention, which met in Baltimore in
June 1864.
Lacking a prominent standard bearer, some disgruntled Republicans gathered
in Cleveland in May 1864 to nominate Frйmont, but the movement never made
much headway. Radical pressure was powerful enough, however, to persuade
Lincoln to drop the most outspokenly conservative member of his cabinet,
Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, and Frйmont withdrew from the race.
Lincoln's Republican critics continued to hope they could summon a new
national convention, which would replace the President with a more Radical
candidate, but this scheme died with news of Union military victories.
For a time Democratic opposition in 1864 to Lincoln's reelection also
appeared to be formidable, for people were tired of the endless war and
disinclined to fight for the liberty of black men. But the Democrats found
it impossible to bring together the two major groups of Lincoln's critics--
those who wanted the President to end the war, and those who wanted him to
prosecute it more vigorously. Meeting at Chicago in August, the Democratic
national convention nominated a candidate, Gen. George B. McClellan,
pledged to the successful conclusion of the war on a platform that called
the war a failure. McClellan's repudiation of this peace plank showed how
fundamentally split were the Democrats.
Whatever chance the Democrats had in 1864 was lost when the war at last
began to favor the Union cause. By the late summer of 1864, Grant had
forced Lee back into the defenses of Richmond and Petersburg. In the West,
Sherman's advancing army captured Atlanta on September 2. At the same time,
Admiral Farragut's naval forces closed the key Confederate port of Mobile.
When the ballots were cast in November, the results reflected both these
Union triumphs and the rift among the opposition. Lincoln carried every
state except Kentucky, Delaware, and New Jersey. He polled 2,206,938
popular votes to McClellan's 1,803,787 and won an electoral vote victory of
212 to 21. It must be remembered, however, that voters in the seceded
states, the strongholds of the Democratic party, did not participate in the
election.
Life in the White House
Beset by military, diplomatic, and political problems, the President
tried to keep his family life as normal as possible. The two youngest
Lincoln boys, Thomas (Tad) and William Wallace (Willie), were high spirited
lads. Their older brother, the sober Robert Todd Lincoln, was less
frequently in Washington, because he was first a student at Harvard and
later an aide to General Grant. Despite the snobbishness of Washington
society and criticisms from those who wanted all social affairs suspended
because of the war, the Lincolns continued to hold receptions in the White
House. But the President found these affairs costly and tiring. He would
slip away late at night after a White House party to visit the telegraph
room of the War Department to read the latest dispatches from the front. He
never took a vacation, but in summer he moved his family to the cooler and
more secluded Soldier's Home in Washington.
Lincoln visibly aged during the war years, and by 1865 he appeared almost
haggard. His life was made harder by personal trials. Early in 1862, Willie
died of typhoid. His mother, always high-strung and hysterical, suffered a
nervous breakdown, and Lincoln had to watch over her with careful
solicitude. But Lincoln emerged from his public and private agonies with a
new serenity of soul. Any trace of vanity or egotism was burned out by the
fires of war. In his second inaugural address, his language reached a new
level of eloquence. Urging his countrymen to act "with malice toward none;
with charity for all," he looked beyond the end of the war toward binding
up the nation's wounds, so as to "achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting
peace."
Reconstruction
From the start of the Civil War, Lincoln was deeply concerned about
the terms under which the Southern states, once subdued, should be restored
to the Union. He had no fixed plan for reconstruction. At the outset, he
would have welcomed a simple decision on the part of any Southern state
government to rescind its ordinance of secession and return its delegation
to Congress. By 1863, however, to this war aim of union he added that of
liberty, for he now insisted that emancipation of the slaves was a
necessary condition for restoration. By the end of the war he was beginning
to add a third condition, equality, for he realized that minimal guarantees
of civil rights for blacks were essential. Privately, he let it be known
that he favored extending the franchise in the Southern states to some of
the blacks--"as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those
who have fought gallantly in our ranks."
As to means by which to achieve these goals, Lincoln was also flexible.
When Union armies advanced into the South, he appointed military governors
for the states that were conquered. Most notable of these was the military
governor of Tennessee, Andrew JOHNSON, who became Lincoln's running mate in
1864. In December 1863, Lincoln enunciated a comprehensive reconstruc tion
program, pledging pardon and amnesty to Confederates who were prepared to
swear loyalty to the Union and promising to turn back control of local
governments to the civil authorities in the South when as few as 10% of the
1860 voting population participated in the elections. Governments operating
under this 10% plan were set up in Louisiana and Arkansas and soon were
petitioning for readmission to Congress.
Inevitably Lincoln's program ran into opposition, both because it
represented a gigantic expansion of presidential powers and because it
appeared not to give adequate guarantees to the freedmen. Defeating an
attempt to seat the senators from the new government in Arkansas, Radical
Republicans in Congress in July 1864 set forth their own terms for
restoration in the far harsher Wade-Davis Bill. When Lincoln pocket-vetoed
this measure, declaring that he was "unprepared to be inflexibly committed
to any single plan of reconstruction," Radicals accused him of "dictatorial
usurpation."
The stage was set for further conflict over reconstruction when Congress
reassembled in December 1864, just after Lincoln's reelection. Assisted by
the Democrats, the Radicals forced Lincoln's supporters to drop the bill to
readmit Louisiana. Lincoln was deeply saddened by the defeat. "Concede that
the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is
to the fowl," he said, "shall we sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg
than by smashing it?" On April 11, 1865, in his last public address, the
President defended his reconstruction policy.
Death
Three days later, the President was shot by the actor John Wilkes
Booth while attending a performance at Ford's Theater in Washington. He
died at 7:22 the following morning, April 15, 1865. After lying in state in
the Capitol, his body was taken to Springfield, Ill., where he was buried
in Oak Ridge Cemetery.
Benjamin P. Thomas,
Author of "Abraham Lincoln: A Biography" and
David Herbert Donald
Harry C. Black Professor of History and Director of the Institute of
Southern History, The Johns Hopkins University
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Source
http://gi.grolier.com/presidents/ea/prescont.html
