And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

This chapter details the role that race played in the early days of the Civil War. Lincoln was against immediate emancipation. According to Meacham, he was also against permitting Black Americans to fight in the war, though this would change soon. Racist Union troops often did not want to fight alongside Black persons. Early on, Union soldiers were directed to treat enslaved people who had escaped as contraband.

Meacham notes that Lincoln had political opponents in both the North and the South and argues that the issues were not nearly as Black and white as they are now presented. Radical Republicans, like Charles Sumner, were upset because Lincoln was slow to free enslaved people. Some Democrats did not want him to free them at any point. Some of these Democrats were called the Copperheads, and they did not even want to fight the war, thinking it better just to let the South go its own way.

Lincoln was aware of how crucial the border states in the Union were to the war effort. These states (Kentucky, Missouri, Delaware, and Maryland) still permitted slavery. Lincoln did not want to isolate them. Meacham reports, “‘Lincoln would like to have God on his side,’ it was said, ‘but he must have Kentucky’” (249). Domestic conflicts in Maryland showed that there was pro-Confederate support in the southern parts of the Union.

Meacham notes that in the early days of the war many Northerners did not have a good sense of the strength of the Southern threat. Lincoln’s personal friend, Elmer E. Ellsworth, was killed in action weeks into the war. The Battle of Bull Run (or Manassas) in Virginia was an important early war victory for the Confederacy on territory close to DC. After this, the Union command changed from Winfield Scott to George B. McClellan. Amongst the Union generals there were divided views on slavery. John Fremont tried to emancipate the enslaved people of Missouri, but Lincoln ordered him not to on the grounds that only the president could issue such an order. McClellan and Ulysses S. Grant explicitly stated that they were solely fighting for the preservation of the Union, not for emancipation. This was the common sentiment at the time.

Another important Confederate victory came at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff in October 1861. There was trouble in the White House as Mary Todd borrowed money and ran up debts to fund her shopping trips. According to the Meacham, the press enjoyed discussing the domestic disputes she had with her husband. When presented with the debts that Mary Todd had accrued, Lincoln was appalled and was reportedly shocked by the political turmoil that would be caused by hypocritical spending in his household.

In February of 1862 the Lincolns’ 11-year-old son, Willie, died of typhoid fever. Both parents were extremely devastated. This was their second dead child. From this point on, Meacham believes, religion took on a new, more personal and individual character for Lincoln. He writes, “We cannot know what he truly believed. We cannot even know whether he knew what he truly believed. What we do know is that from the time of Willie’s death until his own he mused frequently about the will of God and the workings of the world” (260). Meacham believes that Lincoln now saw a choice between succumbing to his grief or embrace the view of divine providence.

In April 1862 Congress, with Lincoln’s support, abolished slavery in Washington, DC. Meacham notes that Lincoln had been concerned with this since his time as a representative in the 1840s. Shortly thereafter Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate leader, successfully campaigned through the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. The eastern theater of the war was still not going well for the Union. At the Seven-Days battle, also in Virginia, General Robert E. Lee and the Confederates defeated McClellan. The Union then lost another battle of Bull Run in August 1862.

Lincoln issued the Homestead Act of 1862, which allowed white farmers to further colonize the western territories. In July of the same year came the Pacific Railway Act, which would open the door to the possibility of a transcontinental railroad stretching to the Pacific. Lincoln took the early pro-emancipation half-measure with the Second Confiscation Act, which granted emancipation to any slave that came into Union possession if that slave was the property of a person engaged in open rebellion against the Union. “I shall not do more than I can, and I shall do all I can, to save the government,” Meacham quotes Lincoln as saying (267). By the summer of 1862, Meacham writes, this meant a general emancipation.

Meacham notes that Lincoln had two portraits in his office: one of Andrew Jackson (that the previous president had left) and the other of John Bright, the British politician and progressive reformer. Bright seems to have been something of a hero to Lincoln at this time. Bright was a champion of democracy, abolition, and even equality in economic opportunity (268). Bright expressed hope for the Union cause, and this was meaningful for Lincoln.

Lincoln was gaining the steam he needed to draft and release the Emancipation Proclamation. The practical and military value of emancipation was rising and he would need this justification to sell the idea to the American public. The Confederate presence in Virginia was still strong. On July 22, 1862, he had a draft of the emancipation presented to his cabinet. The entire cabinet was, reportedly, shocked by the boldness and scope of the proposal. Secretary of State William Seward argued that it was not yet the opportune time to issue the proclamation and Lincoln was persuaded, tabling it for a later date. He would wait to issue it after the next major Union victory.

Meacham notes Lincoln’s proposed plans for the colonization of the formerly enslaved people. Believing, with some just cause, that even in the North there was virulent racism toward Black persons, Lincoln thought it necessary to initiate colonization projects in which free Black populations would live elsewhere. In 1862, Lincoln invited the first Black delegation to ever visit the White House for a discussion on the issue. Robert Purvis and Frederick Douglass, leading Black abolitionists, were not impressed with the plan and offended by the idea. Lincoln oversaw one small colonization project for 450 Black persons on a Caribbean island, but this went astonishingly poorly and no further colonization was thereafter attempted.

In a public response to an editorial, Lincoln made (in)famously clear why he was primarily fighting for the war cause: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that” (277). Lincoln’s prime directive was the maintenance of the Union, not the abolition of slavery. However, he states in the same response that he has a “personal wish” that all people be free (278). According to Meacham, Lincoln was going out of his way to present himself as a pragmatist so that the emancipation would land as a pragmatic, not a moralizing, decision.

The Battle of Antietam would be the justification Lincoln needed. Here, McClellan and the Union gained a decisive victory against the Confederates. On September 22, 1862, Lincoln told his cabinet that the time to issue the proclamation was at hand. Though the proclamation was dated on September 22, it would not take effect until January 1, 1863. Legally, the enslaved people of any state of the Confederacy would now be free in the Union.

This chapter opens with an assessment of late 1862 and early 1863 as a particularly tough time for the president politically. He had to remove McClellan from leadership on the battlefield. Public opinion of Lincoln was not particularly high, and the Republican Party did poorly in the midterm elections. Meacham notes that the stress of the presidency was taking a very tough toll on him physically. Further military defeats, like the Battle of Fredericksburg, were devastating. There was also trouble in the Midwest. Native American tribes were in violent disputes with white settlers in Minnesota.

Mecham describes Lincoln as a man who was not afraid to change his mind and update his views when the time came. In the final version of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln permitted the possibility of Black soldiers in the Union army. Upon signing the Emancipation, Lincoln wrote, “I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right” (288). He goes on to say that he has a clear conscience on the issue, though his supporters had called on him to issue it sooner. Internationally, the Union was in a better position. The victory at Antietam and the Emancipation Proclamation kept the British from getting involved in the war.

Lincoln was still an avid reader when he had the opportunity. He took comfort in the biblical story of Job, a man favored by God who was suddenly tested through extreme trial and desertion. The purpose of God’s test is to judge whether Job would be true to him even when he was disfavored.

The war was dragging on and Lincoln felt that in order to succeed in the defeat of the Confederacy he would need a larger army. He asked Congress for the authority to institute a draft, the first in United States history. The draft was not popular, and working-class white men rioted in New York City over the prospect of being drafted for such a war. Around this time Lincoln also reached out to Jewish leadership and revoked General Grant’s order that disallowed Jewish service in military command. According to Meacham, Lincoln was very much touched by the question of religious liberty.

Things were also continuously troubled for Lincoln domestically. Mary Todd was in dire emotional and mental condition during this time. Both parents still grieved the loss of their child. Roughly two years after their son’s death, Lincoln watched as the White House stables burned. These stables housed the presidential horses, whom his son, Willie, had loved. Lincoln, torn up by the incident, wept.

The Confederacy then crushes the Union in another major battle, Chancellorsville. They then move deep into Union territory, the state of Pennsylvania.