Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

Other burdens conspired to further drain Lincoln’s energies and blacken his impenetrable moods. He received a glut of hate mail, much of it threatening him with various kinds of death, which he filed in an envelope marked “Assassination.” “Soon after I was nominated in Chicago,” Lincoln said, “I began to receive letters threatening my life. The first ones made me feel a little uncomfortable; but I came at length to look for a regular installment of this kind of correspondence in every mail.” Eventually the threats preyed so much on his mind that he began to dream of assassination and funerals in the White House, and his friend Ward Hill Lamon pestered him so badly to protect himself that Lincoln made Lamon federal marshal of the District of Columbia, and let him and Stanton provide regular guards. Lincoln himself made no attempt at protection. As he explained resignedly to Francis Carpenter, there was no security in this life from fate: “If… they wanted to get at me, no vigilance could keep them out. We are so mixed up in our affairs, that—no matter what the system established—a conspiracy to assassinate, if such there were, could easily obtain a pass to see me for any one or more of its instruments.” Besides, Lincoln added, democracy imposed a certain amount of risk on its leaders. “It would never do for a President to have guards with drawn sabres at his door, as if he fancied he were, or were trying to be, or were assuming to be, an emperor.”46

As it turned out, it was not for Lincoln that the bell tolled. In February 1862 Lincoln’s third son, William Wallace Lincoln, died of typhoid fever in the White House, and grief over the boy’s death nearly tipped Mary Todd Lincoln over the brink into insanity. Lincoln, himself “worn out with grief and watching,” could explain the death only as yet another visitation of the inscrutable power that held human destinies in a powerful and inescapable grip. “My poor boy,” Lincoln murmured, “he was too good for this earth… but then we loved him so. It is hard, hard to have him die.” After Willie Lincoln’s death, Lincoln’s own health began to suffer. Mary only made matters worse with spendthrift habits and a weakness for flattery by schemers and poltroons looking to acquire insider information about administration policies. “Many times,” recalled his old friend Orville Hickman Browning, “he used to talk to me about his domestic troubles” and “was constantly under great apprehension lest his wife should do something which would bring him into disgrace.” Unable to sleep, he paced the White House through the night, or sat up into the wee hours of the morning in the telegraph room of the War Department to receive the latest news of the war. He gradually lost weight, until his clothes seemed to hang from him, and in the fall of 1863 he contracted a mild form of smallpox. There was, he complained, a tired spot in him that no rest could ever touch.47

Over and above all these reasons for the haggard look of Lincoln’s face was the crushing weight of having to conduct what amounted to two separate wars. In addition to the shooting war, Lincoln was also compelled to wage a political war behind the lines to keep up civilian support and morale, to enable the armies to keep on fighting, and to implement the long-term agenda of domestic policies he had inherited from Henry Clay and cherished ever since his first days as a Whig politician. The initial consensus of 1861–62 was that Lincoln was no more successful in winning the political war than he was in winning the military one. On the eve of his inauguration, one longtime Washingtonian shook his head over Lincoln: “He certainly does not seem to come much to the level of the great mission” before him “& I fear that a weak hand will command the ship.” “My opinion of Mr. Lincoln,” wrote Orestes Brownson to Charles Sumner at the end of 1862, “is that nothing can be done with him. … He is wrong-headed… the petty politician not the statesman &… ill-deserving the sobriquet of Honest.” The New York lawyer George Templeton Strong confided to his diary in 1862, “Disgust with our present government is certainly universal. Even Lincoln himself has gone down at last. Nobody believes in him any more.”48

Of course, the benefit of hindsight suggests that Lincoln’s critics were wrong and that Lincoln eventually succeeded in rallying the political morale of the North around even the most radical of his policies, emancipation. But it is also true that Lincoln accomplished that goal only very slowly, and at the cost of terrific political turmoil. The reasons lying behind that turmoil are twofold. The first is bound up with Lincoln’s inexperience in national politics. Although Lincoln had been involved in state and local politics for almost his entire adult life, he had never actually been elected to an office of any consequence in Illinois beyond the state legislature, and his only experience on the national level before 1861 consisted of his solitary and undistinguished term as a representative from Illinois’s Seventh District. Had there been such a thing as executive search firms in Lincoln’s day, none of them would have given him a second look. His work habits had been shaped by the experience of local politics and a two-man law practice, and as a result, Lincoln only grudgingly delegated even routine correspondence to his secretaries. “His methods of office working were simply those of a very busy man who worked at all hours,” Robert Todd Lincoln recalled.

He never dictated correspondence; he sometimes wrote a document and had his draft copied by either [John] Nicholay [sic] or [John] Hay; sometimes he himself copied his corrected draft and retained the draft in his papers. … He seemed to think nothing of the labor of writing personally and was accustomed to make