Lincoln's Mentors

by Michael J. Gerhardt

  As Lincoln enjoyed a moment of respite, the principal Confederate official left behind, John Campbell, Davis’s assistant secretary of war, came to see him. Lincoln rarely underestimated people, but he might have done that, or been too eager, with Campbell, the former Supreme Court justice who would become, in the years after the war, one of the nation’s most renowned appellate advocates. Campbell urged Lincoln to pursue a policy of “moderation” against the vanquished forces, sensing Lincoln’s desperation for a workable and lasting peace. He got Lincoln to agree “not to exact oaths, interfere with churches, etc.” and to allow “the Virginia Legislature to meet” in order “to repeal the ordinance of secession.”113 Lincoln failed to consult anyone beforehand, and the agreement was a mistake because it sent the wrong signal to the other secessionist states that Virginia had left and returned to the Union rather than as Lincoln and the Republican Party believed, that its government had been hijacked by rebels who were warring against the nation itself. (However, once the Confederate forces formally surrendered, the mistake would become moot.)

  As he wrapped up his visit to Richmond, Lincoln refocused on the war, following the dispatches from the commanders in the field to ensure the final defeat of the rebels. On the passage back to Washington, Lincoln kept himself amused by regaling his fellow passengers with quotes from Shakespeare. A French journalist, who had been assigned to accompany the president on the journey, recounted that, on the trip back,

  Mr. Lincoln read aloud to us for several hours. Most of the passages he selected were from Shakespeare, especially Macbeth. The lines after the murder of Duncan, when the new king falls prey to moral torment, were dramatically dwelt. Now and then he paused to expatiate on how exact a picture here gives a murderer’s mind when, the dark deed achieved, its perpetrator already envies the victim’s calm peace. He read the scene over twice.114

  Some listeners later wondered whether Lincoln had foreseen his own demise in the story.

  Lincoln might have also read the monologue he liked best in Hamlet, not the title character’s famous “To be, or not to be” speech but instead the lament of Claudius, stepfather to young Hamlet and the murderer of Hamlet’s father. It begins,

  O, my offence is rank it smells to heaven;

  It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,

  A brother’s murder. Pray can I not,

  Though inclination be as sharp as will.

  His conscience tears him apart, bemoaning,

  What if this cursed hand

  Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood,

  Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens

  To wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy?

  But to confront the visage of offence?

  And what’s in prayer but this two-fold force,

  To be forestalled ere we come to fall,

  Or pardon’ being down? Then I’ll look up;

  My fault is past. But, O, what form of prayer

  Can serve my term? “Forgive me my foul murder”?

  That cannot be; since I am still possess’d

  Of those effects for which I did the murder,

  . . .

  There is no shuffling; there the action lies

  In his true nature; and we ourselves compell’d,

  Aching with guilt, he worries still,

  Try what repentance can, what can it not?

  Yet what can it when one can not repent?

  Oh wretched state! Oh bosom black as death!

  Oh limed soul, that, struggling to be free,

  Art more engaged! Help, angels! Help assay!

  There can be little wonder why Lincoln was drawn to that passage filled with a brother’s guilt over murdering his brother, for the Civil War was a battle of brother against brother. Claudius was distraught over killing his brother, while Lincoln felt the great weight of ordering the deaths of his brother citizens. He could only hope that in the end, as Claudius declares in the final line, “all may be well.”115 Lincoln could not help but see himself as different from Hamlet, who listens to Claudius confessing he’s murdered Hamlet’s father, yet Hamlet does nothing in the scene but walk away without avenging his father’s death. In the end, Hamlet kills Claudius, and Lincoln, who hoped to avoid war, unleashed the Union’s forces to put down the Southern rebellion, preserve the nation, and end slavery once and for all. Many of the same themes in Claudius’s plea appear in both of Lincoln’s inaugural addresses—mercy, prayer, freedom, angels, pardon, forgiveness, guilt, and sorrow. The war was not yet over, and Lincoln worried, like Claudius did, that the blood he was responsible for shedding could not be easily, or maybe ever, washed away.

  Upon arriving back in Washington on April 9, Lincoln rushed to visit William Seward, who was in bed recuperating after a carriage accident. “I think we are near the end at last,” Lincoln assured him.116 Later that same evening, Lincoln received news from Grant that earlier that day he had met with Robert E. Lee, who formally surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia. Lee agreed to Grant’s (that is, Lincoln’s) terms of surrender, which included pardons for all officers and their men and allowed Confederate soldiers to return to their homes with their horses and side arms. Washington erupted in celebration.

  VIII

  * * *

  The choice of Andrew Johnson as Lincoln’s second vice president confounds people to this day. There was no obvious reason why Johnson was now the vice president. One possibility is that Whigs stuck with tradition. Whigs never attributed any importance to the vice presidency, and so perhaps neither did Lincoln, even though each of the times a vice president had ascended to the presidency was in a Whig administration. In neither case did these vice presidents—Tyler and Fillmore—advance the policies of the presidents they had served.

  Lincoln said he had left the choice of vice president to the 1864 Republican convention, though he had taken the reigns of the party apparatus well before then. By the summer of 1864, the party was desperate to broaden its appeal to Democrats. Johnson was the only Southern Democrat left in the Senate. The freshly branded National Union Party lauded Johnson’s fidelity to the Union, and Johnson held more appeal to the general electorate than Hamlin, because of Johnson’s Southern connections. Party leaders figured those connections would help to ease reconstruction in the South.

  Lincoln raised no question or objection to the choice of Johnson. The norm of the times treated the vice presidency as nothing more than a political expediency. Tyler and Fillmore each had been selected to give regional balance to the national ticket, while Hamlin brought both ideological balance as someone who had long been antislavery (in contrast with Lincoln’s moderation) and balance in terms of experience, as Hamlin’s public service spanned fifty years (in contrast with Lincoln’s single House and four terms in the Illinois legislature).

  But Lincoln did not treat the deaths of the Whig presidents as cautionary tales, because he did not expect to die in office. Harrison and Taylor died because of physical frailty and illness, while Lincoln was perfectly healthy and robust at fifty-six, much younger than Harrison, who passed away at sixty-nine, and Taylor, who died at sixty-five.

  Of the fifteen presidents before Lincoln, few considered their vice presidents as political allies. Washington considered Adams a genuine partner, but in the presidential election of 1800, Adams’s own vice president, Thomas Jefferson, ran against him. Jackson’s first vice president, John Calhoun, was a competitor devoted to undermining him, whereas Jackson’s second, Van Buren, was both a partner and an heir. Lincoln could not conceive of the vice president as a partner or an heir. For him, the vice presidency was a means to help keep the Union intact. Johnson’s selection appeased factions Lincoln alone could not.

  Johnson held less appeal to Lincoln than Hamlin did as a confidant, and Hamlin complained about not being consulted, listened to, or included in important meetings. Lincoln rarely confided in people. He trusted only a few—Browning as a sounding board, and Kentuckian James Speed, whom he brough
t into his administration as attorney general in December 1864, the brother of his close friend Joshua Speed. Lincoln developed affection and respect for Gideon Welles, his navy secretary, but he needed Welles in the Cabinet. He admired the Blairs, but then Montgomery had become a liability he could not ignore. William Seward had settled into a productive relationship with Lincoln after a rocky start, but he, like Welles, was where Lincoln needed him. Thurlow Weed and Horace Greeley inundated Lincoln with advice, but he steadfastly resisted relinquishing control of any kind over his administration to either of them. He listened patiently as many members of Congress lectured him, but he was wary of all and trusted only a few—Washburne and Stuart, among them. Radical Republicans, like Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, did not trust Lincoln, and so Lincoln did not trust them in return. The advantage of mentors such as Henry Clay, Jackson, and Taylor was that Lincoln could consult them as he pleased, and they never talked back. Mary Todd was a partner who had her own agenda. Lincoln frequently had to work around her, not with her, for the benefit of the nation.

  Curiously, the lessons Lincoln took from Polk’s passing were that he should avoid too extreme a workload but, like Polk, pay close attention to the day-to-day operations of his administration to ensure it functioned as he wished. But Polk had a weak constitution, and Lincoln did not. Nevertheless, Lincoln was often despondent and had dreams of dying. Orville Browning recalled that, when he once visited Lincoln in the White House, “After talking to me a while about his sources of domestic sadness, he sent one of the boys to get a volume of [Thomas] Hood’s poems. It was brought to him and he read several of those sad pathetic pieces—I suppose because they were accurate pictures of his own experiences and feelings.”117 Yet, for a man who spoke often of death, as he did with Browning, Stuart, and Joshua Speed, Lincoln did not fear dying in office. When he suggested that fate controlled him more than he controlled it, it was not merely an expression of humility. It suggested that he left such great matters as life and death to a force beyond his control.

  Johnson’s coming from the South and the Democratic Party appealed to the party elders who wanted the Republican ticket to strip away some votes from McClellan with Democrats who still believed in the Union. There was no reason to think he could be a partner for Lincoln to handle the difficult path to reconstruction, and so unsurprisingly Lincoln never once consulted him. In fact, only near the end of his first term did Lincoln bring someone from the Southern end of the border states into his administration. Bates and Blair came from Missouri, but, after Bates departed, Lincoln brought into the Cabinet James Speed from the border state of Kentucky.

  When all was said and done, Lincoln trusted no one’s political judgment more than his own. He was educable but on his terms. As a result, no one in his administration, least of all his vice president, had any real insight into what he was planning for reconstruction.

  IX

  * * *

  On Tuesday, April 11, 1865, Lincoln finished drafting his first major speech on reconstruction. He read some portions to his secretaries and the journalist Noah Brooks but to no one in the Cabinet. Whether he was feeling more confident in his own judgment, as had increasingly been the case with his public remarks, or less needful of input from others, no one knows for sure. But Lincoln had good reason to be more confident at this time than at any other time in his life. No one alive had done what he had done. No president, save possibly Washington, had accomplished more for the Union, and Lincoln was far from done.

  The public rarely saw Lincoln’s confidence and cockiness, obscured by his persistent proclamations of ordinariness, but it was perhaps more evident in the days after the second inauguration. Herndon said, “It was his intellectual arrogance and assumption of superiority that men like Chase and Seward never could forgive.” The comment suggests that Chase and Seward could see Lincoln’s arrogance and perhaps hear it in the way he talked to them and in his biting humor, which Lincoln often used to cut men down to size. Lincoln’s remark, “Chase is about one and a half times bigger than any other man I know,” was meant to cut Chase down to size. Seward, too, got his comeuppance more than once. Comparing his own penchant for telling anecdotes with that of Seward, Lincoln said, “Mr. Seward is limited to a couple of stories which from repeating he believes are true.”

  For all the humility Lincoln made a show of expressing, he never forgot—and did not let anyone else forget—that he was the president. He had outmaneuvered Chase and Seward at the convention and in the White House. They had their strengths and fancy educations (in his original Cabinet, Simon Cameron was the only member without any formal education), but he knew their weaknesses and had outplayed them in the only game that mattered: politics. If they had earned any glory for themselves, it was because of Lincoln, something he made sure none of them ever forgot.

  Hundreds came to hear him on Tuesday evening, April 11, all crowding under his second-floor window at the White House, word having spread that Lincoln was going to read his first speech on reconstruction. Eventually he appeared, to great applause, and with no other fanfare, began to read his speech. Journalist Noah Brooks stood next to him, holding a light to illuminate the pages.

  Lincoln acknowledged the important role that Congress would play in fashioning reconstruction. He told the crowd that he had “distinctly stated that this was not the only plan which might possibly be acceptable” and “that the Executive claimed no right to say when, or whether members should be admitted to seats in Congress from such States.”118 Lincoln addressed the question of whether Louisiana could “be brought into proper practical relation with the Union sooner by sustaining, or by discarding her new state government.”119 The answer, he said, was, “Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is to the fowl, we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.”120 If Louisiana were not to be readmitted, he said, “we also reject one vote in favor of the proposed amendment to the national constitution.”121 The new legislature, in other words, could still speak for Louisiana, since the state itself had never left the Union. Lincoln conceded he was not firmly committed to the current arrangement in Louisiana that he outlined. “As bad promises are better broken than kept, I shall read this as a bad promise, and break it, whenever I shall be convinced that keeping it is adverse to the public interest.”122 He added, “I have not yet been so convinced.”123

  Recognizing that Radical Republicans in Congress opposed the Louisiana constitution because it did not give African Americans the right to vote, he agreed “that it [should] now [be] conferred on the very intelligent [presumably meaning those who could read and write], and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.”124 Yet Lincoln was not dictating terms. In recognizing a right of suffrage for the newly freed slaves, he was still acting in conformity with his background as a Clay Whig, in deferring to Congress on the logistics of reconstruction.

  Lincoln’s April 11 speech marked the first time that a president acknowledged in public an African American right to vote. Though some of the crowd below grew bored and wandered away as Lincoln explained his thinking about reconstruction, many did not. One man in particular glared angrily at Lincoln from the shadows on the fringe of the crowd. “That means nigger citizenship,” John Wilkes Booth told a friend.125 “Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”126

  This was not the first time Booth came to hear Lincoln speak. Lincoln knew him by sight. He had been in the crowd at the inauguration. If Lincoln recognized Booth then, as he stared down at the president from a portico over Lincoln’s left shoulder, Lincoln never mentioned it to anyone. One of the nation’s preeminent actors, tall and handsome with a sleek moustache, Booth usually stood out. Lincoln had enjoyed seeing him perform Shakespeare. Yet even if Lincoln had tried on the evening of April 11 to make out particular people below his window, it was impossible, and people on the edge of the crowd were shrouded in shadows.

  X

 
* * *

  The first attempt to assassinate an American president was in 1835. On July 28, Andrew Jackson attended a funeral in the House chamber of the Capitol. Afterward he walked down the Capitol steps to be taken back to the White House, but as he finished descending, an unemployed house painter named Richard Lawrence suddenly broke loose from the crowd. He pressed a gun against Jackson’s chest, and pulled the trigger. The gun misfired. Furious, Jackson began striking Lawrence with his cane. Lawrence broke free for a moment, drew a second pistol, and pulled the trigger again. This pistol, too, misfired. As he prepared to take another shot, Jackson’s aides wrestled him to the ground. For the remainder of his presidency, Jackson worried about another attack. He was convinced that the Whigs had paid Lawrence, though there is no evidence to support the claim. In all likelihood, Lawrence was deranged.

  After Lawrence’s failed attack, every president was warned to take assassination attempts seriously, and most took precautions. Lincoln’s head of security during the transition and in the administration, Allan Pinkerton, advised him to take a circuitous route from Springfield to Washington, to avoid any assassins lying in wait. Once in office, Lincoln frequently had bodyguards with him, including his loyal servant William Slade and old friend Ward Hill Lamon. In November 1864, the Washington police force created a special four-man detail to protect the president.

  April 14, three days after Lincoln’s first speech on Reconstruction, was Good Friday. Lincoln awoke feeling unusually refreshed. Though he had meetings scheduled all day, he was eager for a break. There was a play that evening, Our American Cousin, a popular comedy he wanted to see. Edwin Stanton pleaded with Lincoln not to go, sharing reports of assassins still plotting to kill him. Lincoln insisted that the play would be good for him because comedy always lightened his spirit. Unhappily, Stanton relented. The only person from his security detail available to go to the theater with Lincoln was John Parker, well known for his drinking habits. With Mary Todd, Parker, and their guests Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée, Clara Harris, the daughter of Senator Ira Harris of New York, Lincoln left for the theater shortly before the scheduled curtain time.