Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons

Praise for Six Encounters with Lincoln

"At a moment when questions about the efficacy of government are on everybody’s lips, this book eerily reflects some of today’s key issues. . . . A different Lincoln inhabits the pages of Six Encounters with Lincoln. Here we meet the skilled raconteur whose tales promote vacillation, and whose humor disguises costly indecision and delay. . . . Fascinating reading on its own terms, Six Encounters with Lincoln nevertheless confronts readers with startlingly relevant questions. . . . The notion that democracy involves compromises resonates today."

—The New York Times Book Review

Pryor’s Lincoln is a man of excessive ambition, handicapped by strange looks and profound social awkwardness, whose pragmatism often contradicts his loftier ­ideals. . . . Pryor is particularly adept at conveying the impossibility of Lincoln’s task: to represent a profoundly fractured country in which, as one of Lincoln’s friends put it, ‘the eyes of the whole nation will be upon you while unfortunately the ears of one half of it will be closed to anything you say.’

—The Wall Street Journal

This history aims at deconstructing Lincoln’s mythic reputation as the Great Emancipator to arrive at a more nuanced view. . . . Pryor paints a provocative historical portrait while testing common assumptions about an American icon.

—The New Yorker

Provocative . . . Trenchant analysis and graceful writing . . . Pryor found six overlooked episodes that reveal Lincoln’s character, his fallibility, and the awesome task he confronted, at times with mixed success. With them she seeks to replace the ‘mirage’ that Lincoln has become with a living, breathing politician. —The Christian Science Monitor

[An] extraordinary book . . . Pryor carefully examines Lincoln’s interactions with little-known contemporaries, which provides a new and illuminating way of looking at his life and his presidency.

—The National Book Review

Deeply researched, telling moments in the life of arguably the most written-­about man in history . . . Gets beyond the hagiographic portrayals of Lincoln, allowing rare glimpses of the man as vulnerable, clumsy, inarticulate, and very human. . . . Kudos to Pryor for offering readers something fresh about our sixteenth ­president—no small feat.

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Will cinch Pryor’s legacy as a creative scholar . . . What makes the encounters particularly fascinating is that the participants recorded them at the time, so they remain uncolored by the sentimentality of post-assassination remembrance. . . . Pryor’s impressive final book will be of great appeal to Lincoln aficionados.

—Publishers Weekly

In her meticulously researched study of these little-known but arresting encounters with Lincoln, Elizabeth Brown Pryor teases out their meaning with cool discrimination, sensitivity, and a vivid pen. She exposes a human president—sometimes blundering, graceless, socially awkward, obstinate, intolerant—­struggling to cope in time of war with the fluid messiness of democratic government. Iconoclastic, unsentimental, and hard-headed, this is a brilliant work that is bound to provoke animated scholarly discussion.

—Richard Carwardine, author of Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power

"A daring, provocative, and exceptionally important book that convincingly challenges many of the assumptions on which Abraham Lincoln’s greatness is based. Elizabeth Brown Pryor examines Lincoln’s often startling behavior in heretofore little-known but highly revealing encounters, and from them she expertly weaves a larger narrative of his fitful progress as the beleaguered leader of a nation at war. The research is prodigious, the writing graceful and assured. I highly recommend Six Encounters with Lincoln to readers seeking a truly fresh perspective on the sixteenth president and believe it to be one of the most significant works on Lincoln of this generation."

—Peter Cozzens, author of The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

PENGUIN BOOKS

SIX ENCOUNTERS WITH LINCOLN

Elizabeth Brown Pryor (1951–2015) was an award-winning historian who also served as a senior officer in the American Foreign Service. She was the author of the biography Clara Barton, Professional Angel and of Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, which won the 2008 Lincoln Prize, the Jefferson Davis Award, the Richard B. Harwell Book Award, and the Richard Slatten Award.

ALSO BY ELIZABETH BROWN PRYOR

Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters

Clara Barton, Professional Angel

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

penguin.com

First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2017

Published in Penguin Books 2018

Copyright © 2017 by Elizabeth Brown Pryor

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

ISBN 9780143111238 (paperback)

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Names: Pryor, Elizabeth Brown, author.

Title: Six encounters with Lincoln : a president confronts democracy and its demons / Elizabeth Brown Pryor.

Description: New York, New York : Viking, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016042837 (print) | LCCN 2017001615 (ebook) | ISBN 780670025909 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735222793 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865—Anecdotes. | Presidents—United States—Anecdotes. | Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865—Miscellanea. | Presidents—United States—Miscellanea.

Classification: LCC E457.15 .P93 2017 (print) | LCC E457.15 (ebook) | DDC 973.7092—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016042837

Cover design: Colin Webber

Cover photograph: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Courtesy of the Polaroid Corporation.

Version_3

Contents

Praise for Six Encounters with Lincoln

About the Author

Also by Elizabeth Brown Pryor

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword

Note to the Reader

Introduction

1 A WARY HANDSHAKE

2 PFUNNY PFACE

3 TWO EMANCIPATORS MEET

4 OF FATHERS AND SONS

5 HELL-CATS

6 THE HOLLOW CROWN

7 EPILOGUE TO THE HOLLOW CROWN: LINCOLN AND SHAKESPEARE

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Illustration Credits

Index

Foreword

My sister Elizabeth Brown Pryor tragically lost her life on April 13, 2015. A manic-depressive driver, who thought that he could fly his car, was trying to taxi down a quiet city street in Richmond, Virginia, when he rear-ended her beloved Audi TT at 107 miles per hour. She was instantly killed. She left behind two completed manuscripts: one for this book and another for an article, ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’: How Abraham Lincoln Lost the Confidence of His Military Command, which will be published separately.

I remember her sheer elation the previous January, when she called me in London to announce that she had finally finished Six Encounters with Lincoln. It had been a long, slow gestation that had begun with a chance discovery in 2008. The day that she received the Lincoln Prize for Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, she had spent the morning doing research at the New-York Historical Society. When she arrived back at the flat where we were staying to change for dinner (into my new Armani jacket), she was ecstatic. Not in anticipation of receiving such a singular honor—although she was, of course, delighted to receive it—but because she had just discovered an unpublished drawing of Abraham Lincoln sketched in a letter written home during the Civil War. As she put it, There sits Abraham Lincoln, with a familiarity almost unimaginable today, legs folded and tall hat in place, looking for all the world like a cricket perched on the nation’s front porch.

What had been a brief encounter in 1862 between the President and one of his military guards turned out to be not only a fascinating tale, but a springboard for investigating a neglected but significant aspect of Lincoln’s administration. Over the next seven years Elizabeth submerged herself in the letters, diaries, and newspaper articles of the 1860s, carefully piecing together six episodes that explored Lincoln’s difficulty in managing a republic. Her own quarter-century career in the State Department gave her a unique perspective on how slowly the wheels of government turn and how our Founding Fathers’ insistence on a balance of power could cause the cogs of those wheels to lock in an unwelcome impasse. Few other Civil War historians can marry personal experience with scholarly insight in such a compelling way. She served as the foreign affairs adviser to both houses of Congress and so had an insider’s view of the government at work. When we read her criticism of Lincoln as commander in chief, we should remember that she was once the chief U.S. spokesperson for NATO and had earlier been deeply involved with Bosnia, serving in Sarajevo at the time of the siege. She experienced firsthand the importance of military discipline when one was under fire, and she understood that rank matters. As she was fond of saying, she had lived real-time history. It was her unique ability to tie the various threads of her life experience together and reflect upon the lessons she had learned that allowed her to render such a vivid picture of nineteenth-century American history. As one critic put it, The sheer power of [her] language is as inspiring as a great painting.

When I found the manuscript of Six Encounters with Lincoln after her death, the text, footnotes, and bibliography were virtually ready for publication. She had meticulously highlighted in yellow any quotations or page numbers that needed to be rechecked. Only the preface was missing. I undertook the task of checking the notes, quotations, and bibliography, but what appears in the following pages is completely her work in her words. She had ordered four or five photographs, but left no list of illustrations. I knew only that she had once told me that she wanted a lot of pictures. Luckily, since I am an art historian, ordering photographs is one thing I know how to do and my major contribution to this book was deciding what should be illustrated and where it should be placed within the text.

Elizabeth and I and our sister, Peggy, grew up listening to my mother’s tales of the Civil War with rapt attention. Not that Mother herself had been around then, but as a child she had spent hours sitting on the front porch in Terre Haute, Indiana, listening to the tales of her great-grandfather John Jackson Kenley. Grandpa Kenley, who according to family lore had lived to the ripe old age of 104 (his military records, however, show him to have been 96 at his death in 1938), had been a foot soldier in the Twenty-Fourth Indiana Regiment. He saw action at the battles of Shiloh, Corinth, Vicksburg, and Mobile as well as the occupation of New Orleans. The house was full of Civil War heirlooms, including the walnut bookcase made for his wedding in 1863, the fork from his mess kit, and a pile of letters, one of which Elizabeth quotes in this book. Yet as she often said, it was not the stuff that got her hooked on the Civil War, but Mother’s storytelling ability. History after all means story and Mother was able to make it seem very real to the three of us. Mother died just four months after Elizabeth, but for seven years she had been able to follow the progress of the book from beginning to end, listening to the chapters as they were written. She was inordinately proud that her middle daughter was just as good a storyteller as she was.

On a road trip, Elizabeth retraced the Lincoln family’s journey from Virginia to Kentucky to southern Indiana; the same trip that the Kenley family had made in the early years of the nineteenth century. I remember her excitement at finding the gravesite of Grandpa Kenley’s mother, who had died as the family passed through the bluegrass country of Kentucky. In her eyes Lincoln’s history and our history were to some extent inextricably bound. Her trip to what she inevitably referred to as the dreaded CTZ, that is to you and me the Central Time Zone, was tainted only by the lack of three-star Michelin restaurants. For two months she was forced to subsist on a diet of monkey chow, which in her parlance meant Subway sandwiches, chocolate-covered cranberries, and Diet Dr Pepper. The upside, however, was that she saw firsthand the furniture made by Lincoln’s father and found new insights into the Rail-splitter's boyhood.

In the preface to her book on Robert E. Lee, Elizabeth paid me the compliment of saying that my work as an art historian had inspired her to look deep into the letters of Lee and place them within a larger historical context. When an expert points out the factors that influenced the artist, how he or she mixed the paint and chose the colors, where the subject was found and what is behind the iconography, the painting becomes something more than it was. In the same way, interpreting Lee’s letters for the reader lends them context and heightens their value. I would like to return that compliment now. I learned from her that retread history is never good enough. No matter how compelling another author’s arguments might be, it is imperative that one return to the original sources, judging them for their own merit. Too often the yellow varnish applied so thickly by scholars to enhance a story simply obscures the truth. Elizabeth would remind me that there was so little in Lincoln’s own words about his feelings that we were beholden to the observations of those around him. But she would warn me that Renaissance scholars like myself, who must often rely on the secondhand accounts of Giorgio Vasari, should be at once both grateful and skeptical of such observations. As a historian, she would say, you have no greater tool than your skepticism.

Even as a child, Elizabeth had an unquenchable thirst for knowing the facts. Shortly before my mother’s death, I spent an afternoon talking to her about Elizabeth. When I asked what she remembered most about her middle daughter, she said without hesitation, She was always standing at the kitchen counter looking things up in the encyclopedia. One often finds the phrase meticulously researched in reviews of her books, but from an early age she felt compelled to rummage for answers, to seek out hidden gems and to search for the truth. As a mature historian she never ceased exploring new topics with the same inquisitiveness, although the stakes became higher and the process harder. For Clara Barton, Professional Angel, she had some sixty-five thousand autobiographical documents, so many that she felt that at times she took on the role of editor as much as author. With Robert E. Lee, when she was led into doubt, contradiction, or subterfuge, she had his own words to quote and ponder as she laid out his life story. But with Lincoln, she was plunged into incertitude and became reliant on writers such as Dennis Hanks and William Herndon to supply interpretations of his character. Unsatisfied with these well-trawled sources, Elizabeth became something of a ferret, unearthing new nuggets of information in the most unlikely and far-flung places. The Museum of English Rural Life at the University of Reading in Great Britain springs to mind, but that was only one of some fifty libraries and archives that she worked in while researching this book. With a fine-tooth comb, she sifted through more than 350 unpublished collections of family papers and diaries. This was in addition to the sizable number of letters, memoirs, and chronicles that have already seen print, like those of Hanks and Herndon. Leave no stone unturned might well have been her mantra. As these pages show, she truly believed that one account or eyewitness report was never enough to prove a point. For each chapter of Six Encounters with Lincoln the evidence she presents is overwhelming—carefully crafted bricks piled one atop another until the wall is so high and impenetrable that we are obliged to stop and reevaluate every preconceived notion we hold of Lincoln.

I did not find a list of acknowledgments. I know that she had a fellowship from the Huntington Library and spent a good deal of time working at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Harvard University, the Virginia Historical Society, and, of course, the Library of Congress. But for me to create a list of the people I know she would have thanked or to thank only those who helped me as I finished work on her manuscript would be invidious. I would ask only that one day when you pull this book from the shelf that you will remember the question that you answered at the information desk, the heated debate you had over lunch, the glass of wine you shared at the end of day or the laughter over dinner, and know that she was profoundly grateful for your help, for your insights, for your friendship, and for your love.

Beverly Louise Brown

London, April 2016

Note to the Reader

The quotations from primary sources, including letters, diary entries, books, and journals, have been transcribed without changing the spelling, capitalization, or punctuation. Any edits are noted with brackets or ellipses.

Introduction

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time

—T. S. ELIOT, LITTLE GIDDING, V,

FOUR QUARTETS (1943)

To look again with open eyes at a subject we think we know is never straightforward. All the more so when the figure has reached the mythic status of Abraham Lincoln. What more can be said about our sixteenth president that we do not already know? So much has been written, and overwritten, and written over that it seems nearly impossible to find a new nugget of truth to offer. Lincoln is an American icon, whose shadow hangs over every president as the quintessential paradigm of high-caliber leadership in a moment of great moral crisis. President Theodore Roosevelt kept a picture of him over the mantelpiece in his office, and when he was confronted by some matter of conflicting rights, he confided that I would look up at that splendid face and try and imagine him in my place and try to figure out what he would do in the circumstances. ¹ Yet, in truth, we know less of what Lincoln actually was and stood for than what we hope he embodied. He is one of the most malleable figures in American history. Depending on how you read him, he was either maddeningly simplistic or elusively complex. His fame follows from his dogged ability to be the determined and patient tortoise to the harebrained Fire-Eaters surrounding him and from the handful of eloquently written expressions of the agony at hand. Rarely were the latter appreciated in their day nor did they have much contemporary sway, but they—along with his martyr’s death—have propelled him into a special category of American heroes.

Six Encounters with Lincoln is an invitation to rethink our presumptions about Abraham Lincoln. It is an unorthodox and provocative look at the Lincoln presidency, although it did not start out that way. The book began as a simple collection of intriguing stories about a man who himself prized storytelling. The anecdotes were good ones—mostly unknown and all unexplored, involving characters as diverse as Robert E. Lee, Chief Little Crow, Susan B. Anthony, and an old Confederate with a menacing stick in his hand named Duff Green. The backstories were even better, astonishingly so in fact, revealing Lincoln in a way that put the color-enhanced tinsel of his acclaim in a new, more garish light. Each tale describes a meeting between the sixteenth president and his constituents—plebeian or prominent—revealing his opinions and character in surprising ways. Simply to have found new Lincoln material, especially anecdotes that help us peer into dusty corners, is something to celebrate. On the most basic level, these incidents are cracking good stories, showing Lincoln in all his quirky greatness. But each tale also provides a springboard for delving into significant aspects of Lincoln’s administration that have been neglected or previously unknown. Every one of these stories causes us to ponder our preconceptions about Lincoln. The episodes are also connected by a number of common threads, so that in the end the yarn I wanted to spin has re-formed itself into a web.

First and foremost, the stories illustrate the difficulty of managing a republic and creating a presidency. In all of these situations we watch Lincoln struggle to define his administration’s priorities, while resisting the attempts of others to wrest the initiative from him. The democratic demons evoked in the subtitle are not just the political devils Lincoln battled in his ambitious exercise of power—though that could be said to have fully demonized America. They arise from the contradictions inherent in self-government, forming the darker side of our bright republican currency. Among the phantoms that plagued Lincoln’s administration were greed; impatience; the ignorance of the public; the need to manage a large army while subordinating it to the popular will; the structural dysfunction of the American government, guaranteed by Founding Fathers who were suspicious of any authority that might be too efficient; and constant demands from competing sectors of the population—sectors with little in common save their appetite for dominance. Every chief magistrate struggles with this reality, but Lincoln confronted it in the rawest possible context: a nation at war with itself.

Throughout his presidency Lincoln struggled with the very nature of democracy, not only its definitions and traditions but its momentum and fluidity, that irksome capacity to change swiftly like a flash flood in the mountains. He wrestled with the very people who made up so vibrant a community, grappling with their clamorous diversity, their impatience, their outspoken opinions, and above all their demands. Every leader of a republic faces a similar challenge. As President Bill Clinton so aptly put it, [Y]ou come in with your agenda and vision, and the fact is, whether you want it or not, ultimately a lot of the legacy for Presidents is how they handle the hand they were dealt.² We see this in high relief with Lincoln, who both responded to and helped shape a new way of looking at democratic inclusion, not necessarily because he wanted to but because he had to.

The devil in democracy is that it cannot help being itself. It provides a fierce and constant debate; a cacophony of opinions; a minefield of stubborn wills and terrible egos. Within the great truth—the supremacy of the people—there are a myriad of small truths all vying for respect and often at odds with one another. In Lincoln’s day the greatest of these was contradiction between the ideal of democracy and the prevailing views on the treatment of Indians and slavery. As the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, voices rang out in dissent, describing a paralyzed legislative body swayed by the infernal machinations of Mr. Lincoln. Congress keeps in awe the reckless and unscrupulous Administration, as, according to the pious belief of medieval times, holy water awed the devil.³

The 1860s was an era of highly individualistic democracy, when all citizens believed they could petition the nation’s leader for rights, privileges, or direct support. At times it seemed the whole, unwieldy nation was at the President’s doorstep, selling an opinion or begging a favor. Those watching today will remember another slim lawyer from Illinois, who worked to keep true to himself and his policies in the midst of national malaise, and appreciate just how overwhelmingly personal is the job of the president and how difficult it is to address the relentless democratic demands. In the episodes presented here, we see how Lincoln must design his presidency in a hundred daily ways and as he tries to satisfy players as diverse as Julia Ward Howe and John Ross, chief of the Cherokee Nation.

The stories also remind us that Lincoln’s republic was a government of, by, and for only some of the people. It was not just the black population that was excluded, but Native Americans, women, whole categories of immigrants, and even many white males. It may have been, as Lincoln pronounced it, the last best hope on earth—but hope is the operable word here: hope of inclusion and pluralism; hope for equal rights and opportunities. It was not an ideal reached during Lincoln’s lifetime. He surely started—in important ways—the momentum toward a broader democracy, but his vision proved myopic in many instances. Democracy after all is a slippery concept. Lincoln was certainly enthusiastic about the liberty he had embraced—the liberty to reinvent himself; the liberty to move and sway with perceived opportunities; the liberty to try to grow; and even the liberty to fail and try again. That democracy and the idea of true equality were different concepts. While Indians, women, and Negroes might be equals in social niceties or as Lincoln said in the right to eat the bread . . . which his own hand earns, they remained unequal in political rights, social mobility, and opportunity. Lincoln moves to eliminate slavery only when it is a medium to end the war; no matter how eloquently he proclaims it to be a universal wrong. For all his promotion of a society where all men might rise, he raises no platform for better education or universal suffrage.⁴

Interestingly, these encounters also give us a sense of the difficulty Lincoln sometimes had in communicating. The eloquence of his formal writing and his delightful, whimsical humor have, to some degree, obscured the inelegance of his everyday interactions. He disliked spontaneous discussion with people who might misinterpret him. He seemed to be most comfortable when he could project his thoughts through parables or from a written script. In Six Encounters with Lincoln we observe him standing gracelessly mute at his first review of the Army; swearing precipitously at a young soldier on the White House portico; alternately pontificating or talking pidgin English to Indian chiefs; simply avoiding most interaction with women; and in a state of chronic miscommunication with Southerners. The episodes remind us of the human psyche’s contrariness; of how even the most sensitive intellect can be clumsy or obstinate or intolerant.

Lincoln is not always shown at his best in these six episodes. As the eyewitnesses make clear, in his day Honest Abe was not looked upon as the savior of the nation. Instead he was largely viewed as a well-meaning bumbler, a curious and earnest man, but not the leader needed in a national crisis. In each chapter of this book we have multiple protagonists who question Lincoln’s wisdom. Even many of his closest allies believed the war was won despite, rather than because of, his efforts. Today we may be tempted to dismiss this as the poor ability of lesser mortals to appreciate the greatness before them. But the blindness is perhaps ours, not theirs. Speaking of the Irish revolutionary martyr Roger Casement, Mario Vargas Llosa noted that his multifaceted personality will never be totally acknowledged: There will always be a reluctance to accept this complexity which is the complexity of human nature. We are not perfect, and that is not tolerable in our heroes.⁵

Americans have had the same trouble. We are willing to tolerate little personal quirks: George Washington’s false teeth, for example, or Thomas Jefferson’s philandering. We can accept the lovable foibles in Lincoln: his unruly shock of hair or strange gargoyle of a face; his unrealized ambitions in local politics; his problematic marriage; and his smutty, smirking jokes. But questioning his aspiration to lead a country in turmoil, without the barest qualifications; suggesting that he blundered through military labyrinths with all the agility of an angered buffalo, while thousands of people died; accepting that his fundamental racism accompanied his clear distaste for slavery; and acknowledging that as the consummate politician he often cheerfully compromised his principles for favor or party or expediency—these have been taboo subjects for more than a century. They are issues that need to be revisited and rethought if we are going to understand our past with a modicum of honesty.

We cannot do this if our only point of reference is a face staring up in a thousand handfuls of pocket change or down from the magisterial Lincoln Memorial. Over the years, Lincoln’s image has been polished and embellished to add luster to a political party and a set of ethical precepts that he himself did not espouse. It is a kind of mirage shimmering in the water in the road before us, promising more than is actually there. What appeared to his fellow citizens at the time was considerably more concrete, and I have at every instance tried to rely on their words, written in real time. I am less interested in the historical shadows cast by well-meaning memorialists and more interested in actions and outcomes, which are all that we can with veracity assess. For this we must rely on the Johnny-on-the-spot reporters, chroniclers of the moment, diarists, and letter writers.

This testimony is far from complete. Lincoln is largely absent as a voice, because his own writings are sparse, uneven, and largely dull. Even with nine volumes of closely spaced transcripts, the cache is disappointing for those who want to feel the spirit of the man. Most of his writings are limited in subject matter (political scheming and business of the day), and exhibit jumbled thought patterns and syntax. God knows you do not read most of them for the prose. They are filled with countless small acts of accidental violence to the English language. They lack the tone, style, verse, and veracity of Lincoln at his best. Only later in his career did he learn to express himself in sharp, succinct prose, the fineness and brevity of which had the power to dazzle. Much of the earlier writing is so self-contradictory or measured against political advantage that it is difficult to know what he stood for outside of his enormous ambition for elected office. It is a paper-thin personality that emerges, the flimsiest of characters, without the satisfying girth of a well-formed man. It is too bad that Lincoln did not record more of his thoughts and observations, because it really would be interesting to know, for example, what he thought of the women’s movement burgeoning around him. Because on so many issues Lincoln does not share his thoughts, it is open season for those who wish to interpret him.

What we know—or think we do—about Lincoln, and what gives him fascination, all comes from other people. We see him secondhand, through the eyes of friends or enemies and secretaries, who presume to speak for him or of him from authority. Some of those wrote as he lived; some knew him well and respected and liked him. But far more wrote after his tragic assassination, when vice turned to virtue and his legacy seemed unique to all. His famous words were often placed in his mouth by others, for their own purposes. It is the chroniclers who supply the wry, entertaining, and astute oral pyrotechnics that we have come to associate with Lincoln. Some of what they tell us about the man is verifiable, but far more is sullied by the mystic chords of memory.

I have been intrigued by many points of view, but persuaded only by those of people who knew Lincoln and wrote in real time. The six narratives in this book are based on firsthand accounts—no tainted memoirs or heroic post-assassination recollections. I discovered these sources while doing research on topics other than Lincoln—on Clara Barton’s relation with the women’s rights activist Frances Dana Gage, for example, or why the Cherokee fought for the Confederacy. The fact that the documents were in unexpected places and far-flung locations is perhaps why they have escaped the notice of generations of Civil War scholars. In several of the stories, the new information is so striking that it might be worthy of its own monograph. One could explore all of the themes here at length: our loss of Lincoln through mythology; the way he tackled the conundrum of American democracy; and the troubling way that his endearing quirkiness has obscured questions about whether his governance was effective. However, the goal of this particular work is to present the six chapters as an interlinked series of episodes.

The strength of the eyewitnesses is that they knew and worked with Lincoln, and wrote as they were living through the nightmare of civil war. Listening to their voices helps us avoid projecting our perfect knowledge of what did happen—both triumph and tragedy—on our assessment of the war’s outcome. They force us to ask what are apparently unmentionable questions: whether the war could have been ended sooner or less bloodily or with better consequences under a different president. Whatever sacrifices his vacillations may have cost the people, those vacillations will now be forgiven, noted one astute observer on the night Lincoln died. Predicting the onslaught of praise-laden works that would appear for the next century and a half, he added: The murderer’s bullet opens to him immortality.⁶

It did not take long for the petrification of immortality to set in. By the 1880s Lincoln’s halo was so brightly polished that the orator Robert G. Ingersoll could lament that [h]undreds of people are now engaged in smoothing out the lines in Lincoln’s face—forcing all features to the common mold—so that he may be known, not as he really was, but according to their poor standard, as he should have been. As the literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt has noted, we want to cling to vivid symbols, the memorable images that have captured our collective imagination. This is why it is so difficult to even suggest that Abraham Lincoln might have been something less than the mythologers have told us. But to fetishize Lincoln is only to demean him by pretending that he was something that he was not. It should be enough to praise his personal achievement in rising from a humble backwoods beginning to make a mark in the world and to celebrate his quest for greater knowledge and higher understanding. The pride of being something more than you were expected to be is part and parcel of the American dream. What he had already achieved by 1858 was notable enough.⁷

The historian Douglas L. Wilson has written about Lincoln’s pathway between two worlds as a young man.⁸ He undoubtedly took this journey, consciously and unconsciously—blazing not only a trail for himself, but for generations of aspiring Americans. But one of the troubling aspects of Lincoln is that throughout his career he is less a man of principle than of political expediency. Early on he shuns his idol Henry Clay for the presidency when it appears that his party may falter with Clay’s candidacy. In 1836 he denounces the disenfranchisement of tax paying (or mocks it as a possibility). In any case, he never makes a move to alleviate this democratic paradox. By comparison, in his years as president, he had to open up new roads, shaking off long-held prejudices as he created innovative ways of progressing. I see him throughout his presidency, probing the darkness—extending his long fingers into the unknown—for his situation was perilous and his role unprecedented. Reaching into the void he would have had nothing to turn to, neither his lawyerlike instinct for precedent nor the smooth bonhomie of his familiar political machine. At times he did have limited support from long-standing friends, but suspicion often filled the air. His presidency was forged not only by quiet thought and weighty consultation, but also by the constant pressure to respond to the demands of the day. We watch him react or at times overreact to those who sought him out, men—struck by his awkwardness and shrewdness—who made up the chain of experience that ultimately gave him insight.

Lincoln’s trajectory from farm boy to president has been likened to the parable of the mustard seed (Mark 4:26–32), in which large things grew from small beginnings. Well-meaning scholars have tried to rationalize his self-contradictory statements into a kind of Lincolnian unified field theory, by saying he grew over time or was big enough to change as he thoughtfully honed his policies. Yet growing on the job is just another way of saying that he was always playing catch-up—he was behind, not before the curve. Learning on the job is always laudable and might have been fine if the times had been less perilous. It would have been acceptable in a Martin Van Buren or William Henry Harrison presidency and perhaps that is what Lincoln envisioned—a job of patronage, posturing, and party politics. But with a close reading of the political trends of the time, it simply looks like he was expedient, finding the most popular path and following it. This does not make him a moral compass for the nation, especially at a time of war when the consequences were greater and every stumbling step could and did lead to a corpse. In war, the price for growing was death.

We err in assuming the war had to take the course it did and that Lincoln’s heroism lay in the tenacity to see the nation through the labyrinth of terror. Lincoln himself takes this line in his Second Inaugural Address, writing as if the war, the loss, the devastating calamity had nothing to do with him—and the war came—it all took place in the passive tense.⁹ But we cannot say for certain how someone else might have galvanized, rather than divided, the nation, or quickened the end of the war. There is no apparent alternative, although that is not particularly important given the unlikely examples of great war-leaders such as Winston Churchill or Harry S. Truman. Who might have had a better touch cannot be retrospectively predicted. What we do know is that at many junctures the war might have been managed differently. Many serious options for change in policy, personnel, and partisan appeal were presented to Lincoln—options he chose not to take. By his own admission, he lurched and stumbled through much of the crisis, learning on the job. What we do know for certain are the catastrophic consequences of the outcome. But what we like about him is that he tried so very hard to do his best. What we must question is whether in doing his best, he did the best for the country.

Abraham Lincoln’s lasting legacy is the ability to inspire us to be better selves and to do better for our country. We should not underestimate the power of this but nor should we confuse this inspiration with a call to imitate his style of governing. There is much that Lincoln deserves credit for. First and foremost is cementing the concept of majority rule—the disappointed and disgruntled should not simply take their ball and go home, but stay and tough it out, make their case, fight and persuade their way back to power. The emancipation question is more problematic, but certainly he deserves praise for political courage. He hewed a line that made the difficult possible and won at least noisy acquiescence from opponents. It was not a purely humanitarian gesture, however, as Lincoln’s response to Horace Greeley’s open letter in the New York Tribune, which was published in the Daily National Intelligencer on August 20, 1862, makes clear. As a speechwriter Lincoln’s hand became ever surer, but his words—which have so much resonance today—fell flat when they were uttered. The initial response to the Gettysburg Address was decidedly muted. Lincoln was not a crusader. His saving grace is that he upheld a system that allowed for change even when he was not its champion.

When you look through a peephole into the past, you hope for a clear view, but more often than not what you get is a kaleidoscope vision. Little pieces, multifaceted and multicolored, that fit together to make a knowable pattern—not completely knowable because we are looking from afar—yet recognizable and describable. It is not a seamless, unified, or perfectly delineated vision. Looking through the peephole, we have to strain to see clearly and to gain as wide a view as possible. The six episodes presented here offer a changing pattern of images. Some shapes and colors appear in every frame, yet each one is different. The challenge is to adjust our view—to rethink—so as to make sense of them all. As we swivel our kaleidoscope, the Lincoln whom we find at the end may not be the Lincoln whom we wanted to find at the beginning. When we are aware of greatness we want to hear about it over and over again, but greatness does not mean perfection. It is the quirky note in the symphony, the brilliantly odd step in the ballet, the misplaced word in the awe-inspiring sentence that keeps our heroes human, interesting, and bright. Abraham Lincoln is like this, in that his very fallibility punctuates his moments of greatness.

In 1876 Frederick Douglass, speaking at a ceremony to dedicate the Freedmen’s Monument in Washington, D.C., declared that there was nothing new to say about Abraham Lincoln. His personal traits and public acts are better known to the American people than those of any other man of his age.¹⁰ Yet thousands of books later, we still have important insights to relate. And America’s yearning to know its sixteenth president seems not to have abated.

President Lincoln at the foot of Colonel Elmer Ellsworth’s coffin, detail of drawing here.

1

A WARY HANDSHAKE

Of course it was a dismal day. The sky was as leaden as the national mood. Washington, D.C., had suffered incessant storms that winter, and on March 12, 1861, the roads were sticky with mud from the latest squall. Nervous residents could not help comparing the gloomy weather to the turbulent politics threatening the country. Seven Southern states had left the Union since the election of Abraham Lincoln, forming a new Confederate States of America. The outgoing Buchanan administration had only halfheartedly defended federal property against the secessionists, and efforts to find a peaceful resolution to the crisis were faltering. Now it appeared that the new government was following the same uncertain path. We are a weak, divided, disgraced people, unable to maintain our national existence, the Republican magnate George Templeton Strong wrote in alarm. The New York Herald agreed. It was a deplorable state of affairs, complained its editors. All joy, all hope, is fled. ¹

Against this dreary backdrop a curious apparition appeared about midday. At the stolid, neoclassical War Department a large group of military officers in full-dress uniform was assembling, their gold-crested buttons and vivid sashes piercing the dull light. Falling into two columns, they lined up behind Secretary of War Simon Cameron and Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, the Army’s venerable chieftain. In perfect formation, they marched to the Executive Mansion along the tree-lined footpath that connected the two buildings. At the door Scott himself solemnly rang the bell. The United States Army had come to call on its new commander in chief.²

By one count, seventy-eight men paraded into the East Room. Such a large group overfilled the space and they began to snake around the perimeter in an undulating line. The officers were resplendent in dark blue frock coats, tall patent leather boots, gilt scabbards, and black-plumed hats. Set against the shabby yellow wall covering of the nation’s parlor, their presence was all the more splendid. It was a spectacular exhibition, noted one of the company; another observer thought he had never seen an equal number of such fine-looking men in uniform. They stood at attention, kid-gloved fingers lightly pressing the stripes of their trousers, silently awaiting the President. After a few moments, Lincoln entered, accompanied by several cabinet members. Some officers had been influenced by newspaper accounts to expect an afternoon of jesting, and now they were surprised. The man before them was as clumsy as his descriptions, but his face was deadly serious.³

The East Room of the White House, c. 1861–65

WHITE HOUSE COLLECTION

The new president had good reason to be grave. Since taking the oath of office on March 4, he had been confronted with multiple crises, sometimes on an hourly basis. Two days into the job, Lincoln learned that the Confederate Congress had called out 100,000 troops to protect its territory. The attorney general and the secretary of war had just informed him that there was no legal way to stop the shipments of arms reportedly being rushed to Charleston, New Orleans, and nearby Baltimore. Samuel Cooper, a New Yorker who had served for a decade as adjutant general of the Army, left his post on March 6 and headed straight for the Confederate capital—taking with him detailed knowledge of personnel, matériel, and federal intentions. On March 11 the rebel government adopted a constitution containing elaborate legal justifications for a separate nation. A delegation from that nation was in Washington at the moment, under instruction to establish diplomatic ties. Humiliation was in the air, as federal institutions unraveled and Southern sympathizers sniggered over everything from congressional defections to the disappearance of patent files. Worse yet, the country was broke. When Buchanan’s treasury secretary Howell Cobb followed his native state of Georgia out of the Union, he left the nation bankrupt.⁴

Most pressing was the question of whether to withdraw United States forces from Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. This crisis had been transferred to Lincoln just hours after his inauguration. Since his election, occupation of the fortress had been an emotional flashpoint: a contest between the South’s angry belief that it was no longer governed by consent and Northern determination to protect Union prerogatives and Union property. On March 5 the War Department received a letter from the officer in charge of the garrison, Major Robert Anderson, stating that provisions were nearly exhausted and that Confederate leaders were blockading the harbor, forcing a showdown. Lincoln would have to reinforce the fort or retreat, with all the symbolism that implied.⁵

The news came as a shock, for Lincoln had wanted to move slowly, to buy time, allay passions, and reassure nervous Unionists south of the Mason-Dixon Line. As president-elect he had tried to downplay the crisis, terming it artificial and claiming there was nothing going wrong. Once he realized that something was going terribly wrong, and that matters had moved beyond cool reflection, he hoped the separatist fervor would burn itself out. His deliberative political style would prove a handicap, as every day the situation in Charleston became more perilous. While Lincoln temporized, South Carolina strengthened its defenses. Anderson told his superiors he needed twenty thousand soldiers to defend the fort, a number larger than the entire standing army. Now he impatiently awaited the President’s reply. I thought the policy of this new admins. would have been developed by this time, he complained the day before the Army reception, adding that Lincoln’s promise to put the foot down firmly against secession appeared easier said than done.⁶ In fact, the President was getting a swift lesson in the difference between a campaigner’s offhand remarks and the grim responsibility of actually leading the nation through perilous times. The dilemma had paralyzed his predecessor—though Buchanan later claimed he had stood ready to support Anderson, if only he had been asked. No matter how meek—or even traitorous—Buchanan’s inaction seemed, Lincoln now found himself hesitating in just the same manner. Is it possible that Mr. Lincoln is getting scared[?] wrote an influential Illinoisan. I know the responsibility is grate; But for god sake . . . I don’t want to bequeath this damnable question to any posterity.⁷

The Sumter situation was particularly tricky, for it was not just a question of defending a fort or robustly exerting executive authority. It was coupled with an urgent need to keep those slave states that straddled North and South in the Union. These border states included Missouri, the President’s native Kentucky, and the entire region surrounding the nation’s capital. Of these, Virginia was most significant, not only because of its proximity to Washington, but in terms of size, industrial output, and prestige. Maryland, whose communication lines linked the government to the rest of the nation, was also of critical importance. The ties that attached these states to the Union were fraying in March 1861, and their leaders made clear that any coercion against the South would result in those bonds being cut completely.

The tension between these two issues—the need to restore confidence in the border states, yet firmly uphold federal laws and national dignity—had, in fact, been a theme of Lincoln’s inaugural address. That had been a tense day, the proceedings clouded by rumors of Confederate insurrection or attempted assassination. General Scott had summoned all his imposing powers to ensure the new president’s safety, calling up hundreds of troops to guard the Capitol grounds and personally commanding the sharpshooters placed on adjacent roofs. Lincoln was not yet master of simple, compelling statements, and his long message attempted to placate hostility on all sides, while conceding nothing. Despite an emotional appeal to the shared history that bound together the American people, the laboriously crafted address received a mixed response, both North and South. Never did an oracle, in its most evasive response, receive so many, and such various interpretations, as did the President’s inaugural, observed the New York Times.⁸ Within the military it sparked general dismay. Mr Lincolns inaugural came to day, wrote an officer named William T. H. Brooks, who was stationed in Texas. If it can appease or quiet the troubled waters it must bear a different interpretation from what I can give it. At Fort Sumter, officers saw little in the speech to resolve either their dilemma or the nation’s. We have just received the inaugural and from it we derive no hope at all that there will be any peaceful settlement, wrote Assistant Surgeon Samuel Wylie Crawford, despairing that so many qualifications in the President’s words would undermine the address’s impact. Soldiers wanted to hear a simple declaration of intent, but this speech smacked of equivocation. A steel hand in a soft glove was how Major Samuel Heintzelman described it, a few days before stepping into the East Room to greet the President. I fear it will lead to Civil War.⁹

The Sumter issue pressed on Lincoln to the point that he was physically ill, losing sleep and suffering chronic headaches. Before the end of that tempestuous March, his wife reported he had keeled over from worry and fatigue. One of his aides referred to those days as the terrible furnace time, when public anxiety was stoked to the limit, and old patterns of governing melted away in the political fire. Lincoln wanted desperately to avoid appearing as stymied as Buchanan yet found himself unable to formulate a decisive policy. He later told Orville Hickman Browning, a Republican ally, that all the troubles and anxieties of his life had not equaled those he faced during the Sumter crisis.¹⁰

II

Lincoln was suffering from these intense pressures as he faced his finely arrayed officers, but there were other reasons for his distraction. He was new to this world of official events and was not particularly comfortable with the military. At his first levee, three days previous, an invitee noted how the President had gracelessly received the public in oversized white gloves with much the same air & movement as if he were mauling rails. Military niceties particularly confounded him. On March 8 he had hosted a similar group of naval officers, with an embarrassing outcome. Participants remarked that Lincoln was confused by the imposing ceremony, interrupting formal introductions several times to chat with casual visitors or sign papers. Before the end of the reception he abruptly ran off, leaving the officers to stand uncomfortably at attention while he searched for his wife, who wanted to see the display of gold braid. When a senior officer made a handsome speech, pledging allegiance to the beleaguered Union, Lincoln dismayed the company by not responding. The interview was not at all calculated to impress us . . . and there were many remarks made about the President’s gaucherie, far from complementary to him, noted a naval man. ¹¹

Despite his discomfort among the officers, Lincoln was not without military experience. In 1832 he volunteered with the Illinois militia when it was called out to combat the Sauk and Fox Indians. Those tribes, led by Black Hawk, had been tricked into moving from their ancestral lands but decided to fight for their territory.¹² The Army was ultimately victorious against Black Hawk, but the campaign was a badly directed affair, marked by undersupplied troops, slipshod skirmishing, and missed opportunities. Lincoln saw little combat, though he did have enduring memories of camp deprivation and the unsavory burial of mutilated corpses. It was not, he later remarked, a war calculated to make great heroes of men engaged in it.¹³

The Black Hawk War also offered Lincoln his only opportunity to command soldiers. He was selected captain of his first company, an honor that gave him lasting pride. A number of his men remembered him as fair, frank, and companionable. His record of real leadership was more problematic. Accounts mention several situations in which he could not control his troops, who straggled, pillaged, and were sometimes unable to march on account of drunkenness. Captain Lincoln himself was disciplined for recklessly shooting off his gun. Called to organize a field formation for the minor purpose of crossing a fence, he could not command forcefully enough to direct his soldiers through the narrow gate. In his next company Lincoln was not elected captain. His difficulties reflected the unprofessional tone of the whole campaign, but they also foreshadowed problems he would have as commander in chief.¹⁴

Lincoln experienced army life at its worst during the Black Hawk War, but that was only part of his martial malaise. He shared the popular mistrust of a standing armed force, whose starched and steely-eyed commanders seemed a throwback to the hated feudal powers of Europe. As a congressman during the Mexican War he also spoke disparagingly of the military tradition of valor, calling it an attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood—that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy. He again scorned the armed forces during an address to Whig supporters in 1852. Lincoln was then promoting Winfield Scott for the presidency, yet he ridiculed the high-blown military imagery that dominated the campaign. Recalling a local muster day, he mocked the pretension of militia leaders, exaggerating their uniform into a paste-board cocked hat . . . about the length of an ox yoke . . . [and] five pounds of cod-fish for epaulets. He went so far as to assign the citizen-warriors a cutting motto: We’ll fight till we run, and we’ll run till we die. Although he was agile in political circles, which relied on popularity and personal ties for success, Lincoln was never really at ease with military culture, or embraced its heritage of discipline and battlefield gallantry.¹⁵

Now, in the East Room, he uncertainly faced officers whose epaulets were not of codfish, but richly embroidered with gold and silver thread: emblems that in their eyes signified pride and sacrifice and honor. These were the very qualities the President would desperately need as the nation careened into war. If Lincoln appreciated the tradition and service represented by the martial decorations, however, he most certainly failed to communicate it to the men standing at attention.

At least part of Lincoln’s discomfort stemmed from his newly acquired role as head of the armed forces. Among the Constitution’s more problematic clauses is the single sentence that establishes the president as commander in chief of the Army and Navy. This stipulation is at once all-encompassing and vague; granting full responsibility, yet unspecific on the actual exercise of authority. Although the president is not part of the military establishment, he retains ultimate command, including selection of leaders, direction of institutional structures, and the authority to pardon. In the twentieth century, the clause was interpreted to give the president every power a supreme leader is allowed in international law, but this had yet to be recognized in 1861.

Lincoln could look to several predecessors who had interpreted their military function broadly. George Washington did not hesitate to order an extraordinary armed operation during the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion. When federal prerogatives were challenged, he skillfully avoided real strife by displaying military might, yet limiting the action. Four decades later, Andrew Jackson’s stern threat of force silenced states’ righters when they attempted to nullify national law. James K. Polk, a strong and decisive wartime president, used the Army as a tool to implement his political goals. Devising an invasion of Mexico for the thinly veiled purpose of acquiring territory, he stretched the executive role by avoiding a congressional declaration of war, as well as by taking a hands-on approach to questions of strategy and command. The unwavering military stance of his successor, Zachary Taylor—which made no concessions at all to those threatening the federal authority—deflected the crisis of 1849–1850 by convincing the opposition that he would never back down. As a congressman, Lincoln protested what he saw as unauthorized use of the military by Democrats like Jackson and Polk.¹⁶

In the early days of 1861 Lincoln had little desire to follow these examples or to flex his military muscles. His ambitions for the presidency had been imagined differently: an opportunity to preside over party and patronage and to put a few domestic policies in place. Although he would greatly expand presidential war powers, Lincoln arrived in office without a blueprint for doing so. He executed an abrupt about-face, however, when he ordered significant belligerent measures within a few weeks, many of them of questionable legal status. (With Congress out of session, among other things he increased the size of the regular army, ordered a blockade of Southern ports, seized suspicious individuals without warrant, and funded it all with unauthorized sums from the Treasury.) Lincoln later maintained that extraordinary times demanded extraordinary measures, making the case with enough conviction that Congress then upheld him. Ironically, he also justified the actions by invoking the very presidents he had previously criticized. When the wisdom of resupplying Fort Sumter was questioned, he retorted, [Y]ou would have me break my oath and surrender the Government without a blow. There is no Washington in that—no Jackson in that—no manhood nor honor in that. The tension between presidential prerogative and shared constitutional authority over matters of war, coupled with the anomaly of a civilian leading professional soldiers, would challenge Lincoln for the next four years. ¹⁷

III

Lincoln entered the East Room flanked by Simon Cameron, his war secretary of one day. Cameron was a wiry, silver-haired man in his early sixties, with a thunderous, jutting brow. He was a famous wheeler-dealer from the Keystone State—Scott liked to say that Cameron carried Pennsylvania in his breeches pocket—with a reputation for being more shrewd than honest. Although the new secretary had served as a state militia officer in the 1820s, and was given the honorific title general, he seemed more like one of Lincoln’s pasteboard warriors than a real soldier. Cameron himself admitted he knew nothing about military matters and had been appointed because of his talent for backroom bargaining. Lincoln was warned from many corners not to undermine presidential credibility by such an appointment, and, indeed,