Who Was President Lincoln Addressing When He Said "If You Don't Want to Use the Army I Should Like to Borrow It for a While": The 1862 Governors' Deputation, the 300,000-Man Levy, and the Quotation That Never Was

The line is almost certainly misquoted. Lincoln never wrote or said "if you don't want to use the army I should like to borrow it for a while" in any document collected in the standard Lincoln corpus, including Nicolay and Hay's ten-volume Complete Works and the later Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy Basler. The remark resembles what Lincoln actually told a deputation of nine Union governors at the White House on June 28, 1862, when he offered to let them run the war themselves and borrow the army to do it. This article reconstructs that meeting, explains the 300,000-man call that followed, and separates the real quotations from the paraphrase that spread through Civil War histories.

The June 28, 1862 meeting was a nine-governor deputation, not a single visitor

On June 28, 1862, nine Northern governors traveled to Washington and met Lincoln in the White House to demand that he change his war strategy, or at least his generals. The delegation included Andrew Curtin of Pennsylvania, David Tod of Ohio, Israel Washburn of Maine, Nathaniel Berry of New Hampshire, Samuel Kirkwood of Iowa, Edward Salomon of Wisconsin, Charles Olden of New Jersey, William Sprague of Rhode Island, and Richard Yates of Illinois. They came with a written resolution asking Lincoln to reorganize his cabinet, name a general-in-chief to command the whole army, and prosecute the war with greater vigor.

The trigger was Major General George B. McClellan's failure on the Peninsula. McClellan had advanced on Richmond in the spring of 1862 with the Army of the Potomac, then stalled at the gates of the Confederate capital after the Seven Days' Battles, which opened on June 25 and ran through July 1. Northern governors had raised troops by the hundred thousand, and they watched that manpower sit idle while the Confederacy kept the field. The resolution they handed Lincoln was not a courtesy visit; it was a political demand from the very men who supplied his regiments.

Lincoln received the deputation at the White House and listened. The written answer he prepared for them, dated June 28, 1862, survives in the Lincoln papers and is reprinted in Basler's Collected Works, Volume 5. It is careful, slightly defensive, and—crucially—does not contain the borrowing-the-army line. What it does contain is Lincoln's explanation that he had already consulted senior officers about the matter and would continue to do so. The dramatic confrontation that later writers describe happened largely in the telling.

What Lincoln actually wrote back to the governors on that day

The written reply of June 28, 1862, is the primary document for the meeting, and its tone is worth knowing because it is much milder than the paraphrase. Lincoln thanked the governors for their "patriotic and respectful" communication and said he had given it what he called his best consideration. He noted that the statement of a "military commander-in-chief" was something he needed to weigh carefully, since the Constitution made him commander-in-chief himself and he could not delegate the responsibility without consequence. He promised to consult officers, and he did.

None of this reads like a man offering to hand over the army. It reads like a president buying time and defending his prerogative. The famous line, in every version that circulates, comes from a separate, unofficial account of the meeting—Lincoln's spoken words as remembered by the men in the room. That distinction matters because the written answer was drafted for public eyes, while the spoken exchange was not. Lincoln was polite on paper and blunt out loud, and the blunt version is the one history remembers.

Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln's friend and self-appointed bodyguard, published a version of the spoken exchange in his 1872 book Recollections of Abraham Lincoln. Lamon's reliability is uneven—he wrote from memory years after the events—but his account is the earliest extended narrative of the meeting. In Lamon's telling, the governors pressed Lincoln to act, and Lincoln responded by offering to step aside. Modern Lincoln biographers treat the substance as plausible and the wording as reconstructed.

The borrowing-the-army line as it appears in the earliest published accounts

The quotation as modern readers find it usually runs something like this: if the governors did not want to use the army, Lincoln said he would like to borrow it for a while. Lamon's account gives a longer version. He has Lincoln saying that if the governors were dissatisfied, they should appoint a general-in-chief of their own choosing, and that he, Lincoln, would "cheerfully submit" to the arrangement. He then adds that if the governors wanted to use the army, he would like to borrow it, provided they could show how it could be made to do something more than it had done.

That last conditional—"provided you can show how it can be made to do something"—is the actual sting of the remark. The borrowing-the-army phrase is the setup; the demand for a better plan is the punchline. Lincoln was not offering to hand over troops out of frustration. He was calling a bluff: the governors wanted different generals, and he wanted to know what those generals would do differently. The men in the room understood the challenge, and the meeting ended with the governors somewhat mollified and Lincoln not having changed a single command decision that day.

The phrasing "if you don't want to use the army, I should like to borrow it for a while" is a compression of this longer exchange. It is closer to paraphrase than quotation, and its neatness is a warning. Clean, balanced sentences with a single twist tend to be the work of later writers, not of a president speaking off the cuff in a crowded room.

Ward Hill Lamon's account and why every retelling of this line traces back to it

Lamon's book is the wellspring. He was in Washington during the war, knew Lincoln personally, and wrote with an insider's confidence that later historians have found both useful and frustrating. His account of the June 28 meeting runs to several pages and includes dialogue that no one else recorded. Lincoln's secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay wrote their own massive biography of Lincoln, finished in 1890, and they described the meeting more briefly and more cautiously. Their account confirms the governors came and the meeting was tense, but it does not give the borrowing-the-army line in the form Lamon reports.

That gap is the central problem. The two most authoritative early sources disagree on how much of the dialogue is recoverable. Nicolay and Hay had access to Lincoln's papers and wrote with his estate's cooperation. Lamon wrote from memory and from notes he may or may not have kept. When a quotation appears in one and not the other, the responsible conclusion is that the line is traditional, not documentary. It is very likely something like what Lincoln said. It is not something Lincoln is known to have said in those words.

This is not a reason to discard the story. It is a reason to use it correctly. The meeting happened, the deputation was real, the pressure was real, and Lincoln's willingness to say something biting to the men who supplied his armies fits everything else known about him. The borrowing-the-army remark belongs in the category of remembered speech, like the Gettysburg Address's "four score and seven" in its delivered form—plausible, sourced to a named witness, and not to be placed in quotation marks without a caveat.

The 300,000-man call of July 1, 1862 followed three days after the meeting

The meeting's practical result arrived on July 1, 1862, when Lincoln issued a call for 300,000 more volunteers. This is the number that makes the June 28 deputation more than an anecdote. The governors came asking for a change of strategy; Lincoln answered by asking them for more men. The call was issued under the Militia Act of July 17, 1862, which authorized the president to call out the militia and set terms of service, though the July 1 appeal preceded the act's passage and was made on the strength of existing authority and the governors' own offers.

The timing is the argument. Three days after being told his generals were failing, Lincoln demanded a fresh levy larger than any single call of the war up to that point. The governors who had traveled to Washington to demand a new commander went home with quotas. If Lincoln was frustrated enough to offer to lend them the army, he was also clear-eyed enough to know the army needed more men before it could do anything at all. The borrowing line and the 300,000 call are two halves of the same response.

The call did not fill. Recruiting lagged through the summer of 1862, and the failure of the Peninsula campaign depressed enlistment across the North. Lincoln's subsequent calls—for 300,000 more on August 4, 1862, and for 300,000 militia for nine months' service that same month—piled on top of each other. The gap between what the governors demanded in June and what the recruiting offices delivered in July and August is one of the war's quieter disappointments, and it is the part of the story the neat quotation leaves out.

Why the Peninsula campaign failure is the context the quotation cannot be understood without

McClellan's Army of the Potomac was the largest and best-equipped force the Union had assembled, and in the spring of 1862 it moved up the Virginia Peninsula toward Richmond. By late June, after the Seven Days' Battles, it had been driven back and would soon be withdrawn. The governors who came to Washington in June knew the numbers: tens of thousands of men, months of preparation, and no capture of the Confederate capital. Their resolution was a direct response to that failure, and their demand for a general-in-chief was a demand for someone other than McClellan, or at least someone above him.

Lincoln's problem was that he had no obvious replacement. Henry Halleck was brought east in July 1862 and made general-in-chief, a move that partly answered the governors' resolution, but Halleck proved cautious and bureaucratic. McClellan was eventually removed from command of the Army of the Potomac in November 1862, after failing to pursue Lee following Antietam. The command question the governors raised in June was not settled for months, and Lincoln's careful written reply—promising consultation, not action—was an accurate forecast of how slowly he moved.

A president who could not fire his general could still threaten to lend his army to the men who wanted the general gone. The remark, whether or not it was spoken in those words, captures the bind. Lincoln had the authority and not the options. The governors had the troops and not the authority. The borrowing line is a joke about that division, and jokes about real binds tend to survive because they are true in substance even when the wording drifts.

How the line traveled from Lamon's pages into textbooks and quotation sites

The borrowing-the-army remark spread through popular history rather than through academic Lincoln scholarship. Lamon's 1872 book was widely read, and later nineteenth-century writers repeated his dialogue without the caveats. By the twentieth century, the line was appearing in anthologies of Lincoln quotations and in histories written for general readers, usually without attribution to a specific document. The internet accelerated this. Quotation sites list the line among Lincoln's sayings, often with no source at all, and the compressed version has largely displaced Lamon's longer, conditional phrasing.

The compression follows a pattern familiar to anyone who works with historical quotations. A long, hedged spoken passage becomes a short, balanced written one. The conditional about showing a better plan drops out because it complicates the punchline. The nine governors drop out because they are hard to name in a caption. What remains is a president saying a clever thing to an unnamed audience, which is precisely the form that travels best and verifies worst. Treat any bare version of the line as suspect until it is tied to Lamon or to a specific historian's reconstruction.

The line also gets misattributed in the other direction—assigned to other meetings, other years, other presidents. Lincoln said many sharp things to many delegations between 1861 and 1865, and the borrowing-the-army remark has a generic quality that invites confusion. If a source gives the line without the June 28, 1862 date and without the governors' deputation, the source is repeating a tradition, not reporting a record.

Assessing what is documented, what is remembered, and what was invented

Sorting the layers is straightforward once the documents are laid out. The written reply of June 28 is documented. The nine-governor deputation is documented in multiple sources, including the governors' own resolution and Lincoln's reply. The July 1 call for 300,000 men is documented in the Collected Works and in the War Department's General Orders. Lamon's spoken dialogue is remembered. The compressed borrowing-the-army sentence as it appears on most websites is invented in wording, though its substance is close to Lamon.

A reasonable summary: Lincoln almost certainly said something in the room that amounted to an offer to let the governors try their hand at running the war, with the army as the loan. The exact words are not recoverable. The meeting's outcome—no change of command that day, a massive new levy three days later—is recoverable and matters more than the phrasing. Anyone quoting the line in a serious piece should attribute it to Lamon's recollection, note the date and the deputation, and avoid presenting it as a verbatim presidential utterance.

Who the reader should picture in the room, and who is missing from the famous version

The famous version of the line gives no audience, which is why the question "who was Lincoln addressing" is worth asking. The answer is a specific group of nine men, most of them up for reelection or under pressure from their legislatures, all of them responsible for raising and equipping the regiments Lincoln needed. Curtin of Pennsylvania was the delegation's most prominent figure and had called the meeting together after consulting other governors. Tod of Ohio, Kirkwood of Iowa, and Yates of Illinois represented the western states whose troops had fought in the western theater and who resented the east's dominance of strategy. Washburn of Maine, Berry of New Hampshire, and Sprague of Rhode Island represented New England.

What is missing from the famous version is the political weight of the audience. These were not supplicants. They were the men who made Lincoln's army possible, and they had come to tell him his generals were wasting it. The borrowing line works as a joke only if the listener understands that the army in question was, in a real sense, theirs to supply and his to command. The answer to "who was Lincoln addressing" is therefore both narrow (nine named governors on June 28, 1862) and broad (the Union's war governors, whose support Lincoln could not take for granted).

If you want to see the room, think of a hot Washington summer day, a White House receiving room, and nine men in travel-worn coats who had come by rail to deliver a document. Lincoln read it, answered it on paper, and then, according to the only extended account, said something sharper out loud. The written answer survives. The sharp thing survives in memory. Both are part of the record, and the record is more interesting than the quotation.

FAQ

Did Lincoln ever use the exact words "I should like to borrow it for a while"?

No primary document in the standard Lincoln corpus contains that sentence. The line traces to Ward Hill Lamon's 1872 Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, which reports a longer spoken exchange with the June 28, 1862 governors' deputation, and to later writers who compressed it. The substance—an offer to let the governors run the war and take the army—is plausible and fits the meeting's documented friction. The wording is a paraphrase, so quote it with the caveat.

How many governors met Lincoln on June 28, 1862, and who were they?

Nine: Andrew Curtin of Pennsylvania, David Tod of Ohio, Israel Washburn of Maine, Nathaniel Berry of New Hampshire, Samuel Kirkwood of Iowa, Edward Salomon of Wisconsin, Charles Olden of New Jersey, William Sprague of Rhode Island, and Richard Yates of Illinois. They delivered a resolution asking Lincoln to reorganize the cabinet and appoint a general-in-chief. The number nine matters because the compressed quotation gives no audience at all, and the audience is the answer to the question.

What did Lincoln do immediately after the meeting?

He issued a call on July 1, 1862, for 300,000 more volunteers—three days after the deputation. The call is documented in Basler's Collected Works and in War Department orders. Recruiting fell short through the summer, and further calls followed in August 1862. The sequence—demand from the governors, refusal to change command, immediate demand for more men—is the meeting's real legacy.

Is the quotation found in Nicolay and Hay's biography of Lincoln?

Nicolay and Hay describe the meeting and confirm its tension in their 1890 Abraham Lincoln: A History, but they do not supply the borrowing-the-army sentence in its familiar form. Their caution is a useful check on Lamon's more dramatic account. When the two earliest extended sources diverge, the safer reading is that the line is traditional rather than documentary.

Which battle prompted the governors to travel to Washington?

The Seven Days' Battles around Richmond, fought June 25 to July 1, 1862, which ended McClellan's Peninsula campaign without the capture of the Confederate capital. The governors' resolution responded directly to that failure. The timing explains the pressure Lincoln was under and why a remark about borrowing the army would land as a challenge rather than a joke.

Could Lincoln legally have lent the army to the governors?

No. The Constitution makes the president commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and Lincoln's written reply of June 28, 1862, says as much—he could not delegate the responsibility without consequence. The offer, if spoken, was rhetorical. Any actual transfer of command would have required legislation and would have broken the chain of authority the governors themselves depended on.

Why do so many quotation sites list the line without a source?

Because the line traveled through popular history rather than scholarship. Lamon's book was widely read, later writers repeated his dialogue without caveats, and twentieth-century anthologies and quotation sites stripped the date, the audience, and the conditional about showing a better plan. The result is a clean, balanced sentence that verifies poorly—the classic profile of a remembered quotation that has outrun its source.