1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [191]
On May 7, John Hay had gone into Lincoln’s office to brief him on some of the recent White House mail. He found the president contorted into a most unusual position: scrunched up in a chair with his boots braced against the windowsill and a large telescope balanced on the tips of his toes. He was apparently surveying some naval steamboats passing on the Potomac.59
Hay told the chief executive that several correspondents were suggesting the administration could quickly kill secession, present and future, by attacking the taproot of the South’s economy: slavery. Orville Browning, a leading Illinois Republican and a close friend of Lincoln’s for the past thirty years, had sent the most extraordinary letter urging him to “crush all rebel forces” without mercy, and let the Negroes, after having “avenge[d] the wrongs of ages,” turn the confiscated Cotton Belt into a republic of their own. Perhaps Hay even read some of the letter aloud:
Our armies must march into the rebel states, and the negroes will flock to our standard. What is to be done with them? We cant avoid considering and dealing with this question.… There is no escaping it. We must meet it, and solve it, and we had better do it in advance—before the emergency is upon us. When they come we cannot repulse them—we cannot butcher them, we cannot send them back to bondage. Heaven would blast us with its wrath if we did. We cannot incorporate them into our population in the free states. We cannot drive them into the sea—We cannot precipitate them upon any other country. What are we to do with them?60
Lincoln chuckled at this. Yes, he told Hay, some of his Northern friends seemed a bit “bewildered and dazzled by the excitement of the hour.” Some of them appeared to think that the war—still less than a month old and practically bloodless—was going to result in the total abolition of slavery. One gentleman had even proposed—in earnest, it seemed—that he should enlist blacks in the army!
The young secretary persisted. Quite a few people were saying such things, he told Lincoln. Not just politicians, either, judging by the White House mailbag, but ordinary citizens, too.
Behind his boss’s back, Hay had recently given Lincoln a nickname: “the Tycoon.” This word had entered American slang within just the past year or so, as part of the fad for all things Japanese. Taikun was the title of the chief shogun, and suggested—at least to the Western mind—not just a wise and powerful ruler but a figure of deep oriental inscrutability. The Tycoon now made a reply worthy of his name. It impressed Hay so much that he copied it word for word that night into his diary; thirty years later, he would also copy it verbatim into his biography of Lincoln.
“For my own part,” the president began, “I consider the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us, of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.”
So far this was clear enough. In fact it was classic, lambent Lincoln: in three simple sentences he had explained why secession represented not just the failure of democracy but the triumph of anarchy. Those sentences have been quoted in innumerable Civil War histories and Lincoln biographies. But it was also part of his genius with language to deploy words as camouflage, to reveal and mask himself at the same time, like a taikun behind a rice-paper screen—or like an Illinois lawyer in front of a jury. It was this Lincoln who spoke next, in oblique phraseology