Abraham Lincoln: A Biography

18. "There Are No Lincoln Men"

CHAPTER XVIII -_. "There Are No Lincoln Men" TH EPA R T Y nominating conventions were only a few months off. Already the political kettle bubbled noisily. While Lincoln seemed to have reached a turning of the road, he knew that long months of struggle, bloodshed, and patient planning lay ahead, and that the tasks he wished to finish would outlast his term of office. In a letter to Elihu Washburne, in October 1863, he had confided: "A second term would be a great honor and a great labor, which together, perhaps I would not decline if tendered." His renomination and re-election would assure the continuance of the war to total victory, and would commit the people to his lenient terms of peace. But a single term had become almost traditional; no President since Jackson had served a second term, and Lincoln gave no public indication of an intention to run again. Perhaps his keen sense of public opinion told him he did not need to, for he had so won the people's confidence that there was no question of their wish to have him serve another term. The people's trust in Lincoln had been born of his faith in them, for whenever a strong opposition developed in any quarter, he had explained in a public letter what he sought to do and why. His letter to Horace Greeley in August 1862 had set forth his views on emancipation and its relation to the war. His replies to protests of Ohio and New York Democrats against the arrest of Vallandigham defended his severity against seditionists. His 410 ABRAHAM LINCOLN letter of August 1863 to James C. Conkling explained his views on peace, emancipation, and the use of colored troops. In these remarkable state papers he manifested that capacity to understand an opponent's point of view, and to present his own case clearly and simply, which he had so painstakingly acquired as a. circuit lawyer. His straightforward arguments, void of partisan deceptions, cutting through nonessentials to the nub of the matter, and presented in plain language clarified by homely analogies, had proved as effective with the people of the nation as they had with the humble jurymen of the Eighth Circuit. But the people's trust in Lincoln was not shared by the politicians. Many of them still doubted his ability and looked for an abler man. Lyman Trumbull wrote to Henry G. McPike, of Alton: "The feeling for Mr. Lincoln's re-election seems to be very general, but much of it I discover is only on the surface. You would be surprised, in talking with public men we meet here, to find how few, when you come to get at their real sentiment, are for l\i[r. Lincoln's re-election. There is a distrust and fear that he is too undecided and inefficient to put down the rebellion. You need not be surprised if a reaction sets in before the nomination , in favor of some man supposed to possess more energy and less inclination to trust our brave boys in the hands and under the leadership of generals who have no heart in the war. The opposition to Mr. L. may not show itself at all, but if it ever breaks out there will be more of it than now appears." The radical Republicans, while at first offering lip-service to Lincoln's Amnesty Proclamation, had no intention of allowing the Southern states to re-enter the Union unpunished, or of renouncing the political profits of the war. By imposing conditions of readmission that would impoverish the planter aristocracy and force Negro suffrage on the vanquished population, they planned to assure Republican dominance for years to come. Lincoln was a stumbling-block to such designs. David Davis, manager of Lincoln's nomination in 1860, who had been rewarded with a seat on the Supreme Court, wrote: "The politicians in and out of Congress, it is the current belief, would put Mr. "There Are No Lincoln Men" 411 Lincoln aside if they dared." The correspondent of the Detroit Free Press reported: "Not a single Senator can be named as favorable to Lincoln's renomination for President." The crabbed Polish exile Count Adam Gurowski, a close observer of people and events in Washington, recorded in his diary: "The radicals, the purest men in Congress, begin to cave in, and to be reconciled to...