Analysis: President Abraham Lincoln’s Blind Memorandum

Date: 1864

Author: Hay, John M.

Genre: journal

Summary Overview

During the summer of 1864, President Abraham Lincoln asked the members of his cabinet to sign their names to the back of a document without looking at its contents. Later that fall, Lincoln called together those men and revealed to them that the document was a statement that Lincoln and the signatories would, upon defeat in the reelection campaign, work with the president-elect to make one last push to win the Civil War before the latter’s inauguration. Lincoln’s so-called “blind memorandum,” as described in the diary of his private secretary John Hay, demonstrates Lincoln’s fear that the war would cost him reelection against a candidate who would be unable to halt the nation’s disintegration.

Document Analysis

From a Union perspective, the Civil War was, until its very end, marked by embarrassing losses and Pyrrhic victories. Although by the end of the summer of 1864, the Union Army was showing signs of greater success, especially in the northern Confederate states, the war had slogged onward for four years, with the American people awaiting its end with growing impatience.

In Virginia, for example, the Overland Campaign operated by General Ulysses S. Grant had cost the lives of tens of thousands of Americans, and yet it had not produced a decisive defeat of the Confederates. General William Tecumseh Sherman’s forces, fighting in Georgia, had by this time reached the city limits of Atlanta but could not yet take the city. The war was proceeding at a snail’s pace, taking lives and draining the country’s financial resources with few tangible results.

President Abraham Lincoln had been committed from the beginning of his presidency to bringing about a swift and decisive end to the Civil War. His preferred course of action was to simply declare the Confederacy and its actions against the Union illegal. Lincoln was often defiant in his actions—his Emancipation Proclamation (which took effect on January 1, 1863), for example, was seen as a direct challenge to the slave-dependent economy of the Confederacy and as disruptive even in the North. Although many of his policies and proclamations emboldened his enemies, Lincoln remained unapologetic for such initiatives throughout the war.

Despite his often maverick style, Lincoln understood the need for support from his own government and, most importantly, from the people. He made frequent attempts to convince the American people of the importance of continuing the fight—one notable example was during his brief Gettysburg Address, given several months after that pivotal 1863 battle—even if the war continued for an extended period of time. As time and the brutality of war wore on, however, the people’s faith had become shaken. Lincoln’s apparent failure to live up to the lofty goal of defeating the Confederacy in quick fashion brought out Lincoln’s political rivals as his reelection campaign loomed in 1864.

Lincoln’s primary adversary was manifest in the so-called Peace Democrats, who were also known as Copperheads. This group, led by former congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, seized upon Lincoln’s perceived failings as a military commander and upon the war’s length. The group inserted into the Democratic Party’s 1864 platform a plank calling for an immediate end to the war and a negotiated reunion with the Confederate states. Adding insult to the injury of the Democrats’ open defiance of Lincoln’s authority during the war was their apparent choice for a party nominee: former General George McClellan. Although Lincoln had on two occasions removed McClellan from his command (for showing reluctance to fully engage the enemy), this man was very popular among his troops, an indication of the charisma that would almost certainly be called upon as the Democrats’ nominee.

By August of 1864, Lincoln had become highly pessimistic about his chances for reelection. He also knew that, if McClellan did become the nominee and eventually won the election, the country would undergo a major shift in its course—away from defeating the Confederate effort and toward a policy of reconciliation that, in Lincoln’s opinion, would leave the Union fractured for years to come.

In light of his fears, Lincoln held a meeting with the members of his cabinet on August 23. He took from his desk a piece of paper and, without sharing its contents, asked each member to sign his name to the back of the folded document. Secretary of State William Seward, Secretary of the Treasury William Fessenden, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, Attorney General Edward Bates, Secretary of the Interior John Usher, and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair all signed their names to Lincoln’s paper, which Lincoln then returned to his drawer.

A week later, McClellan indeed became the Democratic nominee, carrying the increasingly popular Peace Democrats’ call for the end of the war on his shoulders. In light of Lincoln’s perceived unpopularity and the Union Army’s apparent inability to score a decisive victory on the battlefield, it seemed as though Lincoln’s fears would be validated in the upcoming election.

As fate would have it, however, two days after McClellan’s nomination, General Sherman sent good news from Georgia to Lincoln. All roads and rails into and out of Atlanta were now under Union control, and the Confederate forces in the city were evacuating. “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won,” Sherman reported. News of Sherman’s victory quickly spread through the media, and the American voters started to unify behind their President again. Lincoln’s campaign saw a surge for the remainder of the campaign.

According to the journal of Lincoln’s private secretary, John Hay, on November 11, 1864, Lincoln’s election victory was confirmed during a meeting between the president and his cabinet. Hay reports in the account that, on that morning, fellow presidential private secretary John Nicolay had sent a dispatch to Lincoln with an illustration of Lincoln’s success in Illinois. There, the Republicans, who were expected to lose mightily to the Democrats (and who were under constant attack by the state media), won handily—an overwhelming majority of the congressional seats in that state went Republican, while the Democrats only won four. Lincoln had not only accomplished a landslide victory in his own campaign—he and his party had won an overwhelming majority in a state that had been hostile to the president.

Hay wrote in his diary that an unusual event took place following the report from Illinois. The president reached into his desk and pulled out a folded piece of paper that he had pasted closed. For those cabinet members present, he recalled the events of the previous summer, wherein the president had asked them to affix their names to a mysterious document. At the November 11 meeting, all of the members who had signed their names—with the exception of Blair, who had since been fired from his post—were present. Lincoln asked Hay to carefully open the letter. After Hay cut open the note, Lincoln read its contents.

Hay’s role in this meeting was critical, for neither the meeting nor the document itself were to be made public, at least in the immediate term. Lincoln had penned the memorandum on the same day he presented it for the cabinet members’ signatures. In the message, Lincoln wrote that it had become increasingly clear to him that his administration would not see a second term. In light of this fact, he would make it his duty to cooperate with the president-elect while continuing to fight the war until Lincoln’s successor was inaugurated. The new president, according to Lincoln, would likely be elected on the promise of immediately ending the war and negotiating reconciliation with the Confederate states. Lincoln was vehemently opposed to such a policy; in the memo, Lincoln wrote that the new president, if adopting such a position, would not be able to save the Union. It was incumbent upon Lincoln to attempt to end the war by continuing the fight he had started in 1861—hoping that the Union would succeed before the new administration came to power.

Hay states in his diary that Lincoln told his cabinet that this memorandum would not represent an acceptance of defeat or an expression of despair. Rather, there was a sense of purpose manifest in Lincoln’s action. Indeed, Hay argues that the memo would serve as a course of action for Lincoln and his administration. Although written at a time “when as yet we had no adversary,” Lincoln was operating under the presumption that the adversary in question would be McClellan. Regardless of who the Democratic nominee would be, however, Lincoln states in his memo that his administration “seemed to have no friends,” an indication of the public’s growing impatience with the war and the resulting opposing political forces—including those from Lincoln’s own party—that had surfaced during the campaign.

If Lincoln’s August 23 fear had become reality, he told Hay and the others in November, it was important to reach out to McClellan in a spirit of respect for the president-elect. Lincoln would have acknowledged to McClellan that the latter was “stronger,” with “more influence with the American people” than Lincoln during the campaign. However, Lincoln would still have been the president of the United States, with the ability to continue his policies until the day when McClellan officially took office. In light of these two facts, Lincoln told his cabinet, an opportunity became manifest. Lincoln, according to the memo, would have looked to use McClellan’s popularity and influence to raise more troops, while using his own presidential powers to finish the war in the manner he had set forth in 1861.

Lincoln’s involvement of his cabinet in the “blind memorandum,” as the document came to be known, served two purposes. The first was to unify his cabinet, even in the face of defeat. Had the administration simply accepted defeat to the Democrats and dispersed, the nation would have suffered as a consequence. Lincoln needed his cabinet officials to be just as engaged in continuing the war effort to its end as their president was. The second purpose was to ensure that Lincoln would stay on course, even with the time constraints of the coming inauguration closing in on him. Lincoln relied on the counsel of these men as he continued to fight for the integrity of the Union.

Hay’s account of Lincoln’s presentation does not include a great deal of commentary from the men seated in the room during the November meeting. Hay only cites the response of one of Lincoln’s senior-most cabinet officials, Secretary of State William Seward. Seward appeared highly dubious that McClellan would be willing to work with Lincoln in such a manner. Rather, Seward argued that McClellan would simply say “Yes, Yes,” paying Lincoln little more than lip service. Even if Lincoln continued to push for McClellan to aid him, Seward said, Lincoln would get no commitment—McClellan “would have done nothing at all.”

Lincoln’s response to Seward’s warning was one of limited hope. Even if McClellan refused to assist Lincoln, the president’s conscience would be clear. Lincoln knew there was a risk to reaching out to his political adversary, but the risks of inaction—the eventual disintegration of the Union—made one last attempt to fight and win the war worth taking that risk.

In his journal, Hay does not cite any responses from the other cabinet officials. As mentioned above, the blind memorandum and the meeting were not made public. In fact, the August meeting was also not publicized. The only account of the memorandum and the two proceedings was kept by Hay. Later, several of the men in that meeting asked Hay for copies of the letter as keepsakes from the war era. Hay begrudgingly agreed. One of those officials, Gideon Welles, was writing a memoir and wanted to use the document as part of his research. He first published his account of the blind memorandum in the Atlantic Monthly in 1878. In the account, Welles describes the memo as evidence of Lincoln’s despair and depression over the likelihood that he was facing defeat. He reflects on Lincoln’s demeanor in August, saying that, in his opinion, Lincoln had never been more depressed than during that period. Hay did not appreciate the Atlantic Monthly article; as possessor of the original memorandum, he regretted having given out copies of it. He was also in the midst of preparing his own account of Lincoln’s presidency, along with fellow former secretary John Nicolay. Hay and Nicolay would detail the events surrounding the blind memorandum in the ninth of ten volumes about Abraham Lincoln, published in 1890.

Lincoln’s blind memorandum has been analyzed considerably since it reached the public domain. Many scholars agree with Welles’s assessment—that it was an expression of Lincoln’s depression at the seemingly unwinnable situation with which he was faced. However, for the author of the Emancipation Proclamation—a bold statement made against seemingly insurmountable opposition—to react to this situation in such a private manner would seem out of character, even if Lincoln was experiencing such despair. With this departure in mind, scholars have analyzed Lincoln’s action rather than his words. In other words, the fact that Lincoln kept his next course of action confined to his cabinet may also be seen as an attempt to solidify the support of his political allies while simply reflecting upon the situation at hand. By offering his perspective on the implications of the election, Lincoln, through the blind memorandum, could have been ensuring the loyalty and support of his closest advisors as they took the next step after defeat.

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