Abraham Lincoln and men of war-times : some personal recollections of war and politics during the Lincoln administration ; with introduction by Dr. A.C. Lambdin

Preface

The chapters in this volume make n o pretensions t o give either a biography of Abraham Lincoln or a history of his memorable Administration.

They were written amidst the constant pressure of editorial duties simply to correct some popular errors as to Lincoln's character and actions. So much has been written of him by persons assuming to possess information obtained in the inner circle of his confidence, and such conflicting presentations of his personal attributes and private and public acts have been given to the public, that I have deemed it a duty to contribute what little I could from personal knowledge, to correct some common errors in estimating his character, ability, and efforts.

The closest men to Abraham Lincoln, both before and after his election to the Presidency, were David Davis,

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Leonard Swett, Ward H. Lamon, and William H. Herndon. Davis and Swett were his close personal and political counselors; Lamon was his Marshal for Washington and Herndon had been his law-partner for twenty years. These men, who knew Mr. Lincoln better than all others, unite in testifying that his extreme caution prevented him from making a personal confidant of any one; and my own more limited intercourse with him taught me, in the early period of our acquaintance, that those who assumed that they enjoyed Lincoln's confidence had little knowledge of the man. It is the generally honest but mistaken belief of confidential relations with Lincoln on the part of biographers and magazine and newspaper writers that has presented him to the public in such a confusion of attitudes and as possessing such strangely contradictory individual qualities.

I saw Mr. Lincoln many times during his Presidential term, and, like all of the many others who had intimate relations with him, I enjoyed his confidence only within the limitations of the necessities of the occasion. I do not therefore write these chapters assuming to have been the confidant of Mr. Lincoln; but in some things I did see him as he was, and, from necessity, knew what he did and why he did it. What thus happened to come under my own observation and within my own hearing often related to men or measures of moment then and quite as momentous now, when the events of the war are about to be finally crystallized into history.

My personal knowledge of occurrences in which Mr. Lincoln and other great actors in the bloody drama of

PREFACE. 5

our Civil War were directly involved enables me to present some of the chief characteristics of Mr. Lincoln, and to support them by facts and circumstances which are conclusive. I have, therefore, written only of Lincoln and his relations with the prominent chieftains and civilians with whom I had more or less intimate personal acquaintance. The facts herein given relating to leading generals and statesmen are presented to illustrate in the clearest manner possible the dominating characteristics of Mr. Lincoln. They may or may not be accepted by the public as important, but they have the one merit of absolute truthfulness.

Abraham Lincoln achieved more in American statesmanship than any other President, legislator, or diplomat in the history of the Republic; and what he achieved brought no borrowed plumes to his crown. Compelled to meet and solve the most momentous problems of our government, and beset by confused counsels and intensified jealousies, he has written the most lustrous records of American history; and his name and fame must be immortal while liberty shall have worshipers in any land. To aid to a better understanding of this " noblest Roman of them all ' ' is the purpose of these chapters ; and if they shall, in the humblest degree, accomplish that end, I shall be more than content.

The portraits in these chapters have been selected with scrupulous care and executed in the best style. The frontispiece portrait of Lincoln is the only perfect copy of his face that I have ever seen in any picture. It was

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taken in March, 1864, on the occasion when he handed Grant his commission as lieutenant-general. Two negatives were taken by the artist, and only one of them ' ' touched tip ' ' and copies printed therefrom at the time. The other negative remained untouched until a few months ago, when it was discovered and copies printed from it without a single change in the lines or features of Lincoln's face. It therefore presents Lincoln true to life. The other portraits of Lincoln present him as he appeared when he delivered his speech in Cooper Institute, New York, in 1859, with the cleanly-shaven face that was always maintained until after his election to the Presidency, and as he appeared when studying with his son "Tad" at his side. These portraits I have selected because they give the most accurate presentations of the man, and to them are added a correct picture of the humble home of his early childhood; of his Springfield home of i860; of the tomb in which his dust reposes near Springfield, 111. ; and a fac-simile of his letter of acceptance in i860.

I am greatly indebted to the Lives of Lincoln given by Nicolay and Hay — the most complete and accurate record of dates and events, military and civil, relating to Lincoln— by Mr. Herndon, by Mr. Lamon, by Mr. Arnold, and by Mr. Brooks, and to Mr. Blaine's "Twenty Years in Congress," for valuable information on many points referred to in these chapters.

A. K. McCLURE.

Philadelphia, 1892.

Introduction

The modern spirit, which is essentially the democratic spirit, that has so profoundly influenced every manifestation of human thought, has wrought a great change in the study of history and in the estimate of historical personages.

To the older writers history was mainly a record of the acts of great men — monarchs, ministers, and generals — who rose out of the mist of the past as independent and irresponsible agents; the champions of opposing ideas, it might be, but themselves the centres of all interest, and to be considered and classified as heroes or villains according as one liked or disliked the general purpose of their lives. The modern historian, on the other hand, finds the material for a just estimate of times past not in the lives of the few as much as in the lives of the many — in the general conditions of civilization, of which the men of distinction are only the strongest exponents, dramatizing in themselves the forces of their age.

Most of all is this recognized concerning periods of storm and stress, of war and tumult. Leaders may hasten or retard events, may direct or misdirect the impulses of the people, but they do not create these impulses. They are governed by them. Whether or not we accept that magnificent generalization of Count Tolstoi in his Physiology of War that makes Napoleon and Alexander but cock-boats on the tide, and the private soldier a more genuine power than either of them, the time certainly is past when one could speak of wars or revolutions as the capricious acts of individual men, or could profess to estimate the character and achievements of these men apart from the history of the people that surrounded them.

This does not diminish the admiration due to the heroes of history. If it takes from them that element of the miraculous by which their proportions were distorted, it shows more clearly the means and methods of their achievement, which no longer appears due to the mere accident of birth, position, or opportunity, but rather to the individual qualities by which one man is enabled to assert himself as the representative of the mass. Most of all is this the case in a republic, where these accidents of birth or place, while they give opportunities, confer no privileges; where incapacity may find preferment, but where it must be soon discovered; and where, in the long run, it is the man who best appreciates and can most highly direct the forces of his time that earns his final place among the great.

It follows that while the history of the individual can be studied only in relation with his surroundings, the history of a nation may be exemplified in that of its representative men. There is no sharp dividing-line between history and biography. As the poet, the painter, the composer must be considered in the light of the poetry, the painting, the music of his period, which he in turn illuminates, so the man of affairs can onlv be understood if we can see him in his relations with his contemporaries, as he appeared to them and they to him, and as he and they were related to the great popular movements that controlled them all. And these movements, in their turn, may be best understood when we can see them as they were apprehended by the men who had directly to deal with them.

The history of our civil war is yet to be written. A great popular movement and counter-movement, the contest, now seen to have been inevitable, of ideas developed through generations, bearing results more far-reaching than the wisest could foresee and affecting the whole current of the nation's life, requires the perspective of a greater distance in time than we have reached perhaps even yet, for the final view that shall give to every part its just proportion. The soldier in battle sees only that part of the field that is about him ; the colonel reports only the movements of his own regiment; the general of his brigade, division, corps; yet from these

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various reports the military historian forms his estimate of the campaign. Thus far, our records of the war are mainly in biography, personal narrative, and this for the most part of a controversial character, designed to set forth some one person's view, to vindicate his conduct, to defend the policy of a party. Even the purely military movements from 1861 to 1865 have scarcely yet crystallized in history, and the vastly more important political and social history of that great era is still in controversy.

With the exception of Mr. Blaine's delightful narrative of Twenty Years in Congress, the most comprehensive, compact, and philosophic summary that has been made of any like experience, we have nothing relating to this period that approaches to the dignity of history. The Life of Lincoln by Nicolay and Hay is an admirable compilation of the political records of the time, and its narrative of public events is invaluable. But as an actual biography of Lincoln it is unsatisfactory, and as a comprehensive view of the great forces for which Lincoln stood it is lacking in proportion as in insight.

For Lincoln is, above all things, the representative of the people whose President he was, the embodiment and exponent of their convictions, their courage, their persistence, their limitations as well as their strength, their homely as well as their heroic attributes. The halo of a martyr's death exalted him, in the eyes of those of us who came after, to the plane of the ideal where we lost sight of the actual man. To know Lincoln as he was we must know him in his actual relations to the tremendous task that devolved upon him, and to all the fluctuations of that public sentiment whose support alone could make the execution of this task possible. To think of him as a specially inspired genius, innocent of the world and holding his triumphant way against all experience by some sort of supernatural insight, is to do needless violence alike to the philosophy of history and to recorded fact.

The chapters upon Lincoln which make up this volume have one supreme value — that they present a convincingly truthful picture of the man as he appeared to an experienced observer who was called at various times into intimate relations with him, and who records only what he personally and directly knew of Lincoln's acts and motives at certain critical and illustrative periods, and of his attitude toward other actors in the same great drama.

A many-sided character like Lincoln's shows itself under various aspects to various men, and Mr. McClure makes it very plain to us that few if any of those who thought they knew Lincoln intimately knew really more than the one side he showed to each of them. Much of Mr. McClure' s intercourse with Lincoln had to do, from time to time, with what we now call practical politics, and his extraordinary shrewdness as a politician is one aspect of this many-sided character that has not before been so intelligently set forth. Yet this seems one of the great secrets of Lincoln's success — his ready perception of the popular current, his carefulness in guiding it, and his ability to wait for it if he found himself in danger of going ahead too fast. No man of his time was more earnest and sincere in his convictions, but he could not afford to risk them in impracticable experiments. He had to achieve results and patiently to await opportunities. The ideal hero of the old-fashioned historian, who must be always heroic, would not have waited. And he would not have achieved. If those to whom these revelations of Lincoln's shrewdness and ingenuity as a practical politician bring something of a shock will only think of the failures that he witnessed, and what failure in his case would have meant, they will not fear that Lincoln's fame will suffer from the truth.

It is perhaps best of all in Mr. Lincoln's relations with his immediate associates and subordinates that we observe those elements of shrewd judgment, of patience, self-repression, persistence, and abiding faith that are such essential parts of his character. His treatment of Grant is a conspicuous illustration not only of his judgment of men, but of that cautious policy that so often enabled him to carry his ends by deferring them. His patient endurance with Stanton, often yielding to him against his own convictions in order to avoid a rupture that would have brought disaster, and indeed his relations with all the leading members of his Cabinet, not less than the curiously characteristic diplomacy that resulted in the nomination of Andrew Johnson, illustrate this same thoughtful prudence that ever subordinated the minor issue to the greater — which is the art of the statesman.

This aspect of Mr. Lincoln's character is dwelt upon here because it is one that has been generally obscured in the popular estimate, but that is absolutely essential to any right estimate of the man and his work. No acts of his administration have been less understood than the great achievement of emancipation and his attitude toward the States in rebellion at the close of the war. On both of these points Mr. McClure speaks with the authority of exact knowledge, and he shows us with how little of self-assertion, with how much of prudent self-repression, Mr. Lincoln approached these as all other great crises of his career. He was not more in advance of his time than others were in foreseeing the inevitable destruction of slavery; but to him the one great purpose of the restoration of the Union was ever paramount, and the other must wait till the exigencies of the war should solve the problem or bring the people, the masses as well as the leaders, to recognize an act of emancipation as a supreme necessity. His own plan of compensated emancipation he brought forward in his Cabinet, and when it was disapproved he folded it up and put it by. And so he watched and waited till the time came when the country called for more heroic measures and he could speak as the mouthpiece of the nation.

Again, at the close of the war he had his own plan, deliberately formed, for the recall of the legislatures of the Southern States to resume their functions under the Constitution. There can be no dispute as to Lincoln's intentions, as expressed in his own directions concerning Virginia, or his communication of these intentions to

General Sherman. But when he found that he was not sustained he withdrew his instructions, to await the turn of events; and before he could recast his plans to make the present yielding lead to future achievement, the assassin's bullet ended his great life. Then all the men who had complained of Lincoln's slowness, his timidity, his indirectness, and who thought it the part of a leader to go ahead, irrespective of whether anybody followed him, had the opportunity they wished to try their various experiments.

We know what confusion and disaster they wrought. The appeal was not, like his, to the conscience and convictions of the people, but to their passions and resentments; and it is only now, when a new generation has come upon the scene, that we are emerging from the shadows of that dreadful time, and are learning to estimate its men and measures justly. And Lincoln rises in our esteem as we see in him not merely an abstract, impossible ideal, nor merely, on the other hand, a rough, unschooled Western politician, but the typical Northern American of his time, the embodiment of the character of the nation in its period of greatest trial.

Such at least is the idea that comes strongly to me from these chapters. Always somewhat skeptical of the untutored genius, as well as of the genius who thinks himself in advance of his age, I confess that I like much better to think of Lincoln as a man schooled for his work by thoughtful study and patient watchfulness, and meeting the strong men who surrounded him as at least their peer, not alone in singleness of devotion to a cause, but in the art of statesmanship as well. Very many of these strong men Mr. McClure brings before us with the vivid relief of intimate knowledge, and the reader will not fail to recognize the just appreciation with which each one of these great figures is presented. This seems to me another of the qualities that give to this volume a value that is new. While its point of view is that of personal knowledge, it is also that of the impartial student, in whose mind the controversies of a quarter of a . century have clarified and confirmed the judgments of the historian. He has given us thus not only a series of illustrative episodes, but a well-proportioned group of figures representing truthfully the political forces of the period of the war, with the one great figure always in the centre — the great President, and more than that, the great American, the embodiment of the strength and uprightness, the conscience and the courage, of American manhood, the realization of our democratic ideal.

ALFRED COCHRAN LAMBDIN.

The Times Office, "l April, 1892. J

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

FACING PAGE

Abraham Lincoln Frontispiece.

Lincoln's Letter op Acceptance, i860 21

Abraham Lincoln, 1859 38

Winfield Scott 51

Abraham Lincoln and "Tad" 64

Abraham Lincoln's Homes 76

Abraham Lincoln's Tomb 88

Hannibal Hamlin 104

Salmon P. Chase 119

Simon Cameron 134

Edwin M. Stanton 155

Ulysses S. Grant 174

George B. McClellan 192

William T. Sherman 209

Andrew G. Curtin, i860 229

Lincoln's Letter to Curtin , 244

Andrew G. Curtin, 1892 250

Thaddeus Stevens 255

Stevens's Letter to McClure 269

James Buchanan . ' 273

Horace Greeley 288

Greeley's Letter to McClure 3°5

John Brown 307

George G. Meade 327

George H. Thomas 327

Fitz John Porter 327

G. K. Warren 327

D. C. Buell 327

Robert E. Lee 362

J. E. B. Stuart 370

Lee's Letter to McClure 380

Samuel W. Crawford 392