DR: When the war starts, the North is considered so likely to win that at the First Battle of Bull Run, people come out with picnic tables and carts. They’re going to watch the North annihilate the South. What happened?
DKG: Many of the soldiers ran away from the battle, and it was a humiliation for the North. That night, Lincoln couldn’t sleep, and he saw the soldiers and people coming through Washington and knew what had happened. So he stayed up all night.
This is what Lincoln was like. He just had to figure out what went wrong. He would always write down what he could when something went wrong so that he could learn from mistakes.
He realized the three-month term of army service was too short. Many of these people were about to be out of the service, so they ran away from the battle. He realized the general wasn’t right. The discipline was wrong. As long as he could figure that out and start to change what had happened, then he was able to finally go to sleep.
Always that was his mantra. He said, “As long as I can figure out what I’ve done wrong, I’d like to believe I’m smarter today than I was yesterday because of what I’ve understood about what happened.”
DR: His general at the beginning was George McClellan. Why was McClellan not so effective? Why did he not attack the South?
DKG: Oh, McClellan. When I say I want to live with the people that I love—I did not love George McClellan.
He was very popular among the troops. They loved him. But unlike Grant later, he was always assuming he didn’t have enough troops and that he didn’t have enough supplies. There was a lack of forward movement on his part.
Worse than that, when you read his diary, or you read the letters that he wrote to his wife—which she should never have allowed to be published; his reputation might have been different—he says terrible things about everybody. He says, “The whole cabinet are geese, Lincoln’s stupid. I could be a dictator if I wanted to, they love me so much.”
“The President and General McClellan on the Battle-field of Antietam.”
There’s a famous story where Lincoln went to McClellan’s house one night. This is in 1861. McClellan is coming home from someplace, and he’s supposed to be home soon, and Lincoln’s waiting in the parlor.
McClellan knows that Lincoln is there, but he goes straight up to bed. John Hay, Lincoln’s secretary, was there, and he said, “This is the insolence of the epaulet.” And Lincoln says, “I will hold his horse if he wins a battle. That’s all that matters.”
He gives McClellan too many chances—always wanting somebody to have a second chance was one of the weaknesses that he had—keeps him on too long, until finally he decides that McClellan has to go and fires him.
DR: Toward the end of the war, Lincoln gets a general he likes—Ulysses S. Grant. But initially he resisted efforts to free the slaves. Why was that, and why did he issue the Emancipation Proclamation?
DKG: He initially resisted it because he didn’t think that the federal government had the power to do anything about slavery, because of the Constitution.
But after the defeat of the Peninsula Campaign of 1862, when McClellan was so out-generaled by Lee, Lincoln said that we were at the end of our rope and that something had to happen. So he went to his summer cottage at the Soldiers’ Home, which is where he would often go to think just to get away from Washington.
In those days, people who wanted to see Lincoln could come in the mornings. They would be lining up outside his office to ask him for a job. These are the days before the Civil Service.
He would spend two hours with these ordinary people. When his secretary said, “You don’t have time for these ordinary people,” he said, “I must never forget the popular assemblage from which I have come.”
But he knew he needed time to think about what to do, so he went to the Soldiers’ Home, and it was there that he began drafting, in the summer of 1862, the Emancipation Proclamation.
He had visited the troops at least a dozen times and realized, as he talked to the soldiers, that slaves were an enormously positive force for the Confederacy. They were working in the camps, they were tending to the kitchens, and they were helping the Confederates in the balance of power.
He began to realize that “I’m commander in chief of the army, and if I can emancipate the slaves to help the war struggle, then I can issue an emancipation proclamation.”
He comes back to his cabinet and he tells them. They’ve been debating for months what to do about slavery. Several people in the cabinet thought he should have done it right away. There were others who thought, “If you do it, the South will never, ever stop fighting. This war will never end.”
Lincoln tells them, “I’m issuing an emancipation proclamation, and I will listen to your advice about its timing and its implementation, but I want you to know I’ve made up my mind about it.”
Seward comes back and says, “I’m with you on this, but you can’t issue it now. It’ll look like it’s part of the defeat of the Peninsula Campaign. Wait until the eagle of victory takes flight.” That’s the way they talked in those days—“Wait until the eagle of victory takes flight.”
So Lincoln waits until the Union victory at Antietam in September. He doesn’t issue it in July. When Lee’s forces are pulled back, he issues the Emancipation Proclamation.
The amazing thing is he meets with the cabinet again, and at that point—even though several of them are still not happy with what he’s doing, and he tells Montgomery Blair, his postmaster general, “I’ll let you file your written objections to anybody”—none of them go against it publicly. So much do they by that time respect Lincoln, they present a united front to the country, which was essential—that the cabinet be together in that important moment.
DR: The Gettysburg Address is very eloquent, and so is Lincoln’s second inaugural address. Why is the Emancipation Proclimation just boilerplate?
DKG: He meant the Emancipation Proclamation to be a legal document, not a speech. Also, he knew that it was so important that this be accepted by as many people as possible in the North. He knew, and was told, that a lot of soldiers would leave the army if he freed the slaves. They were just fighting for the Union, not against slavery.
There were states in the North that passed resolutions saying they might secede from the Union because New England was pushing us into this emancipation. So he wanted the proclamation to be the least incendiary document it could be, so as not to spark the tinder that was already there.
DR: While there are slaves who are freed, and some of them do fight for the North, it still takes a long time for the war to come to an end. The final, critical battles take place in Gettysburg. What happened there?
“The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation Before the Cabinet.”
DKG: They begin to make Lee’s army retreat. But the hard thing for Lincoln about Gettysburg was that they were sending telegrams to General Meade and saying to him, “Just don’t let Lee’s army escape, no matter what you do.” Unfortunately, Meade did let Lee’s army escape.
The soldiers from the North were decimated as well. They were exhausted. Lincoln later understood why that might have been so, but it was one of the biggest moments of depression for him when they heard that Lee’s army had escaped.
He wrote a long letter to General Meade saying, “I’m immeasurably distressed you didn’t do what we asked you to do. Had you been able to get Lee’s army, the war might have ended in a few months. Now it could go on year after year.”
But he knew that that would paralyze the general, who was in the field, so he did what he often did in these moments: he wrote what he called a “hot letter” to General Meade. He would then put these hot letters aside, hoping he would cool down psychologically and never need to send them.
When his papers were opened in the twentieth century, underneath this one to Meade was written “Never sent and never signed.” He did that dozens of times.
It seems to me that would be a good thing for people in today�
�s world of Twitter to learn. Just write a hot Twitter account, don’t post it.
DR: After Gettysburg, although Meade did not pursue Lee the way Lincoln would have preferred, ultimately the North does prevail. Grant becomes a great general. He defeats Lee. Was Lincoln’s view that Lee and the South should be humiliated at the surrender at Appomattox?
DKG: Without question, no. Lincoln understood early on—and he made it known to Grant—that he wanted to treat the South with as much leniency as possible, even in terms of what he hoped would happen to the Confederate leaders. He knew that if they stayed in the United States, there would be a wish to put them on trial. He didn’t want that.
He hoped they would kind of escape—go somewhere else, so that they didn’t have to be caught. He hoped that the government could give the soldiers in the South guns so that they could go back to their farms, give them back their horses, not take away their personal property.
And indeed, on the last day of Lincoln’s life, when Grant came to the cabinet to talk about the terms that he had given to Lee’s army and to the soldiers, that was what Lincoln wanted, and he was so happy.
That’s what’s so sad. That day was probably the happiest day he’d had in his life. His son Robert was back from the war. He and Mary went together that afternoon on a carriage ride and talked about how difficult the years had been for her. They’d lost their son Willie, the favorite kid in the family, at ten years old.
And the Lincolns said maybe they could dream about what would happen after the presidency. He wanted to go to California more than anywhere, over the Rockies. She wanted to go to Europe. They had the sense of a future before them.
He’s at the White House talking to a bunch of his friends that night. He used to go to the theater for recreation. He went a hundred times, during the Civil War, to the theater—more than a hundred times. He said, like Roosevelt with his famous cocktail hours, that for a few precious hours he could go back to another time and forget the war that was raging.
But that night he didn’t want to go, he was so happy talking to his friends in the White House. But he had given his word, and it was in the newspapers that morning that he was going to go. So he said to them, “I’d rather stay, but I’ve given my word, so I have to go to the theater.”
DR: The night before he goes, he gives his last speech at the White House, and he talks about incendiary things. John Wilkes Booth was standing there, listening. What made Booth so upset?
DKG: What Lincoln talked about that night was the possibility of giving the vote to black soldiers. John Wilkes Booth turned to the person next to him, one of the conspirators, and said—in worse words—“That means Negro citizenship. We have to get him.”
DR: He plotted not just to kill Lincoln but to kill three people. Who were the three?
DKG: He was going to kill Seward and Andrew Johnson, the vice president, and Lincoln. The conspirators did actually go to Seward’s house. It’s an extraordinary scene. Seward lived with his wife and his daughter and son in a mansion that’s right where the Hay-Adams hotel is right now.
The guy comes in with a knife and pretends that he’s bringing a prescription medicine for Seward, because Seward had been in a carriage accident several weeks earlier and had broken his jaw. The attacker goes into Seward’s room and he slashes Seward’s jaw. The only reason Seward lived was that his jaw had been wired, so the assailant didn’t hit the artery that he would otherwise have.
The guy who was supposed to kill Andrew Johnson was staying at a hotel. At the last minute he goes and has a drink at the bar, and he decides not to do it.
But, of course, John Wilkes Booth comes to the back of the Lincolns’ box at the Ford’s Theatre because he was known in the theater as an actor. His brother Edwin Booth was the most famous Shakespearean actor at the time, whom Lincoln had met and admired.
They let him into the back of the box. He shoots Lincoln, as we know, in the back of the head.
The doctor said Lincoln should have died instantly, but he didn’t die, he was so vital. They said he stayed alive until that next morning, and then Stanton gives the words that have come down to us. “Now,” Stanton said, “he belongs to the ages.” The very thing he had dreamed of—that he’d be remembered over time.
The famous editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast offered a rosy view of post–Civil War life for emancipated African Americans, contrasting scenes of freedom with scenes of the horrors of slavery.
DR: It took you ten years to write this book. At the beginning, you mentioned to Steven Spielberg that you were doing this, and he said he was going to make a movie out of it, and he did. What part did he choose, and were you upset that he only used four pages out of your seven hundred?
DKG: No, no! The whole point is, did he get the man, Lincoln, that I thought I knew? He got this man who was an incredibly great political genius, who was able to trade for what he wanted yet was a transformative leader.
I’d met Spielberg because he was doing a documentary on the century that had just passed. He’d always wanted to make a movie about Lincoln. He said it would be the culmination of his life. He had read Franklin and Eleanor, so he asked me if he could have first dibs when I finished the Lincoln book—like there’s going to be twelve Steven Spielbergs wanting to do this book. Of course I said yes.
Then, whenever he was on a movie set, he would call me—he hadn’t bought the rights yet, he had just optioned them at this point—and he would say, “What did Lincoln do today?” And I’d tell him, “Lincoln was at the courthouse today,” “He’s on the legal circuit,” or “He was telling a funny story.” That’s the way Spielberg would relax between his other movies.
He finally put two scriptwriters on it even before I finished the book, and they both wrote really good scripts. But to neither of those scripts did Daniel Day-Lewis [who had been cast as Lincoln] say yes.
Finally Tony Kushner started working on the script, and I worked with him. At first he had something like a seven-hundred-page script. Chase was a big figure in it. The cabinet was a big figure in it.
But the filmmakers knew they had to focus on a smaller subject instead of telling a bigger story where you wouldn’t get into his character. The plot was less important than what it showed about Lincoln.
Finally Daniel says yes to the screenplay, and Spielberg called me the next day and he said, “Daniel wants a year to become Lincoln, so we’re not going to announce that he’s Lincoln yet, but I want you to take him to Springfield. He going to come under an assumed name, and you’ll take him around and show him all the sights.”
We get to the hotel, and I say, “We’re just supposed to eat in the hotel, right, with you under this assumed name?” He said, “Oh, no, let’s go to a bar.”
So we went to a bar, and immediately somebody bought us drinks, and I thought, “Oh my God. It’s already over.” But they didn’t recognize him; they recognized me. It became a huge joke between us.
For an entire year, as he’s preparing for the role, I’m sending him books, and we’re talking, we’re texting each other, and he’s becoming Lincoln. He’s reading about Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster.
I went to the filming in Richmond, Virginia—it was great the way that Richmond opened its doors to this film. It felt like a reconciliation between North and South.
Daniel was by now Lincoln. He never was out of character. Even the other actors had to call him Mr. President or Mr. Lincoln. It was an extraordinary experience to watch Lincoln come to life.
DR: Let’s go to baseball for a moment. Why do you care about baseball?
DKG: I grew up as a Brooklyn Dodgers fan in Long Island when the Dodgers, the Yankees, and the Giants were all there at the same time. My father came from Brooklyn and loved the Brooklyn Dodgers. He taught me how to keep score when I was six years old. He would come home, and I would recount every single play that had taken place that afternoon.
It made me think, “There’s something special about history, ev
en if it’s only five hours old, keeping my father’s attention.” I’m convinced I learned the narrative art from those nightly sessions with my father, because at first, I’d be so excited I would blurt out, “The Dodgers won!” or “The Dodgers lost!” which took the drama of this two-hour telling away. I finally learned you had to tell a story from beginning to middle to end.
My father died before I got married and had my three sons. But I have given them that love of my father through the stories I’ve told and through baseball. I then went to Harvard and became an equally irrational Red Sox fan. My kids are now Red Sox fans. I can sit there at a game with the kids and just imagine myself a young girl once more in the presence of my father watching my players—Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges—and it’s a magical thing, because then I can feel as if my father is still there.
Even though they never met their grandfather, they’ve heard about him through the stories I’ve told, which is why I love history. We make these people who were part of our families and part of our country’s history come back to life.
8 A. SCOTT BERG
on Charles Lindbergh
“He was human quarry all his life.”
BOOK DISCUSSED:
Lindbergh (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1998)
Most of the biographies in this series involve government officials or those who influenced government policy. Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974) is in a different category, but his impact on history, and on the United States and Europe, was truly unique.
In May 1927, a little-known twenty-five-year-old airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh made history when, responding to a $25,000 prize challenge, he became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic, piloting his plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, from New York to Paris in a thirty-three-and-a-half-hour flight. The feat made him an instant celebrity around the world—perhaps the most famous human in world history up to that point—and, as award-winning biographer A. Scott Berg explains, it ushered in the modern era of media superstardom.
The American Story Page 18