Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [238]
Lincoln worked long hours on the text, shifting words, condensing, deleting sentences. Even Senator Orville Browning, his old friend from Illinois who had come to see him, was told he was busy, but Lincoln overheard Browning talking and sent for him. It was after 9 p.m. on July 3, and he had just that moment finished writing. “He said he wished to read it to me, and did so,” Browning recorded in his diary. “It is an able state paper and will fully meet the expectations of the Country.”
Lincoln did not personally deliver his address on Capitol Hill. President Thomas Jefferson had denounced presidential appearances before Congress, considering them a monarchical remnant of the English system where kings personally opened parliamentary sessions. Since Jefferson, presidents had submitted their written messages to be read by a clerk. Yet, if the practice lacked theatricality, Lincoln’s arguments against secession and for the necessity of executive action in the midst of rebellion left an indelible impression. He traced the history of the struggle and called on Congress to “give the legal means for making this contest a short, and a decisive one.”
He asked for “at least four hundred thousand men, and four hundred millions of dollars…a less sum per head, than was the debt of our revolution.” A “right result, at this time, will be worth more to the world, than ten times the men, and ten times the money,” he assured Congress. For “this issue embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes….
“This is essentially a People’s contest,” the president asserted. “On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” As evidence of the capacity of free institutions to better the “condition” of the people, “beyond any example in the world,” he cited the regiments of the Union Army, in which “there is scarcely one, from which could not be selected, a President, a Cabinet, a Congress, and perhaps a Court, abundantly competent to administer the government itself.”
Northern newspapers generally praised the message, though some failed to appreciate the rigor of Lincoln’s appeal and the clear grace of his language. “In spite of obvious faults in style,” the New York Times correspondent conceded, “I venture to say it will add to the popularity of the Rail-splitter. It is evidently the production of an honest, clear-headed and straightforward man; and its direct and forcible logic and quaint style of illustration will cause it to be read with peculiar pleasure by the masses of the people.” More important, the Congress responded with alacrity. Its members authorized more money and an even larger mobilization of troops than the president had requested. In addition, they provided retroactive authority for nearly all of Lincoln’s executive actions taken before they convened, remaining silent only on his suspension of habeas corpus. With the Southern Democrats gone, the Republicans had a substantial majority. And, for the moment, Northern Democrats also acceded, their dislike of Republicans overshadowed by patriotic fervor.
Not everyone was pleased. Abolitionists and radical Republicans found the message disheartening. “No mention is, at all, made of slavery,” Frederick Douglass lamented. “Any one reading that document, with no previous knowledge of the United States, would never dream from anything there written that we have a slaveholding war waged upon the Government…while all here know that that is the vital and animating motive of the rebellion.”
Radicals tended to blame Seward for