1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [212]
For form’s sake, the clerk of the House called on each of the seceded states’ delegations when he took roll, pausing just a moment as if by some remote possibility they would come creeping back, all past sins forgiven and troubles forgotten. Before this, however—perhaps more fruitfully, perhaps not—a Methodist chaplain addressed the Almighty at considerable length, in terms that made it clear he thought God was a Republican.9
Lincoln’s summons to Congress had coincided with his demand for seventy-five thousand troops, on April 15, perhaps suggesting his belief that the decision for war would have to be ratified first by the people themselves, in the form of the volunteer militia, even before their elected representatives considered it. In the same vein, he had resisted calls to convene the national legislature immediately, deferring the special session almost three months. There were good political reasons for him to do this. The president feared, justly, that Congress would try to take the conduct of the war into its own hands—or worse, that it might try to broker a dishonorable peace, offering terms that coddled slavery even more than the Crittenden, Corwin, and Peace Conference plans had done. Clearly he intended to make his own decisions first and seek congressional blessing later.10
But the unusual timing of July 4 for the special session’s opening day also signaled that in Lincoln’s mind, the business before the nation’s representatives in 1861 was somehow related to the business of their predecessors in 1776. The president made it known that he would issue a written communiqué to Congress on the session’s first day. Perhaps it would clarify the connection more fully.
Almost from the moment of the April announcement, Lincoln threw himself tirelessly into drafting his message. This in itself was remarkable, even astonishing. Most chief executives, faced with the war’s multitudinous and urgent demands, would probably have let military undertakings trump literary ones. In fact, Lincoln’s Confederate counterpart, Jefferson Davis, had not even begun work on his own unmemorable inaugural address until the day before the ceremony.11
As early as May 7, however, John Hay recorded in his diary that Lincoln was “engaged in constant thought upon his Message: It will be an exhaustive review of the questions of the hour & of the future.” That was the same day that the Tycoon had made his intriguing statements to Hay about the philosophical underpinnings of the Union cause, while dropping a hint about the future of slavery; he was clearly rehearsing the ideas he planned to air publicly on the Fourth of July.12 (Elmer Ellsworth and John Nicolay had both been at the White House that morning, too; Nicolay was definitely present during Lincoln’s conversation with Hay and Ellsworth may well have been also.)
Curiously, Lincoln tried his ideas on a second audience on that same day in May, a most unlikely one: the “regent captains” of the minuscule European nation of San Marino. He had recently received by letter a conferral of honorary citizenship from them, and it was now his duty to acknowledge their gracious gesture. He could easily have asked one of his secretaries to dash off a pro forma response. But the president knew that San Marino was more than just a five-mile-wide enclave of Italian-speaking sheep farmers. It was also the longest-lived constitutional republic in the world, claiming origins in the fourth century a.d. So, when Lincoln picked up his pen and addressed the regent captains, he did so as the leader of a young and immense democratic nation speaking to the leaders of an old and tiny one:
Although your dominion is small, your State is nevertheless one of the most honored, in all history. It has by its experience demonstrated the truth, so full of encouragement to the friends of Humanity, that Government founded on Republican principles is capable of being so administered as to be secure and enduring.
You have kindly adverted to the trial through which this Republic is now passing. It is one of deep import. It