Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power

428 Pages·2007·3.65 MB·English

by  Richard Carwardine

CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
1. Inner Power: Lincoln’s Ambition and Political Vision, 1809–54
2. The Power of Opinion: Lincoln, the Illinois Public, and the New Political
Order, 1854–58
3. The Power of Party: Winning the Presidency, 1858–60
4. The Limits of Power: From President-Elect to War President, 1860–61
5. The Purposes of Power: Evolving Objectives, 1861–65
6. The Instruments of Power: Coercion and Voluntary Mobilization, 1861–
65
7. The Potency of Death
Afterword
Endnote
Notes
Further Reading
Chronology of Lincoln’s Life
Select Glossary of Terms
Illustration Credits
A Note About the Author
Also by Richard Carwardine
Copyright
In memory of Peter Parish, Robert Parry, and Brian Stevens
PREFACE
Abraham Lincoln understood the value of a well-judged disclaimer, so it may be
as well to begin by stating what this book does not purport to be. It is not a
personal biography of the sixteenth president of the United States. Rather, it is a
study of Lincoln’s political career, one which explores the sources and
characteristics of his political authority, both before and after he won national
recognition.
To study Lincoln involves peering through a veil of myth and iconography. Any
president who successfully steers a nation through a civil war can expect to be
decked with the victor’s laurels, but in Lincoln’s case garlands for the Union’s
Savior and Great Emancipator have been interwoven with wreaths for its First
Martyr. The nature and timing of Lincoln’s death, personal and public tragedy
though it was, proved perfect for his historical canonization. Legions of Lincoln
scholars have recognized this, of course, and have tussled to reveal the enigmatic
human being and unvarnished politician encased within the marble figure of
national memory. After all, the Union’s war president was scarcely a revered
national hero at the time: even the loyal press—impatient, anxious, and
occasionally despairing—often questioned his wisdom and suitability for the job.
Yet Lincoln still emerges, in so much that is written about him and the wartime
Union, as a wholly—even unaccountably—exceptional figure. The remedy does
not lie in gratuitous debunking: Lincoln was indeed a talented politician who
rose beyond expectation to the supreme challenge of his office. But the key to
understanding his rise to power and his achievement as president is to place him
firmly into the setting in which he operated and to recognize the external sources
of his authority, as much as his own endowments.
In mid-nineteenth-century America, the world’s first mass participatory
democracy, political success derived from the effective interplay of three
elements: personal drive, the force of public opinion, and the organizing
machinery of the political party and other networks of communication. During
Lincoln’s career as a peacetime politician and then as the only United States
president to face the challenge of a civil war, his great achievement was to set
ambitious but realizable political goals; to fathom the thinking of ordinary
citizens and to reach out to them with uncommon assurance; and to hone his
impressive skills as a manager of the often unstable and fractious elements that
made up the political parties to which he belonged. In what follows I have given
particular emphasis to each of these elements, but within a largely narrative
framework which recognizes that Lincoln’s words and actions, and those for
whom they were intended, need to be understood within specific and changing
contexts.
It seemed to many who watched Lincoln at first hand in Illinois and Washington
that his special talent lay in his feel for opinion and in establishing rapport with
the public at large. One young Springfield lawyer, convinced that Lincoln was
privately “a radical—fanatically so,” deemed that his strength lay in his never
going “beyond the People.” For George Baker, a clerk in the State Department,
the president’s success “consisted very much in the confidence and respect he
won from the people. Other wiser, greater and as good men might not have won
this and then all would have been lost in some of our great crises.”*1 But public
opinion in Illinois and the wider Union comprised many ideological and cultural
strands. Understanding “the people” meant comprehending pluralism. A
common theme in what historians have written about Lincoln is the skill with
which he made himself attractive, or at least indispensable, to a broad range of
conservative, moderate, and radical elements within—successively—the Whig
party, the antebellum Republican coalition, and the wartime Union. Less well
appreciated is his remarkable success in reaching out to what was the most
powerful of all the era’s subcultures, evangelical Protestantism. Mainstream
evangelicals did much to shape the style, substance, and rhetoric of the mass
participatory politics that reached their maturity in America at about the same
time that Lincoln arrived at his. In antebellum Illinois, as elsewhere, the political
fault lines commonly coincided with religious and ethnic ones. Alert to the
power of religious opinion, Lincoln fused appeals to Protestant millennialism
and Enlightenment rationalism. The orthodox Protestantism which underpinned
the ethical stance of Republicans and much of the wartime Union coalition, and
which flourished in New England and its “Yankee” diaspora, was not Lincoln’s
religious faith. But he shrewdly harnessed the power of the most politically
influential and energetic members of that constituency, both to win the
presidency and to rally support behind his national vision and the war’s
purposes.
Half of this study addresses Lincoln’s pre-presidential career. The first chapter
explores the roots of Lincoln’s political ambition, examining his early life, the
sources of his ideas, his alienation from the land, his seizing of the opportunities
offered by the emerging market economy, and his evolution by 1840 into a
leading Illinois Whig. His effectiveness in state politics and his election to the
United States Congress, where he served from 1847 to 1849, signaled his
political ability, but only hinted at the more serious and morally engaged figure
that reentered politics in 1854 after the repeal of the Missouri Compromise
opened the door to slavery’s westward expansion into Kansas-Nebraska.
Establishing the philosophical sources of that moral engagement demands a
discussion of Lincoln’s evolving religious views.
Chapter 2 examines how during the mid-1850s Lincoln became a chief
beneficiary of the swirling public opinion that, acting as the arbiter of political
power, destabilized the old parties and opened the door to realignment. Through
several seasons of public speaking Lincoln’s steady advocacy of an antislavery
argument did much to shape public sentiment and to effect the displacement of
the Whigs by a broader-based Republican party that aspired to national power.
Within the mix of ideological, ethnic, and religious loyalties amongst Illinois
voters, Yankee influence came to preponderate through the decade. In his
debates in 1858 with his great rival, United States Senator Stephen A. Douglas,
Lincoln earnestly sought to harness antislavery religious sensibilities not only in
the Yankee-dominated settlements but as widely as possible across the state, and
showed his grasp of the dynamics of the emergent mass democracy that made
America politically unique.
Two years after Lincoln’s narrow defeat at Douglas’s hands, the power of a
crusading party unlocked the door of the presidency. In the interplay of the
elements shaping Lincoln’s antebellum career, it was the operations of party
which did most to bring about his remarkable political ascent in 1860. Chapter 3
shows how his winning the presidential nomination demanded the confidence of
a Republican organization whose national leadership had several other names
from which to choose. Once Lincoln had been selected, his reaching office was
almost completely dependent upon his party’s exertions. Party organizations
were essential to effective campaigning, their controls over patronage providing
the necessary levers of discipline and unity. The chapter examines the posture of
a party that was an institutional and philosophical amalgam. Economic interest
and bitter anti-southern feeling were important elements of the Republican mix.
Equally important, the party was an expression of the reform-minded, optimistic
Protestant evangelicalism unleashed by the religious movement known as the
Second Great Awakening. Lincoln’s candidacy served its purposes well, for in
his blend of constitutional conservativism and high-minded, even Yankee-style
moralism, they had a champion behind whom both pragmatic coalition-builders
and high-minded crusaders could enthusiastically rally.
The fourth chapter examines Lincoln’s response to the challenge of exercising
influence and power during the year or so between his election and early 1862.
During the three phases of this period—as president-elect, as president during
the uneasy peace before Sumter, and as a war leader—Lincoln showed those
signs of anxiety and uncertainty only to be expected in someone lacking
executive experience and facing a uniquely daunting challenge. Still, what gave
coherence and continuity to his political course throughout this momentous year
were three elements essential to the Union’s victory and his own political
survival. First, he kept an undeviating focus on the permanence of the Union.
Second, he instinctively understood the strategic essentials: limiting secession
and maximizing support in the border region; blockading the South; and
preventing the internationalizing of the conflict. Third, he engaged with and
nourished a cross-party, broad-based popular patriotism.
Chapter 5 concerns Lincoln’s political purposes and their evolution from
restoring the prewar Union to embracing emancipation. Lincoln’s assault on
slavery was born of pragmatism and sustained by his evolving ideas of divine as
well as human purposes. He defended emancipation as an essential means of
preserving the Union and mortally wounding the Confederacy. But it became an
end in itself, something without which the Union was scarcely worth saving and
toward which God’s own plan appeared to be driving him. Emancipation raised
unavoidable questions about the place of the ex-slave and African-American in
the nation’s life, issues on which Lincoln and the more radical Republicans
found themselves at odds as they fashioned their policies on the reconstruction
of the Union. By the end of his life Lincoln was contemplating votes for
educated freedmen; he had traveled a long way from the defense of the racial
status quo that he had mounted as an antebellum aspirant for political office.
The instruments of Lincoln’s presidential power provide the focus of chapter 6.
Much of that authority derived from a strong-arm use of the law and the military:
charges of coercion and dictatorship were not without some foundation in fact.
But Lincoln’s achievement in holding the Union together and in enjoying the
unique experience of being reelected president during a bloody civil war derived
less from coercion than from his ability to harness the surges of Union patriotism
that flowed through three essentially “voluntary” organizations: his party, the
Union army, and the religious-philanthropic bodies of the North.
Republican/Union party leaders, most notably the state governors and the
editorial corps, mobilized massive and sustained support for the war; the army,
whatever loyalty it had once felt for General-in-Chief George McClellan,
evinced even more for “Father Abraham”; organized Protestantism provided the
president with a ready-made and devoted network of speakers and fund-raisers.
The outcome of the 1864 presidential election plainly revealed Lincoln’s success
in nurturing and sustaining Unionism in each of these domains.
Active in life, Lincoln passively exerted further power in death, as his
transformation into a Christ-like martyr, slain on Good Friday, gave a new layer
of sanctification to American nationalism. As they mourned his assassination,
Americans read into their bereavement a millennial promise that fused the sacred
all the more powerfully with the secular. The book’s conclusion notes how the
nationhood preserved by Unionists through the Civil War now yielded an
enhanced and ambitious patriotism quite unlike any that the country had known
before.
Many elements of the inner Lincoln, including his personal faith and key
questions about his motivation and evolving political ambitions, necessarily
remain a puzzle. Lincoln wrote with arresting precision and clarity, but he kept
no diary or private journal. Only reluctantly did he proffer a few, spare
autobiographical sketches. Though he was an indefatigable conversationalist,
could be excellent company, and dominated gatherings through his storytelling,
even his near friends encountered reticence and secrecy, and most judged that he
“never told all he felt.” Discretion in politically sensitive matters, including
racial issues, marked his handling of men and measures. Norman Judd, one of
his closest associates, stated bluntly, “Lincoln never told mortal man his
purposes— Never.”2 We are left reflecting that the Great Emancipator’s
enduring hold over the historical imagination may owe almost as much to his
enigmatic features as to the reality of his achievements and to his tragic end.
Even so, questions about Lincoln’s private political reflections, moral
convictions, and religious understanding must be addressed, particularly if it is
true—as some scholars have convincingly argued3—that he took ideas seriously:
Lincoln had a pragmatic streak but he by no means lacked philosophical
moorings. Some answers to hard questions can be gleaned from the galaxy of
firsthand recollections left by family, friends, professional associates, and
acquaintances. In recent years reprinted memoirs—variable in reliability and
usefulness, and including at least one grotesque fabrication—have cascaded
from the presses. A cluster of works marked by superb editorial scholarship