I have been reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s
Pulitzer-Prize-winning bio of Abraham Lincoln, Team of Rivals. It is the book on which the recently-released
Spielberg film, Lincoln, is
partly based. But Spielberg’s film
focuses only on the fight for the thirteenth Amendment; Goodwin’s book begins
with Lincoln’s life as a boy, follows him as a young lawyer in Springfield
Illinois, describes his part in forming the new Republican Party out of the
wreckage of the old Whig party, charts his victorious campaign for the
Republican nomination and presidency, and beyond. It includes the lives of
Lincoln’s three rivals for the presidency, William Seward, Salmon Chase, and
Edward Bates, all of whom he tapped for important posts in his new
administration: Seward as Secretary of State, Chase as Secretary of the
Treasury and Bates as Attorney General.
More
important, to me, Team of Rivals reminds
one how hazardous was the situation facing the nation and Lincoln, even before
he took office. Seven Southern states had seceded almost immediately after
Lincoln was declared the winner in the November 1860 election. In the weeks
thereafter, countless members of Congress from those southern states left their
offices to take part in the rebellion. So did huge chunks of the officer corps,
Robert E. Lee of Virginia being only the most conspicuous. Moreover, rumors
were rife that a Southern plot existed to invade and seize Washington DC before
Lincoln could even take office. Edwin Stanton, a member of then-president
Buchanan’s cabinet (and later Lincoln’s Secretary of War), was convinced that
the government was filled with traitors and spies, that “the army had been
deployed in far-flung places,” with arms shifted from northern arsenals to
various southern ones, and that if Maryland and Virginia could be induced to join
the secession, the rebels would seize an essentially defenseless capital,
including all the symbols of government, the treasuries, the army and navy, and
assassinate the new President in the bargain. Stanton decided to become a spy
within the lame-duck Buchanan government, initiating contacts with then-Senator
Seward in late December of 1860 to neutralize potential traitors. Seward in
response gave a major speech, without Lincoln’s consent, offering concessions
to the South, rehearsing Lincoln’s resolutions calling for a constitutional
amendment to prevent any future Congress from interfering with slavery where it
already existed, and taking steps to enforce the hated Fugitive Slave Laws. He
even promised additional conciliatory changes to the Constitution to mollify the
southern secessionists. Of course, Seward’s speech had no effect whatever on
the southern states, but it is an important indication of where both he and
Lincoln stood regarding slavery.
Goodwin
reminds us that it was not slavery itself that Lincoln and Seward and most of
their allies in the new party objected to. It was the extension of slavery into
the newly-forming states of the west. Lincoln himself said a number of times
that he had no intention whatever to interfere with slavery in the states where
it already existed. He also insisted that he had no intention of trying to make
slaves “equal” to whites, even in the free states, except in the most formal
sense of being free of bondage. In fact, so unequal did Lincoln consider
blacks, and so impossible did he consider the mixing of the races that he was a
proponent of a plan to ship freed slaves back to their native countries in
Africa (as well as one, about the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, to
find a home for them in Central America). Both Lincoln and Seward calculated
that if the Southern secessionists could be persuaded that they would be left
alone to have their slaves and way of life, they would withdraw from the brink
of civil war. They also had in mind that the border states like North Carolina,
Tennessee and Kentucky could be persuaded to remain in the Union if they saw how moderate and conciliatory the
new Republican administration would be.
Of
course, they were wrong. The border states joined the rebellion, as did
Virginia. Maryland came very close, with major riots breaking out by
secessionists in Baltimore, even as Lincoln’s train was proceeding to
Washington for his inauguration. So dangerous, indeed, was the inaugural situation
that Seward and others prevailed on Lincoln to leave the main train
transporting his wife and family members to Washington from Illinois, and board
a separate train that would slip through Baltimore late at night. Lincoln did
exactly that, and arrived safely.
But
the danger was far from over. Before a month was out, Lincoln had ordered the
re-supply of Fort Sumter, which was bungled, the Confederate forces had
attacked its fewer than one-hundred defenders there, and the outmanned and
outgunned commander, Major Anderson, had surrendered. With the defection of
Virginia to the Confederacy, the huge naval depot at Norfolk also fell to the rebels.
Now it was a question of whether Washington DC itself could be defended.
Maryland was wavering, and if it too joined the Confederates, the capital would
be surrounded by Confederates. Though it did not come to that, it came close: a
group of Baltimore delegates demanded that Union troops stay out of their
entire state, and though Lincoln refused to comply, he could not prevent a mob
of secessionists in Baltimore from
cutting all the telegraph wires in Baltimore and demolishing all the railroad
bridges surrounding the city. Washington was at one stroke isolated from any
communication with the north, and for the next week all Washington residents trembled
behind barricaded doors and locked windows, able to see the campfires of the
Confederate soldiers across the Potomac in Virginia, and knowing there was no
army at hand to defend them.
Fortunately,
Abraham Lincoln maintained a calm exterior, though he hardly slept most of the
time. This makes it all the more remarkable that when he finally gave his
inauguration speech, it was filled with the stirring phrases for which he
became known. On March 4, 1861, he continued to try to placate the South, as he
had been advised to by Secretary of State Seward—who had made major revisions
to Lincoln’s original draft. The new president repeated his promise not to
“directly or indirectly interfere with the institution of slavery in the States
where it exists,” saying he had no lawful right or even inclination to do so.
He pledged to uphold the Fugitive Slave provision of the Constitution requiring
that “slaves shall be delivered upon claim of the party to whom such service or
labor may be due.” He also pledged not to invade or use force against the
people of the South, though he was determined to defend government
property—i.e. Fort Sumter. But he also made clear that there could be no
separation of the American people from each other:
Physically
speaking, we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from
each other, nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may
be divorced, and go out of the presence, and beyond the reach of each other;
but the different parts of our country cannot do this. They cannot but remain
face to face; and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue
between them.
Then he ended with the beautiful verbal music of which he
was uniquely capable, though the original phrasing had come from Seward:
The
mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave,
to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell
the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the
better angels of our nature.
Goodwin
titles her chapter with that magical phrase, ‘the mystic chords of memory.’ And
though neither those “chords” of unity nor the “better angels of our nature” would
emerge for many many years, if ever, especially where the pervasive racism of
Americans is concerned, Lincoln was in the most fundamental sense correct: the
Union would survive its most dangerous crisis, though it would take four years
and the bloodiest war in American history to preserve it.
Now,
with yet another president offering a ringing inaugural address, the question,
if not the details, is essentially the same: can the warring factions from
different areas of this country ever come together on the strength of those “mystic
chords of memory” to agree on a sane way out of our current crises? One would
like to think so; but given the persistent lunacy and power of selfish
interests that prevails, it’s going to take something like those ‘better angels,’
and more, to make it happen.
Lawrence DiStasi
