The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln Read online

  Lack of respect for the feeble federal power was peaking as Lincoln took office, but the tradition of defying the national government was as old as the nation. On his first presidential trip to Boston in 1789, George Washington sat in a hotel room for two days fighting a battle of wills with Massachusetts governor John Hancock over who should call on whom. Since then, there had been a number of organized attempts to challenge the Washington government, by Northern as well as Southern states: Pennsylvania’s Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, Virginia’s and Kentucky’s opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, the threat of secession in New England at the Hartford Convention in 1814, South Carolina’s Ordinance of Nullification in 1833, and Northern personal liberty laws which flouted the federal Fugitive Slave Law in the 1850s.

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  Moreover, when Lincoln took office in 1861, he was twice removed from the focus of power. Not only was government power centered in the states rather than in Washington, but Washington power was centered in Congress rather than in the Presidency. During Lincoln’s run for office, abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips mocked the power of the President, asking, “Did you ever see on Broadway a black figure grinding chocolate in the windows? He seems to turn the wheel, but in truth the wheel turns him.” Lincoln lived in the golden age of legislature, where the President’s task was to carry out the policies of the lawmakers who dispensed wisdom from beneath the alabaster dome of the Capitol. In Lincoln’s century, all political parties, whatever else they proclaimed, adhered to one common principle: they all argued against a strong presidency. The times were dominated by those who believed the presidency was, in Patrick Henry’s warning, an “awful squint toward the monarchy.”

  Americans focused their political interest on Congress through the entire first century of the nation’s existence. In an era when the President almost never spoke in public once he had delivered his inaugural address, the real titans of the young nation’s political arena—“The Great Compromiser” Henry Clay, the “Godlike Daniel” Webster, “The Champion of States’ Rights” John C. Calhoun, “The Little Giant” Stephen A. Douglas—battled regularly beneath packed galleries in the chambers of the House and Senate. Every two years, newspaper readers nationwide followed the candidates for Speaker of the House almost as closely as they did presidential candidates, trying to discern which way the legislative winds were blowing. The President was not so much a force as a symbol: the nation’s first citizen, the ceremonial head of state, receiver of distinguished visitors, signer of bills. As presidential observer Theodore Lowi put it: “In the nineteenth century, chief executives were chief of very little and executive of even less.”

  It is hard for us, in a time when the President is referred to routinely as “the most powerful man in the world,” to imagine the presidency as the handmaiden to Congress as it existed in Lincoln’s time. The intervening growth in the power and prestige of the Oval Office—the creation of a Presidency that has since overcome the caution of the Founders and put Congress in its shadow—has obscured the low expectations for it in Lincoln’s century.

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  The role of the Washington government has been transformed since Lincoln by the astounding growth of the nation beyond what the Founders could foresee. Sweeping social changes and the rise of an industrial economy brought problems on a scale unimaginable in revolutionary times. Whereas in 1860 Americans still resented the national government for its “interference,” they later turned more and more to the presidency as the only institution adequate to battle emergencies that came at ever-increasing speeds.

  The result—government by a large professional bureaucracy, with the President at its head—has become known as the “institutional presidency,” and marks a constitutional era entirely different from the congressional heyday in which Lincoln was elected. In the modern era, with scores of administrative agencies responsible only to the President, there has developed the exclusively modern notion that the President is the government.

  It is difficult to remember that, compared to today’s mighty ship of state, Lincoln steered a tiny skiff. Suffering from nearly three quarters of a century of penny-pinching, the apparatus that Lincoln worked in 1861 had grown little since George Washington’s time. The central government did little more for its citizens in 1860 than it had done in 1800. Washington had established six executive departments; Lincoln inherited seven—the additional Interior Department had been carved out of the Treasury in 1849. All the departments were inadequately staffed, with overworked clerks toiling at low salaries in cramped quarters. The State Department of the 1850s, for example, handled foreign affairs with a staff of eighteen men.

  At Lincoln’s election, with the population of the United States at slightly more than 30 million, there were a mere 20,000 civilian federal employees, with another 16,000 soldiers on the payroll. By contrast, at the beginning of the 21st century, to serve a population ten times the 1860 population, the federal government now requires almost three million employees to run it—150 times the Lincoln-era figure—with another three million on the military payroll.

  The change in the size of government is also reflected in the budget. The Federal budget Lincoln inherited in 1861 was sixty-three million dollars—or about one billion in today’s dollars. A modern president flexes a Federal budget in the trillions.

  The figure that speaks loudest about the public appreciation of the size of the President’s job, however, and where we can best see the relative weakness of the presidency as Lincoln inherited it, is the size of the White House budget appropriated by Congress. In the first decade of the 21st century, the modern White House staff approaches 6,000 employees, in 125 offices, with an annual budget estimated at $730 million. In 1861, the White House staff consisted of a solitary secretary.

  Until shortly before Lincoln arrived, in fact, there had been no budget at all for a staff for the president, commensurate with the people’s low appraisal of the demands of his job. In those days, the people assumed that the president’s seven cabinet members would provide him with all the information and advice he needed. For his daily business the Chief Executive was on his own. If he wanted to hire assistance, he usually paid sons or nephews out of his own salary. Only in 1857 was the post of “President’s Private Secretary” established by Congress, at a salary of $2,500 per year. In addition, $1,200 was set aside for a steward to take charge of the White House, and $900 for a part-time messenger. There were still no adequate provisions for expenses. The yearly stationery budget, for example, had remained at $250 since the days of John Adams.

  Lincoln’s secretary, 28-year-old John G. Nicolay, who met Lincoln while working as clerk to the Illinois secretary of state, managed to wangle a second presidential assistant—his friend John Hay, a 22-year-old poet—by having him put on the payroll as a clerk in the Department of the Interior and detailed for special service at the White House. For much of Lincoln’s tenure, these two stayed within the government budget by sleeping in a corner room on the second floor of the White House, across the hall from the Executive Offices.

  Lack of an adequate staff had already tripped Lincoln on his unprotected approach to the capital and caused his pratfall into Washington. It had not occurred to President Buchanan to loan the President-elect a guard, nor were there any national police, nor anybody in the government whose job it was to see him from Springfield to Washington safely. Lincoln was shielded only by a few friends. If he had been attacked anywhere on the way, it would have been up to local police to investigate the crime and catch the guilty ones. A local court would have had the responsibility of trying, sentencing, and jailing them.

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  Any trappings of power—even so much as a bodyguard—were repulsive to Americans in 1860. They were still distrustful of their creation, the presidency. They did not seek great men. They knew the history of democracy in the world had been an unbroken series of failures. From Aristotle on, political philosophers agreed that democracy was unstable, and disi
ntegrated into anarchy, then finally to despotism. The Roman republic had its Caesar. The brief republic of the Commonwealth of England had its Cromwell. The French Revolution had its Reign of Terror, and finally its Napoleon. As a fresh reminder, Louis Napoleon had overthrown the flimsy Second Republic of France as recently as 1852. Because early Americans were so acutely aware of the vulnerability of republics to conspiracies and plots, Americans in Lincoln’s time had a strong distrust of men of genius. It was feared their talents would drive them to break free of the constraints of law by which ordinary men were bound.

  The American habit of distrust was well marked. After his visit in 1842, novelist Charles Dickens wrote:

  One great blemish in the popular mind of America, and the prolific parent of an innumerable brood of evils, is Universal Distrust. Yet the American citizen plumes himself upon this spirit, even when he is sufficiently dispassionate to perceive the ruin it works; and will often adduce it … as an instance of the great sagacity and acuteness of the people, and their superior shrewdness and independence.

  “You carry,” says the stranger, “this jealousy and distrust into every transaction of public life. By repelling worthy men from your legislative assemblies, it has bred up a class of candidates … who, in their very act, disgrace your Institutions and your people’s choice. It has rendered you so fickle, and so given to change, that your inconstancy has passed into a proverb; for you no sooner set up an idol firmly, than you are sure to pull it down and dash it into fragments. … Any man who attains a high place among you, from the President downwards, may date his downfall from that moment; for any printed lie that any notorious villain pens, although it militate directly against the character and conduct of a life, appeals at once to your distrust, and is believed. … Is this well, think you, or likely to elevate the character of the governors or the governed, among you?”

  The answer is invariably the same: “There’s freedom of opinion here, you know. Every man thinks for himself, and we are not to be easily overreached. That’s how our people come to be suspicious.”

  If it was great men Americans feared, by the mid-nineteenth century Americans were getting exactly what they wanted.

  Chapter 3

  The Rise of Party Politics

  “Deformed, mediocre, sniveling, unreliable, false-hearted men.”

  In 1860, an apocryphal story made the rounds: the captain of a sailing vessel outbound from New York City was hailed by a ship homeward bound after a long voyage to China. The question came over, “Who is the President of the United States?”

  The captain shouted back, “Abraham Lincoln.”

  A minute later, a second question came over: “Who the hell is Abraham Lincoln?”

  Although much of Lincoln’s initial lack of esteem could be attributed to the lack of regard for the institution of the presidency in the mid-nineteenth century, his problem was made worse by the fact that when he was elected President, Lincoln the man was unknown. The jeering mobs that rushed his train in Baltimore knew very little about him except that he had won the election as the nominee of the hated “Black Republican” party. Their knowledge of Lincoln himself was almost entirely limited to his nickname: “The Railsplitter.”

  Lincoln was well aware of his anonymity; he conceived his Springfield-to-Washington whistle-stop tour as a way to introduce himself to the people who had elected him. In one of his first utterances, at Indianapolis, he referred to himself disparagingly as “an accidental instrument of a great cause.” James Lowell described him as “the unknown man whom a blind fortune, as it seemed, had lifted from the crowd.” But in the weird political logic of his time, it was Lincoln’s anonymity that had recommended him as a presidential candidate.

  In the infancy of the Republic, while America was slow-moving and fragmented, while its many sections were governed locally and had little contact with each other, while any state’s allegiance to Washington was loose and the government there did little, the President’s role was small. But as the population grew and as the steamboat, the railroad, and the telegraph combined to bring the sections of the country into closer and closer contact, another political phenomenon developed to give the President a new kind of power never envisioned by the Framers. This phenomenon was the rise of American political parties, a development that, in the thirty years before Lincoln, sensationalized politics to an extent never seen in the world before and not approached since. In these “awkward years” of the republic, party politics became the national obsession. This new party system would pave the way for the nomination of Lincoln, but at a terrible price: Lincoln, the anonymous candidate, would find himself the leader of a nation as a stranger in the White House at a time when the country could least afford it. It was this gale wind of early party politics that blew the obscure Illinoisan into office in 1860, and fanned the flame of contempt for him at the same time.

  An Abraham Lincoln could never have been chosen President in the political culture that existed in the infancy of the United States. The revolutionary nation builders who assembled in Philadelphia in 1787 had been squeamish about the idea of huge numbers of rank and file Americans choosing their own leaders. The thousands of years of tragic history of republican experiments in government had taught the delegates to the Constitutional Convention that the uninstructed teeming masses were “liable to yield their own opinions to the guidance of unprincipled leaders,” as one put it. With this in mind, they drew up rules that restricted the vote to the “right people”—that is, landowners and taxpayers. These were the men who could be counted on to act responsibly by virtue of their economic stake in society. As added insurance that the selection of the President would be insulated from the “mobocracy” they dreaded, the voters would not choose the President. Instead, the Constitution required that, every four years, each state appoint electors, and the electors would choose the President.

  The electors, as envisioned by the Founding Fathers, would be outstanding citizens, local notables with the confidence of the voters, whose vision would not be clouded by self-interest or party politics. They would elect the nation’s most qualified man by congregating in sober reflection, smoking their pipes in thoughtful little puffs. After forging their choice, they would return to ordinary life, warm in the satisfaction of having selected the best man by an appeal to pure reason. In the first two elections, when George Washington was available, the electors only had to choose him to confirm the wisdom of the Founders’ scheme. After Washington passed out of public life, however, the choice for the most qualified man inevitably muddied, and the presidential selection process descended quickly into something the Founders never foresaw: a tug-o’-war between political parties.

  The Framers had detested political parties and had seen no place for them in America. They thought voters should be national in outlook; they should be above faction, and disagreements should be resolved solely on the issues. Yet before the echoes of Washington’s Farewell Address had died away, political parties had formed over the fundamental issue of how strong the central government should be. This sudden scurry of the nation’s leaders into two opposing camps had an immediate effect on presidential elections.

  The Constitution, so clear about how the President would be elected, had been silent about how the candidates would be nominated. Taking advantage of this omission in the constitutional rules, both parties assembled informal congressional caucuses before presidential elections to determine their nominees behind closed doors, and privately narrowed what the Founding Fathers had hoped would be a teeming field of outstanding potential candidates to two—one for each party. Thus, by 1800, the decision of who would run for President had been taken away from the tiny group of eligible voters and seized by a much tinier group of congressmen. At election time, a state appointed its electors not as individuals of high character who could be counted on to vote their consciences, but as a slate of men pledged to one of the congressional caucus nominees.

  The resulting concentration of power
in Congress, called “King Caucus,” was distilled further in the elections between 1800 and 1820 by the swift disappearance of the Federalist Party, which had contended for strong central government. Their rivals, Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans (or “Republicans,” for short) inheritors of the belief that “that government is best which governs least,” became virtually unopposed in Washington. This period has come down to us with the rosy moniker “The Era of Good Feelings,” and it climaxed in the election of 1820, when President James Monroe was reelected by a vote of 231 to 1.

  The Presidents sworn in during these formative years of the country could never have included a self-educated frontier character like Lincoln. Eligible voters—still only six percent of adult Americans—were too exclusive, too well-educated, too wealthy, too sophisticated. Because they were a like-minded elite, and because the central government was so small and so carefully limited by the Constitution that it little touched their daily lives, they applauded as the congressional gentlemen’s club choreographed a stately parade of high-caliber aristocrats to their head: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. The system was embarrassingly undemocratic, but proponents of King Caucus could point to its triumphs—parties now seemed to be a thing of the past, the Founders’ vision of philosopher-patriot Presidents had been made real, and elected office was a place of honor, whose legitimacy no one argued.