Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [339]
Finally, knowing that the public would ultimately be the judge of the administration’s actions on the home front, Lincoln began drafting a document that would put the complex matter of military arrests into perspective. He had contemplated the subject for months, but his delineation of his ideas assumed new urgency with the public outrage at the arrest of Vallandigham. “Often an idea about it would occur to me which seemed to have force and make perfect answer to some of the things that were said and written about my actions,” he later told a visitor. “I never let one of those ideas escape me, but wrote it on a scrap of paper.” Now he would have to cobble those scraps into a cogent argument that the American public would accept.
Furthermore, Lincoln needed the proper forum in which to present his ideas. It came in late May, when a meeting of New York Democrats passed a set of resolutions condemning his military arrests as unconstitutional. Lincoln’s extensive response to the Democratic resolutions took “less time than any other of like importance” because he had already “studied it from every side.” In early June, the president read his draft to the cabinet. “It has vigor and ability,” a delighted Welles noted. Blair advised the president to emphasize that “we are Struggling against a Conspiracy to put down popular Govt.” Blair realized that Lincoln had often reiterated this theme, but as Thomas Hart Benton used to say, the “ding dong” proved to be “the best figure in Rhetoric.”
The finished letter, addressed to New York Democrat Erastus Corning, was released to the New York Tribune on June 12. Conceding that in ordinary times, military arrests would be unconstitutional, Lincoln reminded his critics that the Constitution specifically provided for the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus “in cases of Rebellion or Invasion.” He went on to say that Vallandigham was not arrested for his criticism of the administration but “because he was laboring, with some effect, to prevent the raising of troops, to encourage desertions from the army, and to leave the rebellion without an adequate military force to suppress it.”
Pointing out that “long experience has shown that armies can not be maintained unless desertion shall be punished by the severe penalty of death,” Lincoln posed a question that was soon echoed by supporters everywhere: “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert? This is none the less injurious when effected by getting a father, or brother, or friend, into a public meeting, and there working upon his feelings, till he is persuaded to write the soldier boy, that he is fighting in a bad cause, for a wicked administration of a contemptable government, too weak to arrest and punish him if he shall desert.”
The president’s letter garnered extravagant praise throughout the North. “It is full, candid, clear and conclusive,” the New York Times affirmed. Even Democrats were impressed. While Edward Everett told Lincoln he would not have advocated Vallandigham’s arrest, he considered the president’s “defence of the step complete.” Supporters were thrilled. “It is a grand document, strong, plain, simple, without one sparkle of tinsel ornament,” Stoddard enthused, “yet dignified as becomes the ruler of a great people when the nation is listening to what he says. It should be printed in every Northern paper, and read by every citizen.” In fact, Lincoln took every step to ensure that his words would shape public opinion. Printed in a great variety of formats, the letter eventually reached an astonishing 10 million people in their homes and workplaces, on isolated farms and in the cities. And as the American people absorbed the logic of Lincoln’s argument, popular sentiment began to shift.
WITH THE APPROACH OF SUMMER, the tempers of the cabinet ministers grew