Lincoln Rallies the North

July 3, 2011, 8:36 pm
Lincoln’s Rhetorical Fireworks
By HAROLD HOLZER


When the Confederacy opened fire on Fort Sumter in April 1861, Abraham Lincoln responded within hours, ordering a naval blockade of Southern ports and calling for 75,000 volunteers to “maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union.” But in a 19th-century precursor to President Obama’s decision to act alone against Libya, Lincoln made no effort to win immediate Congressional approval — much less appropriations to pay for his orders. The reason seemed simple enough: Congress was out of session and out of town.

Lincoln was fully aware that House and Senate support was required, if only to rubber-stamp the emergency measures he took during their recess. So he made one of the most audacious political decisions of his entire presidency: he called Congress back into special session. And with symbolic panache, he ordered it to re-convene on a sacred holiday — the Fourth of July — as if to recapture the ideals of independence and revolution for the North before they could be misappropriated by the South. There, amid the Independence Day celebrations, he sent Congress the text of (presidents rarely addressed Congress directly) one of the best and most overlooked statements of his presidency, a stirring and politically savvy call to arms against the Confederacy.

Enemies of the administration had predictably bristled at Lincoln’s exercise in executive power in the wake of Fort Sumter. New Orleans’ Daily Picayune denounced Lincoln as a “military dictator … grasping at the power of a despot.” And the New York Evening Day-Book likened his threat to “save the Union” with “the bayonet” as no less inhumane than the repressive actions against his own people by the French dictator, Louis Napoleon.

Lincoln might have avoided such attacks by summoning Congress back to Washington sooner (even though some seats were still up for grabs in springtime House races). Railroad and steamboat travel made the capital far more accessible than it had been in the days when Congressional sessions were preceded by weeks of exhausting travel. Instead, he gambled that once he had ordered resources into the fray, none would be recalled, not even by a Congress filled with dubious Democrats. Perhaps Lincoln could even suppress the rebellion and re-unite the country on his own.

On that score, Lincoln miscalculated. In the 10 weeks between April 18 and July 4, Southern resistance hardened, Upper South states seceded, and federal troops filled the capital. (Lincoln responded by acting alone once again, on April 27, to suspend the writ of habeas corpus between Philadelphia and Washington.)

Lincoln largely avoided the harsh judgment of history by deploying the most effective weapon in his personal arsenal: words. For at least two weeks in June, during which time he saw few visitors and focused intently on writing, he crafted a lengthy, deceptively simple, yet ingenious message for the special session. Though his final text did ramble, it combined lawyerly logic with evangelical zeal to accomplish several daunting but essential goals.

For one thing, it reminded Congress and the public that the South had been the original aggressors, not the North: “They have brought many good men to a willingness to take up arms against the government.” Lincoln also used the message to defend his initial response to hostilities. He had acted alone with “the deepest regret,” he claimed almost apologetically, only because “no choice was left but to call out the war power…to resist force, employed for its destruction, by force, for its preservation.” It had been a further duty, he argued, to suspend the hallowed writ. After all, he asked, “are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” He “could but perform this duty, or surrender the existence of the government.”

The message then deftly recruited Congress as a partner in the impending war by requesting 400,000 men and $400 million in financing: “The material for the work is abundant, and … needs only the hand of legislation to give it practical shape and efficiency.” When read aloud, this passage reportedly elicited cheers from the House galleries.

Perhaps most importantly, Lincoln rallied the entire North by using appeals to both history and hope in words designed for “plain people” to understand (he even said so in his text). Today we would call them “sound bites.” The idea that any state held supremacy over the entire Union he termed a “sophism.” Secession was patently illegal, its defenders absurd, their arguments “sugar-coated” (a phrase he proudly retained even when a government printer suggested it was too coarse). Its supporters were the enemies not just of the Union, but of the entire concept of popular government.

In one particularly sublime passage, he dubbed the approaching war nothing less than “a people’s contest,” one that presented “to the whole family of man, the question, whether… a government of the people, by the same people — can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes.” More than a fight for national preservation, it was “a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is to elevate the conditions of men — to lift artificial weights from all shoulders — to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”

Reaction to this bravura declaration was predictably mixed. Even though Border State legislators chafed, Congress rallied behind the president. Friendly Republican newspapers heaped lavish praise. To the pro-Lincoln New York Times, it was nothing less than the most “careful” and “important” message ever transmitted to Congress. But a French journal warned that Lincoln was about to plunge his country into debt (some issues are perennial). And to one Baltimore paper, the message showed that the president was either “a disgusting fool” or “the equal, in despotic wickedness, of Nero or any of the other tyrants who have polluted this earth.” But Lincoln meant business; the army soon shut that paper down. As he had ominously warned in the message: “Such will be a great lesson of peace, teaching men that what they cannot take by an election, neither can they take it by a war — teaching all, the folly of being the beginners of a war.”

Lincoln himself never uttered a word of his greatest Congressional message. By tradition, he simply sent it to Capitol Hill to be read aloud by clerks; it was then sent to newspapers for wider distribution. In fact, the publication of the so-called July 4th message was not actually read until July 5th, and even then its first telegraphic transmissions were garbled.

Lincoln had brilliantly defined the coming struggle in words ordinary Americans could understand, appreciate and support. He could now count on public and Congressional support for his burgeoning war effort. No president before ever used the power of words more deftly. “And,” as Lincoln sadly recalled four years later, “the war came.” Had his Independence Day message failed, history — and this nation — might have been far different.