At this point, at which the issue of the war, if it were only pursued, could not be doubted, and at which, as it happens, the need of Lincoln's personal intervention in military matters became greatly diminished, we may try to obtain a general impression of his wisdom, or want of it, in such affairs. The closeness and keen intelligence with which he followed the war is undoubted, but could only be demonstrated by a lengthy accumulation of evidence. The larger strategy of the North, sound in the main, was of course the product of more than one co-operating mind, but as his was undoubtedly the dominant will of his Administration, so too it seems likely that, with his early and sustained grasp of the general problem, he contributed not a little to the clearness and consistency of the strategical plans. The amount of the forces raised was for long, as we shall see later, beyond his control, and, in the distribution of what he had to the best effect, his own want of knowledge and the poor judgment of his earlier advisers seem to have caused some errors. He started with the evident desire to put himself almost unreservedly in the hands of the competent military counsellors, and he was able in the end to do so; but for a long intermediate period, as we have seen, he was compelled as a responsible statesman to forego this wish. It was all that time his function first to pick out, with very little to go by, the best officers he could find, replacing them with better when he could; and secondly to give them just so much direction, and no more, as his wisdom at a distance and their more expert skill upon the spot made proper. In each of these respects his occasional mistakes are plain enough, but the evidence, upon which he has often been thought capable of setting aside sound military considerations causelessly or in obedience to interested pressure, breaks down when the facts of any imputed instance are known. It is manifest that he gained rapidly both in knowledge of the men he dealt with and in the firm kindness with which he treated them. It is remarkable that, with his ever-burning desire to see vigour and ability displayed, he could watch so constantly as he did for the precise opportunity or the urgent necessity before he made changes in command. It is equally remarkable that, with his decided and often right views as to what should be done, his advice was always offered with equal deference and plainness. "Quite possibly I was wrong both then and now," he once wrote to Hooker, "but in the great responsibility resting upon me, I cannot be entirely silent. Now, all I ask is that you will be in such mood that we can get into action the best cordial judgment of yourself and General Halleck, with my poor mite added, if indeed he and you shall think it entitled to any consideration at all." The man whose habitual attitude was this, and who yet could upon the instant take his own decision, may be presumed to have been wise in many cases where we do not know his reasons. Few statesmen, perhaps, have so often stood waiting and refrained themselves from a firm will and not from the want of it, and for the sake of the rare moment of action.
The passing of the crisis in the war was fittingly commemorated by a number of State Governors who combined to institute a National Cemetery upon the field of Gettysburg. It was dedicated on November 19, 1863. The speech of the occasion was delivered by Edward Everett, the accomplished man once already mentioned as the orator of highest repute in his day. The President was bidden then to say a few words at the close. The oration with which for two hours Everett delighted his vast audience charms no longer, though it is full of graceful sentiment and contains a very reasonable survey of the rights and wrongs involved in the war, and of its progress till then. The few words of Abraham Lincoln were such as perhaps sank deep, but left his audience unaware that a classic had been spoken which would endure with the English language. The most literary man present was also Lincoln's greatest admirer, young John Hay. To him it seemed that Mr. Everett spoke perfectly, and "the old man" gracefully for him. These were the few words: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or to detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
2. Conscription and the Politics of 1863.
The events of our day may tempt us to underestimate the magnitude of the American Civil War, not only in respect of its issues, but in respect of the efforts that were put forth. Impartial historians declare that "no previous war had ever in the same time entailed upon the combatants such enormous sacrifices of life and wealth." Even such battles as Malplaquet had not rivalled in carnage the battles of this war, and in the space of these four years there took place a number of engagements—far more than can be recounted here—in many of which, as at Gettysburg, the casualties amounted to a quarter of the whole forces engaged. The Southern armies, especially towards the end of the war, were continually being pitted against vastly superior numbers; the Northern armies, whether we look at the whole war as one vast enterprise of conquest or at almost any important battle save that of Gettysburg, were as continually confronted with great obstacles in the matter of locality and position. In this case, of a new and not much organised country unprepared for war, exact or intelligible figures as to losses or as to the forces raised must not be expected, but, according to what seems to be a fair estimate, the total deaths on the Northern and the Southern side directly due to the war stood to the population of the whole country at its beginning as at least 1 to 32. Of these deaths about half occurred on the Northern and half on the Southern side; this, however, implies that in proportion to its population the South lost twice as heavily as the North.
Neither side obtained the levies of men that it needed without resort to compulsion. The South, in which this necessity either arose more quickly or was seen more readily, had called up before the end of the war its whole available manhood. In the North the proportion of effort and sacrifice required was obviously less, and, at least at one critical moment, it was disastrously under-estimated. A system of compulsion, to be used in default of volunteering, was brought into effect half-way through the war. Under this system there were in arms at the end of the war 980,000 white Northern soldiers, who probably stood to the population at that time in as high a proportion as 1 to 25, and everything was in readiness for calling up a vastly greater number if necessary. After twenty months of war, when the purely voluntary system still existed but was proving itself inadequate to make good the wastage of the armies, the number in arms for the North was 860,717, perhaps as much as 1 in 27 of the population then. It would be useless to evade the question which at once suggests itself, whether the results of voluntary enlistment in this country during the present war have surpassed to the extent to which they undoubtedly ought to have surpassed the standard set by the North in the Civil War. For these two cases furnish the only instances in which the institution of voluntary enlistment has been submitted to a severe test by Governments reluctant to abandon it. The two cases are of course not strictly comparable. Our own country in this matter had the advantages of riper organisation, political and social, and of the preparatory education given it by the Territorials and by Lord Roberts. The extremity of the need was in our case immediately apparent; and the cause at issue appealed with the utmost simplicity and intensity to every brave and to every gentle nature. In the Northern States, on the other hand, apart from all other considerations, there were certain to be sections, local, racial, and political, upon which the national cause could take no very firm hold. That this was so proves no unusual prevalence of selfishness or of stupidity; and the apathy of such sections of the people, like that of smaller sections in our own case, sets in a brighter light the devotion which made so many eager to give their all. Moreover, the general patriotism of the Northern people is not to be judged by the failure of the purely voluntary system, but rather, as will be seen later, by the success of the system which succeeded it. There is in our case no official statement of the exact number serving on any particular day, but the facts which are published make it safe to conclude that, at the end of fifteen months of war, when no compulsion was in force, the soldiers then in service and drawn from the United Kingdom alone amounted to 1 in 17 of the population. The population in this case is one of which a smaller proportion are of military age than was the case in the Northern States, with their great number of immigrants. The apparent effect of these figures would be a good deal heightened if it were possible to make a correct addition in the case of each country for the numbers killed or disabled in war up to the dates in question and for the numbers serving afloat. Moreover, the North, when it was driven to abandon the purely voluntary system, had not reached the point at which the withdrawal of men from civil occupations could have been regarded among the people as itself a national danger, or at which the Government was compelled to deter some classes from enlisting; new industries unconnected with the war were all the while springing up, and the production and export of foodstuffs were increasing rapidly. For the reasons which have been stated, there is nothing invidious in thus answering an unavoidable question. Judged by any previous standard of voluntary national effort, the North answered the test well. Each of our related peoples must look upon the rally of its fathers and grandfathers in the one case, its brothers and sons in the other, with mingled feelings in which pride predominates, the most legitimate source of pride in our case being the unity of the Empire. To each the question must present itself whether the nations, democratic and otherwise, which have followed from the first, or, like the South, have rapidly adopted a different principle, have not, in this respect, a juster cause of pride. In some of these countries, by common and almost unquestioning consent, generation after generation of youths and men in their prime have held themselves at the instant disposal of their country if need should arise; and, in the absence of need and the absence of excitement, have contentedly borne the appreciable sacrifice of training. With this it is surely necessary to join a further question, whether the compulsion which, under conscription, the public imposes on individuals is comparable in its harshness to the sacrifice and the conflict of duties imposed by the voluntary system upon the best people in all classes as such.
From the manner in which the war arose it will easily be understood that the South was quicker than the North in shaping its policy for raising armies. Before a shot had been fired at Fort Sumter, and when only seven of the ten Southern States had yet seceded, President Jefferson Davis had at his command more than double the number of the United States Army as it then was. He had already lawful authority to raise that number to nearly three times as many. And, though there was protest in some States, and some friction between the Confederate War Department and the State militias, on the whole the seceding States, in theory jealous of their rights, submitted very readily in questions of defence to the Confederacy.
It is not clear how far the Southern people displayed their warlike temper by a sustained flow of voluntary enlistment; but their Congress showed the utmost promptitude in granting every necessary power to their President, and on April 16, 1862, a sweeping measure of compulsory service was passed. The President of the Confederacy could call into the service any white resident in the South between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, with certain statutory exemptions. There was, of course, trouble about the difficult question of exemptions, and under conflicting pressure the Confederate Congress made and unmade various laws about them. After a time all statutory exemptions were done away, and it was left entirely in the discretion of the Southern President to say what men were required in various departments of civil life. The liability to serve was extended in September, 1862, to all between eighteen and forty-five, and finally in February, 1864, to all between seventeen and fifty. The rigorous conscription which necessity required could not be worked without much complaint. There was a party disposed to regard the law as unconstitutional. The existence of sovereign States within the Confederacy was very likely an obstacle to the local and largely voluntary organisation for deciding claims which can exist in a unified country. A Government so hard driven must, even if liberally minded, have enforced the law with much actual hardship. A belief in the ruthlessness of the Southern conscription penetrated to the North. If was probably exaggerated from the temptation to suppose that secession was the work of a tyranny and not of the Southern people. Desertion and failure of the Conscription Law became common in the course of 1864, but this would seem to have been due not so much to resentment at the system as to the actual loss of a large part of the South, and the spread of a perception that the war was now hopelessly lost. In the last extremities of the Confederate Government the power of compulsion of course completely broke down. But, upon the surface at least, it seems plain that what has been called the military despotism of Jefferson Davis rested upon the determination rather than upon the submissiveness of the people.
In the North, where there was double the population to draw upon, the need for compulsion was not likely to be felt as soon. The various influences which would later depress enlistment had hardly begun to assert themselves, when the Government, as if to aggravate them in advance, committed a blunder which has never been surpassed in its own line. On April 3, 1862, recruiting was stopped dead; the central recruiting office at Washington was closed and its staff dispersed. Many writers agree in charging this error against Stanton. He must have been the prime author of it, but this does not exonerate Lincoln. It was no departmental matter, but a matter of supreme policy. Lincoln's knowledge of human nature and his appreciation of the larger bearings of every question might have been expected to set Stanton right, unless, indeed, the thing was done suddenly behind his back. In any case, this must be added to the indications seen in an earlier chapter, that Lincoln's calm strength and sure judgment had at that time not yet reached their full development. As for Stanton, a man of much narrower mind, but acute, devoted, and morally fearless, kept in the War Department as a sort of tame tiger to prey on abuses, negligences, pretensions, and political influences, this was one among a hundred smaller erratic doings, which his critics have never thought of as outweighing his peculiar usefulness. His departmental point of view can easily be understood. Recruits, embarrassingly, presented themselves much faster than they could be organised or equipped, and an overdriven office did not pause to think out some scheme of enlistment for deferred service. Waste had been terrific, and Stanton did not dislike a petty economy which might shock people in Washington. McClellan clamoured for more men—let him do something with what he had got; Stanton, indeed, very readily became sanguine that McClellan, once in motion, would crush the Confederacy. Events conspired to make the mistake disastrous. In these very days the Confederacy was about to pass its own Conscription Act. McClellan, instead of pressing on to Richmond, sat down before Yorktown and let the Confederate conscripts come up. Halleck was crawling southward, when a rapid advance might have robbed the South of a large recruiting area. The reopening of enlistment came on the top of the huge disappointment at McClellan's failure in the peninsula. There was a creditable response to the call which was then made for volunteers. But the disappointment of the war continued throughout 1862; the second Bull Run; the inconclusive sequel to Antietam; Fredericksburg; and, side by side with these events, the long-drawn failure of Buell's and Rosecrans' operations. The spirit of voluntary service seems to have revived vigorously enough wherever and whenever the danger of Southern invasion became pressing, but under this protracted depressing influence it no longer rose to the task of subduing the South. It must be added that wages in civil employment were very high. Lincoln, it is evident, felt this apparent failure of patriotism sadly, but in calm retrospect it cannot seem surprising.
In the latter part of 1862 attempts were made to use the powers of compulsion which the several States possessed, under the antiquated laws as to militia which existed in all of them, in order to supplement recruiting. The number of men raised for short periods in this way is so small that the description of the Northern armies at this time as purely volunteer armies hardly needs qualification. It would probably be worth no one's while to investigate the makeshift system with which the Government, very properly, then tried to help itself out; for it speedily and completely failed. The Conscription Act, which became law on March 3, 1863, set up for the first time an organisation for recruiting which covered the whole country but was under the complete control of the Federal Government. It was placed under an officer of great ability, General J. B. Fry, formerly chief of staff to Buell, and now entitled Provost-Marshal-General. It was his business, through provost-marshals in a number of districts, each divisible into sub-districts as convenience might require, to enroll all male citizens between twenty and forty-five. He was to assign a quota, in other words a stated proportion of the number of troops for which the Government might at any time call, to each district, having regard to the number of previous enlistments from each district. The management of voluntary enlistment was placed in his hands, in order that the two methods of recruiting might be worked in harmony. The system as a whole was quite distinct from any such system of universal service as might have been set up beforehand in time of peace. Compulsion only came into force in default of sufficient volunteers from any district to provide its required number of the troops wanted. When it came into force the "drafts" of conscripts were chosen by lot from among those enrolled as liable for service. But there was a way of escape from actual service. It seems, from what Lincoln wrote, to have been looked upon as a time-honoured principle, established by precedent in all countries, that the man on whom the lot fell might provide a substitute if he could. The market price of a substitute (a commodity for the provision of which a class of "substitute brokers" came into being) proved to be about 1,000 dollars. Business or professional men, who felt they could not be spared from home but wished to act patriotically, did buy substitutes; but they need not have done so, for the law contained a provision intended, as Lincoln recorded, to safeguard poorer men against such a rise in prices. They could escape by paying 300 dollars, or 60 pounds, not, in the then state of wages, an extravagant penalty upon an able-bodied man. The sums paid under this provision covered the cost of the recruiting business.
Most emphatically the Conscription Law operated mainly as a stimulus to voluntary enlistment. The volunteer received, as the conscript did not, a bounty from the Government; States, counties, and smaller localities, when once a quota was assigned to them, vied with one another in filling their quota with volunteers, and for that purpose added to the Government bounty. It goes without saying that in a new country, with its scattered country population and its disorganised great new towns, there were plenty of abuses. Substitute brokers provided the wrong article; ingenious rascals invented the trade of "bounty-jumping," and would enlist for a bounty, desert, enlist for another bounty, and so on indefinitely; and the number of men enrolled who were afterwards unaccounted for was large. There was of course also grumbling of localities at the quotas assigned to them, though no pains were spared to assign them fairly. There was some opposition to the working of the law after it was passed, but it was, not general, but partly the opposition of rowdies in degraded neighbourhoods, partly factitious political opposition, and partly seditious and openly friendly to the South. In general the country accepted the law as a manifest military necessity. The spirit and manner of its acceptance may be judged from the results of any of the calls for troops under this law. For example, in December, 1864, towards the end of the war, 211,752 men were brought up to the colours; of these it seems that 194,715 were ordinary volunteers, 10,192 were substitutes provided by conscripts, and only 6,845 were actually compelled men. It is perhaps more significant still that among those who did not serve there were only 460 who paid the 300-dollar penalty, as against the 10,192 who must have paid at least three times that sum for substitutes. Behind the men who had been called up by the end of the war the North had, enrolled and ready to be called, over two million men. The North had not to suffer as the South suffered, but unquestionably in this matter it rose to the occasion.