Lincoln's Mentors

by Michael J. Gerhardt

  Orville Browning was eager to see Lincoln, having not seen him since the formal surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, when the two briefly conferred on reconstruction. Remembering the dark days when the war first started and he often visited alone with Lincoln, he hoped to have a celebratory moment with the president. He knew Lincoln would be busy, and he was—there was much work to be done on reconstruction, and the killing had not yet ended. Even after Grant’s meeting with Lee at Appomattox, Sherman was still chasing General Johnston’s army down south, and Nathan Bedford Forrest and his guerrilla units continued to terrorize Union forces and African Americans until they surrendered on May 9, 1865. For the moment, Browning was joyful, walking around his city. Most offices were still closed, the remnants of the partying the evening before still smoldering. In his diary for the evening of April 13 he had written, “Illumination of the city at night for General Lee’s surrender.”127

  The next morning, some businesses and government offices were slowly beginning to reopen. Browning went to the War Department to “get passes for some refugee Germans to return to their families in Richmond.”128 From there, he walked to the Treasury Department, where he was following up on the “Singletons business,” an arrangement that Browning and others had made with James Singleton, who had negotiated for peace earlier in the year, for the federal government to purchase cotton and tobacco from Virginia.129 At three o’clock that afternoon, Browning and Nevada’s first senator, William Morris Stewart, went to visit the president, but they were told that Lincoln “was done receiving for the day and we did not send in our cards.”130 Browning and Stewart returned to finish their business at the Capitol.

  At seven that evening, Browning returned alone to the White House. He asked to see Lincoln and was led upstairs to Lincoln’s office. Browning’s diary recorded that he “went into [Lincoln’s] room and sat there till 8 o’clock waiting for him, but he did not come. He was going to the theater.”131

  Epilogue

  The first permanent memorial to Lincoln was one of the most difficult to arrange. Within days of his death, Mary Todd and their son Robert found themselves in heated dispute with John Todd Stuart and a self-appointed committee he led, the National Lincoln Monument Association, over where and how the fallen president should be buried. The ensuing “Battle of the Gravesite” was the first in an ongoing series of tussles over Lincoln’s legacy.

  On April 19, an elaborate ceremony was held in Washington to honor President Lincoln. Two days later, a funeral train began a twelve-day journey to return Lincoln’s body to Springfield, following in reverse the route he had traveled from his home to his inauguration. Thousands lined the tracks to pay homage.

  Initially, Mary Todd and Robert told Springfield leaders their preference was to bury Lincoln either in the empty crypt prepared for George Washington’s body in the U.S. Capitol, or in Chicago, where Mary Todd hoped to settle. Eventually, Mary Todd relented and agreed with the rest of his family to bury Lincoln at the top of a hill in bucolic Oak Ridge Cemetery, next to Springfield. But Stuart’s committee had other plans: they preferred for the murdered president to be buried at a site in the center of town, which they believed would be good for business in Springfield. Though Robert stayed with Stuart during the Springfield services, the skirmish continued, until Mary Todd made the ultimatum to bury Lincoln as she wished or she would withdraw her consent entirely for a burial in Springfield. Stuart’s committee took a final vote, deciding by a narrow margin, 8–7, to acquiesce to her demands.

  The principal themes of the eulogies were nearly the same everywhere except in the South. First, Lincoln had been the instrument of God’s will. Among the longest orations was that of Bishop Matthew Simpson of the Methodist Episcopal Church of Philadelphia, who declared that

  the great cause of this mourning is found in the man himself. Mr. Lincoln was no ordinary man; and I believe the conviction has been growing on the nation’s mind, as it has certainly been on mine, especially in the last years of his administration, that by the hand of God he was especially singled out to guide our government in these troubled times. And it seems to me that the hand of God may be traced in many of the events connected with his history.

  In a ceremony in Washington, Dr. Phineas Gurley, the pastor of New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, which the president had attended, had sounded the same theme. “God raised him up for a great and glorious mission, furnished him for his work, and aided him in its accomplishment.” Of Lincoln’s many qualities, Simpson said the most impressive was his character. Lincoln’s “moral power gave him pre-eminence. The convictions of men that Abraham Lincoln was an honest man, led them to yield to his guidance.” A Springfield theology professor simply said, “Rest, Noble Martyr.” One Springfield newspaper predicted, “Millions will drop a tear to his memory, and future generations will make pilgrimages to his tomb. Peace to his ashes.”

  The eulogies and Lincoln lore have great resonance because they fit the narrative of Lincoln’s life as he had lived it. One essential element was his educability. Frederick Douglass often berated Lincoln for being too slow, cautious, incremental, and racist in his thinking, actions, and language. On April 14, 1876, eleven years after Lincoln’s death, Douglass reiterated, “Truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument to his memory. [Lincoln] was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he [wa]s preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.”1

  Lincoln was all that Douglass said and more. In that same speech in 1876, Douglass expressed gratitude for Lincoln’s “great works” and praised him as “a great and glorious friend and benefactor.” Douglass, as clear-eyed as anyone assessing Lincoln in his own times, might have appreciated that Lincoln was educable, though not nearly as fast as Douglass had hoped from the man he called “the first martyr President of the United States.” Lincoln never stopped studying and learning from people and events as much as he learned from books. In 1862, he met with a delegation of African American citizens from Washington, D.C. He told them, “You and we are different races,” and suggested that “it was better for us both [to] be separated.”2 But later that same year, in 1862, Lincoln announced his intention to issue an Emancipation Proclamation. By the end of the war, he had moved beyond Clay’s and his own past thinking, authorizing Douglass to put together an outfit of African American troops to fight for the Union, discarding the notion that slave-owners deserved compensation, and planning for an America of unprecedented equality. In 1864, Lincoln met in the White House with African American abolitionist Sojourner Truth, who had waited hours to see him. He shared with her a Bible that was given to him by African Americans in Baltimore. When she thanked him profusely for the Emancipation Proclamation, he assured her that Washington and other predecessors would have done the same “if the time had come.” Lincoln was not above racist thinking and language, but he was also the first president to welcome African Americans into the White House—both literally and ideologically.

  No one knows whether Lincoln’s legacy would have been different had he not died as a martyr for his cause, even though he repeatedly expressed concern that he was headed to a “terrible end.” Such premonitions did not lead him to take greater care to protect himself from the assassins he knew were hunting him.

  Mary Todd had that and much more to regret as she settled in Chicago. Her debts hounded her, until she prevailed on Thaddeus Stevens to persuade his colleagues to enact legislation that covered much of the money she owed. When her son Tad died in 1871, the grief was too much for her. In 1875, Robert approved her commitment to an insane asylum. Six years later, she secured her release and went to Europe to escape the negative attention she was receiving in the United States. Eventually, she returned to the United States, where she died in 1882. She was buried with Lincoln, along with every other member of the family except Robert. When Robert died in 1926, his
wife refused to allow her husband to be buried next to Lincoln. She did not wish Robert to be overshadowed in death by his father, as he had been in life. He was interred in Arlington National Cemetery, the last surviving member of the Cabinets of presidents James Garfield and Chester Arthur.

  Slowly, other memorials to Lincoln began to appear outside Illinois, in most of the rest of the country, except, again, in the South. In 1869, Nebraska renamed its state capitol Lincoln in honor of the late president. Two years before that, Oliver Howard, a brigadier general known as the Christian General because of his determination to base his policies on his strong religious convictions, founded Howard University in Washington, D.C. (He later founded Abraham Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee, the first such site in the South honoring the fallen president.)

  As memorials and markers spread, however, a more extended battle was being waged over Lincoln’s legacy. Andrew Johnson’s legacy was not one of unity or racial progress, to say the least. Among the divisions that emerged was the question of whether and how to remember Lincoln. Republicans claimed Lincoln as their own. They defended his image the way he had shaped it in life. They burnished his memory as the first Republican president, the one who freed the slaves, whose rhetoric was unmatched, and who embodied calmness, steadiness, and humility during the most stressful years in American history. Lincoln had set the stage for the second founding, reconstructing the original Constitution to guarantee the freedom and equality of every American, regardless of race. Lincoln had done his part in both implementing the great promise of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” and crafting a new American rhetoric—plain, clear, and yet mellifluent and stirring. As Frederick Douglass observed,

  In my interviews with him, I found him as I have already described him, a plain man. His manners were simple, unaffected, unstudied. His language, like himself, was plain strong and sinewy, just as it appears in his written productions. He spoke as he wrote, without ornament. Earnest always, but never extravagant. I never met a man who could state more clearly and forcibly, just what he wished to make apparent.3

  Lincoln became mythic, nearly divine, in memorial after memorial paying homage to his martyrdom. Yet many Americans, particularly in the South, saw a different Lincoln, more devil than saint. They viewed him as a president elected by only a minority of the country who was a tyrant and waged war to force law-abiding Southerners to give up their way of life. The battle over Lincoln’s legacy was essentially a war over a vision for America. It was a battle over which myth of Lincoln to advance and which story of the war to champion, more protracted than the war itself and ultimately more consequential for America’s identity. For loyal Confederates, reconstruction and reunion required rebranding the purpose of the conflict. For the South, it became a noble contest to vindicate “states’ rights” over federal supremacy, as Jefferson Davis proclaimed in his address to the Confederate Congress on April 29, 1861: “All we ask is to be let alone.”4 In the remainder of that address, which not only defined the terms of engagement at the start of the war but was drawn upon by sympathizers long after Lee’s surrender, Davis denounced the “wrongs” and “evils” that the North had imposed on the Confederates. The wrongs and evils were the Union’s efforts to contain slavery. Over the next few years, it was clear what Davis and other Confederate leaders wanted done if they were left alone—fortify and expand slavery to the fullest extent possible.

  After Jefferson Davis died in 1881, the battle to rewrite the narrative on the reasons for the war did not stall but continued with greater fervor. Monuments sprouted up around the South, funded by the descendants of rebel soldiers who venerated their ancestors and their “lost cause.” They celebrated not Lincoln but instead retold the history of the war to recast it as having been waged for reasons other than preserving slavery and to honor the valor of Confederate war heroes and leaders. More than a century after Davis died, Richmond, capital of the Confederacy, refused to allow a mural of Lincoln to join the monuments of Confederate generals lining its Monument Avenue. When a statue of Lincoln and his son Tad was erected in a different part of town in 2003, more than a century and a half since the end of the Civil War, over a hundred Sons of Confederate Veterans protested. One complained that the people erecting the statue “have no concept of history. . . . As a southerner, I am offended. You wouldn’t put a statute of Winston Churchill in downtown Berlin, would you? What’s next, a statue of Sherman in Atlanta?”5

  The debate over Civil War–era monuments still rages today. The May 25, 2020, murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer sparked a renewed debate across the South and the rest of the nation. Protests against police brutality directed at African Americans spread like wildfire across the country, leading to the toppling of Confederate monuments, particularly in the South, including those for Jefferson Davis and General Williams Carter Wickham in Richmond (and prompting the governor to take down a monument of Robert E. Lee); the House vote to take down the seventeen monuments to Confederates in the Capitol; the vote of both chambers in Congress to rename federal military bases that had been named after Confederate military officers and the removals of shrines to white supremacy and monuments or celebrations of other Confederate figures in at least eleven states, including Washington and Oregon.

  In the midst of all this, Lincoln was not forgotten but venerated. President Trump declared (falsely) that he had done as much for African Americans as Lincoln had, if not more. Americans yearned for a Lincoln, and President Trump was keen to align himself with Lincoln’s legend and to get on the bandwagon that Lincoln had put in motion to secure equality throughout the land.

  The finest Lincoln scholars—Sidney Blumenthal, Michael Burlingame, David Herbert Donald, Eric Foner, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Allen Guelzo, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Holzer, James McPherson, Kate Masur, Allan Nevins, J. G. Randall, and Kenneth Winkle—to name but a few—have worked to restore Lincoln’s humanity, to show that he was not a god or myth but a man.6 His achievements are all the more impressive because he was not divine or superhuman but a mere mortal. He was not born to greatness but earned his way, his map drawn by the men, books, plays, and poetry that he took inspiration and instruction from.

  When asked whether Lincoln was a weak man, Stephen Douglas said no, but quickly added that “he is preeminently a man of the atmosphere that surrounds him.” Whether he intended it or not, Douglas captured an essential element of Lincoln’s leadership—his ability to imbue and express, in all its complexity, the time in which he lived. Even if Lincoln were playing “chess” with other people’s lives (as a Chicago lawyer friend suggested), his moves were not made in a series of sudden leaps ahead but rather incrementally, each step tracking the core values, sentiments, and ideals of the people and country he led. In being “a man of the atmosphere” around him, Lincoln had the unique capacity to absorb and adapt to his own ends the rhetoric, attitudes, and experiences of the leaders, visionaries, and poets of his era. As president, he was surrounded by Jackson men and pushed relentlessly to be firm and “manly” like Jackson. Having grown up among Jacksonian Democrats and counting many of them as close friends, Lincoln understood the allure of Jackson. It is no surprise that he wished to be a president like Jackson, who would be willing to die for his cause rather than to be a president, like Buchanan, who shrank from danger. Better to “be assassinated on this spot,” as Lincoln said in front of Independence Hall in 1861, “than to surrender” the principle of liberty for all promised in the Declaration of Independence. His emulation extended to adopting Jackson’s stories when it seemed appropriate. When approaching Richmond with his son Tad in April 1865, Lincoln told his shipmates of a Western stump speaker who had once sought [appointment to lead] a foreign embassy and was “only appeased by the gift of an old pair of breeches.” It was a story first told by Jackson. Lincoln had substituted himself for Jackson, his coda merely “But it is well to be humble.”7

  In the fight over Lincoln’
s legacy, Lincoln’s mentors have largely been neglected. A rare exception can be found in the center of Philadelphia, once the nation’s largest market for slave trade. A building dating back to 1862 houses the grandest Union League in the nation. On its second floor is a hall with portraits of every Republican president, beginning with the first, Abraham Lincoln. Yet not all the presidents in that great hall were Republicans. On the wall, in the lower right corner, sits a portrait of Andrew Jackson, painted during a visit to New Orleans in 1839. Above him is Zachary Taylor, the last Whig elected president. The largest painting of all in the Union League is not of Lincoln but is a nine-foot-tall portrait of his greatest mentor. Standing erect, Henry Clay is depicted as the “Father of the American System,” with several emblems of his vision of industry and agriculture as indispensable to the nation’s economic growth—a plow, an anvil, a shuttle, some cattle, a ship, and a globe with the American flag draped over it. Then in his sixties, Clay stands, looking as vibrant and imposing as ever. Above a bannister in another part of the Union League, there is a smaller portrait of Henry Charles Carey, who crafted the economic theory underlying Clay’s American System and who had served as an adviser to Lincoln in his Treasury Department.

  In the years following Lincoln’s death, the legacies and reputations of his principal mentors have followed different paths. Of the three mentors who did not outlive him, history has been kindest to Clay. Clay is one of only five former senators commemorated by statues in the nation’s capital. Historians acknowledge his strong influence on Lincoln and the role he played in congressional debates at critical moments of the antebellum period, none more so than in the Compromise of 1850. Yet, what continues to shine most from Clay’s life is his oratory, still widely studied and emulated in the years after his death in 1852. No senator has been quoted as much by a president as Lincoln quoted Clay.