A. Lincoln A Biography

Chapter 26
With Malice Toward None, with Charity for All
December 1864–April 1865

A KING’S CURE FOR ALL THE EVILS.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Describing the Thirteenth Amendment, February 1, 1865

BRAHAM LINCOLN WENT TO BED AFTER MIDNIGHT ON ELECTION night, November 8, 1864. His old friend Ward Hill Lamon, who had always worried about the president’s safety more than anyone, gathered some blankets and lay down in front of the president’s bedroom door armed with a brace of pistols and a Bowie knife. Knowing Lincoln would have discounted any danger, Lamon left before the president awoke in the morning.
Lamon had been warning the president of danger from the moment he accompanied Lincoln on his midnight train ride through Baltimore to Washington after an assassination plot was uncovered in February 1861. His fears increased when Lincoln started riding back and forth from the White House to the Soldiers’ Home in the summer of 1862. At that time, Lamon urged upon him “the necessity of a military escort,” but the president waved off the suggestion and persisted in riding alone. One evening at about eleven, a rifle shot rang out as Lincoln rode from the White House to the Soldiers’ Home. Lincoln’s horse, Old Abe, took off “at a break-neck speed.” The next morning Lincoln, minus his eight-dollar plug hat, told Lamon this story but to his surprise, “in a spirit of levity,” Lincoln protested that it must have been an accident, but admitted, “I tell you there is no time on record equal to that made by the two Old Abes on that occasion.”
The threats to Lincoln multiplied after his reelection when foes, both in the South and North, recognized that the president would be in office for another four years. In December 1864, Lamon put his concerns in writing. “I regret that you do not appreciate what I have repeatedly said to you in regard to proper police arrangements connected with your household and your own personal safety.” He added, “You know, or ought to know, that your life is sought after, and will be taken unless you and your friends are cautious; for you have many enemies within our lines.” His plea to the president: “ You are in danger. ”
TWO NIGHTS LATER, Lincoln greeted serenaders from a second-floor window at the White House. In prepared remarks he spoke to them not about a Republican triumph, but about the fact “that a people’s government can sustain a national election, in the midst of a great civil war.” Lincoln said the election affirmed that “he who is most devoted to the Union, and most opposed to treason, can receive most of the people’s votes.” With the debate over the future of Reconstruction after the war on the lips of politicians, Lincoln signaled his attitude. “For my own part I have striven to avoid placing any obstacle in the way. So long as I have been here I have not willingly planted a thorn in any man’s bosom.” Many in Lincoln’s own party did not appreciate the president’s offering of reconciliation.
In the weeks that followed, Lincoln looked toward a second term that would last until March 1869. He busied himself thinking about his staff, cabinet, and an important judicial appointment. In his first term Lincoln had enjoyed the full support of his two loyal secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, but he knew they were exhausted. The president intended to reward their service by appointing them to diplomatic positions in France.
He already knew who would take their place. In the last two years of his first term, no one had become closer to Lincoln than Noah Brooks, the politically perceptive correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union. Brooks had become a trusted friend as well as a liaison with the press. Born in Castine, Maine, Brooks moved to Dixon, Illinois, in 1856, where he first became acquainted with Lincoln during John C. Frémont’s Republican presidential campaign. Brooks moved to California in 1859, but when his wife died in childbirth in 1862, he accepted an assignment to report for the Sacramento Daily Union from Washington. He enjoyed unusual access to the president. When so many around Lincoln constantly pestered him for preferment, Brooks asked nothing for himself.
Lincoln needed to make new cabinet appointments. Attorney General Edward Bates, at seventy-one, had decided to step down. Lincoln asked James Speed, the older brother of Joshua Speed, to accept this important post. Unlike his younger brother, James Speed was an early and strong opponent of slavery. “I am a thorough Constitutional Abolitionist,” he had declared in the fall campaign of 1864.
Lincoln appointed Ohioan William Dennison, who had chaired the National Union Party convention in Baltimore in June 1864, to replace Montgomery Blair, who had resigned. Lincoln would also replace the largely ineffectual interior secretary, John P. Usher, with Senator James Harlan of Iowa, a strong supporter of Lincoln. Treasury Secretary William Fessenden told Lincoln he wanted to return to the Senate, so the president selected the competent if colorless Hugh McCullough, comptroller of the currency, for treasury.
Taken together, these appointments signaled the prospect of a quite different leadership style for Lincoln’s second term. In his first term he had selected recognized leaders for his cabinet, both Republican and Democratic, arguing that he needed the most capable people around him. What Lincoln didn’t say, but implied, was an acknowledgment of his own lack of experience. Lincoln’s selections for the second term, on the other hand, represented capable people, but none of them rose to the same level of prominence as party leaders as Seward, Chase, Bates, and Cameron. He gladly continued with William Seward as secretary of state, a recognized but controversial leader who had become his closest political friend. The appointments of Speed and Dennison strengthened the radical side of the Republican Party in his cabinet. All of the new appointees, unlike some of his first-term appointments, had demonstrated their personal loyalty to the president.
LINCOLN’S MOST IMPORTANT APPOINTMENT would be a new chief justice of the United States to succeed Roger Taney, who had died on October 12, 1864. There was no shortage of candidates who stepped forward in self-promotion or were lobbied for by friends. Attorney General Edward Bates wrote Lincoln the day after Taney’s death requesting to be appointed “as the crowning, retiring honor of my life.” Former Illinois senator Orville Browning encouraged Lincoln to appoint Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Francis Blair, Sr., wrote Lincoln imploring him to appoint his son, Montgomery, until recently postmaster general, which would “remove the cloud which his ostracism from your Cabinet” brought about by his forced resignation. Charles Sumner recommended Salmon P. Chase, whose candidacy, in a typically clumsy manner, was supported by an overkill of letters to the president. Sumner, who had Lincoln’s ear, went so far as to ask Chase to write him a letter that he would then show the president. Chase must have swallowed hard when he penned Sumner before the November election, “Happily it is now certain that the next Administration will be in the hands of Mr. Lincoln from whom the world will expect great things.”
Lincoln decided to take his time with this appointment. To the frustration of the many candidates and their supporters, he had not made any decision before the election. Lincoln had already appointed four associate justices—Noah Swayne, Samuel F. Miller, David Davis, and Stephen J. Field—more than any president since Andrew Jackson.
Lincoln, the lawyer in the White House, believed that the validity of the Emancipation Proclamation and other Civil War acts could easily come under the review of the Supreme Court. Weighing this distinctive circumstance, Lincoln believed he should go with a person whose views were known. He told Congressman George S. Boutwell of Massachusetts, “We cannot ask a man what he will do, and if we should, and he should answer us, we should despise him for it. Therefore we must take a man whose opinions are known.”
Lincoln chose Salmon P. Chase. The president understood better than anyone that Chase was hugely ambitious, had tried to unseat him for the 1864 Republican nomination, and criticized him behind his back from the beginning of his presidency. But Lincoln also knew Chase’s opinions. He knew that he would stand by the Emancipation Proclamation and a hoped-for amendment to outlaw slavery forever. It would be the last time Lincoln would turn to one of his rivals to carry out his policies.
When the new Congress convened on December 5, 1864, Lincoln’s choice of Chase proved generally popular. Everyone recognized that the court would far outlast Lincoln in deciding the issues sure to emerge from the Civil War. Chase’s huge political ambition, which seemingly could be satisfied only by winning the presidency, would now be put aside forever by appointment to the top judicial post in the country. Lincoln’s generosity of spirit, combined with his shrewd political thinking, shone in this strategic choice.
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LINCOLN HAD COME TO ADMIRE William Tecumseh Sherman for his pluck and courage, but he was also worried. After his capture of Atlanta, Sherman sought permission for a bold plan to leave his supply lines behind, march 285 miles to the sea, and then turn north to join Grant by attacking Robert E. Lee from the rear. Lincoln and Grant both worried that General John Bell Hood, who had replaced Confederate general Joseph Johnston, would disengage from Sherman and march north and west to reinvade Tennessee. Sherman met these objections by offering to send General George Thomas, “the Rock of Chickamauga,” with sixty thousand men to block Hood. Sherman argued that marching through Georgia would impose not simply a military defeat but a psychological blow on Southern morale. He won the argument and received permission for the march.
On November 15, 1864, Sherman departed a smoldering Atlanta to march east to the Atlantic Ocean. Just as Lincoln and Grant had feared, Hood immediately struck out for Tennessee, hoping to draw some of Sherman’s army out of Georgia.
In Georgia, the slim, red-bearded Sherman understood the venture before him as not simply the clash of two armies but of two societies. Sherman led a march in which his troops, deployed fifty miles wide, tore up railroad tracks and burned both businesses and homes that lay in their path. His words to his men, veterans of Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga: “Forage liberally on the country.” Sherman offered his own definition of war: “War is cruelty and you cannot refine it,” he declared to the mayor of Atlanta.
For the next month, in November and December 1864, with no telegraphic communication from Sherman, reports of his whereabouts, mostly from hostile Confederate newspaper accounts, were fragmentary. Nevertheless, the Northern public became caught up in the drama of Sherman’s march. In New York, George Templeton Strong wrote on November 28, 1864, “He has passed by Macon, has harried Milledgeville, and is threatening Savannah. Rebel editors judiciously keep back most of their information about his movements.” On December 8, Strong reflected the mood in the North when he confided to his diary, “Much concern about Sherman. His failure would be a fearful calamity.”
No one was more worried about Sherman than Lincoln. Finally, after more than five weeks of waiting, he received a telegram from Sherman that had been carried by ship to the Virginia peninsula for transmit-tal to Washington. “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah with 150 heavy guns & plenty of ammunition & also about 25,000 bales of cotton.” The ten thousand Confederate defenders of Savannah had evacuated the city before Sherman could launch an attack.
Lincoln answered Sherman immediately. Reminiscent of the spirit of his congratulatory letter to Grant after the victory at Vicksburg, he wrote, “When you were about leaving Atlanta … I was anxious, if not fearful; but feeling that you were the better judge.” Lincoln added, “Now, the undertaking being a success, the honor is all yours; for I believe none of us went farther than to acquiesce.” Lincoln, in this Christmas season of 1864, used words from the prophet Isaiah to tell Sherman that his march “brings those who sat in darkness, to see a great light.”
THROUGHOUT THE WAR, one of the burdens that Lincoln took upon himself was writing to families who had lost a loved one in battle. In November, Lincoln learned through the War Department that Mrs. Lydia Bixby, a Boston widow, had lost five sons in the war. On November 16, 1864, Lincoln wrote her a heartfelt letter in which he told her, “I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming.” Lincoln concluded with a prayer: “that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.”
An equal or greater burden for the president was reviewing capital sentences of soldiers after court-martial trials. He set aside time each Friday for what he called “butcher’s day.” He thoroughly disliked this task but knew it had to be done. Lincoln looked for reasons to pardon soldiers accused of falling asleep on sentry duty, going home without leave, fleeing from the battlefront, and desertion. Lincoln was known to be especially amenable to mothers and wives who came to the White House to plead for sons and husbands. He knew in issuing so many pardons he was going against the opinion of commanding officers who worried that the president’s penchant for leniency could work against their obligation to establish order and discipline. On the same day Lincoln wrote to Mrs. Bixby, he wrote a letter typical of hundreds he penned during the Civil War. “Upon rejoining his regiment as soon as practicable & faithfully serving out his term, this man is pardoned for any overstaying of time or deserting heretofore committed.”
The care that Lincoln devoted to this task was especially reflected in a letter to James Madison Cutts, who was sentenced to dismissal from the army after a series of problems, including peering through a hotel transom at a woman undressing, violence and abuse toward soldiers under his command, and quarreling with other officers. Lincoln knew Cutts was the brother of Adele Cutts Douglas, the widow of Senator Stephen A. Douglas, and now wrote him a fatherly letter. “You have too much of life before you, and have shown too much promise as an officer, for your future to be lightly surrendered.” After quoting Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “Beware of entrance to a quarrel,” Lincoln offered his own advice: “Quarrel not at all.” Why? “No man resolved to make the most of himself, can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper, and the loss of self-control.” Lincoln sent him back to serve in the Army of the Potomac. Cutts went on to distinguish himself in the battles at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Petersburg, winning the only triple Medal of Honor in the history of the U.S. military.
AFTER HIS REELECTION, Lincoln, thinking of the future, determined to pass an amendment that would abolish slavery for all time. One of the problems facing any amendment was the fact that the Constitution had been amended only twice since the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791. There had been no new amendments for sixty years. Lincoln had remained silent as debates over various proposed amendments on slavery went forward in the winter and spring of 1864. On June 15, 1864, a proposed Thirteenth Amendment failed to receive the necessary two-thirds majority, falling short by thirteen votes in the House.
In November 1864, Republicans generated a strong majority in Congress, but the Thirty-ninth Congress would not convene for four months. Republican leaders counseled Lincoln to be patient and rely on future action by the new Congress. Another option would be to call a special session of Congress, as Lincoln had done in July 1861. He decided against both alternatives.
Rather, with formal debate in the old Congress due to begin in less than two months in January 1865, Lincoln went into action. In his first four years as president, Lincoln had not often become involved in the day-to-day legislative processes of the Congress. But now he turned his full attention to a renewed effort to pass a Thirteenth Amendment. He and Secretary of State Seward selected various Democratic congressmen and lobbied them to change their votes. The fact that Lincoln was not willing to wait a mere four months to pass this antislavery amendment is the best indication of his full commitment to end slavery.
The House of Representatives scheduled a final vote on January 31, 1865. The Thirteenth Amendment read:
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Spectators packed the Capitol’s galleries, including African-Americans of all ages. Charles Douglass, Frederick Douglass’s oldest son, who had served in the famous Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Infantry, took a seat in the gallery.
The clerk called the roll. The final tally was 119 to 56 in favor, with eight members absent. The House erupted in shouts and cheers. People in the galleries held one another in joy. Both blacks and whites wept. Charles Douglass wrote his father, “I wish that you could have been here, such rejoicing I have never before witnessed (white people I mean).”
Lincoln joined the celebration the next day. Even though the Constitution did not require a president to sign a constitutional amendment, he took great pleasure in signing the Thirteenth Amendment and greeting serenaders at the White House. Immediately, Lincoln was criticized by foes in Congress and the press as wielding unseemly presidential power.
That evening, February 1, 1865, in response to a serenade at the White House, Lincoln spoke with passion. One phrase captured Lincoln’s sentiments on this momentous occasion: “This amendment is a King’s cure for all the evils.”


This illustration in Harper’s Weekly depicts the joyous scene in the House of Representatives at the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment on January 31, 1865.

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THE CRY FOR PEACE was mounting from all sides. Desertions from Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia reached pandemic quantities: fully 8 percent in both January and February. Morale on the Union homefront was not much better. Death and terrible wounds, so often resulting in amputations, were diminishing support for Grant and the Army of the Potomac.
Lincoln was wary of these calls for peace, which he believed would either doom his twin goals of Union and emancipation, or unwittingly prolong the war. In his annual message to Congress on December 5, 1864, Lincoln had stated that Jefferson Davis “would accept nothing short of severance of the Union—precisely what we will not and cannot give. His declarations to this effect are explicit and oft repeated. He does not attempt to deceive us. He affords us no excuse to deceive ourselves.” Lincoln told Congress: “Between him and us the issue is distinct, simple, and inflexible. It is an issue which can only be tried by war, and decided by victory.”
In early January 1865, sensitive to the charges that he was not making every effort to end the war, Lincoln, against his better judgment, allowed his friend Francis P. Blair to undertake a peace mission to Richmond. The elder Blair, once a friend of Jefferson Davis, arrived in Richmond on January 11 determined to use many keys to open doors to peace. In one scenario, Blair and Davis talked about the possibility of the Union and Confederate armies joining together to drive the French from Mexico, which they had occupied since 1862. In the end, the Confederate president gave Blair a letter to take to Lincoln saying he would appoint commissioners “to secure peace to the two countries.”
Davis’s letter to Blair confirmed Lincoln’s doubts about negotiation. Lincoln sent Blair on a return mission to Richmond armed with his own letter, which stated clearly that he would be willing to receive commissioners to secure peace, but only “to the people of our one common country.”
But Davis was also under pressure from Confederate leaders; he agreed to appoint three commissioners who were each advocates of negotiation: Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy; John A. Campbell, assistant secretary of war; and Robert M. T. Hunter, Confederate senator from Virginia. Davis, however, reduced any possibilities of success by tenaciously insisting on Southern independence.
Lincoln and Stanton initially refused to meet with the Confederate commissioners because of Davis’s language about two countries. Lincoln finally agreed that it would look impolite if he did not meet with the three commissioners.
On February 3, 1865, Lincoln and Secretary of State Seward met Stephens, Campbell, and Hunter on Lincoln’s steamer, the River Queen, at Hampton Roads off the tip of the Virginia peninsula. Lincoln remembered Alexander Stephens fondly from their time together in the Thirtieth Congress, which helped engender an air of cordiality aboard the ship. The participants agreed to keep no notes of the meeting, which lasted four hours.
Stephens took the lead in asking Lincoln, “Well, Mr. President, is there no way of putting an end to the present trouble, and bringing about a restoration of the general feeling and harmony … between the different States and Sections of the country?” Stephens carefully avoided Davis’s language of two countries. Lincoln replied directly: “There was but one way that he knew of, and that was, for those who were resisting the laws of the Union to cease that resistance.” Stephens, the shrewd politician that Lincoln remembered, attempted to change the trajectory of the conversation by speaking of the “Continental question.” He referred to Francis Blair ’s discussion in Richmond about the Union and Confederate armies joining together to force the French from Mexico.
Campbell asked Lincoln what could be the terms of Reconstruction if the Southern states agreed to rejoin the Union. Lincoln replied that once armed resistance ceased, the Southern states “would be immediately restored to their practical relations to the Union.” The president told the commissioners that he could not negotiate as long as the South persisted in its armed aggression against the Union. When Hunter tried to counter with a history lesson that Charles I of England had negotiated with enemy forces, Lincoln replied, “I do not profess to be posted in history. On all such matters I will turn over to Seward. All I distinctly recollect about the case of Charles I, is, that he lost his head at the end.” The Hampton Roads conference, as Lincoln told Congress a week later, “ended without result.”
ON FEBRUARY 1, 1865, General Sherman led his sixty thousand troops north out of Savannah. Slicing up through South Carolina, his veteran soldiers pummeled the state they knew had been the seedbed of secession with even greater destruction than they inflicted on Georgia. Lincoln understood this aggressive military destruction as necessary to end the Confederacy’s resistance. To celebrate Sherman’s victories in Charleston, South Carolina, and Wilmington, North Carolina, Lincoln, three weeks later, ordered a nighttime illumination in the capital on February 22, George Washington’s birthday.
Meanwhile, the Army of the Potomac remained in front of Petersburg, twenty-five miles south of Richmond. Petersburg, with its five railroads and important connecting roads, was the key to sustaining the Confederate capital. In what would become the longest siege in American warfare, Grant slowly cut the rail and roads into Petersburg. The Confederates, reduced to defensive warfare, hung on as Lee, forever reading Northern newspapers, still hoped the Northern population would grow tired of this endless war. The siege had begun in June 1864, and although Grant and Meade had slowly tightened the noose in more than two hundred days of trench warfare, they still remained on the outside looking in. Grant lived in fear that Robert E. Lee would one day disappear and try to link up with General John Bell Hood further south.
At the end of February, Union general Edward Ord and Confederate general James Longstreet talked about possibilities for peace in a conversation during an exchange of prisoners. Longstreet took this conversation back to Lee, who wrote to Grant on March 3, 1865, the day before Lincoln’s second inauguration, proposing to meet and enter into “an interchange of views” aimed at “the possibility of arriving at a satisfactory adjustment of the present unhappy difficulties.” Lincoln, through Stanton, immediately wrote Grant. “The President directs me to say to you he wishes you to have no conference with General Lee unless it be for the capitulation of Gen. Lee’s army, or on some minor, purely military matter.” He then articulated Lincoln’s political leadership position. “He instructs me to say that you are not to decide, discuss, or confer upon any political question. Such questions the President holds in his own hands; and will submit them to no military conferences or conventions.” Despite Lincoln’s unbounded confidence in Grant, he reiterated through Stanton what he had determined at the beginning of the war—he alone would decide national policy, which, because he was also commander in chief, encompassed military policy.
WASHINGTON HAD NEVER SEEN so many people, as travelers converged on the capital for Lincoln’s second inauguration. With March 4, 1865, approaching, apprehension mingled with hope. Rumors abounded that desperate Confederates, now realizing that defeat was imminent, would attempt to abduct or assassinate the president. Stanton took extraordinary safety measures. Roads leading to Washington had been heavily picketed by Union soldiers for some days. Sharpshooters positioned themselves on the buildings that would ring the inaugural ceremonies.
The president, assaulted by critics for much of the war, was finally receiving recognition for his political leadership. Supporters rejoiced that recent events vindicated him. The Illinois State Journal in Springfield declared in its March 4, 1864, editorial, “All honor to Abraham Lincoln through whose honesty, fidelity, and patriotism, those glorious results have been achieved.” The Chicago Tribune editorialized, “Mr. Lincoln has slowly and steadily risen in the respect, confidence, and admiration of the people.” The Washington Daily Morning Chronicle urged Mr. Lincoln to crow a bit. “We shall not be surprised if the President does not, in the words he will utter this morning, point to the pledges he gave us in his inaugural of 1861, and claim that he has not departed from them in a single substantial instance.”
Inauguration Day dawned with incessant rain. In the early morning, fog continued to hang over the city as the crowd began arriving at the east entrance of the Capitol. The streets oozed with soft mud, described by locals as “black plaster.” Gale winds whipped through the city uprooting trees. Police estimates placed the crowd between thirty thousand and forty thousand. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the arriving throng was present “in force sufficient to have struck terror into the heart of Lee’s army (had the umbrellas been muskets).”
The ceremonies would not differ greatly from Lincoln’s first inaugural. Yet, there were some differences. Instead of the small clusters of soldiers present in 1861, large numbers of soldiers were present all through the city. Ever-increasing numbers of Confederate deserters were visible. In February alone twelve hundred and thirty-nine disheartened Confederate soldiers had arrived in the capital.
The presence of so many blacks in the inaugural crowd particularly struck the correspondent for the Times of London. He estimated that “at least half the multitude were colored people. It was remarked by everybody, stranger as well as natives, that there never had been such crowds of negroes in the capital.”
At 11:40, the rain suddenly ceased and rifts in the clouds revealed an azure sky. Washington camera artist Alexander Gardner stood ready to record the event for posterity. The second inaugural address would be the only occasion in which Lincoln was photographed delivering a speech. Subject to the limitations of a craft and technology still in its young adulthood, the photo shows Lincoln’s face but not clearly.


This photograph for years mislabeled as the grand review of the army in May 1865, is now understood to be a photo of the crowd at Lincoln’s second inaugural. Notice the large presence of soldiers in the crowd.

From the podium, the president recognized in the crowd Frederick Douglass. After meetings with the president in 1863 and 1864, Douglass had come to hear what Lincoln would say with the end of the war in view.
Behind Lincoln, only thirty-five feet away, stood the actor John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln had seen Booth perform at Ford’s Theatre in The Marble Heart on November 9, 1864, a week before he traveled to Gettysburg. The dashing twenty-six-year-old Booth, five feet eight inches tall, with black hair and a black mustache, had first won fame as a Shakespearean actor in Southern theaters, especially Richmond. Booth, seething with hatred, had come to the Second Inaugural with his own dark motives: He had been working on a plan to abduct Lincoln and take him to Richmond.
When Lincoln was introduced, the crowd exploded in expectation. The president rose from his chair and stepped out from beneath the shelter of the Capitol. At fifty-six, he looked much older than his years. Precisely as he began to speak, the sun broke through the clouds. Many persons, at the time and for years after, commented on this celestial phenomenon. Michael Shiner, an African-American mechanic in the naval shipyard in Washington, recorded his awe in his diary entry for March 4, 1865. “As soon as Mr. Lincoln came out the wind ceased blowing and the rain ceased raining and the Sun came out and it became clear as it could be and calm.”
In the highly charged atmosphere of wartime Washington, with soldiers everywhere, politicians and newspaper editors had speculated on what Lincoln would say were his latest plans for reconstruction. Would he use his rhetorical skills to hit hard at his opponents in the South and North? Should the Confederate States of America be treated as a conquered nation? How did one distinguish between the innocent and the guilty, between citizens and soldiers? What about the slaves? They had been emancipated, but what about the question of suffrage?
Lincoln began his finest address in a subdued tone.
At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.
In the impersonal language of the first paragraph, Lincoln lowered expectations with the words “less,” “little,” and “no.” He started more like an observer than the main actor and directed the focus of his remarks away from himself by speaking in a passive voice. After the first paragraph he would use no more personal pronouns.
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.
In the second paragraph, we first hear Lincoln’s political vision. His primary rhetorical strategy was the use of inclusive language. Over and over again in the sentences of the second paragraph, he used the adjectives “all” and “both.” How the crowd would have cheered if Lincoln had chosen to demonize the South. Lincoln, instead, imputed the best possible motives to the supposed enemy.
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
When Lincoln introduced the Bible in the third paragraph, “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God,” he signaled his intention to speak theologically as well as politically about the meaning of the war. In the 701 words of his second inaugural address, Lincoln mentioned God fourteen times, quoted the Bible four times, and invoked prayer three times. The Bible had been quoted only one time in the previous eighteen addresses, by John Quincy Adams, but the lack of precedent did not deter Lincoln.
This sentence is filled with multiple meanings. First, Lincoln was affirming the use of the Bible and prayer by both Union and Confederate soldiers. He was also probing the appropriate use of the Bible. Throughout the war, Lincoln had hosted delegations of ministers and politicians, most of whom were quite confident that God was on the side of the Union. Lincoln here suggested that the Bible and prayer can be used as weapons to curry God’s favor for one side or the other. On one side stood those who read a Bible that they steadfastly believed sanctioned slavery. On the other side were those who understood the Bible as encouraging the abolition of slavery.
Lincoln asked how it was possible for one side to seek God’s aid against the other side. He inveighed against a tribal God who took the side of a section or party. But Lincoln seemed to balance judgment from the Old Testament with mercy from the New Testament: “Let us judge not that we be not judged.” These words came from the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus advocated a new ethic rooted in humility and compassion.
Lincoln, throughout his address, balanced pretension with possibility. The pretension of the misuse of religion provides the transition to Lincoln’s major theological affirmation of his address: “The Almighty has His own purposes.” It becomes clear here that Lincoln was building on his private “Meditation on the Divine Will,” written in 1864. He began that reflection with similar words, “The will of God prevails.” After discussing different players, Lincoln concentrates on God as the primary actor. He described God’s actions: “He now wills to remove,” “He gives to both North and South, this terrible war,” “Yet, if God wills that it continue.”


Alexander Gardner took the only photograph of Lincoln speaking, here at the second inaugural on March 4, 1865, standing on a platform in front of the east portico of the Capitol.

Though praising the inscrutable intentions of God, Lincoln did not retreat to agnosticism. He focused on God’s purposes by invoking a fiery biblical quotation from Matthew 18:7: “Woe unto the world because of offences! For it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!” The purposes of God can also bring judgment.
Before his election as president, Lincoln had been willing to contain slavery politically and geographically, but he had since come to the conclusion that its moral implications could not be contained. When he said, “If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses,” Lincoln employed the sanction of Scripture to initiate his indictment of slavery and his formal charge against the American people. He did not say “Southern slavery.” By saying “American slavery,” Lincoln again used inclusive language to assert that North and South must together own the offense. He was not simply trying to set the historical record straight. He was thinking of the future. Lincoln understood, as the radicals in his party did not, that the Southern people would never be able to take their full places in the Union if they felt that they alone were saddled with the guilt for the national offense of slavery.
Who was this God who “gives to both North and South this terrible war”? Lincoln answered that question by observing that God’s activity is no “departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to him.” Lincoln heard Phineas Gurley speak of the “divine attributes” of God at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. Gurley learned this language from Professor Charles Hodge at Princeton Seminary, who titled chapter 5 in his Systematic Theology “The Nature and Attributes of God,” spending nearly eighty pages making the case that attributes are “essential to the nature of a divine Being” with personality.
As the address built toward its final paragraph, Lincoln made an unexpected political and religious move. Speaking on the eve of military victory, when many expected him to celebrate the successes of the Union, he called upon his audience to recognize a perilous evil in their midst. Instead of self-congratulation, he asked his fellow citizens for self-analysis.
Lincoln’s second inaugural resembled a Puritan jeremiad as he combined both criticism and reaffirmation. The task of the preacher was to point out to the congregation the cause of God’s anger. Because of the evil of the “offence” of slavery, the nation was deserving of God’s punishment. As in a jeremiad, Lincoln prosecuted his case not in generalities but with concrete, visual representations. He reached back beyond the nation’s birth as he recalled “two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil.” Lincoln reminded his audience that the stain of slavery was enmeshed in the fabric of American history from its beginnings. His images reached their zenith in “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” The sword of military battle was the judgment of God. Lincoln drew his confidence in “the judgments of the Lord” from Psalm 19, the fourth biblical passage he cited.
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
Lincoln now moved quickly from the past to the future, from judgment to hope. In an address filled with surprises, he turned briskly to his unexpected conclusion: “With malice toward none, with charity for all.” Lincoln began his final exhortation by asking his audience to enter a new era, armed not with enmity but with forgiveness. He summoned them to overcome the boundary of sectionalism, of North and South, and come together in reconciliation.
In the final paragraph, Lincoln offered an ethical imperative, a response to his political and theological indicative declared in the first three paragraphs. In the Presbyterian sermons that Lincoln heard, the preacher would have spent the majority of the sermon reciting a grand indicative about what God had done. The indicative pattern of Christ’s life, teaching, and death led to the imperative for selfless love and reconciliation. This was a frequent motif in Phineas Gurley’s sermons.
Lincoln’s imperative was ethical in content if pastoral in tone. Lincoln concluded his second inaugural address with a coda of healing: “to bind up,” “to care for,” “to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace.” Portraits of widows and orphans now balanced the images of blood and swords.
To win the peace there must be reconciliation. Lincoln declared that the true test of the aims of war is how the victors treat those who have been defeated. If enmity continued after hostilities ceased, the war would have been in vain. These are no maudlin words crafted for emotional effect. His words describe the tough, practical living actions that must replace retribution with “charity.” He set this mandate for himself as he looked forward to his second term.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AFTER LISTENING to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, was determined to attend the inaugural reception that evening at the White House. Thousands of people crowded the streets outside the White House waiting for the gates to open at 8 p.m. Immediately a free-for-all began. William H. Crook, Lincoln’s bodyguard, observed, “The White House looked as if a regiment of rebel troops had been quartered there—with permission to forage.” Lincoln, in the East Room, looking exhausted, prepared to shake the hands of the more than six thousand people who would crowd the reception.
Douglass found himself barred at the door by two policemen. When he protested, they informed him that their “directions were to admit no one of color.” He understood that the old practices were still in effect. Douglass spoke up that there must be some mistake for “no such order could have emanated from President Lincoln.” In order to end the war of words that was blocking the doorway, one officer offered to escort Douglass in. It was not long, however, before Douglass found himself being ushered through a window that had been set up as a short-term exit. Douglass saw the ploy and asked a guest to please tell Mr. Lincoln that he was being held up. The petition reached the president.
All of the handshaking ceased as Frederick Douglass entered the East Room. As he walked in, Lincoln called out, “Here comes my friend Douglass.” Lincoln’s greeting was said in such a loud voice “that all around could hear him.” Taking Douglass by the hand, the president said, “I am glad to see you. I saw you in the crowd today, listening to my inaugural address; how did you like it?”
Douglass replied, “Mr. Lincoln, I must not detain you with my poor opinion, when there are thousands waiting to shake hands with you.”
“No, no,” Lincoln answered, “you must stop a little Douglass; there is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours. I want to know what you think of it?”
“Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.”
SOON AFTER LINCOLN’S INAUGURATION, General Grant invited the president to come down to his headquarters at City Point, Virginia. “I think the rest will do you good.” Lincoln arrived on the River Queen on March 24, 1865. Always enjoying visiting with the troops, Lincoln spent time talking with wounded soldiers in the hospital tents, making a special point of speaking with wounded Confederates.
Although Lincoln would make no public predictions about the end of the war, privately he knew that Robert E. Lee, for all his deserved renown, could not hold out much longer. Grant and Meade and the Army of the Potomac were slowly closing off both supply routes and escape routes for Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
With his army down to fifty thousand men, of whom thirty-five thousand were fit to fight, with desertions sapping his strength daily, Lee decided to take one more desperate gamble. He would try to break through the weakest point of the Union line. On the day after Lincoln’s arrival at City Point, Lee dispatched General John B. Gordon, who had succeeded Stonewall Jackson, to attempt a breakout against Fort Sted-man. Gordon punched open a hole in the Union line, but it was quickly closed as Lincoln watched from a distance. In desperate fighting, the Confederates lost 5,000 men compared to Union losses of 1,500.
On March 28, 1865, Grant arranged a meeting with the president, Admiral David Porter, and General Sherman, who had come up by boat from North Carolina. During the conference, Sherman asked Lincoln: “What is to be done with the rebel armies when defeated?” The president offered a lengthy reply stressing his desire for reconciliation. Lincoln told Sherman he wanted to “get the men comprising the Confederate armies back to their homes, at work on their farms and in their shops.” Sherman wanted to know if that generosity would include Jefferson Davis and the top Confederate leaders. Lincoln responded with a story about a teetotaler who when asked whether he wanted his lemonade spiked with whiskey responded that it would be all right if he didn’t know about it. Grant, Sherman, and Porter understood the president to say that if Davis and the chief Confederate leaders were to escape it would be all right with him.
As the meeting was about to conclude, Lincoln turned to Sherman. “Do you know why I took a shine to you and Grant?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Lincoln. You have been extremely kind to me, far more than I deserve.”
“Well,” Lincoln replied, “you never found fault with me.”
Sherman left immediately to return to his troops and never saw Lincoln again. He wrote later, “Of all the men I have met, he seemed to possess more of the elements of greatness, combined with goodness, than any other.”
Grant knew that he now had Lee cornered, having cut off nearly all his escape routes to the south. On April 2, 1865, the Army of the Potomac attacked all along the lines at Petersburg. After a siege of 293 days, the Confederates finally abandoned both Petersburg and Richmond on the same evening.
When Lincoln learned that Confederate forces had left Richmond, he decided he wanted to visit the capital of the Confederacy. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, concerned that snipers might still be in Richmond, telegraphed Lincoln urging him not to expose himself to great risk. Lincoln replied, “I will take care of myself.”
Why did he go? Southerners said, then and later, that he came with a ghoulish desire to gloat over a city still burning. The real reason he went was revealed in his actions and words there.
On the morning of April 4, 1865, Lincoln started up the James River for Richmond on the River Queen. Lincoln took Tad with him, who was celebrating his twelfth birthday that day. Admiral Porter had hoped to arrive with a grand display of naval power, but the Confederates had blocked and mined the river. By the time his original flotilla of ships approached Richmond, Lincoln and his entourage—Porter, two officers, and a guard of twelve sailors in blue jackets and round blue hats—were reduced to travel in what amounted to a large rowboat. As the boat docked at Richmond’s Rocket’s Landing, the president could see smoke rising from the burning city. General Godfrey Weitzel, the new Union commander of the Army of the James, had been alerted to Lincoln’s plans, but since the president was not expected until the afternoon, no honor guard was present to meet him.
Although Lincoln entered Richmond unannounced, the tall man with the silk hat did not go far before the city’s black residents recognized him. A woman greeted him. “I know that I am free, for I have seen Father Abraham.” Lincoln said to a black man who dropped to his knees, “Don’t kneel to me. That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will enjoy hereafter.” With each block, more black residents joined the parade, many coming up to the president to shake his hand or simply touch him. White residents observed the pageant from the steps of their homes or stayed behind locked doors.
Lincoln’s destination was General Weitzel’s headquarters at Jefferson Davis’s house, three blocks from Richmond’s Capitol Square. As the president arrived, the crowd broke into cheers. Lincoln turned and bowed in response. He entered the house and sat at the departed Davis’s desk. While soldiers were taking everything that was not bolted down in the White House of the Confederacy, Lincoln took only a glass of water.
In the afternoon, Lincoln toured the burned district of the city and the prisons, the conditions of which had long been a source of anger in the North. Now the prisons were filled with Confederates, but the evidence of years of inhumane conditions prompted a Union officer to exclaim, “Jefferson Davis should be hanged.” Lincoln replied quietly, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”
Lincoln left Richmond late in the afternoon. As he was departing, General Weitzel asked for his counsel in dealing with the proud but frightened people of the Confederate capital as well as the prisoners. Lincoln replied, “If I were in your place, I’d let ’em up easy, let ’em up easy.”
WHEN RICHMOND FELL, Lee led his exhausted troops toward the last rail link to North Carolina and a hoped-for meeting with General Joseph Johnston’s troops. General Philip Sheridan’s cavalry raced to cut off Lee’s supplies at Amelia Court House. On the night of April 7, 1865, Grant passed on to Lincoln a note from Sheridan: “If the thing is pressed I think Lee will surrender.” Lincoln replied: “Let the thing be pressed.”
Early on Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865, Lee asked for an interview with Grant for the purposes of surrender. An aide of Grant was sent to find a suitable meeting place and secured a first-floor parlor in Wilmer McLean’s house in the little town of Appomattox Court House, Virginia. McLean had owned a farm at Manassas in 1861, but when a shell came through his window in the first battle of Bull Run he decided to move to this small town in isolated southern Virginia to escape the war.
Lee arrived first, in full dress uniform, with saber at his side. Grant arrived at 1:30 in a mud-spattered private’s uniform. Grant wished to preserve Lee’s dignity even as he asked for the surrender of his army. If Lincoln had been firm that he wanted Grant to accept only unconditional surrender, now Grant, with Lincoln’s full backing, offered a generous peace. Each Confederate soldier would be allowed to return to his home and a normal life, and he could take his horse and mule with him. Lee was grateful. “This will have the best possible effect upon the men. It will be very gratifying and will do much toward conciliating our people.”
LINCOLN DECIDED TO RETURN from Virginia to Washington on the morning of April 9, 1865, when he was informed that William Seward had been seriously injured in a carriage accident. Upon his return on the River Queen, he was informed by Secretary of War Stanton that Lee had surrendered to Grant earlier in the day. Lincoln made his way through surging crowds to visit Seward, who had suffered a fractured jaw, a broken arm, and facial lacerations.
On the morning of April 10, 1865, all of Washington learned the war was over when Secretary of War Stanton ordered the firing of five hundred cannons, which broke windows on Lafayette Square. In the afternoon, three thousand people marched to the White House to serenade the president. They called for a speech. He thanked them for coming, but unprepared to speak spontaneously, asked them to return the following evening. He asked the military band to play “Dixie,” a song he said that now belonged to the whole country.
April 11, 1865, became an official day of celebration. Government offices closed. Across the Potomac in Arlington, thousands of African-Americans gathered on the lawn of Robert E. Lee’s former home to sing “The Year of Jubilee.” In the evening, public buildings and private homes were illuminated.
An even larger crowd walked to the White House to hear the president speak. Noah Brooks stood behind the president with a candle to help illuminate the pages from Lincoln’s prepared remarks. Tad, crouching below the window, delighted in picking up the pages as they fell from his father’s hands. Lincoln focused his remarks not on the past but on the future. Avoiding the contentious debate about whether the seceded states had been in or out of the Union the past four years, Lincoln declared, “Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper relations between these states and the Union.” He devoted the bulk of his speech to speaking about Louisiana, admitting that he had been severely criticized for his Reconstruction plan for the state. Secretary of War Stanton, Chief Justice Chase, and Republican Senate radicals complained that without granting Southern blacks suffrage, they would remain under the control of their former masters. Lincoln, who was not yet certain of his ideas on suffrage, said he preferred that “very intelligent blacks,” and the nearly two hundred thousand who had served in the military, be granted the right to vote.
Lincoln called for everyone to exercise flexibility in navigating the whole new territory of Reconstruction. He tipped his hat to Congress, saying they had a rightful role to play, but declared that “no exclusive, and inflexible plan can safely be prescribed as to details and collaterals” at this time. Lincoln concluded, “In the present ‘situation,’ as the phrase goes, it may be my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South. I am considering, and shall not fail to act, when satisfied that action will be proper.”
The response to Lincoln’s address was polite but muted. The crowd came expecting a rousing speech praising the Union and the courageous efforts of soldiers, not a rather technical defense of Lincoln’s Reconstruction policies. Some people, disappointed, left before Lincoln finished his remarks. The president sensed the cool response of the crowd.
The response of one man, however, was far from muted. When the Civil War had first erupted, John Wilkes Booth continued to work in the North, making no effort to cover up his Southern sympathies, including his support for slavery. Booth, taking pride in himself as a cultured actor, held Lincoln in disdain as a man of low culture and coarse jokes.
Booth had become despondent when Lincoln was reelected in November and the fortunes of the South shrank in the winter and early spring of 1865. Now that the war was over, he resolved that stronger measures were needed. He was in touch with the Southern secret service as he sought to do something “heroic” for the South. When Lincoln spoke about the possibility of voting rights for some African-Americans, Booth turned to a friend and snapped, “That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”
ON GOOD FRIDAY MORNING, April 14, 1865, Lincoln arose feeling well. He had enjoyed a good night’s sleep after many nights of restlessness. He had had once again a recurrent dream. He found himself on a ship traveling to a distant, unknown shore. He told Mary of the dream, but said he was not concerned because he had experienced a similar dream several times before, always before a significant Union victory, at Antietam, Gettysburg, and Vicksburg. He hoped that the dream meant favorable news this day. Perhaps Johnston, in North Carolina, had surrendered to Sherman.
He enjoyed breakfast with Mary and Tad; Robert arrived later. He had invited Mary for a carriage ride in the afternoon. In the evening he was looking forward to going to Ford’s Theatre to see Our American Cousin, an English comedy starring the celebrated English actress Laura Keene. Lincoln invited Ulysses and Julia Grant to join them.
At 11 a.m. Grant, who had arrived in the city the night before, joined Lincoln for a cabinet meeting. Grant shared news of the last drive in Virginia and the surrender of Lee at Appomattox Court House. Lincoln asked about news from Sherman in North Carolina. He told everyone that the news would surely be that Johnston had surrendered because he had had a dream the night before that had always preceded military victories. When the discussion turned to how to deal with the defeated South, Lincoln spoke sympathetically of Lee. The president then spoke with discouragement that men in his own party “possess feelings of hate and vindictiveness in which I do not sympathize and cannot participate.”
Grant lingered after the cabinet meeting to tell Lincoln that they would not be accompanying him that evening to Ford’s Theatre. The Grants were going to take the evening train to Philadelphia as they were anxious to see their sons in Long Branch, New Jersey.
Lincoln ate an apple for lunch and, back at his office, signed another pardon, this time for a man accused as a Confederate spy. “Well, I think the boy can do us more good above ground than under ground.” After dealing patiently with a number of callers, Lincoln went to get Mary for their four o’clock carriage ride.
Lincoln did his best to try to calm Mary. At City Point she had embarrassed him by claiming loudly that he was flirting with an officer’s wife. She had even accosted Julia Grant and upbraided her for wanting to succeed her in the White House. Now, on this Good Friday afternoon, he told Mary, “We must both be more cheerful in the future.” He acknowledged that “between the war & the loss of our darling Willie—we have both been very miserable.” But the conversation turned happier when they spoke of the future. Lincoln said he wanted to visit Europe, perhaps even Jerusalem. One day he wanted to travel out west—to California.
Returning to the White House, Lincoln endured more callers. Mary, who complained of a headache, said she would rather stay home. Lincoln knew their plan had been announced in the newspapers and said they must attend, and so they dressed for the evening. She wore a lovely gray silk dress and he a black suit, overcoat, white kid gloves, and top hat. As they were about to go, Congressman Isaac Arnold came by to see Lincoln. The president told him, “I am going to the theatre. Come by and see me in the morning.”
Finally, after a quick walk to the War Department, Abraham and Mary prepared to leave. William H. Crook, a White House guard, wanted to accompany the president, but Lincoln told Crook he knew he had had a long day and he should take the night off. On their way to the theater, they stopped at Senator Ira Harris’s house to pick up Major Henry R. Rathbone and Harris’s daughter Clara, whom Lincoln invited when the Grants declined. On a foggy Washington evening, the Lincolns finally arrived at Ford’s at eight-thirty, late for the play.
When the Lincolns entered their flag-draped box, the play stopped and the audience cheered. Major Rathbone and Miss Harris took the front seats while Abraham and Mary sat in the rear. John F. Parker, another White House guard, who was to stand in front of the door to the Lincolns’ box, instead decided to find a seat in order to see the play.
As the farcical comedy rollicked forward, Mary had to point out to her exhausted husband what was happening onstage. Lincoln found it difficult to get his mind off the myriad of problems with Reconstruction. Mary slipped her hand into his.
During the third act, John Wilkes Booth entered the unguarded box. He aimed a small derringer pistol at the back of Lincoln’s head, and, from a distance of six inches, fired one shot. Lincoln slumped ahead in his chair. Mary screamed in terror. Rathbone rose to confront the intruder, but Booth, dagger in hand, slashed the young major before leaping from the box to the stage. He yelled in defiance, “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus ever to tyrants.”)
The audience was stunned. Bedlam erupted and people rushed for the exits. Lincoln’s limp body was carried across the street to the modest home of William Peterson, a tailor. The doctor who examined the president knew that he could not live. The bullet had entered his head on the left side and lodged near his right eye.
As Mary Lincoln sobbed inconsolably, Secretary of War Stanton took charge. Welles arrived and observed, “The giant sufferer lay extended diagonally across the bed, which was not long enough for him.” House Speaker Colfax, Senator Sumner, and prominent members of the cabinet gathered in the small back room of the Peterson home. Lincoln’s pastor, Phineas Gurley, arrived. Rumors circulated that assassins had also attacked Vice President Johnson and General Grant. A further report said Secretary of State Seward was assaulted but survived.
Throughout the long night, Washington officials came and went. Robert Lincoln arrived and broke down when he saw his father. Mary tried to speak to her husband, kissed his face, and told him to speak to their departed children. She recalled his dream he told her of the phantom ship traveling to the distant shore.
Finally, Lincoln’s pulse weakened, and he died at 7:22 a.m. on Saturday, April 15, 1865. Stanton asked Pastor Gurley to offer a prayer. Then the secretary of war, who had come to such a deep appreciation of Lincoln, said simply, “Now, he belongs to the ages.”
GRIEF FOR THE DEAD PRESIDENT spread quickly across the country. Many well-known people spoke in impromptu meetings in cities large and small. In Rochester, New York, Mayor Daniel David Tompkins hastily called a meeting at the city hall. He invited three of the leading citizens of Rochester to speak of their appreciation for Abraham Lincoln. Frederick Douglass took a seat toward the back of the auditorium. After the scheduled speakers delivered their eulogies, attendees called for Douglass to speak. He walked to the platform to offer his spontaneous eulogy, focusing his remarks on words from Lincoln’s second inaugural address. He quoted two sentences from the address.
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another, drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still must it be said, that the judgments of the Lord are righteous altogether.
Douglass spoke the words from memory, declaring that “those memorable words—words which will live immortal in history,” will “be read with increasing admiration from age to age.”
The day after Lincoln’s death, Easter Sunday, hundreds of ministers and preachers offered a new definition of Abraham Lincoln. In sermons across the North they interpreted the president’s death as a sacrifice for the nation’s sins. They declared him the Civil War’s final casualty.
In the subsequent days and weeks, in general stores and schools and churches across the country, others attempted to define the meaning of Lincoln’s life. Their first instinct was to look backward, from the vantage point of the end of the Civil War, to see with new appreciation what Lincoln had accomplished in holding the Union together and declaring freedom for the slaves. Some pondered what might have been in Lincoln’s second term as the nation suddenly faced the uncertainty of reconciliation and reconstruction. They wondered what role Lincoln might have played in healing the country after so many years of violence. They wondered what new designation he might have earned.
In the years that have followed, each generation of Americans, indeed citizens around the world, has attempted to define and redefine Lincoln from their own historical vantage point, asking new questions relevant to their day. One reason we have never settled on one definition of Lincoln, and, indeed, never will, is that Lincoln never stopped asking questions of himself. Painfully aware of the shortcomings of his early education, Lincoln—whether as schoolboy, Illinois legislator, prairie lawyer, or as president—always continued his self-study, growing in wisdom and self-knowledge with each passing year. He read, discussed, and pondered the great ideas not only of his time, but of those of the generations before him. He also thought into the future, anticipating the moral questions of subsequent generations. And Lincoln underwent a religious odyssey that deepened as he aged, inquiring about everlasting truths until his last day.
In the days after Lincoln’s death, preparations began for a vast public mourning. Arrangements were made for the long train ride home to the prairies of Illinois. Lincoln’s casket would retrace the exact route where cheering crowds had greeted the president-elect on his way to Washington four years before. On Tuesday, April 18, it seemed that all of Washington stood in line outside the White House to pay their respects to the dead president. After waiting hours they entered the East Room to pass the president’s open casket, finding him dressed in the black suit he had worn at his Second Inaugural. Three days after the assassination, some of the mourners may have offered the most accurate characterization of the man behind the signature “A. Lincoln.” As was the custom of the time, many people wore silk mourning badges. One badge, seen everywhere in Washington during those sad days, said what was in people’s hearts: “With malice toward none; with charity for all.”