Moreover, he clearly foresaw the absolute nature of a great civil war. Foreign wars may well, and often do, end in some sort of compromise, especially when the home life of the opponents can go on as before. But a great civil war cannot end in compromise because it radically changes the home life of one side or the other. Davis stood for "Independence or extermination"; Lincoln simply for the Union, which, in his clear prevision, meant all that the body politic could need for a new and better life. He accepted the word "enemy" as descriptive of a passing phase. He would not accept such phraseology as Meade's, "driving the invader from our soil." "Will our generals," he complained, "never get that idea out of their heads? The whole country is our soil."He was a life-long advocate of Emancipation, first, with compensation, now as part of the price to be paid for rebellion.
Emancipation, however, depended on the Union, not the Union on it. His Proclamation was ready in the summer of '62. But to publish it in the midst of defeat would make it look like an act of despair. In September, when the Confederates had to recross the Potomac after Antietam, the Proclamation was given to the world. Its first effect was greater abroad than at home; for now no foreign government could say, and rightly say, that the war, not being fought on account of slavery, might leave that issue still unsettled. This was a most important point in Lincoln's foreign policy, a policy which had been haunted by the fear of recognition for the South or the possibility of war with either the French or British, or even both together.
Lincoln's Cabinet was composed of two factions, one headed by Seward, the Secretary of State, the other by Chase, the Secretary of the Treasury. Both the fighting services were under War Democrats: the Army under Stanton, the Navy under Welles. All these ministers began by thinking that Lincoln had the least ability among them. Seward and Welles presently learnt better.
Stanton's exclamation at Lincoln's death speaks for itself "Now he belongs to the ages!" But Chase never believed that Lincoln could even be his equal. Chase and the Treasury were a thorn in the side of the Government; Chase because it was his nature, the Treasury because its notes fell to thirty-nine cents in the dollar during the summer of '64. Welles, hard-working and upright, was guided by an expert assistant. Stanton, equally upright and equally hardworking, made many mistakes. And yet, when all is said and done, Stanton was a really able patriot who worked his hardest for what seemed to him the best.
Such were the four chief men in that Cabinet with which Lincoln carried out his Union policy and over which he towered in what became transcendent statesmanship--the head, the heart, the genius of the war. He never, for one moment, changed his course, but kept it fixed upon the Union, no matter what the winds and tides, the currents and cross-currents were. Thus, while so many lesser minds were busy with flotsam and jetsam of the controversial storm, his own serener soul was already beyond the far horizon, voyaging toward the one sure haven for the Ship of State.
But Lincoln was more than the principal civilian war statesman:
he was the constitutional Commander-in-Chief of all the Union forces, afloat and ashore. He was responsible not only for raising, supplying, and controlling them, but for their actual command by men who, in the eyes of the law, were simply his own lieutenants. The problem of exercising civil control without practicing civilian interference, always and everywhere hard, and especially hard in a civil war, was particularly hard in his case, in view of public opinion, the press, his own war policy, and the composition of his Cabinet. His solution was by no means perfect; but the wonder is that he reached it so well in spite of such perverting factors. He began with the mere armed mob that fought the First Bull Run beset with interference. He ended with Farragut, Grant, and Sherman, combined in one great scheme of strategy that included Mobile, Virginia, and the lower South, and that, while under full civil control, was mostly free from interference with its naval and military work--except at the fussy hands of Stanton.
The fundamental difference between civil control, which is the very breath of *******, and civilian interference, which means the death of all efficiency, can be quite simply illustrated by supposing the proverbial Ship of State to be a fighting man-of-war. The People are the owners, with all an owner's rights; while their chosen Government is their agent, with all an agent's delegated power. The fighting Services, as the word itself so properly implies, are simply the People's servants, though they take their orders from the Government. So far, so good, within the limits of civil control, under which, and which alone, any national resources--in men, money, or material--can lawfully be turned to warlike ends. But when the ship is fitting out, still more when she is out at sea, and most of all when she is fighting, then she should be handled only by her expert captain with his expert crew. Civilian interference begins the moment any inexpert outsider takes the captain's place; and this interference is no less disastrous when the outsider remains at home than when he is on the actual spot.