Chapter 16
An Humble Instrument in the Hands of the Almighty November 1860–February 1861
I NOW LEAVE, NOT KNOWING WHEN, OR WHETHER EVER, I MAY RETURN, WITH A TASK BEFORE ME GREATER THAN THAT WHICH RESTED UPON WASHINGTON.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Farewell address at Springfield, Illinois, February 11, 1861
IN THE FIRST DAYS AFTER HIS ELECTION, ABRAHAM LINCOLN TOOK THE initial steps to build his administration and determine his policies. He faced a problem never encountered by any of his predecessors—how to preserve the nation. For all his gifts and abilities, Lincoln still did not fully understand the very real possibilities for secession and war while he remained isolated in Springfield. Thinking of himself as a son of the South, he failed to appreciate that Kentucky, as a border state, was not representative of Southern opinion. With his upbeat mind-set, removed from the information and intrigue of Washington, as well as Southern state capitals, he remained optimistic that all would yet be well.
Lincoln and his Republican colleagues had become used to persistent enmity between North and South, which, for nearly thirty years, had always stopped short of war. Lincoln, as the first president ever elected by a minority, sectional electorate, faced twin challenges: how to defend the Union but not resort to war, and how to save the Union but not give in to compromise. These challenges would grow, not diminish, in the long months ahead.
“WELL, BOYS, YOUR TROUBLES are over now,” Lincoln greeted some newspapermen on the morning after the election; “mine have just begun.” Lincoln had gone home at 2 a.m., but not to sleep. Both exhilarated and exhausted, “I then felt, as I never had before, the responsibility that was upon me. I began at once to feel that I needed support, others to share with me the burden.”
Lincoln stayed up pondering whom he should name to his cabinet. He had been thinking about this question for some time, but on this night he wrote down eight names on a slip of paper:
Lincoln
Judd
Seward
Chase
Bates
M. Blair
Dayton
Welles
Lincoln listed himself at the top, but within the list. The other seven names all had some kind of leadership experience, in business or politics, whereas Lincoln was keenly aware that he had no executive experience. All were on record as against the extension of slavery into the territories. Lincoln included his three major Republican rivals, William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates. The four other men listed had come into the Republican ranks from previous Free Soil and Democratic affiliations. Lincoln seemed to be aiming for geographical balance. Gideon Welles came from New England (Connecticut); William Seward and William Dayton from Northeastern states (New York and New Jersey); Norman Judd and Salmon Chase from the Northwest (Illinois and Ohio); and Edward Bates and Montgomery Blair from border states (Missouri and Maryland). Lincoln would hold this list close to his chest.
IT TOOK SEVERAL DAYS for the returns to reveal the final shape of the election. Lincoln won with 180 electoral votes, followed by 72 for John Breckinridge, 39 for John Bell, and 12 for Stephen Douglas. Lincoln won the popular contest with 1,866,452 votes to 1,376,957 for Douglas, 849,781 for Breckinridge, and 588,879 for Bell. This highly spirited election drew 82.2 percent of the eligible voters to the polls, making it the second highest turnout in the nation’s history. Lincoln won all of the free, Northern states, dividing the electoral votes of New Jersey with Douglas. Despite finishing second in the popular vote, Douglas won only Missouri. Bell won three states in the upper South: Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Breckinridge won the rest of the South.
In the midst of celebration, there was some sobering news. Lincoln was the first Republican elected as president, but he won with only 39.9 percent of the popular vote, and with almost a million votes less than the combined total of his three opponents. The Republicans had failed to win either chamber of Congress. The most portentous warning for a party that had steadfastly denied it was a sectional party was that Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin won not one vote in ten Southern states.
Immediately after the election, Lincoln committed one of his greatest errors of political judgment by failing to grasp the growing agitation over secession spreading across the South. Senator Truman Smith of Connecticut tried to alert him when he wrote Lincoln a long letter on November 7, 1860. Smith had become aware of a group, “among the most respectable citizens of New York,” who were speaking out against Lincoln’s election and plans for the nation. The senator told Lincoln,
Public exigencies may be such as to make it incumbent on a successful candidate to speak out, not to repel slander, for that is of little consequence, but to disarm mischief makers, to allay causeless anxiety, to compose the public mind, and to induce all good citizens to … “judge the tree by its fruit.”
Lincoln replied on November 10, 1860, “It is with the most profound appreciation of your motive, and highest respect for your judgment too, that I feel constrained, for the present, at least, to make no declaration for the public.” Lincoln’s decision to be silent muted his greatest strength—speaking persuasively to any audience.
President-elect Lincoln now sought to organize for a long transition. It would be four months before he would be inaugurated in Washington on March 4, 1861. This extended time would remain the pattern in American politics until the second term of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937, when the date for the presidential inauguration was shifted from March 4 to January 20.
Lincoln continued to use the governor’s room on the second floor of the statehouse, a room about fifteen by twenty-five feet in size, with long windows looking out on the south and east sides of the square. He arrived each morning looking much the same, except for a fringe of beard he had begun to grow. Eleven-year-old Grace Bedell of Westfield, New York, had written him on October 15, 1860, urging him to grow a beard. She told Lincoln, “You would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President.”
John G. Nicolay, Lincoln’s one-man campaign staff, now became his one-man transition team. Lincoln worked at a corner table with his secretary. “Heaps and hills” of newspapers were piled everywhere. Letters cascaded in from Republican leaders recommending themselves or others for offices. Lincoln dictated responses or wrote them in his own hand. Hate mail from the South also arrived regularly, constantly comparing Lincoln to the devil. The writers threatened him with death by hanging, gibbet, and stiletto. Most were not signed with real names, but rather by the “Southern Brotherhood” or other such organizations.
Lincoln greeted friends, politicians, reporters, and visitors in his corner office from ten until twelve. At noon, he walked home for lunch with Mary and the boys. He returned to work with Nicolay in the early afternoon and held another open house from three until five-thirty. The young newspaperman Henry Villard, posted to Springfield to cover Lincoln for the New York Herald, recorded the scene in the first days after Lincoln’s election. “He sits or stands among his guests, throwing out hearty Western welcomes, asking and answering questions, joking, endeavoring to make matters every way comfortable to all present.”
People even followed Lincoln home at night and “he was once more crowded upon in his parlor, and had to undergo another agony of presentations … by the constant influx of an ill-mannered populace.” Mary enjoyed the visibility and attention, but she had “to endure,” night after night, the complete first floor of her home filled with visitors, as many “callers ask each other, ‘Is that the old woman?’ ” Villard, who had covered Lincoln in the debates in 1858, was impressed that Lincoln’s personality had not changed with his election. “He is precisely the same man as before—open and generous in his personal communications with all who approach him.”
UNDER RELENTLESS PRESSURE to speak about his policies as the future president, Lincoln partially broke his silence on November 20, 1860. Senator Trumbull was slated to speak at a Republican victory celebration in Springfield, and Lincoln gave him two paragraphs to insert into his speech. Lincoln sat beside Trumbull as he announced that under the new Republican administration “each and all of the States will be left in as complete control of their own affairs respectively, and at as perfect liberty to choose, and employ, their own means of protecting property, and preserving peace and order within their respective limits, as they have ever been under any administration.”
These words were meant to reassure the South, but the speech continued with words that took away that assurance. “Disunionists per se, are now in hot haste to get out of the Union, precisely because they perceive they can not, much longer, maintain apprehension among the Southern people that their homes, and firesides, and lives, are to be endangered by the action of the Federal Government.” Lincoln’s insertion revealed that he wrongly believed the secessionists represented only a tiny minority of Southern sentiment. His concluding words were the most surprising of all. “I am rather glad of this military preparation in the South. It will enable the people the more easily to suppress any uprisings there, which their misrepresentations of purposes may have encouraged.” Fortunately, Trumbull decided not to include these two sentences, and the public never heard them.
Trumbull’s address satisfied no one. The Democratic-leaning New York Herald charged that the president-elect seemed to be either cut off from “all knowledge of the Southern revolutionary movements of the day; or that he is so completely under the control of his party advisors that he dare not speak; or that he feels himself unequal to the crisis, and is afraid to speak.”
Though following the nineteenth-century tradition of refusing to speak publicly before inauguration, in private Lincoln worked tirelessly to influence events in the coming months, by both affirmation and rejection of ideas brewing in Congress. On November 21, 1860, Lincoln left Springfield, for the first time in more than six months, for a three-day meeting with Vice President–elect Hamlin and several others in Chicago.
Calling himself a private citizen, Lincoln purchased tickets on the Chicago, Alton, and St. Louis Railroad. He and Mary traveled with Lyman and Julia Trumbull—Mary was now speaking to Julia—in a regular crowded train car. Lincoln also invited Joshua Speed and his wife, Fanny, to come from Kentucky, as he wished to surround himself with friends, even as he sought to build a government mostly with men he had never met. Lincoln spoke with Speed, a Southerner who disagreed with Lincoln about slavery, about a cabinet position, but his longtime friend was not interested.
In Chicago, Lincoln explained to Hamlin and Trumbull that he wanted to reach out to his rivals, especially Seward, Bates, and Chase; he wanted to tap the best talent available for the difficult road ahead. He was most concerned about getting Seward on board as secretary of state. He wondered if Seward, rejected by the convention, might in turn reject Lincoln’s invitation. He entrusted Senator Hamlin, wise to the ways of Washington politics, to handle the negotiations with Seward. As Trum-bull listened to Lincoln’s rationale to secure the most able leaders for the cabinet, he began to assume that Lincoln “would lean heavily on members of his Cabinet and leave many crucial decisions to them.”
Lincoln looked forward to meeting with Vice President–elect Hannibal Hamlin at a conference in Chicago in November 1860.
ON DECEMBER 3, 1860, Lincoln waited anxiously for news from Washington: On this day the Thirty-sixth Congress would assemble and receive President Buchanan’s fourth and final annual message. Buchanan was popularly known as a “doughface,” a derogatory term for the Northerners who, pliable like dough, adapted their views to appease Southern leaders on slavery. In his farewell, the seventy-year-old president placed responsibility for the national crisis on the North. “The long continued and intemperate interference of the northern people with the question of slavery in the southern States has at length produced its natural effects.” How could the present crisis be settled? “All that is necessary” is for the South “to be let alone and permitted to manage their domestic institutions in their own way.”
President Buchanan told the states of the South there was no legal right under the Constitution to proceed to acts of secession, because the United States was an organic Union and not merely a voluntary association of states. Having denied that the federal government, under his leadership, was guilty of any abuse of Southern rights, Buchanan put Lincoln on notice. “Reason, justice, a regard for the Constitution, all require we shall wait for some overt and dangerous act on the part of the President elect, before resorting to such a remedy.” Finally, Buchanan declared that he did not have the power to mediate the conflict between the federal government and the states, something only Congress had the power to do.
Lincoln, upon reading the address, felt dismay at Buchanan’s assessment of the crisis. He realized that the lame-duck president would continue to be part of the problem.
IN HIS INCOMING CORRESPONDENCE, Lincoln found a number of letters advocating the inclusion of Senator Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania in the cabinet. He had not included Cameron in his original list, in part because he had heard a steady refrain of charges that Cameron was a wire-puller whose politics always ended up being economically profitable for himself. Now, as Lincoln sought to resolve the final shape of the cabinet, a tug-of-war developed between pro-and anti-Cameron forces.
Lincoln also reread a letter from Henry J. Raymond. From his post as editor of the New York Times, Raymond had become aware of the public misunderstanding about the intentions of Lincoln and the new Republican administration. He had written to urge Lincoln to make some reassuring statement and, rather audaciously, sent Lincoln some sentences of what the president-elect ought to say. Lincoln, having sat on Raymond’s letter, now replied that he believed his policy of silence had “a demonstration in favor of my view.” Lincoln had been talked into inserting words into Trumbull’s speech, but now he asked Raymond, “Has a single newspaper, heretofore against us, urged that speech [upon its readers] with a purpose to quiet public anxiety?” Lincoln, irritated and reaching for a way to express his discontent to the New York Times editor, concluded with Jesus’s words “ ‘They seek a sign, and no sign shall be given them.’ ” Jesus’s words were delivered to “an evil and adulterous generation;” Lincoln characterized his own generation as possessed by “ ‘Party malice’ and not ‘public good.’ ”
Lincoln’s first choice for his cabinet was Seward, but he did not consider the effect that New York politics, as well as the rumor mill, would have on his wish. While Lincoln proceeded in his own mind with all deliberate speed, others wondered aloud why he was taking so long to decide on the key appointment of secretary of state. This interval of silence allowed for the anti-Seward factions in New York to recycle their criticisms. Then political gossip began to circulate that Lincoln did not really want Seward but intended to offer him the position with the expectation that Seward would decline it. As these rumors drifted back to Springfield, Lincoln took up his pen on December 8, 1860, to write Seward directly. He admitted he had “delayed so long to communicate” because of what he thought was “a proper caution in this case.” As for the gossip, “I beg you to be assured that I have said nothing to justify these rumors. … It has been my purpose, from the day of the nomination at Chicago, to assign you, by your leave, this place in the administration.” Several days later, Seward thanked Lincoln for the honor of the invitation, but asked for more time to consider it.
Lincoln now contacted Bates, next in priority for the cabinet. Lincoln offered to travel the ninety miles to meet the august, bearded Bates in St. Louis, but the old-line Whig believed that would be demeaning for the president-elect, and offered to come to Springfield instead. They met in Bates’s room at the Chenery House on December 15, 1860. Lincoln offered him the position of attorney general, which he accepted. Immediately after their conference, Bates confided to his diary that he found Lincoln “free in his communications and candid in his manner.”
LINCOLN BELIEVED THAT ONE WAY to reassure the South that his was not a sectional government was to include at least one Southerner in his cabinet. Hamlin had supported this idea in their face-to-face meeting in Chicago, as did Seward and Judge Davis. Lincoln considered James Guthrie, a Kentuckian who had served both as president of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad and as secretary of the treasury in the Pierce administration. Lincoln sent Speed to feel out Guthrie who, about to turn seventy-two, said he supported the Union but did not want the position.
As he deliberated over his cabinet, Lincoln learned of a striking speech delivered by one of the most reasonable Southern leaders, Alexander Stephens, his old Whig colleague from the Thirtieth Congress, who had recently retired from Congress. On November 14, 1860, Stephens, even more shrunken in form than when Lincoln had known him, had pleaded in a speech to the Georgia legislature, “Don’t give up the ship. Don’t abandon her yet.”
Someone called out, “The ship has leaks in her.”
“Let us stop them if we can,” replied Stephens.
Lincoln wrote to Stephens requesting a copy of his speech. Stephens sent the speech on December 14, along with the injunction, “The country is certainly in great peril, and no man ever had heavier or greater responsibility resting upon him than you have in the present momentous crisis.”
After studying Stephens’s speech, Lincoln replied on December 22, 1860, asking, “Do the people of the South really entertain fears that a Republican administration would, directly, or indirectly, interfere with their slaves, or with them, about their slaves? If they do, I wish to assure you, as once a friend, and still, I hope, not an enemy, that there is no cause for such fears.” Lincoln might have stopped there, but did not. “You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub.”
Stephens replied on December 30, 1860. “In addressing you thus, I would have you understand me as being not a personal enemy, but as one who would have you do what you can to save our common country.” Yet, Stephens did believe slavery was right, and resented any party that continued to make slavery the primary issue in the country. Lincoln had undoubtedly misinterpreted Stephens’s understanding of the Union. He felt a Union upheld by force was “nothing short of a consolidated despotism.” In concluding, Stephens appealed to wisdom from Proverbs 25:11 to encourage Lincoln to speak publicly before it was too late. “A word fitly spoken by you now would be like ‘apples of gold in pictures of silver.’ ” Lincoln never replied.
Although Lincoln was a reconciler by nature, and his first instinct was to reach out to his former rivals, after Stephens’s reply he became more hesitant about including Southerners in his cabinet. In an editorial he placed in the Illinois State Journal on December 12, 1860, affirming the “frequent allusion to a supposed purpose on the part of Mr. Lincoln to call into his cabinet two or three Southern gentlemen, from the parties opposed to him politically,” he asked two questions.
Would such a person “accept a place in the cabinet?”
“Does he surrender to Mr. Lincoln, or Mr. Lincoln to him, on the political differences between them?”
Seward, Thurlow Weed, and Judge Davis nevertheless continued to press Lincoln to consider a Southerner. He hosted Weed for a two-day meeting in Springfield on December 20 and 21, 1860. They were joined by Davis and Swett. Weed, a tall man whose elongated nose was compared by cartoonists to Cyrano de Bergerac’s, had earned a reputation as a tough political operator in New York. He found himself surprised by his attraction to Lincoln. “While Mr. Lincoln never underestimated the difficulties which surrounded him, his nature was so elastic, and his temperament so cheerful, that he always seemed at ease and undisturbed.” Lincoln told Weed that “the making of a cabinet” was not nearly as easy as he had supposed.
Weed encouraged Lincoln to have at least two members of the cabinet from slaveholding states, but Lincoln wondered if these “white crows” could be trusted over the long haul. Vice President–elect Ham-lin proposed North Carolina congressman John A. Gilmer, a slaveholder and former Whig. Gilmer had written a long letter to Lincoln on December 10, 1860. “For one politically opposed to you” Gilmer had encouraged Lincoln to write a “clear and definite exposition of your views,” which “may go far to quiet, if not satisfy all reasonable minds, that on most of them it will become plain that there is more misunderstanding than difference.” To probe what differences there were, Gilmer asked Lincoln six detailed questions. Lincoln replied on December 15 with a question of his own: “May I be pardoned if I ask whether even you have ever attempted to procure the reading of the Republican platform, or my speeches, by the Southern people?” Lincoln wanted to know why a new statement would “meet a better fate? … It would make me appear as if I repented for the crime of having been elected, and was anxious to apologize and beg forgiveness.” Lincoln referred Gilmer to chapter and verse in the published Joint Debates but also answered his questions in some detail. In the end, he said to Gilmer what he said to Alexander Stephens: “You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted.” Lincoln did, however, authorize Weed to explore a cabinet position with Gilmer. The matter lingered on through January, Lincoln telling Seward on January 12, 1861, that he still hoped Gilmer would “consent to take a place in the cabinet.” Gilmer wrote on January 29 declining the invitation.
A struggle ensued over whether to appoint Henry Winter Davis, a former Whig, or Montgomery Blair, a former Democrat, both from Maryland, where they were locked in a bitter rivalry for leadership of the Republican Party. In the end, Blair prevailed. At some point Weed asked Lincoln if it was wise to give former Democrats a majority of one in the new cabinet. Lincoln, with his wrinkled smile, replied, “But why do you assume that we are giving that section of our party a majority of the cabinet? You seem to forget that /expect to be there; and counting me as one, you see how nicely the cabinet would be balanced and ballasted.”
With Bates and now Blair joining the cabinet, Lincoln was content that his choices would appease Southerners. He overestimated the effect the appointment of two border-state politicians—one of whom had been a candidate for the Republican nomination for president—would have on the South’s perception of him and failed to understand the violent feelings represented by leaders such as Senators Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, Robert Toombs of Georgia, and John Slidell of Louisiana.
IN LINCOLN’S TRANSITION WINTER, he would spend much more time than he expected in dealing with a Republican house divided. The Republicans of 1856 found cohesion in their role as an opposition party. The Republicans in the winter of 1860–61 had become an institution in power torn between radicals and conservatives who represented different regions and had different viewpoints on slavery and the South.
Lincoln won his leadership spurs in Illinois by building a coalition brought together by initial opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Stephen Douglas and staying together because of its hatred of Pierce, Buchanan, and Democratic corruption. Many ex-Whigs and ex-Democrats became Republicans more for what they were against than what they were for. Now, Lincoln faced Republican acrimony not only in states such as Pennsylvania, New York, and Maryland, but also on the national stage of the House and Senate in Washington.
The question on everyone’s lips was where Lincoln stood in the midst of this spectrum of beliefs. His nomination gave all sides hope that he was on their side. Conservatives voted for him both because he was a former Whig, and because they could not vote for Seward. Radicals knew of his persistent stand against the extension of slavery. As rumors swirled about his cabinet selections, some Republicans became fearful he would surround himself with old-line Whigs; others worried that he would be open to too many ex-Democrats. All factions within the party believed they could persuade him to move in their direction.
In Congress, Republicans and many Democrats—having lost confidence in President Buchanan—scurried to forge some kind of consensus on secession. With Lincoln publicly silent in Springfield, others stepped in to fill the void. Seward became viewed by many as the unofficial head of the party. Once he accepted his new role as secretary of state—a position that in the first seventy-two years of the Republic exhibited far more power over administrative policy than in modern times—he began to exercise leadership, sometimes on his own accord.
Old John J. Crittenden, the unobtrusive seventy-three-year-old senator from Kentucky, offered compromise legislation that he hoped could stop the secessionist impulse. Born during the Constitutional Convention and first entering the Senate at the inauguration of President James Monroe in 1817, Crittenden, an old-line Henry Clay Whig, had seen it all. With his still-erect angular frame, sparkling dark eyes, iron-gray hair, and a tobacco quid in his jaw, he was calm and thoughtful in demeanor. He shone not in speeches on the Senate floor but in the art of private negotiation.
If Lincoln believed he knew Kentucky, Crittenden was convinced he understood it much better. His legislation grew from his experiences in a border state he thought of as three states. Unbridled secessionists nestled together on the southern border with Tennessee, Unionists tended to live along the Ohio River in northern Kentucky, and the central part of the state was inhabited by people who simply wanted to get along. Crittenden believed that in this sense Kentucky represented a microcosm of the nation at large.
Crittenden rose in the Senate on December 18, 1860, to offer a comprehensive package of six constitutional amendments that would remove slavery from federal jurisdiction for all time. The Kentucky senator believed that all agreements since 1787 had been legislative compromises that were always subject to overturning by later Congresses. The first amendment would reinstate the Missouri Compromise all the way to the Pacific Ocean with the effect of protecting slavery south of the line. The second amendment would prohibit Congress from abolishing slavery in slave states. He also called for a congressional resolution on the fugitive slave law that would recognize the law as constitutional but amend it to take out some clauses “obnoxious” to citizens in the North.
Lincoln watched from Springfield as what became known as the Crittenden Plan gathered momentum. Petitions poured into Congress supporting it. Business interests in the North and some Republican leaders believed it could provide a way out of the mounting crisis.
Lincoln opposed the Crittenden Plan because it would permit slavery to expand into the West. Congressman Elihu B. Washburne and Senator Lyman Trumbull were Lincoln’s eyes and ears in Congress during these critical months. Washburne wrote from Washington, “The secession feeling has assumed proportions of which I had but a faint conception when I saw you at Springfield, and I think our friends generally in the west are not fully apprised of the imminent peril which now environs us.” Lincoln, aware that anxiety would push some in his own party toward compromise, wrote to Trumbull, “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery. Stand firm. The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter.” Three days later, Lincoln wrote to Washburne, “Prevent, as far as possible, any of our friends … entertaining propositions for compromise of any sort. … hold firm, as with a chain of steel.”
Despite popular support for the Crittenden Plan, including the backing of some Republicans, Lincoln won high marks for steeling Republicans in the Senate to back away from the illusory compromise.
THE SOUTHERN PRESS was filled with indignation at Lincoln’s election. “The election of Lincoln … means all the insult … that such an act can do,” spewed the Wilmington (North Carolina) Herald. The New Orleans Crescent summed up the editorial comment of countless Southern papers: “The Northern people, in electing Mr. Lincoln, have perpetrated a deliberate, cold-blooded insult and outrage on the people of the slaveholding states.” In the border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, editors spoke out against talk of secession and disunion. St. Louis’s Missouri Democrat, a Republican newspaper, wrote, “Throughout the campaign … [Lincoln] has been portrayed by most newspapers as an Abolitionist; a fanatic of the John Brown type. Never was a public man so outrageously misrepresented.” Nevertheless, the Richmond Enquirer, which Lincoln had long read to keep up with the sentiment of the South, charged that “the Northern people, by a sectional vote, have elected a President for the avowed purpose of aggression on Southern rights.” The Enquirer concluded, “This is a declaration of war.”
Lincoln continued to believe that the strong Southern talk was mostly bluff. The North had encountered this bluster before, in 1820 and 1850, and also at the time of the formation of the Republican Party in 1856. The plantation owners were angry, but Lincoln was convinced that the ordinary yeoman farmers, whom he believed he understood, would not, in the end, go along with disunion. He continued to think that sensible leaders would stop any final moves toward separation.
The “tug” Lincoln spoke of in his letter to Trumbull became a jolt on December 20, 1860, when a South Carolina convention, meeting in Charleston, voted unanimously to secede from the Union. The die was cast. Or was it? As politicians and editors raged, everyone wondered about Lincoln’s attitude. Even as he refrained from public speaking, people looked to the Illinois State Journal for clues to Lincoln’s thinking. The Journal editorialized that South Carolina could not pull out of the Union without a fight. “If she violates the laws, then comes the tug of war.” Editor Baker, in regular conversation with Lincoln, had taken Lincoln’s tug analogy from the Trumbull letter. “The President of the United States has a plain duty to perform.” The Journal worried, “Disunion by armed force, is treason, and treason must and will be put down at all hazards.”
Over the next forty days, one by one, the states of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas voted themselves out of the Union, quickly taking over federal institutions, including forts and arsenals. The whole North waited to see if Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas would follow.
IN THE MIDST OF the Union’s disintegration, Lincoln made a major priority the preparation of his inaugural address to be delivered in Washington on March 4, 1861. He had begun his research shortly after his election, borrowing from the Illinois State Library The Statesman’s Manual, a volume published in 1854 that contained the addresses and messages of presidents from 1789 to 1849. Lincoln examined President Andrew Jackson’s proclamation in the nullification controversy of 1832. As he had done before his Cooper Union address, Lincoln was looking for historic precedents.
In late December, with the coming of a new governor and the convening of the state legislature scheduled on January 7, 1861, Lincoln had to give up his office in the statehouse. Joel Johnson, who owned an office building on the Springfield square, offered Lincoln the use of two offices on the second floor.
Lincoln discovered that these new offices, even busier than the old, were not an ideal place to work on an inaugural address. He accepted an invitation from Clark Moulton Smith, his brother-in-law, to use a room on the third floor of his store as his writing space. Lincoln wrote and revised at an old merchant’s desk, which contained plenty of pigeonholes for his many notes.
The Charleston Mercury’s headline trumpeted South Carolina’s secession from the Union on December 20, 1860.
In January, Lincoln asked Herndon to acquire copies of two speeches he had long appreciated. As a young man living in New Salem, Lincoln had read Daniel Webster’s reply to Robert Hayne. In 1830, after Senator Robert Hayne of South Carolina had defended the right of nullification—arguing that ultimate power rested in the states, which could withdraw from the Union—on the floor of the Senate, Senator Webster of Massachusetts replied to him, closing with the memorable words, “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.” Lincoln also asked for a copy of Senator Henry Clay’s memorable speech in support of the Compromise of 1850.
By late January, Lincoln asked William H. Bailhache, one of the owners of the Illinois State Journal, to secretly print copies of his inaugural address. For an address of this magnitude, he decided to seek the suggestions of a few friends. He asked Judge Davis to read the entire address, but he made no suggestions. Lincoln put copies of his address, plus notes for speeches for the trip to Washington, in a black oilcloth handbag, which he gave to his son Robert for safekeeping on the train and in the cities they would be visiting in February.
TOWARD THE END OF JANUARY, Lincoln began his farewells to family and friends. On January 30, 1861, Lincoln slipped away from reporters and office seekers and traveled by train and horse and buggy to Farmington, a small remote community in Coles County. He wished to see his aging stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln. The summer before, when she heard of her stepson’s nomination, she feared that if elected something terrible would happen to him. Lincoln also wanted to visit his father’s grave, which had stood unmarked since 1851. On this trip, Lincoln ordered a stone marker for it.
Returning to Springfield, Lincoln concluded many personal and family matters. He rented the beloved family home to Lucian Tilton, the retired proprietor of the Wabash Railroad, for $350 a year. The Lincolns sold much of their furniture. They gave away their floppy-eared dog Fido to neighbor boys John and Frank Roll, whose father, John Roll, was the carpenter who had helped remodel the Lincoln home. Fearing a violation of privacy, Mary burned heaps of old letters and papers in the rear alley. Lincoln left a batch of his letters and papers for safekeeping with Elizabeth Grimsley, Mary’s cousin. Mistaking the speeches and letters for trash, Grimsley’s maid would later burn most of the contents, which included Lincoln’s “Discoveries and Inventions” speech as well as the partial drafts from his “House Divided” speech. On February 7, 1861, the Lincolns moved out of their home to the Chenery House, a hotel across from Lincoln’s office.
On his final day in Springfield, Sunday, February 10, 1861, Lincoln walked to his law office at 105 South Fifth Street to meet his law partner, Herndon. Lincoln rested his large frame on the comfortable sofa one last time. After the two men reminisced about old times and conferred about unfinished legal business, Lincoln requested that the sign board on its rusty hinges at the foot of the stairway should remain. “Let it hang there undisturbed. … If I live I’m coming back some time, and then we’ll go right on practicing law as if nothing had ever happened.” On that final evening, Lincoln took some Chenery House cards, turned them over, and wrote, “A. Lincoln, Executive Mansion, Washington.” The nearly one hundred days as president-elect in Springfield had come to a close.
ON MONDAY MORNING, February 11, 1861, Lincoln arrived at the small, brick Great Western railway station to begin the journey to Washington. The day dawned cold with rain dripping from low-hanging clouds.
Lincoln had notified the press that he would offer no speech. After the many farewells of recent days, Lincoln believed there was no need for more words. Newspaperman Villard captured a compelling scene. “The President elect took his station in the waiting-room, and allowed his friends to pass by him and take his hand for the last time.” Lincoln’s “face was pale, and quivered with emotion so deep as to render him almost unable to utter a single word.”
The ringing of the engine bell alerted Lincoln that it was time to depart. As Lincoln stepped out onto the platform, friends and neighbors who had come to say their good-byes crowded each side of the special train. Despite his publicly announced intention not to speak, the crowd thronging around the rear platform encouraged their neighbor to offer some remarks.
In response to these requests, Lincoln hesitated, gathering himself to offer a speech he had not intended to give. Caught off guard, in the poignancy of this moment, Lincoln bared his spirit in deeply emotive language: “My friends—No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything.” Though his personality usually prompted him to conceal rather than to reveal his emotions, he now spoke openly. The sadness etched in his face was voiced in his words. In twelve succinct words, Lincoln offered heartfelt appreciation to a city where he had lived for nearly twenty-four years, and to his neighbors, and friends.
Then Lincoln quickly moved from past to present: “I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington.”
Until now, Lincoln had steadfastly avoided speaking about the task that lay ahead. Now, in the midst of spontaneous remarks about community and family, he inserted what might sound like an audacious comment about himself.
Lincoln, as a young boy, had developed a reverence for George Washington through his reading of Mason Locke Weems’s Life of George Washington. In his address in 1838 to the Young Men’s Lyceum, Lincoln had spoken of the less important role of his own generation compared to that of the giants who came before. As a young man, he had said he was standing at the end of the revolutionary generation now being carried away by “the silent artillery of time.” Now an “old man” by his own reckoning, he was being summoned by some unsearchable fate or providence “to a task greater than Washington.” These words were not boastful. They were offered with a sense of an appointment with destiny.
Lincoln concluded,
Without the assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trusting in Him, who can go with me, and remain with you and be every where for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me.
He devoted 63 of his 152 words to sketching the omnipresence of God.
The God that Lincoln invoked was more than the creative first force cited by Jefferson. Lincoln appealed to a God who acted in history—who attended George Washington in the past, was able to go with Abraham Lincoln to Washington in the present, and would remain with Lincoln’s friends in Springfield in the future.
In saying “To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me,” Lincoln reached for prayer as the invisible connective tissue that would bind him to those he was about to leave.
Lincoln’s capacity to connect with his audience was demonstrated in their response. His encouragement to pray elicited shouts of “We will do it, we will do it.” As Lincoln turned to enter the train, three cheers split the air, and in a few moments the train chugged slowly forward into the dark morning.
As Lincoln took his seat in the passenger car, the powerful Rogers locomotive began to pull the train slowly east. Newspaper correspondents Henry Villard, Edward L. Baker of the Illinois State Journal, and Henry M. Smith of the Chicago Tribune crowded around Lincoln and asked about the speech. In response, Lincoln started to write out what he had said. The effects of a moving train made the task difficult, and at the beginning of the fifth sentence, Lincoln handed the paper to John Nicolay, who took up the task of writing while Lincoln dictated.
Lincoln, after delivering his farewell address in Springfield, tried to write it down on a bumpy train. He finally dictated it to John Nicolay, who completed writing the brief speech.
Back in Springfield, Lincoln’s friend James Conkling described the audience’s response to Lincoln’s farewell remarks when he wrote his son, Clinton, a good friend of Bob Lincoln’s, the next day. As for the crowd, “Many eyes were filled to overflowing.” Of “Mr. Lincoln,” his “breast heaved with emotion and he could scarcely command his feelings sufficiently to commence.”
In the next day’s paper, Edward L. Baker editorialized in the Journal, “We have known Mr. Lincoln for many years; we have heard him speak upon a hundred different occasions; but we never saw him so profoundly affected, nor did he ever utter an address which seemed to us so full of simple and touching eloquence.”
Lincoln’s farewell words did not stay in Springfield. His remarks appeared in newspapers the next day and in Harper’s Weekly. Citizens in large cities and small towns across America were eager to know more about this gangly rail splitter from the West who was about to become their president.
LINCOLN’S JOURNEY TO WASHINGTON would provide his first opportunity to speak to the American people since his election three months earlier. He would see and be seen by more people in more places than any American president before him. After Lincoln’s extended silence, politicians, press, and ordinary people were eager to take his measure. Yet his speeches on his journey from Springfield to Washington have usually been overlooked or undervalued.
Seward had urged Lincoln in December 1860 to make the long trip through some of the most populous states, from the prairies of Illinois, across central Indiana and Ohio, down to Cincinnati to the Southern border on the Ohio River. In Cleveland and Pittsburgh, Lincoln would encounter people on the western border of the urban-industrial edge of an expanding America. He would arrive in New York in a region settled by New England Yankees and proceed through the center of the state to New York City. He looked forward to his visit to Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the birthplace of the nation. The twelve-day trip would cover 1,904 miles over the tracks of eighteen separate railroads. Lincoln’s itinerary called for him to arrive in the nation’s capital to a gala reception late on Saturday afternoon, February 23, 1861, ten days before his inauguration.
The events of the twelve days took on the festive moods of a carnival, a political rally, and a religious revival. Between the major cities, the train would make numerous stops at small towns decorated with American flags. Lincoln would say again and again that the celebrations were not about a person, but about an office and a nation. He insisted that the guest lists should not be partisan. In that spirit, he invited supporters of Stephen Douglas, John Breckinridge, and John Bell to ride with him.
Whatever the original reasons for the journey, by the time of Lincoln’s departure from Springfield it had become controversial. Seward had long ago changed his mind about the wisdom of the trip. He wrote on December 29, 1860, informing Lincoln of a Southern plot to seize the capital on or before March 4. Seward stated, “I therefore renew my suggestion of your coming earlier than you otherwise would—and coming in by surprise—without announcement.” Lincoln did not take Seward’s counsel and continued planning his extended preinaugural trip. Nicolay wrote that Lincoln “had no fondness for public display,” but well understood “the importance of personal confidence and live sympathy” between a leader and his constituents.
AS IF LINCOLN’S TRAIN TRIP to Washington were not drama enough, a second train with another president-elect departed on the same day, February 11, 1861, bound for his own inauguration. Only one week before Lincoln’s departure, on February 4, delegates from six Southern states gathered in Montgomery, Alabama, to begin the task of hammering out a new nation. Four days later, this Confederate convention adopted a provisional constitution. The next day, they unanimously elected a provisional president, Jefferson Davis, and a provisional vice president, Lincoln’s friend Alexander Stephens of Georgia.
Starting on February 11, 1861, all eyes across the nation were fixed on not one but two trains. After departing from Springfield, Lincoln’s moved slowly east through Indianapolis, Columbus, and Pittsburgh toward Washington. Davis, after leaving his plantation, Brierfield, in Mssissippi, was carried by boat to Vicksburg, and then traveled by train in a roundabout route to Jackson, Chattanooga, and Atlanta, and then west toward Montgomery, the Confederate capital. The public’s fascination with these two journeys to two capitals was chronicled in the New York Times on February 11, 1861, in two columns placed side by side:
The New Administration The New Confederacy
—
LINCOLN’S TRAIN ARRIVED at its first overnight stop at Indianapolis right on schedule at 5 p.m. on February 11, 1861. Governor Oliver P. Morton, Indiana’s first native-born governor, welcomed Lincoln who, on the first of many occasions, had to reply extemporaneously to welcoming words by a local politician. In his remarks Lincoln offered what would become an oft-repeated demur: “I do not expect, upon this occasion, or on any occasion, till after I get to Washington, to attempt any lengthy speech.”
Lincoln referred to himself as an “accidental instrument.” He would work with this metaphor in several ways in the days ahead. In Indianapolis, he restricted his responsibility as president by saying his role was “temporary” and “for a limited time.” His real purpose, he said, was to encourage the responsibilities ordinary citizens must ask of one another.
During an evening reception for members of the Indiana legislature, Lincoln grew impatient as he asked for the speeches that he had entrusted to his son. The boy and the bag were missing. When Robert, who was being called “the Prince of rails” by his young friends, finally arrived, he explained that he had left the oilcloth bag with the hotel clerk. Lincoln bid a hasty departure to the reception, and his long legs carried him quickly down the stairs to the hotel lobby. Burrowing through the pile of luggage, Lincoln attacked the first bag that looked like his, but it surrendered only a dirty shirt, playing cards, and a half-empty whiskey bottle. He quickly discovered his bag and recovered the copies of the inaugural address and other speeches, the whole episode good for a laugh at the end of an exhausting day.
While in Indianapolis, Lincoln gave Orville H. Browning, who had accompanied Lincoln on the train, one of the copies of his inaugural address. Upon his return to Springfield, Browning wrote his response to Lincoln. He made a single proposal, which he wrote at the bottom of the page of Lincoln’s text. He suggested that Lincoln “modify” the passage: “All the power at my disposal will be used to reclaim the public property and places which have fallen; to hold, occupy and possess these, and all other property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties on imports; but beyond what may be necessary for these, there will be no invasion of any State.”
Browning told Lincoln, “On principle the passage is right as it now stands. The fallen places ought to be reclaimed. But cannot that be accomplished as well, or even better without announcing the purpose in your inaugural?” He suggested revising the sentence to delete the clause, “to reclaim the public property and places which have fallen.”
JEFFERSON DAVIS’S PRESIDENTIAL TRAIN pulled into Jackson, Mississippi, on the evening of February 11, 1861. Encircled by well-wishers, he spoke at the capitol to an audience that “occupied every available inch of space.” Davis declared that he deplored war but would face it “with stern serenity of one who knows his duty and intends to perform it.” He asserted that England and France will “not allow our great staple to be dammed up within our limits.” Finally, if war came, Davis promised to “go forward … with a firm resolve to do his duty as God might grant him power. ”
THE PRESIDENTIAL SPECIAL arrived in Columbus on February 13, 1861, punctually at 2 p.m. Lincoln went directly to the capitol, where he addressed the Ohio legislature. In his prepared remarks he said, “I have not maintained silence from any want to real anxiety. It is a good thing that there is no more than anxiety, for there is nothing going wrong. … We entertain different views upon political questions, but nobody is suffering anything.”
Lincoln’s remark “there is nothing going wrong” added to the controversy that was building toward his inauguration. Supporters contended that his remarks were part of a strategy to diminish public alarm. Critics argued that Lincoln’s remarks exposed a president-elect out of touch with the forces gearing up for civil war.
Meanwhile, Jefferson Davis traveled through Mississippi and Alabama on February 14, 1861, the firing of cannons welcoming him at many stops. In Stevenson, in northeastern Alabama, he told the crowd he expected the border states to become part of the Confederate States of America within sixty days. He also declared that “England will recognize us, and … grass will grow in the northern cities where the pavements have been worn off by the tread of commerce.” Davis concluded by saying he “hopes for peace but is prepared for war.”
on the morning of february 15, 1861, Lincoln spoke from the balcony of the Monongahela House in Pittsburgh to a crowd of five thousand standing under umbrellas. After Columbus, he was determined to sidestep questions about an impending civil war and instead spoke about the tariff, a topic of great importance in Pennsylvania. He declared that because there was no direct taxation, a tariff was necessary. “The tariff is to the government what a meal is to the family.” In speaking about protections for home industries, Lincoln stated, “I must confess I do not understand the subject in all its multiform bearings.”
Villard characterized the Pittsburgh speech as “the least creditable performance” of the entire trip. “What he said was really nothing but crude, ignorant twaddle.” He believed that this speech proved Lincoln to be “the veriest novice in economic matters.”
Next, Lincoln backtracked to Cleveland. Here he was entering greater New England, for the northern tier of Ohio was settled by westward-moving Yankees from the New England states. New England, and by extension northern New York and northern Ohio, were the regions that supported abolitionism most strongly. Cheering spectators stood in deep mud along Euclid Street. Lincoln told the assembled crowd, “Frequent allusion is made to the excitement at present existing in our national politics, and it is as well that I should also allude to it here. I think that there is no occasion for any excitement. The crisis, as it is called, is altogether an artificial crisis.”
These remarks only fueled the controversy begun in Columbus. Did the president-elect not understand the escalating crisis?
The nation’s greatest orator read the daily newspaper reports of Lincoln’s speeches. Edward Everett, a native of Massachusetts, had served with distinction in a multiplicity of offices for over four decades. He began as a young professor at Harvard in 1819 and later returned as president of the nation’s oldest college. Everett served Massachusetts as congressman, senator, and governor and represented the United States as secretary of state and minister to England. On February 15, 1861, he wrote in his diary, “These speeches thus far have been of the most ordinary kind, destitute of everything, not merely of felicity and grace, but of common pertinence.” Everett, who believed that speeches were a mirror revealing the character of the person, had formed an opinion about Lincoln. “He is evidently a person of very inferior cast of character, wholly unequal to the crisis.”
LINCOLN LEFT CLEVELAND on the morning of February 16, 1861. The train traveled east again, through Ohio and across the northwest corner of Pennsylvania. Entering New York, the Presidential Special chugged along the shore of Lake Erie. The first stop was Westfield, where a banner was stretched across the tracks emblazoned, “Welcome Abraham Lincoln to the Empire State.”
He told the crowd that several months earlier he had received a letter from a “young lady” from Westfield. His correspondent recommended that he “let his whiskers grow, as it would improve my personal appearance.” Lincoln had accepted her counsel, and now he wished to know if she was present in the crowd. A small boy cried out, “There she is Mr. Lincoln.” Grace Bedell, a blushing eleven-year-old girl with dark eyes, stepped from the crowd, and President-elect Lincoln gave her several hearty kisses “amid the yells of delight from the excited crowd.”
Lincoln arrived in Buffalo in the afternoon. Exhausted, at the half-way point of his long train trip, he rested on the Sabbath, attending church the next day with former president Millard Fillmore. Across the street from Lincoln’s hotel, a banner on the Young Men’s Christian Association building was inscribed with words of reply to Lincoln’s farewell remarks at Springfield: “We Will Pray For You.”
Lincoln, upon his arrival in Westfield, New York, asked to see Grace Bedell, the young girl who had written to tell him he would look better in whiskers.
JEFFERSON DAVIS ENDURED his longest day of traveling and speaking on February 16, 1861. Arriving in Atlanta at about four o’clock in the morning, he spoke at midmorning, taking aim at Northern abolitionism, especially “its systematic aggression upon the constitutional rights of the South for the last forty years.”
After the speech, Davis boarded his special car on the Atlanta and West Point Railroad and headed west across Georgia. During the day he stopped to speak in Fairburn, Palmetto, Newman, Grantville, LaGrange, and West Point. At each stop he was greeted by women waving their handkerchiefs. Entering Alabama, the Davis train stopped for speeches at Opelika and Auburn. A correspondent for the New York Tribune reported that Davis would give elements of the same speech several times during his many stops. Davis arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, at 10 p.m. at the completion of his eight-hundred-mile train trip.
On Monday, February 18, 1861, while Lincoln’s train traveled through the Mohawk Valley toward Albany, Lincoln learned that Jefferson Davis had taken the oath of office as provisional president of the Confederate States of America, and Alexander Stephens the oath of office as vice president. In Montgomery, Davis gave his inaugural address from the portico of the Alabama capitol building, which was now the capitol of the Confederacy. Without a national anthem, the band played “La Marseillaise,” the national anthem of France.
Davis spoke to his fellow Southerners, to the citizens of the United States, and to foreign nations who had a vital interest in the availability of cotton. He never mentioned Lincoln. The speech was remarkably mild; some in the audience had expected to hear a trumpet call to war. As for oratory, the second sentence of the address was typical.
Looking forward to the speedy establishment of a permanent government to take the place of this, and which by its greater moral and physical power will be better able to combat with the many difficulties which arise from the conflicting interests of separate nations, I enter upon the duties of the office to which I have been chosen with the hope that the beginning of our career as a Confederacy may not be obstructed by hostile opposition to our enjoyment of the separate existence and independence which we have asserted, and, with the blessing of Providence, intend to maintain.
This sentence of one hundred words reveals the limitations of Davis’s leadership. The sentences would only get longer as the speech unfolded. The contrast to Lincoln’s economy of language and rhetorical artistry would become even more apparent in the four years to come.
LINCOLN ARRIVED IN NEW YORK CITY on Tuesday, February 19, 1861, at 3 p.m. with what had to be mixed emotions. He was returning to the scene of his triumph at Cooper Union the previous winter, but though he had carried the state in the election, he received less than 35 percent of the vote in the city.
An apprehensive crowd estimated at more than two hundred thousand greeted Lincoln. One astute observer was Walt Whitman, the young poet who was in the midst of negotiations with a Boston publisher to bring out an expanded third edition of his Leaves of Grass. Whitman found himself on the top of a Broadway omnibus stalled in traffic. He took the measure of Lincoln for the first time.
I had, I say, a capital view of it all, and especially of Mr. Lincoln, his look and gait—his perfect composure and coolness—his unusual and uncouth height, his dress of complete black, stovepipe hat pushed back on the head, darkbrown complexion, seam’d and wrinkled yet canny-looking face, black, bushy head of hair, disproportionately long neck, and his hands held behind him as he stood observing the people.
Whitman wrote of Lincoln, “He look’d with curiosity upon that immense sea of faces, and the sea of faces return’d the look with similar curiosity.”
The poet spied hostility as well as curiosity and admiration in the crowd. “Many an assassin’s knife and pistol lurk’d in hip or breast-pocket there, ready, as soon as break and riot came.”
Another interested eyewitness was George Templeton Strong. Strong, a lawyer, Episcopal vestryman, and trustee of Columbia College, was a careful observer of political events. In 1835, at age fifteen, he began to write in uniform blank books every evening before he went to bed. He wrote for the next forty years. The diary, ultimately comprising nearly four and a half million words, would remain unknown to the public for more than fifty years after Strong’s death in 1875. A supporter of Seward, Strong had been following Lincoln’s trip as it wound its way toward New York. He wrote an appraisal in his diary. “Lincoln is making little speeches as he wends his way towards Washington, and has said some things that are sound and credible and raise him in my esteem.” However, Strong confided, “But I should have been better pleased with him had he held his tongue altogether.”
Strong walked uptown on Broadway the next afternoon to join the crowd welcoming Lincoln. Later that evening Strong recorded in his diary, “The great rail-splitter’s face was visible to me for an instant, and seemed a keen, clear, honest face, not so ugly as his portraits.”
AFTER LINCOLN HAD SPENT more than a week on the Presidential Special, newspapers across the North and South began to weigh in with their assessments of his preinaugural speeches. The Baltimore Sun, with ardent Southern sympathies, offered the opinion, “He approaches the capital of the country more in the character of a harlequin,” or a character in a comedy. “There is that about his speechification which, if it were not for the gravity of the occasion, would be ludicrous.” The pro-Lincoln Chicago Tribune countered, “The wiseacres who indulge in criticism of the verbal structure of Mr. Lincoln’s recent speeches” were off the mark. The Tribune’s defense pointed out that former presidents George Washington and Andrew Jackson did not have the “gift of gab” when asked to speak extemporaneously.
Yet some pro-Lincoln editors were worried. Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican, had been enthusiastic about Lincoln when he heard him speak in Boston in 1848, and the paper had supported Lincoln in the 1860 election. But Bowles was concerned as he read reports of Lincoln’s speeches. On February 26, 1861, he wrote to Henry L. Dawes, a member of Congress from Massachusetts, of his discouragement both with Lincoln and the disagreements rankling the Republican Party. Bowles told Dawes, “Lincoln is a ‘simple Susan.’ ”
Among Republicans in Congress trepidation abounded. In several speeches, when Lincoln seemed to be supporting coercion of the South, his words were taken to be a refutation of Seward’s efforts at conciliation. In other speeches, Lincoln seemed to point toward a policy of moderation. Questioners wondered whether Lincoln was wavering in his position or even certain of his own opinion.
Charles Francis Adams, the son and grandson of presidents, whom Seward would soon propose to Lincoln to become minister to England, was deeply concerned. He confided to his diary on February 20, 1861, “[Lincoln’s speeches] betray a person unconscious of his position as well as the nature of the contest around him.” Adams thought that Lincoln was “good-natured, kindly,” but he considered the president-elect “frivolous and uncertain.” In Adams’s evaluation, Lincoln’s speeches “put to flight all notions of greatness.”
THE PRESIDENTIAL SPECIAL departed New York at 9:05 a.m. on February 21, 1861, reaching Trenton, the state capital of New Jersey, at 11:50 a.m. Speaking in the Senate chamber, Lincoln told the legislators that of all the accounts of the “struggles for liberties,” none remained so fixed in his mind as Washington crossing the Delaware and winning the battle at Trenton on December 26, 1776.
At Indianapolis, Lincoln had spoken of himself as an “accidental instrument.” At Trenton, he changed his meaning and his metaphor: “I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people.” Lincoln often pointed to his humble beginnings, but his depiction of the American people as an “almost chosen people” is one of his most enigmatic phrases. The concept that Americans were God’s chosen people arrived with the Puritans. This identity flourished in the eighteenth century and, whether in secular or religious versions, undergirded the revolutionary generation that founded a new nation in 1776. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Americans added the sense of “manifest destiny,” the right and duty to inhabit and civilize the whole of the continent to promote the great experiment in democracy.
Lincoln never clarified “almost.” Is his qualification an allusion to slavery? In an era of absolutes, whether sponsored by abolitionists or secessionists, Lincoln could live comfortably with the uncertainties facing an “almost chosen people.”
Lincoln reached Philadelphia at 4 p.m. on Thursday, February 21, 1861. In response to greetings from Mayor Alexander Henry, Lincoln declared his fidelity to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. “All my political warfare has been in favor of the teachings coming forth from that sacred hall.” Lincoln used fiery imagery from the Psalms to swear his allegiance: “May my right hand forget its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if ever I prove false to those teachings.”
The next day, the booming of cannon and the ringing of church bells announced the celebration of the birthday of George Washington. Early in the morning, Lincoln traveled by carriage to Independence Hall where he participated in the raising of the new American flag with thirty-four stars, the final star for Kansas, which had been admitted as a state on January 29, 1861. Lincoln told the huge crowd, “I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”
Lincoln, bareheaded, raised the flag at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. F. DeBourg took this photograph just after sunrise on George Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1861.
He had offered this sentiment a number of times since his reemer-gence into politics in 1854, but Lincoln must have taken special delight in affirming his loyalty to the Declaration of Independence at the place where the sacred document was signed more than eighty-four years before. To underline his commitment to this principle, he told his audience, “I would rather be assassinated on the spot than to surrender it.”
On the previous evening, Lincoln had been startled to learn of a plan to kill him before he could reach Washington. In his room at the Continental Hotel, Lincoln met Allan Pinkerton, a Chicago detective whose company worked for the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad. Pinkerton informed Lincoln that his detectives had uncovered a plot to assassinate him as his train car was pulled by horses through the streets of Baltimore in the middle of the day. Pinkerton insisted that no one in the presidential party be told of the plot and that Lincoln take a train for Washington that night. He refused. He insisted on keeping his date at Independence Hall.
Lincoln left Philadelphia at 9 a.m. for the 106-mile trip to Harris-burg, the state capital of Pennsylvania. Governor Andrew Curtin met Lincoln and took him to the state capitol, where he addressed the legislature in joint session.
At dusk, the plans for Lincoln’s secret trip to Washington were put into action. Instead of traveling with his usual stovepipe hat, Lincoln wore a soft Kossuth hat given to him in New York. At Philadelphia, Lincoln boarded a sleeping car, accompanied by only Pinkerton and Ward Hill Lamon, his Illinois lawyer friend and now bodyguard, but no one slept. Lincoln was so tall that he “could not lay straight in his berth.” The train arrived in Baltimore at about 3:30 a.m., and Lincoln’s car was transferred to the Camden Street Station, where he boarded a Baltimore and Ohio train and waited in the dark for thirty minutes before departing at 4:15 a.m. for Washington. Lincoln arrived at the Baltimore and Ohio depot at New Jersey Avenue and C Street at six in the morning, almost ten hours ahead of his scheduled late-afternoon arrival and reception. He arrived in Washington virtually alone, unannounced and unrecognized.
Allan Pinkerton, a Chicago detective who uncovered a plot to assassinate Lincoln in Baltimore, accompanied the president-elect on a secretive night journey to Washington.
Lincoln, exhausted from his twelve-day train trip, went to Mathew Brady’s studio probably the day after his arrival in Washington. Alexander Gardner took five poses of a president-elect deep in thought.CHAPTER 16
An Humble Instrument in the Hands of the Almighty November 1860–February 1861
I NOW LEAVE, NOT KNOWING WHEN, OR WHETHER EVER, I MAY RETURN, WITH A TASK BEFORE ME GREATER THAN THAT WHICH RESTED UPON WASHINGTON.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Farewell address at Springfield, Illinois, February 11, 1861
N THE FIRST DAYS AFTER HIS ELECTION, ABRAHAM LINCOLN TOOK THE initial steps to build his administration and determine his policies. He faced a problem never encountered by any of his predecessors—how to preserve the nation. For all his gifts and abilities, Lincoln still did not fully understand the very real possibilities for secession and war while he remained isolated in Springfield. Thinking of himself as a son of the South, he failed to appreciate that Kentucky, as a border state, was not representative of Southern opinion. With his upbeat mind-set, removed from the information and intrigue of Washington, as well as Southern state capitals, he remained optimistic that all would yet be well.
Lincoln and his Republican colleagues had become used to persistent enmity between North and South, which, for nearly thirty years, had always stopped short of war. Lincoln, as the first president ever elected by a minority, sectional electorate, faced twin challenges: how to defend the Union but not resort to war, and how to save the Union but not give in to compromise. These challenges would grow, not diminish, in the long months ahead.
“WELL, BOYS, YOUR TROUBLES are over now,” Lincoln greeted some newspapermen on the morning after the election; “mine have just begun.” Lincoln had gone home at 2 a.m., but not to sleep. Both exhilarated and exhausted, “I then felt, as I never had before, the responsibility that was upon me. I began at once to feel that I needed support, others to share with me the burden.”
Lincoln stayed up pondering whom he should name to his cabinet. He had been thinking about this question for some time, but on this night he wrote down eight names on a slip of paper:
Lincoln
Judd
Seward
Chase
Bates
M. Blair
Dayton
Welles
Lincoln listed himself at the top, but within the list. The other seven names all had some kind of leadership experience, in business or politics, whereas Lincoln was keenly aware that he had no executive experience. All were on record as against the extension of slavery into the territories. Lincoln included his three major Republican rivals, William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates. The four other men listed had come into the Republican ranks from previous Free Soil and Democratic affiliations. Lincoln seemed to be aiming for geographical balance. Gideon Welles came from New England (Connecticut); William Seward and William Dayton from Northeastern states (New York and New Jersey); Norman Judd and Salmon Chase from the Northwest (Illinois and Ohio); and Edward Bates and Montgomery Blair from border states (Missouri and Maryland). Lincoln would hold this list close to his chest.
IT TOOK SEVERAL DAYS for the returns to reveal the final shape of the election. Lincoln won with 180 electoral votes, followed by 72 for John Breckinridge, 39 for John Bell, and 12 for Stephen Douglas. Lincoln won the popular contest with 1,866,452 votes to 1,376,957 for Douglas, 849,781 for Breckinridge, and 588,879 for Bell. This highly spirited election drew 82.2 percent of the eligible voters to the polls, making it the second highest turnout in the nation’s history. Lincoln won all of the free, Northern states, dividing the electoral votes of New Jersey with Douglas. Despite finishing second in the popular vote, Douglas won only Missouri. Bell won three states in the upper South: Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Breckinridge won the rest of the South.
In the midst of celebration, there was some sobering news. Lincoln was the first Republican elected as president, but he won with only 39.9 percent of the popular vote, and with almost a million votes less than the combined total of his three opponents. The Republicans had failed to win either chamber of Congress. The most portentous warning for a party that had steadfastly denied it was a sectional party was that Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin won not one vote in ten Southern states.
Immediately after the election, Lincoln committed one of his greatest errors of political judgment by failing to grasp the growing agitation over secession spreading across the South. Senator Truman Smith of Connecticut tried to alert him when he wrote Lincoln a long letter on November 7, 1860. Smith had become aware of a group, “among the most respectable citizens of New York,” who were speaking out against Lincoln’s election and plans for the nation. The senator told Lincoln,
Public exigencies may be such as to make it incumbent on a successful candidate to speak out, not to repel slander, for that is of little consequence, but to disarm mischief makers, to allay causeless anxiety, to compose the public mind, and to induce all good citizens to … “judge the tree by its fruit.”
Lincoln replied on November 10, 1860, “It is with the most profound appreciation of your motive, and highest respect for your judgment too, that I feel constrained, for the present, at least, to make no declaration for the public.” Lincoln’s decision to be silent muted his greatest strength—speaking persuasively to any audience.
President-elect Lincoln now sought to organize for a long transition. It would be four months before he would be inaugurated in Washington on March 4, 1861. This extended time would remain the pattern in American politics until the second term of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937, when the date for the presidential inauguration was shifted from March 4 to January 20.
Lincoln continued to use the governor’s room on the second floor of the statehouse, a room about fifteen by twenty-five feet in size, with long windows looking out on the south and east sides of the square. He arrived each morning looking much the same, except for a fringe of beard he had begun to grow. Eleven-year-old Grace Bedell of Westfield, New York, had written him on October 15, 1860, urging him to grow a beard. She told Lincoln, “You would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President.”
John G. Nicolay, Lincoln’s one-man campaign staff, now became his one-man transition team. Lincoln worked at a corner table with his secretary. “Heaps and hills” of newspapers were piled everywhere. Letters cascaded in from Republican leaders recommending themselves or others for offices. Lincoln dictated responses or wrote them in his own hand. Hate mail from the South also arrived regularly, constantly comparing Lincoln to the devil. The writers threatened him with death by hanging, gibbet, and stiletto. Most were not signed with real names, but rather by the “Southern Brotherhood” or other such organizations.
Lincoln greeted friends, politicians, reporters, and visitors in his corner office from ten until twelve. At noon, he walked home for lunch with Mary and the boys. He returned to work with Nicolay in the early afternoon and held another open house from three until five-thirty. The young newspaperman Henry Villard, posted to Springfield to cover Lincoln for the New York Herald, recorded the scene in the first days after Lincoln’s election. “He sits or stands among his guests, throwing out hearty Western welcomes, asking and answering questions, joking, endeavoring to make matters every way comfortable to all present.”
People even followed Lincoln home at night and “he was once more crowded upon in his parlor, and had to undergo another agony of presentations … by the constant influx of an ill-mannered populace.” Mary enjoyed the visibility and attention, but she had “to endure,” night after night, the complete first floor of her home filled with visitors, as many “callers ask each other, ‘Is that the old woman?’ ” Villard, who had covered Lincoln in the debates in 1858, was impressed that Lincoln’s personality had not changed with his election. “He is precisely the same man as before—open and generous in his personal communications with all who approach him.”
UNDER RELENTLESS PRESSURE to speak about his policies as the future president, Lincoln partially broke his silence on November 20, 1860. Senator Trumbull was slated to speak at a Republican victory celebration in Springfield, and Lincoln gave him two paragraphs to insert into his speech. Lincoln sat beside Trumbull as he announced that under the new Republican administration “each and all of the States will be left in as complete control of their own affairs respectively, and at as perfect liberty to choose, and employ, their own means of protecting property, and preserving peace and order within their respective limits, as they have ever been under any administration.”
These words were meant to reassure the South, but the speech continued with words that took away that assurance. “Disunionists per se, are now in hot haste to get out of the Union, precisely because they perceive they can not, much longer, maintain apprehension among the Southern people that their homes, and firesides, and lives, are to be endangered by the action of the Federal Government.” Lincoln’s insertion revealed that he wrongly believed the secessionists represented only a tiny minority of Southern sentiment. His concluding words were the most surprising of all. “I am rather glad of this military preparation in the South. It will enable the people the more easily to suppress any uprisings there, which their misrepresentations of purposes may have encouraged.” Fortunately, Trumbull decided not to include these two sentences, and the public never heard them.
Trumbull’s address satisfied no one. The Democratic-leaning New York Herald charged that the president-elect seemed to be either cut off from “all knowledge of the Southern revolutionary movements of the day; or that he is so completely under the control of his party advisors that he dare not speak; or that he feels himself unequal to the crisis, and is afraid to speak.”
Though following the nineteenth-century tradition of refusing to speak publicly before inauguration, in private Lincoln worked tirelessly to influence events in the coming months, by both affirmation and rejection of ideas brewing in Congress. On November 21, 1860, Lincoln left Springfield, for the first time in more than six months, for a three-day meeting with Vice President–elect Hamlin and several others in Chicago.
Calling himself a private citizen, Lincoln purchased tickets on the Chicago, Alton, and St. Louis Railroad. He and Mary traveled with Lyman and Julia Trumbull—Mary was now speaking to Julia—in a regular crowded train car. Lincoln also invited Joshua Speed and his wife, Fanny, to come from Kentucky, as he wished to surround himself with friends, even as he sought to build a government mostly with men he had never met. Lincoln spoke with Speed, a Southerner who disagreed with Lincoln about slavery, about a cabinet position, but his longtime friend was not interested.
In Chicago, Lincoln explained to Hamlin and Trumbull that he wanted to reach out to his rivals, especially Seward, Bates, and Chase; he wanted to tap the best talent available for the difficult road ahead. He was most concerned about getting Seward on board as secretary of state. He wondered if Seward, rejected by the convention, might in turn reject Lincoln’s invitation. He entrusted Senator Hamlin, wise to the ways of Washington politics, to handle the negotiations with Seward. As Trum-bull listened to Lincoln’s rationale to secure the most able leaders for the cabinet, he began to assume that Lincoln “would lean heavily on members of his Cabinet and leave many crucial decisions to them.”
Lincoln looked forward to meeting with Vice President–elect Hannibal Hamlin at a conference in Chicago in November 1860.
ON DECEMBER 3, 1860, Lincoln waited anxiously for news from Washington: On this day the Thirty-sixth Congress would assemble and receive President Buchanan’s fourth and final annual message. Buchanan was popularly known as a “doughface,” a derogatory term for the Northerners who, pliable like dough, adapted their views to appease Southern leaders on slavery. In his farewell, the seventy-year-old president placed responsibility for the national crisis on the North. “The long continued and intemperate interference of the northern people with the question of slavery in the southern States has at length produced its natural effects.” How could the present crisis be settled? “All that is necessary” is for the South “to be let alone and permitted to manage their domestic institutions in their own way.”
President Buchanan told the states of the South there was no legal right under the Constitution to proceed to acts of secession, because the United States was an organic Union and not merely a voluntary association of states. Having denied that the federal government, under his leadership, was guilty of any abuse of Southern rights, Buchanan put Lincoln on notice. “Reason, justice, a regard for the Constitution, all require we shall wait for some overt and dangerous act on the part of the President elect, before resorting to such a remedy.” Finally, Buchanan declared that he did not have the power to mediate the conflict between the federal government and the states, something only Congress had the power to do.
Lincoln, upon reading the address, felt dismay at Buchanan’s assessment of the crisis. He realized that the lame-duck president would continue to be part of the problem.
IN HIS INCOMING CORRESPONDENCE, Lincoln found a number of letters advocating the inclusion of Senator Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania in the cabinet. He had not included Cameron in his original list, in part because he had heard a steady refrain of charges that Cameron was a wire-puller whose politics always ended up being economically profitable for himself. Now, as Lincoln sought to resolve the final shape of the cabinet, a tug-of-war developed between pro-and anti-Cameron forces.
Lincoln also reread a letter from Henry J. Raymond. From his post as editor of the New York Times, Raymond had become aware of the public misunderstanding about the intentions of Lincoln and the new Republican administration. He had written to urge Lincoln to make some reassuring statement and, rather audaciously, sent Lincoln some sentences of what the president-elect ought to say. Lincoln, having sat on Raymond’s letter, now replied that he believed his policy of silence had “a demonstration in favor of my view.” Lincoln had been talked into inserting words into Trumbull’s speech, but now he asked Raymond, “Has a single newspaper, heretofore against us, urged that speech [upon its readers] with a purpose to quiet public anxiety?” Lincoln, irritated and reaching for a way to express his discontent to the New York Times editor, concluded with Jesus’s words “ ‘They seek a sign, and no sign shall be given them.’ ” Jesus’s words were delivered to “an evil and adulterous generation;” Lincoln characterized his own generation as possessed by “ ‘Party malice’ and not ‘public good.’ ”
Lincoln’s first choice for his cabinet was Seward, but he did not consider the effect that New York politics, as well as the rumor mill, would have on his wish. While Lincoln proceeded in his own mind with all deliberate speed, others wondered aloud why he was taking so long to decide on the key appointment of secretary of state. This interval of silence allowed for the anti-Seward factions in New York to recycle their criticisms. Then political gossip began to circulate that Lincoln did not really want Seward but intended to offer him the position with the expectation that Seward would decline it. As these rumors drifted back to Springfield, Lincoln took up his pen on December 8, 1860, to write Seward directly. He admitted he had “delayed so long to communicate” because of what he thought was “a proper caution in this case.” As for the gossip, “I beg you to be assured that I have said nothing to justify these rumors. … It has been my purpose, from the day of the nomination at Chicago, to assign you, by your leave, this place in the administration.” Several days later, Seward thanked Lincoln for the honor of the invitation, but asked for more time to consider it.
Lincoln now contacted Bates, next in priority for the cabinet. Lincoln offered to travel the ninety miles to meet the august, bearded Bates in St. Louis, but the old-line Whig believed that would be demeaning for the president-elect, and offered to come to Springfield instead. They met in Bates’s room at the Chenery House on December 15, 1860. Lincoln offered him the position of attorney general, which he accepted. Immediately after their conference, Bates confided to his diary that he found Lincoln “free in his communications and candid in his manner.”
LINCOLN BELIEVED THAT ONE WAY to reassure the South that his was not a sectional government was to include at least one Southerner in his cabinet. Hamlin had supported this idea in their face-to-face meeting in Chicago, as did Seward and Judge Davis. Lincoln considered James Guthrie, a Kentuckian who had served both as president of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad and as secretary of the treasury in the Pierce administration. Lincoln sent Speed to feel out Guthrie who, about to turn seventy-two, said he supported the Union but did not want the position.
As he deliberated over his cabinet, Lincoln learned of a striking speech delivered by one of the most reasonable Southern leaders, Alexander Stephens, his old Whig colleague from the Thirtieth Congress, who had recently retired from Congress. On November 14, 1860, Stephens, even more shrunken in form than when Lincoln had known him, had pleaded in a speech to the Georgia legislature, “Don’t give up the ship. Don’t abandon her yet.”
Someone called out, “The ship has leaks in her.”
“Let us stop them if we can,” replied Stephens.
Lincoln wrote to Stephens requesting a copy of his speech. Stephens sent the speech on December 14, along with the injunction, “The country is certainly in great peril, and no man ever had heavier or greater responsibility resting upon him than you have in the present momentous crisis.”
After studying Stephens’s speech, Lincoln replied on December 22, 1860, asking, “Do the people of the South really entertain fears that a Republican administration would, directly, or indirectly, interfere with their slaves, or with them, about their slaves? If they do, I wish to assure you, as once a friend, and still, I hope, not an enemy, that there is no cause for such fears.” Lincoln might have stopped there, but did not. “You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub.”
Stephens replied on December 30, 1860. “In addressing you thus, I would have you understand me as being not a personal enemy, but as one who would have you do what you can to save our common country.” Yet, Stephens did believe slavery was right, and resented any party that continued to make slavery the primary issue in the country. Lincoln had undoubtedly misinterpreted Stephens’s understanding of the Union. He felt a Union upheld by force was “nothing short of a consolidated despotism.” In concluding, Stephens appealed to wisdom from Proverbs 25:11 to encourage Lincoln to speak publicly before it was too late. “A word fitly spoken by you now would be like ‘apples of gold in pictures of silver.’ ” Lincoln never replied.
Although Lincoln was a reconciler by nature, and his first instinct was to reach out to his former rivals, after Stephens’s reply he became more hesitant about including Southerners in his cabinet. In an editorial he placed in the Illinois State Journal on December 12, 1860, affirming the “frequent allusion to a supposed purpose on the part of Mr. Lincoln to call into his cabinet two or three Southern gentlemen, from the parties opposed to him politically,” he asked two questions.
Would such a person “accept a place in the cabinet?”
“Does he surrender to Mr. Lincoln, or Mr. Lincoln to him, on the political differences between them?”
Seward, Thurlow Weed, and Judge Davis nevertheless continued to press Lincoln to consider a Southerner. He hosted Weed for a two-day meeting in Springfield on December 20 and 21, 1860. They were joined by Davis and Swett. Weed, a tall man whose elongated nose was compared by cartoonists to Cyrano de Bergerac’s, had earned a reputation as a tough political operator in New York. He found himself surprised by his attraction to Lincoln. “While Mr. Lincoln never underestimated the difficulties which surrounded him, his nature was so elastic, and his temperament so cheerful, that he always seemed at ease and undisturbed.” Lincoln told Weed that “the making of a cabinet” was not nearly as easy as he had supposed.
Weed encouraged Lincoln to have at least two members of the cabinet from slaveholding states, but Lincoln wondered if these “white crows” could be trusted over the long haul. Vice President–elect Ham-lin proposed North Carolina congressman John A. Gilmer, a slaveholder and former Whig. Gilmer had written a long letter to Lincoln on December 10, 1860. “For one politically opposed to you” Gilmer had encouraged Lincoln to write a “clear and definite exposition of your views,” which “may go far to quiet, if not satisfy all reasonable minds, that on most of them it will become plain that there is more misunderstanding than difference.” To probe what differences there were, Gilmer asked Lincoln six detailed questions. Lincoln replied on December 15 with a question of his own: “May I be pardoned if I ask whether even you have ever attempted to procure the reading of the Republican platform, or my speeches, by the Southern people?” Lincoln wanted to know why a new statement would “meet a better fate? … It would make me appear as if I repented for the crime of having been elected, and was anxious to apologize and beg forgiveness.” Lincoln referred Gilmer to chapter and verse in the published Joint Debates but also answered his questions in some detail. In the end, he said to Gilmer what he said to Alexander Stephens: “You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted.” Lincoln did, however, authorize Weed to explore a cabinet position with Gilmer. The matter lingered on through January, Lincoln telling Seward on January 12, 1861, that he still hoped Gilmer would “consent to take a place in the cabinet.” Gilmer wrote on January 29 declining the invitation.
A struggle ensued over whether to appoint Henry Winter Davis, a former Whig, or Montgomery Blair, a former Democrat, both from Maryland, where they were locked in a bitter rivalry for leadership of the Republican Party. In the end, Blair prevailed. At some point Weed asked Lincoln if it was wise to give former Democrats a majority of one in the new cabinet. Lincoln, with his wrinkled smile, replied, “But why do you assume that we are giving that section of our party a majority of the cabinet? You seem to forget that /expect to be there; and counting me as one, you see how nicely the cabinet would be balanced and ballasted.”
With Bates and now Blair joining the cabinet, Lincoln was content that his choices would appease Southerners. He overestimated the effect the appointment of two border-state politicians—one of whom had been a candidate for the Republican nomination for president—would have on the South’s perception of him and failed to understand the violent feelings represented by leaders such as Senators Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, Robert Toombs of Georgia, and John Slidell of Louisiana.
IN LINCOLN’S TRANSITION WINTER, he would spend much more time than he expected in dealing with a Republican house divided. The Republicans of 1856 found cohesion in their role as an opposition party. The Republicans in the winter of 1860–61 had become an institution in power torn between radicals and conservatives who represented different regions and had different viewpoints on slavery and the South.
Lincoln won his leadership spurs in Illinois by building a coalition brought together by initial opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Stephen Douglas and staying together because of its hatred of Pierce, Buchanan, and Democratic corruption. Many ex-Whigs and ex-Democrats became Republicans more for what they were against than what they were for. Now, Lincoln faced Republican acrimony not only in states such as Pennsylvania, New York, and Maryland, but also on the national stage of the House and Senate in Washington.
The question on everyone’s lips was where Lincoln stood in the midst of this spectrum of beliefs. His nomination gave all sides hope that he was on their side. Conservatives voted for him both because he was a former Whig, and because they could not vote for Seward. Radicals knew of his persistent stand against the extension of slavery. As rumors swirled about his cabinet selections, some Republicans became fearful he would surround himself with old-line Whigs; others worried that he would be open to too many ex-Democrats. All factions within the party believed they could persuade him to move in their direction.
In Congress, Republicans and many Democrats—having lost confidence in President Buchanan—scurried to forge some kind of consensus on secession. With Lincoln publicly silent in Springfield, others stepped in to fill the void. Seward became viewed by many as the unofficial head of the party. Once he accepted his new role as secretary of state—a position that in the first seventy-two years of the Republic exhibited far more power over administrative policy than in modern times—he began to exercise leadership, sometimes on his own accord.
Old John J. Crittenden, the unobtrusive seventy-three-year-old senator from Kentucky, offered compromise legislation that he hoped could stop the secessionist impulse. Born during the Constitutional Convention and first entering the Senate at the inauguration of President James Monroe in 1817, Crittenden, an old-line Henry Clay Whig, had seen it all. With his still-erect angular frame, sparkling dark eyes, iron-gray hair, and a tobacco quid in his jaw, he was calm and thoughtful in demeanor. He shone not in speeches on the Senate floor but in the art of private negotiation.
If Lincoln believed he knew Kentucky, Crittenden was convinced he understood it much better. His legislation grew from his experiences in a border state he thought of as three states. Unbridled secessionists nestled together on the southern border with Tennessee, Unionists tended to live along the Ohio River in northern Kentucky, and the central part of the state was inhabited by people who simply wanted to get along. Crittenden believed that in this sense Kentucky represented a microcosm of the nation at large.
Crittenden rose in the Senate on December 18, 1860, to offer a comprehensive package of six constitutional amendments that would remove slavery from federal jurisdiction for all time. The Kentucky senator believed that all agreements since 1787 had been legislative compromises that were always subject to overturning by later Congresses. The first amendment would reinstate the Missouri Compromise all the way to the Pacific Ocean with the effect of protecting slavery south of the line. The second amendment would prohibit Congress from abolishing slavery in slave states. He also called for a congressional resolution on the fugitive slave law that would recognize the law as constitutional but amend it to take out some clauses “obnoxious” to citizens in the North.
Lincoln watched from Springfield as what became known as the Crittenden Plan gathered momentum. Petitions poured into Congress supporting it. Business interests in the North and some Republican leaders believed it could provide a way out of the mounting crisis.
Lincoln opposed the Crittenden Plan because it would permit slavery to expand into the West. Congressman Elihu B. Washburne and Senator Lyman Trumbull were Lincoln’s eyes and ears in Congress during these critical months. Washburne wrote from Washington, “The secession feeling has assumed proportions of which I had but a faint conception when I saw you at Springfield, and I think our friends generally in the west are not fully apprised of the imminent peril which now environs us.” Lincoln, aware that anxiety would push some in his own party toward compromise, wrote to Trumbull, “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery. Stand firm. The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter.” Three days later, Lincoln wrote to Washburne, “Prevent, as far as possible, any of our friends … entertaining propositions for compromise of any sort. … hold firm, as with a chain of steel.”
Despite popular support for the Crittenden Plan, including the backing of some Republicans, Lincoln won high marks for steeling Republicans in the Senate to back away from the illusory compromise.
THE SOUTHERN PRESS was filled with indignation at Lincoln’s election. “The election of Lincoln … means all the insult … that such an act can do,” spewed the Wilmington (North Carolina) Herald. The New Orleans Crescent summed up the editorial comment of countless Southern papers: “The Northern people, in electing Mr. Lincoln, have perpetrated a deliberate, cold-blooded insult and outrage on the people of the slaveholding states.” In the border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, editors spoke out against talk of secession and disunion. St. Louis’s Missouri Democrat, a Republican newspaper, wrote, “Throughout the campaign … [Lincoln] has been portrayed by most newspapers as an Abolitionist; a fanatic of the John Brown type. Never was a public man so outrageously misrepresented.” Nevertheless, the Richmond Enquirer, which Lincoln had long read to keep up with the sentiment of the South, charged that “the Northern people, by a sectional vote, have elected a President for the avowed purpose of aggression on Southern rights.” The Enquirer concluded, “This is a declaration of war.”
Lincoln continued to believe that the strong Southern talk was mostly bluff. The North had encountered this bluster before, in 1820 and 1850, and also at the time of the formation of the Republican Party in 1856. The plantation owners were angry, but Lincoln was convinced that the ordinary yeoman farmers, whom he believed he understood, would not, in the end, go along with disunion. He continued to think that sensible leaders would stop any final moves toward separation.
The “tug” Lincoln spoke of in his letter to Trumbull became a jolt on December 20, 1860, when a South Carolina convention, meeting in Charleston, voted unanimously to secede from the Union. The die was cast. Or was it? As politicians and editors raged, everyone wondered about Lincoln’s attitude. Even as he refrained from public speaking, people looked to the Illinois State Journal for clues to Lincoln’s thinking. The Journal editorialized that South Carolina could not pull out of the Union without a fight. “If she violates the laws, then comes the tug of war.” Editor Baker, in regular conversation with Lincoln, had taken Lincoln’s tug analogy from the Trumbull letter. “The President of the United States has a plain duty to perform.” The Journal worried, “Disunion by armed force, is treason, and treason must and will be put down at all hazards.”
Over the next forty days, one by one, the states of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas voted themselves out of the Union, quickly taking over federal institutions, including forts and arsenals. The whole North waited to see if Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas would follow.
IN THE MIDST OF the Union’s disintegration, Lincoln made a major priority the preparation of his inaugural address to be delivered in Washington on March 4, 1861. He had begun his research shortly after his election, borrowing from the Illinois State Library The Statesman’s Manual, a volume published in 1854 that contained the addresses and messages of presidents from 1789 to 1849. Lincoln examined President Andrew Jackson’s proclamation in the nullification controversy of 1832. As he had done before his Cooper Union address, Lincoln was looking for historic precedents.
In late December, with the coming of a new governor and the convening of the state legislature scheduled on January 7, 1861, Lincoln had to give up his office in the statehouse. Joel Johnson, who owned an office building on the Springfield square, offered Lincoln the use of two offices on the second floor.
Lincoln discovered that these new offices, even busier than the old, were not an ideal place to work on an inaugural address. He accepted an invitation from Clark Moulton Smith, his brother-in-law, to use a room on the third floor of his store as his writing space. Lincoln wrote and revised at an old merchant’s desk, which contained plenty of pigeonholes for his many notes.
The Charleston Mercury’s headline trumpeted South Carolina’s secession from the Union on December 20, 1860.
In January, Lincoln asked Herndon to acquire copies of two speeches he had long appreciated. As a young man living in New Salem, Lincoln had read Daniel Webster’s reply to Robert Hayne. In 1830, after Senator Robert Hayne of South Carolina had defended the right of nullification—arguing that ultimate power rested in the states, which could withdraw from the Union—on the floor of the Senate, Senator Webster of Massachusetts replied to him, closing with the memorable words, “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.” Lincoln also asked for a copy of Senator Henry Clay’s memorable speech in support of the Compromise of 1850.
By late January, Lincoln asked William H. Bailhache, one of the owners of the Illinois State Journal, to secretly print copies of his inaugural address. For an address of this magnitude, he decided to seek the suggestions of a few friends. He asked Judge Davis to read the entire address, but he made no suggestions. Lincoln put copies of his address, plus notes for speeches for the trip to Washington, in a black oilcloth handbag, which he gave to his son Robert for safekeeping on the train and in the cities they would be visiting in February.
TOWARD THE END OF JANUARY, Lincoln began his farewells to family and friends. On January 30, 1861, Lincoln slipped away from reporters and office seekers and traveled by train and horse and buggy to Farmington, a small remote community in Coles County. He wished to see his aging stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln. The summer before, when she heard of her stepson’s nomination, she feared that if elected something terrible would happen to him. Lincoln also wanted to visit his father’s grave, which had stood unmarked since 1851. On this trip, Lincoln ordered a stone marker for it.
Returning to Springfield, Lincoln concluded many personal and family matters. He rented the beloved family home to Lucian Tilton, the retired proprietor of the Wabash Railroad, for $350 a year. The Lincolns sold much of their furniture. They gave away their floppy-eared dog Fido to neighbor boys John and Frank Roll, whose father, John Roll, was the carpenter who had helped remodel the Lincoln home. Fearing a violation of privacy, Mary burned heaps of old letters and papers in the rear alley. Lincoln left a batch of his letters and papers for safekeeping with Elizabeth Grimsley, Mary’s cousin. Mistaking the speeches and letters for trash, Grimsley’s maid would later burn most of the contents, which included Lincoln’s “Discoveries and Inventions” speech as well as the partial drafts from his “House Divided” speech. On February 7, 1861, the Lincolns moved out of their home to the Chenery House, a hotel across from Lincoln’s office.
On his final day in Springfield, Sunday, February 10, 1861, Lincoln walked to his law office at 105 South Fifth Street to meet his law partner, Herndon. Lincoln rested his large frame on the comfortable sofa one last time. After the two men reminisced about old times and conferred about unfinished legal business, Lincoln requested that the sign board on its rusty hinges at the foot of the stairway should remain. “Let it hang there undisturbed. … If I live I’m coming back some time, and then we’ll go right on practicing law as if nothing had ever happened.” On that final evening, Lincoln took some Chenery House cards, turned them over, and wrote, “A. Lincoln, Executive Mansion, Washington.” The nearly one hundred days as president-elect in Springfield had come to a close.
ON MONDAY MORNING, February 11, 1861, Lincoln arrived at the small, brick Great Western railway station to begin the journey to Washington. The day dawned cold with rain dripping from low-hanging clouds.
Lincoln had notified the press that he would offer no speech. After the many farewells of recent days, Lincoln believed there was no need for more words. Newspaperman Villard captured a compelling scene. “The President elect took his station in the waiting-room, and allowed his friends to pass by him and take his hand for the last time.” Lincoln’s “face was pale, and quivered with emotion so deep as to render him almost unable to utter a single word.”
The ringing of the engine bell alerted Lincoln that it was time to depart. As Lincoln stepped out onto the platform, friends and neighbors who had come to say their good-byes crowded each side of the special train. Despite his publicly announced intention not to speak, the crowd thronging around the rear platform encouraged their neighbor to offer some remarks.
In response to these requests, Lincoln hesitated, gathering himself to offer a speech he had not intended to give. Caught off guard, in the poignancy of this moment, Lincoln bared his spirit in deeply emotive language: “My friends—No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything.” Though his personality usually prompted him to conceal rather than to reveal his emotions, he now spoke openly. The sadness etched in his face was voiced in his words. In twelve succinct words, Lincoln offered heartfelt appreciation to a city where he had lived for nearly twenty-four years, and to his neighbors, and friends.
Then Lincoln quickly moved from past to present: “I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington.”
Until now, Lincoln had steadfastly avoided speaking about the task that lay ahead. Now, in the midst of spontaneous remarks about community and family, he inserted what might sound like an audacious comment about himself.
Lincoln, as a young boy, had developed a reverence for George Washington through his reading of Mason Locke Weems’s Life of George Washington. In his address in 1838 to the Young Men’s Lyceum, Lincoln had spoken of the less important role of his own generation compared to that of the giants who came before. As a young man, he had said he was standing at the end of the revolutionary generation now being carried away by “the silent artillery of time.” Now an “old man” by his own reckoning, he was being summoned by some unsearchable fate or providence “to a task greater than Washington.” These words were not boastful. They were offered with a sense of an appointment with destiny.
Lincoln concluded,
Without the assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trusting in Him, who can go with me, and remain with you and be every where for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me.
He devoted 63 of his 152 words to sketching the omnipresence of God.
The God that Lincoln invoked was more than the creative first force cited by Jefferson. Lincoln appealed to a God who acted in history—who attended George Washington in the past, was able to go with Abraham Lincoln to Washington in the present, and would remain with Lincoln’s friends in Springfield in the future.
In saying “To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me,” Lincoln reached for prayer as the invisible connective tissue that would bind him to those he was about to leave.
Lincoln’s capacity to connect with his audience was demonstrated in their response. His encouragement to pray elicited shouts of “We will do it, we will do it.” As Lincoln turned to enter the train, three cheers split the air, and in a few moments the train chugged slowly forward into the dark morning.
As Lincoln took his seat in the passenger car, the powerful Rogers locomotive began to pull the train slowly east. Newspaper correspondents Henry Villard, Edward L. Baker of the Illinois State Journal, and Henry M. Smith of the Chicago Tribune crowded around Lincoln and asked about the speech. In response, Lincoln started to write out what he had said. The effects of a moving train made the task difficult, and at the beginning of the fifth sentence, Lincoln handed the paper to John Nicolay, who took up the task of writing while Lincoln dictated.
Lincoln, after delivering his farewell address in Springfield, tried to write it down on a bumpy train. He finally dictated it to John Nicolay, who completed writing the brief speech.
Back in Springfield, Lincoln’s friend James Conkling described the audience’s response to Lincoln’s farewell remarks when he wrote his son, Clinton, a good friend of Bob Lincoln’s, the next day. As for the crowd, “Many eyes were filled to overflowing.” Of “Mr. Lincoln,” his “breast heaved with emotion and he could scarcely command his feelings sufficiently to commence.”
In the next day’s paper, Edward L. Baker editorialized in the Journal, “We have known Mr. Lincoln for many years; we have heard him speak upon a hundred different occasions; but we never saw him so profoundly affected, nor did he ever utter an address which seemed to us so full of simple and touching eloquence.”
Lincoln’s farewell words did not stay in Springfield. His remarks appeared in newspapers the next day and in Harper’s Weekly. Citizens in large cities and small towns across America were eager to know more about this gangly rail splitter from the West who was about to become their president.
LINCOLN’S JOURNEY TO WASHINGTON would provide his first opportunity to speak to the American people since his election three months earlier. He would see and be seen by more people in more places than any American president before him. After Lincoln’s extended silence, politicians, press, and ordinary people were eager to take his measure. Yet his speeches on his journey from Springfield to Washington have usually been overlooked or undervalued.
Seward had urged Lincoln in December 1860 to make the long trip through some of the most populous states, from the prairies of Illinois, across central Indiana and Ohio, down to Cincinnati to the Southern border on the Ohio River. In Cleveland and Pittsburgh, Lincoln would encounter people on the western border of the urban-industrial edge of an expanding America. He would arrive in New York in a region settled by New England Yankees and proceed through the center of the state to New York City. He looked forward to his visit to Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the birthplace of the nation. The twelve-day trip would cover 1,904 miles over the tracks of eighteen separate railroads. Lincoln’s itinerary called for him to arrive in the nation’s capital to a gala reception late on Saturday afternoon, February 23, 1861, ten days before his inauguration.
The events of the twelve days took on the festive moods of a carnival, a political rally, and a religious revival. Between the major cities, the train would make numerous stops at small towns decorated with American flags. Lincoln would say again and again that the celebrations were not about a person, but about an office and a nation. He insisted that the guest lists should not be partisan. In that spirit, he invited supporters of Stephen Douglas, John Breckinridge, and John Bell to ride with him.
Whatever the original reasons for the journey, by the time of Lincoln’s departure from Springfield it had become controversial. Seward had long ago changed his mind about the wisdom of the trip. He wrote on December 29, 1860, informing Lincoln of a Southern plot to seize the capital on or before March 4. Seward stated, “I therefore renew my suggestion of your coming earlier than you otherwise would—and coming in by surprise—without announcement.” Lincoln did not take Seward’s counsel and continued planning his extended preinaugural trip. Nicolay wrote that Lincoln “had no fondness for public display,” but well understood “the importance of personal confidence and live sympathy” between a leader and his constituents.
AS IF LINCOLN’S TRAIN TRIP to Washington were not drama enough, a second train with another president-elect departed on the same day, February 11, 1861, bound for his own inauguration. Only one week before Lincoln’s departure, on February 4, delegates from six Southern states gathered in Montgomery, Alabama, to begin the task of hammering out a new nation. Four days later, this Confederate convention adopted a provisional constitution. The next day, they unanimously elected a provisional president, Jefferson Davis, and a provisional vice president, Lincoln’s friend Alexander Stephens of Georgia.
Starting on February 11, 1861, all eyes across the nation were fixed on not one but two trains. After departing from Springfield, Lincoln’s moved slowly east through Indianapolis, Columbus, and Pittsburgh toward Washington. Davis, after leaving his plantation, Brierfield, in Mssissippi, was carried by boat to Vicksburg, and then traveled by train in a roundabout route to Jackson, Chattanooga, and Atlanta, and then west toward Montgomery, the Confederate capital. The public’s fascination with these two journeys to two capitals was chronicled in the New York Times on February 11, 1861, in two columns placed side by side:
The New Administration The New Confederacy
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LINCOLN’S TRAIN ARRIVED at its first overnight stop at Indianapolis right on schedule at 5 p.m. on February 11, 1861. Governor Oliver P. Morton, Indiana’s first native-born governor, welcomed Lincoln who, on the first of many occasions, had to reply extemporaneously to welcoming words by a local politician. In his remarks Lincoln offered what would become an oft-repeated demur: “I do not expect, upon this occasion, or on any occasion, till after I get to Washington, to attempt any lengthy speech.”
Lincoln referred to himself as an “accidental instrument.” He would work with this metaphor in several ways in the days ahead. In Indianapolis, he restricted his responsibility as president by saying his role was “temporary” and “for a limited time.” His real purpose, he said, was to encourage the responsibilities ordinary citizens must ask of one another.
During an evening reception for members of the Indiana legislature, Lincoln grew impatient as he asked for the speeches that he had entrusted to his son. The boy and the bag were missing. When Robert, who was being called “the Prince of rails” by his young friends, finally arrived, he explained that he had left the oilcloth bag with the hotel clerk. Lincoln bid a hasty departure to the reception, and his long legs carried him quickly down the stairs to the hotel lobby. Burrowing through the pile of luggage, Lincoln attacked the first bag that looked like his, but it surrendered only a dirty shirt, playing cards, and a half-empty whiskey bottle. He quickly discovered his bag and recovered the copies of the inaugural address and other speeches, the whole episode good for a laugh at the end of an exhausting day.
While in Indianapolis, Lincoln gave Orville H. Browning, who had accompanied Lincoln on the train, one of the copies of his inaugural address. Upon his return to Springfield, Browning wrote his response to Lincoln. He made a single proposal, which he wrote at the bottom of the page of Lincoln’s text. He suggested that Lincoln “modify” the passage: “All the power at my disposal will be used to reclaim the public property and places which have fallen; to hold, occupy and possess these, and all other property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties on imports; but beyond what may be necessary for these, there will be no invasion of any State.”
Browning told Lincoln, “On principle the passage is right as it now stands. The fallen places ought to be reclaimed. But cannot that be accomplished as well, or even better without announcing the purpose in your inaugural?” He suggested revising the sentence to delete the clause, “to reclaim the public property and places which have fallen.”
JEFFERSON DAVIS’S PRESIDENTIAL TRAIN pulled into Jackson, Mississippi, on the evening of February 11, 1861. Encircled by well-wishers, he spoke at the capitol to an audience that “occupied every available inch of space.” Davis declared that he deplored war but would face it “with stern serenity of one who knows his duty and intends to perform it.” He asserted that England and France will “not allow our great staple to be dammed up within our limits.” Finally, if war came, Davis promised to “go forward … with a firm resolve to do his duty as God might grant him power. ”
THE PRESIDENTIAL SPECIAL arrived in Columbus on February 13, 1861, punctually at 2 p.m. Lincoln went directly to the capitol, where he addressed the Ohio legislature. In his prepared remarks he said, “I have not maintained silence from any want to real anxiety. It is a good thing that there is no more than anxiety, for there is nothing going wrong. … We entertain different views upon political questions, but nobody is suffering anything.”
Lincoln’s remark “there is nothing going wrong” added to the controversy that was building toward his inauguration. Supporters contended that his remarks were part of a strategy to diminish public alarm. Critics argued that Lincoln’s remarks exposed a president-elect out of touch with the forces gearing up for civil war.
Meanwhile, Jefferson Davis traveled through Mississippi and Alabama on February 14, 1861, the firing of cannons welcoming him at many stops. In Stevenson, in northeastern Alabama, he told the crowd he expected the border states to become part of the Confederate States of America within sixty days. He also declared that “England will recognize us, and … grass will grow in the northern cities where the pavements have been worn off by the tread of commerce.” Davis concluded by saying he “hopes for peace but is prepared for war.”
on the morning of february 15, 1861, Lincoln spoke from the balcony of the Monongahela House in Pittsburgh to a crowd of five thousand standing under umbrellas. After Columbus, he was determined to sidestep questions about an impending civil war and instead spoke about the tariff, a topic of great importance in Pennsylvania. He declared that because there was no direct taxation, a tariff was necessary. “The tariff is to the government what a meal is to the family.” In speaking about protections for home industries, Lincoln stated, “I must confess I do not understand the subject in all its multiform bearings.”
Villard characterized the Pittsburgh speech as “the least creditable performance” of the entire trip. “What he said was really nothing but crude, ignorant twaddle.” He believed that this speech proved Lincoln to be “the veriest novice in economic matters.”
Next, Lincoln backtracked to Cleveland. Here he was entering greater New England, for the northern tier of Ohio was settled by westward-moving Yankees from the New England states. New England, and by extension northern New York and northern Ohio, were the regions that supported abolitionism most strongly. Cheering spectators stood in deep mud along Euclid Street. Lincoln told the assembled crowd, “Frequent allusion is made to the excitement at present existing in our national politics, and it is as well that I should also allude to it here. I think that there is no occasion for any excitement. The crisis, as it is called, is altogether an artificial crisis.”
These remarks only fueled the controversy begun in Columbus. Did the president-elect not understand the escalating crisis?
The nation’s greatest orator read the daily newspaper reports of Lincoln’s speeches. Edward Everett, a native of Massachusetts, had served with distinction in a multiplicity of offices for over four decades. He began as a young professor at Harvard in 1819 and later returned as president of the nation’s oldest college. Everett served Massachusetts as congressman, senator, and governor and represented the United States as secretary of state and minister to England. On February 15, 1861, he wrote in his diary, “These speeches thus far have been of the most ordinary kind, destitute of everything, not merely of felicity and grace, but of common pertinence.” Everett, who believed that speeches were a mirror revealing the character of the person, had formed an opinion about Lincoln. “He is evidently a person of very inferior cast of character, wholly unequal to the crisis.”
LINCOLN LEFT CLEVELAND on the morning of February 16, 1861. The train traveled east again, through Ohio and across the northwest corner of Pennsylvania. Entering New York, the Presidential Special chugged along the shore of Lake Erie. The first stop was Westfield, where a banner was stretched across the tracks emblazoned, “Welcome Abraham Lincoln to the Empire State.”
He told the crowd that several months earlier he had received a letter from a “young lady” from Westfield. His correspondent recommended that he “let his whiskers grow, as it would improve my personal appearance.” Lincoln had accepted her counsel, and now he wished to know if she was present in the crowd. A small boy cried out, “There she is Mr. Lincoln.” Grace Bedell, a blushing eleven-year-old girl with dark eyes, stepped from the crowd, and President-elect Lincoln gave her several hearty kisses “amid the yells of delight from the excited crowd.”
Lincoln arrived in Buffalo in the afternoon. Exhausted, at the half-way point of his long train trip, he rested on the Sabbath, attending church the next day with former president Millard Fillmore. Across the street from Lincoln’s hotel, a banner on the Young Men’s Christian Association building was inscribed with words of reply to Lincoln’s farewell remarks at Springfield: “We Will Pray For You.”
Lincoln, upon his arrival in Westfield, New York, asked to see Grace Bedell, the young girl who had written to tell him he would look better in whiskers.
JEFFERSON DAVIS ENDURED his longest day of traveling and speaking on February 16, 1861. Arriving in Atlanta at about four o’clock in the morning, he spoke at midmorning, taking aim at Northern abolitionism, especially “its systematic aggression upon the constitutional rights of the South for the last forty years.”
After the speech, Davis boarded his special car on the Atlanta and West Point Railroad and headed west across Georgia. During the day he stopped to speak in Fairburn, Palmetto, Newman, Grantville, LaGrange, and West Point. At each stop he was greeted by women waving their handkerchiefs. Entering Alabama, the Davis train stopped for speeches at Opelika and Auburn. A correspondent for the New York Tribune reported that Davis would give elements of the same speech several times during his many stops. Davis arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, at 10 p.m. at the completion of his eight-hundred-mile train trip.
On Monday, February 18, 1861, while Lincoln’s train traveled through the Mohawk Valley toward Albany, Lincoln learned that Jefferson Davis had taken the oath of office as provisional president of the Confederate States of America, and Alexander Stephens the oath of office as vice president. In Montgomery, Davis gave his inaugural address from the portico of the Alabama capitol building, which was now the capitol of the Confederacy. Without a national anthem, the band played “La Marseillaise,” the national anthem of France.
Davis spoke to his fellow Southerners, to the citizens of the United States, and to foreign nations who had a vital interest in the availability of cotton. He never mentioned Lincoln. The speech was remarkably mild; some in the audience had expected to hear a trumpet call to war. As for oratory, the second sentence of the address was typical.
Looking forward to the speedy establishment of a permanent government to take the place of this, and which by its greater moral and physical power will be better able to combat with the many difficulties which arise from the conflicting interests of separate nations, I enter upon the duties of the office to which I have been chosen with the hope that the beginning of our career as a Confederacy may not be obstructed by hostile opposition to our enjoyment of the separate existence and independence which we have asserted, and, with the blessing of Providence, intend to maintain.
This sentence of one hundred words reveals the limitations of Davis’s leadership. The sentences would only get longer as the speech unfolded. The contrast to Lincoln’s economy of language and rhetorical artistry would become even more apparent in the four years to come.
LINCOLN ARRIVED IN NEW YORK CITY on Tuesday, February 19, 1861, at 3 p.m. with what had to be mixed emotions. He was returning to the scene of his triumph at Cooper Union the previous winter, but though he had carried the state in the election, he received less than 35 percent of the vote in the city.
An apprehensive crowd estimated at more than two hundred thousand greeted Lincoln. One astute observer was Walt Whitman, the young poet who was in the midst of negotiations with a Boston publisher to bring out an expanded third edition of his Leaves of Grass. Whitman found himself on the top of a Broadway omnibus stalled in traffic. He took the measure of Lincoln for the first time.
I had, I say, a capital view of it all, and especially of Mr. Lincoln, his look and gait—his perfect composure and coolness—his unusual and uncouth height, his dress of complete black, stovepipe hat pushed back on the head, darkbrown complexion, seam’d and wrinkled yet canny-looking face, black, bushy head of hair, disproportionately long neck, and his hands held behind him as he stood observing the people.
Whitman wrote of Lincoln, “He look’d with curiosity upon that immense sea of faces, and the sea of faces return’d the look with similar curiosity.”
The poet spied hostility as well as curiosity and admiration in the crowd. “Many an assassin’s knife and pistol lurk’d in hip or breast-pocket there, ready, as soon as break and riot came.”
Another interested eyewitness was George Templeton Strong. Strong, a lawyer, Episcopal vestryman, and trustee of Columbia College, was a careful observer of political events. In 1835, at age fifteen, he began to write in uniform blank books every evening before he went to bed. He wrote for the next forty years. The diary, ultimately comprising nearly four and a half million words, would remain unknown to the public for more than fifty years after Strong’s death in 1875. A supporter of Seward, Strong had been following Lincoln’s trip as it wound its way toward New York. He wrote an appraisal in his diary. “Lincoln is making little speeches as he wends his way towards Washington, and has said some things that are sound and credible and raise him in my esteem.” However, Strong confided, “But I should have been better pleased with him had he held his tongue altogether.”
Strong walked uptown on Broadway the next afternoon to join the crowd welcoming Lincoln. Later that evening Strong recorded in his diary, “The great rail-splitter’s face was visible to me for an instant, and seemed a keen, clear, honest face, not so ugly as his portraits.”
AFTER LINCOLN HAD SPENT more than a week on the Presidential Special, newspapers across the North and South began to weigh in with their assessments of his preinaugural speeches. The Baltimore Sun, with ardent Southern sympathies, offered the opinion, “He approaches the capital of the country more in the character of a harlequin,” or a character in a comedy. “There is that about his speechification which, if it were not for the gravity of the occasion, would be ludicrous.” The pro-Lincoln Chicago Tribune countered, “The wiseacres who indulge in criticism of the verbal structure of Mr. Lincoln’s recent speeches” were off the mark. The Tribune’s defense pointed out that former presidents George Washington and Andrew Jackson did not have the “gift of gab” when asked to speak extemporaneously.
Yet some pro-Lincoln editors were worried. Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican, had been enthusiastic about Lincoln when he heard him speak in Boston in 1848, and the paper had supported Lincoln in the 1860 election. But Bowles was concerned as he read reports of Lincoln’s speeches. On February 26, 1861, he wrote to Henry L. Dawes, a member of Congress from Massachusetts, of his discouragement both with Lincoln and the disagreements rankling the Republican Party. Bowles told Dawes, “Lincoln is a ‘simple Susan.’ ”
Among Republicans in Congress trepidation abounded. In several speeches, when Lincoln seemed to be supporting coercion of the South, his words were taken to be a refutation of Seward’s efforts at conciliation. In other speeches, Lincoln seemed to point toward a policy of moderation. Questioners wondered whether Lincoln was wavering in his position or even certain of his own opinion.
Charles Francis Adams, the son and grandson of presidents, whom Seward would soon propose to Lincoln to become minister to England, was deeply concerned. He confided to his diary on February 20, 1861, “[Lincoln’s speeches] betray a person unconscious of his position as well as the nature of the contest around him.” Adams thought that Lincoln was “good-natured, kindly,” but he considered the president-elect “frivolous and uncertain.” In Adams’s evaluation, Lincoln’s speeches “put to flight all notions of greatness.”
THE PRESIDENTIAL SPECIAL departed New York at 9:05 a.m. on February 21, 1861, reaching Trenton, the state capital of New Jersey, at 11:50 a.m. Speaking in the Senate chamber, Lincoln told the legislators that of all the accounts of the “struggles for liberties,” none remained so fixed in his mind as Washington crossing the Delaware and winning the battle at Trenton on December 26, 1776.
At Indianapolis, Lincoln had spoken of himself as an “accidental instrument.” At Trenton, he changed his meaning and his metaphor: “I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people.” Lincoln often pointed to his humble beginnings, but his depiction of the American people as an “almost chosen people” is one of his most enigmatic phrases. The concept that Americans were God’s chosen people arrived with the Puritans. This identity flourished in the eighteenth century and, whether in secular or religious versions, undergirded the revolutionary generation that founded a new nation in 1776. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Americans added the sense of “manifest destiny,” the right and duty to inhabit and civilize the whole of the continent to promote the great experiment in democracy.
Lincoln never clarified “almost.” Is his qualification an allusion to slavery? In an era of absolutes, whether sponsored by abolitionists or secessionists, Lincoln could live comfortably with the uncertainties facing an “almost chosen people.”
Lincoln reached Philadelphia at 4 p.m. on Thursday, February 21, 1861. In response to greetings from Mayor Alexander Henry, Lincoln declared his fidelity to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. “All my political warfare has been in favor of the teachings coming forth from that sacred hall.” Lincoln used fiery imagery from the Psalms to swear his allegiance: “May my right hand forget its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if ever I prove false to those teachings.”
The next day, the booming of cannon and the ringing of church bells announced the celebration of the birthday of George Washington. Early in the morning, Lincoln traveled by carriage to Independence Hall where he participated in the raising of the new American flag with thirty-four stars, the final star for Kansas, which had been admitted as a state on January 29, 1861. Lincoln told the huge crowd, “I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”
Lincoln, bareheaded, raised the flag at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. F. DeBourg took this photograph just after sunrise on George Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1861.
He had offered this sentiment a number of times since his reemer-gence into politics in 1854, but Lincoln must have taken special delight in affirming his loyalty to the Declaration of Independence at the place where the sacred document was signed more than eighty-four years before. To underline his commitment to this principle, he told his audience, “I would rather be assassinated on the spot than to surrender it.”
On the previous evening, Lincoln had been startled to learn of a plan to kill him before he could reach Washington. In his room at the Continental Hotel, Lincoln met Allan Pinkerton, a Chicago detective whose company worked for the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad. Pinkerton informed Lincoln that his detectives had uncovered a plot to assassinate him as his train car was pulled by horses through the streets of Baltimore in the middle of the day. Pinkerton insisted that no one in the presidential party be told of the plot and that Lincoln take a train for Washington that night. He refused. He insisted on keeping his date at Independence Hall.
Lincoln left Philadelphia at 9 a.m. for the 106-mile trip to Harris-burg, the state capital of Pennsylvania. Governor Andrew Curtin met Lincoln and took him to the state capitol, where he addressed the legislature in joint session.
At dusk, the plans for Lincoln’s secret trip to Washington were put into action. Instead of traveling with his usual stovepipe hat, Lincoln wore a soft Kossuth hat given to him in New York. At Philadelphia, Lincoln boarded a sleeping car, accompanied by only Pinkerton and Ward Hill Lamon, his Illinois lawyer friend and now bodyguard, but no one slept. Lincoln was so tall that he “could not lay straight in his berth.” The train arrived in Baltimore at about 3:30 a.m., and Lincoln’s car was transferred to the Camden Street Station, where he boarded a Baltimore and Ohio train and waited in the dark for thirty minutes before departing at 4:15 a.m. for Washington. Lincoln arrived at the Baltimore and Ohio depot at New Jersey Avenue and C Street at six in the morning, almost ten hours ahead of his scheduled late-afternoon arrival and reception. He arrived in Washington virtually alone, unannounced and unrecognized.
Allan Pinkerton, a Chicago detective who uncovered a plot to assassinate Lincoln in Baltimore, accompanied the president-elect on a secretive night journey to Washington.
Lincoln, exhausted from his twelve-day train trip, went to Mathew Brady’s studio probably the day after his arrival in Washington. Alexander Gardner took five poses of a president-elect deep in thought.
A. Lincoln A Biography
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