Abraham Lincoln and William Cullen Bryant by Gilbert H. Muller

Author:Gilbert H. Muller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Bryant ascribed the wave of Republican defeats in the midterm elections to “the prevailing discontent with the conduct of the Administration.” He was confident, however, that the Emancipation Proclamation had little effect on the outcome of the fall elections. Instead, he asserted that the Proclamation highlighted the inherent incompatibility between slave and free societies. Bryant depicted this primal clash with figurative flair: “It is like yoking a drudge ox and the winged-horse Pegasus in the same traces; they will not pull together; and our incessant struggle rages between them.” Then, dispensing with figurative language, he leveled a savage attack on the “barbarism” inherent in slave society, which reflected the “very antipodes of democracy.” Slave society was predicated on “a brutal helot class, an ignorant and vicious low white class, and an imperative rich aristocratic class.” By contrast, a free society was based on “the moral life of the community”; such a society, modernist in essence, served as a beacon of “progressive national civilization.”

For Bryant, the war had become a clash of civilizations, but Lincoln did not have time for such lofty ideological sentiments. Looking careworn and dejected to visitors, the president was filled with anxiety over the loyalty of certain members of the officer corps. Grimly determined to choke off any potential mutiny, to “break up that game” as he said, Lincoln in a White House meeting demanded the resignation of a promising officer, Major John J. Key, who apparently had made intemperate remarks that the army had not intended to “bag” the Confederates after Antietam.

Perhaps unreasonably suspicious of disloyalty in the officer corps, Lincoln traveled to McClellan’s headquarters on October 1 not only to survey the Antietam battlefield but also to take the pulse of the Army of the Potomac. Studiously polite but formal in his meetings with McClellan, the president came away with the impression that his troops were loyal and that he was more popular with them than Little Mac. He returned to Washington confident that he could sack McClellan when he was ready.

After another frustrating month of McClellan’s prevarication and delay, Lincoln finally reached the breaking point: he relieved Little Mac of his command on November 5, 1862. The same day he appointed Ambrose M. Burnside—the swaggering six-foot “Burn”—as commander of the Army of the Potomac. McClellan’s military career had ended. “A great mistake,” Young Napoleon complained. “Alas, my poor country.” The general who confessed that he abhorred the Emancipation Proclamation, who favored his own race, and who did not “like the odor of either Billy Goats or niggers,” retreated to New York City; there he was lionized by influential Democrats, offered lucrative employment, and groomed for a presidential bid against Lincoln in 1864.

From Bryant’s perspective, the dismissal of McClellan was woefully overdue. “The President,” the Evening Post announced in its November 10 editorial, “has done an act which he has long been unwilling to do simply on the conclusions of his own judgment.” Bryant hailed Lincoln’s decision to finally dismiss McClellan, whose “peculiar cautiousness and

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