Mr. Carpenter, who made the famous painting of the Cabinet when Mr. Lincoln read the draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, and who was a client of mine, told me Mr. Lincoln had said to him that for a long time he had been considering the necessity of eventually issuing the Proclamation; but that he was held back by the intense desire that was always in his mind to restore the Union, and his fear that if he proclaimed emancipation prematurely the restoration of the Union would be prevented. During his entire administration and in all his addresses this desire to restore the Union was supreme and it controlled his every action.
On the momentous occasion when Lincoln read the preliminary draft of his Emancipation Proclamation before his Cabinet, he amused himself and the others—with the exception of Secretary Stanton, who was plainly amazed at the President’s seeming levity—by first reading to them from Artemas Ward’s amusing story of “The High-Handed Outrage at Utica.”
Later on I remember having been present when Lincoln said, “If my name is ever remembered it will be for this act; my whole soul is in it.”
It is curious, the thing we call history. An act popularly regarded as madness at one period is hailed as concrete wisdom at another. History is only a crystallization of popular beliefs.
Many people very close to Lincoln have doubted his sympathy for the slaves, and have referred to his frequent characterization of abolitionists as “a disturbing element in the nation, that ought to be subjected to some sort of control.” They assert that his efforts were directed solely to restraining the ambitions of the slaveholders to extend their system of human bondage over larger areas of the United States.
Such judgment of Lincoln is at variance with my personal observations and does him a grave injustice. His nature was essentially sympathetic, although he never went the length of asserting that he regarded the black man as his social equal.
Subsequent observation has shown me that the immediate admission of the liberated slaves to equal rights of franchise was an error.
It revived the former bitterness with which the Southern people had regarded the Northerners, and imposed a grievous injustice upon them, an injustice naturally and forcibly resented. And so followed the formation of the “Invisible Empire” and the excesses of the “Ku-Klux Klan.”
VIII
THE RENOMINATION
The renomination of Mr. Lincoln in 1864 was not accomplished with ease. The difficulties did not all show upon the surface, because some of the President’s closest associates were secretly conspiring against him. Open and frank opposition came from such influential Republicans as Henry Winter Davis, of Maryland, Benjamin F. Wade, of Ohio, and Horace Greeley, of New York, who believed his re-election impossible. But the opposition of Salmon P. Chase, of Ohio, was secret, as he had been scheming for the nomination himself. Chase, while regarding himself as Mr. Lincoln’s friend and constantly protesting his friendship to the President, held a condescending opinion of Mr. Lincoln’s intellect. He could not believe the people so blind as to prefer Abraham Lincoln to Salmon Chase. He vigorously protested, both verbally and in letters written to every part of the country, his indifference to the Presidency, at the same time painting pessimistically the dreadful state of government affairs, and indicating, not always subtly, his willingness to accept the nomination.