Over the next forty days, one by one, the states of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas voted themselves out of the Union, quickly taking over federal institutions, including forts and arsenals. The whole North waited to see if Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas would follow.
IN THE MIDST OF the Union’s disintegration, Lincoln made a major priority the preparation of his inaugural address to be delivered in Washington on March 4, 1861. He had begun his research shortly after his election, borrowing from the Illinois State Library The Statesman’s Manual, a volume published in 1854 that contained the addresses and messages of presidents from 1789 to 1849. Lincoln examined President Andrew Jackson’s proclamation in the nullification controversy of 1832. As he had done before his Cooper Union address, Lincoln was looking for historic precedents.
In late December, with the coming of a new governor and the convening of the state legislature scheduled on January 7, 1861, Lincoln had to give up his office in the statehouse. Joel Johnson, who owned an office building on the Springfield square, offered Lincoln the use of two offices on the second floor.
Lincoln discovered that these new offices, even busier than the old, were not an ideal place to work on an inaugural address. He accepted an invitation from Clark Moulton Smith, his brother-in-law, to use a room on the third floor of his store as his writing space. Lincoln wrote and revised at an old merchant’s desk, which contained plenty of pigeonholes for his many notes.
The Charleston Mercury’s headline trumpeted South Carolina’s secession from the Union on December 20, 1860.
In January, Lincoln asked Herndon to acquire copies of two speeches he had long appreciated. As a young man living in New Salem, Lincoln had read Daniel Webster’s reply to Robert Hayne. In 1830, after Senator Robert Hayne of South Carolina had defended the right of nullification—arguing that ultimate power rested in the states, which could withdraw from the Union—on the floor of the Senate, Senator Webster of Massachusetts replied to him, closing with the memorable words, “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.” Lincoln also asked for a copy of Senator Henry Clay’s memorable speech in support of the Compromise of 1850.
By late January, Lincoln asked William H. Bailhache, one of the owners of the Illinois State Journal, to secretly print copies of his inaugural address. For an address of this magnitude, he decided to seek the suggestions of a few friends. He asked Judge Davis to read the entire address, but he made no suggestions. Lincoln put copies of his address, plus notes for speeches for the trip to Washington, in a black oilcloth handbag, which he gave to his son Robert for safekeeping on the train and in the cities they would be visiting in February.
TOWARD THE END OF JANUARY, Lincoln began his farewells to family and friends. On January 30, 1861, Lincoln slipped away from reporters and office seekers and traveled by train and horse and buggy to Farmington, a small remote community in Coles County. He wished to see his aging stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln. The summer before, when she heard of her stepson’s nomination, she feared that if elected something terrible would happen to him. Lincoln also wanted to visit his father’s grave, which had stood unmarked since 1851. On this trip, Lincoln ordered a stone marker for it.
Returning to Springfield, Lincoln concluded many personal and family matters. He rented the beloved family home to Lucian Tilton, the retired proprietor of the Wabash Railroad, for $350 a year. The Lincolns sold much of their furniture. They gave away their floppy-eared dog Fido to neighbor boys John and Frank Roll, whose father, John Roll, was the carpenter who had helped remodel the Lincoln home. Fearing a violation of privacy, Mary burned heaps of old letters and papers in the rear alley. Lincoln left a batch of his letters and papers for safekeeping with Elizabeth Grimsley, Mary’s cousin. Mistaking the speeches and letters for trash, Grimsley’s maid would later burn most of the contents, which included Lincoln’s “Discoveries and Inventions” speech as well as the partial drafts from his “House Divided” speech. On February 7, 1861, the Lincolns moved out of their home to the Chenery House, a hotel across from Lincoln’s office.
On his final day in Springfield, Sunday, February 10, 1861, Lincoln walked to his law office at 105 South Fifth Street to meet his law partner, Herndon. Lincoln rested his large frame on the comfortable sofa one last time. After the two men reminisced about old times and conferred about unfinished legal business, Lincoln requested that the sign board on its rusty hinges at the foot of the stairway should remain. “Let it hang there undisturbed. … If I live I’m coming back some time, and then we’ll go right on practicing law as if nothing had ever happened.” On that final evening, Lincoln took some Chenery House cards, turned them over, and wrote, “A. Lincoln, Executive Mansion, Washington.” The nearly one hundred days as president-elect in Springfield had come to a close.
ON MONDAY MORNING, February 11, 1861, Lincoln arrived at the small, brick Great Western railway station to begin the journey to Washington. The day dawned cold with rain dripping from low-hanging clouds.
Lincoln had notified the press that he would offer no speech. After the many farewells of recent days, Lincoln believed there was no need for more words. Newspaperman Villard captured a compelling scene. “The President elect took his station in the waiting-room, and allowed his friends to pass by him and take his hand for the last time.” Lincoln’s “face was pale, and quivered with emotion so deep as to render him almost unable to utter a single word.”
The ringing of the engine bell alerted Lincoln that it was time to depart. As Lincoln stepped out onto the platform, friends and neighbors who had come to say their good-byes crowded each side of the special train. Despite his publicly announced intention not to speak, the crowd thronging around the rear platform encouraged their neighbor to offer some remarks.
In response to these requests, Lincoln hesitated, gathering himself to offer a speech he had not intended to give. Caught off guard, in the poignancy of this moment, Lincoln bared his spirit in deeply emotive language: “My friends—No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything.” Though his personality usually prompted him to conceal rather than to reveal his emotions, he now spoke openly. The sadness etched in his face was voiced in his words. In twelve succinct words, Lincoln offered heartfelt appreciation to a city where he had lived for nearly twenty-four years, and to his neighbors, and friends.
Then Lincoln quickly moved from past to present: “I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington.”
Until now, Lincoln had steadfastly avoided speaking about the task that lay ahead. Now, in the midst of spontaneous remarks about community and family, he inserted what might sound like an audacious comment about himself.
Lincoln, as a young boy, had developed a reverence for George Washington through his reading of Mason Locke Weems’s Life of George Washington. In his address in 1838 to the Young Men’s Lyceum, Lincoln had spoken of the less important role of his own generation compared to that of the giants who came before. As a young man, he had said he was standing at the end of the revolutionary generation now being carried away by “the silent artillery of time.” Now an “old man” by his own reckoning, he was being summoned by some unsearchable fate or providence “to a task greater than Washington.” These words were not boastful. They were offered with a sense of an appointment with destiny.
Lincoln concluded,
Without the assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trusting in Him, who can go with me, and remain with you and be every where for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me.
He devoted 63 of his 152 words to sketching the omnipresence of God.
The God that Lincoln invoked was more than the creative first force cited
by Jefferson. Lincoln appealed to a God who acted in history—who attended George Washington in the past, was able to go with Abraham Lincoln to Washington in the present, and would remain with Lincoln’s friends in Springfield in the future.
In saying “To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me,” Lincoln reached for prayer as the invisible connective tissue that would bind him to those he was about to leave.
Lincoln’s capacity to connect with his audience was demonstrated in their response. His encouragement to pray elicited shouts of “We will do it, we will do it.” As Lincoln turned to enter the train, three cheers split the air, and in a few moments the train chugged slowly forward into the dark morning.
As Lincoln took his seat in the passenger car, the powerful Rogers locomotive began to pull the train slowly east. Newspaper correspondents Henry Villard, Edward L. Baker of the Illinois State Journal, and Henry M. Smith of the Chicago Tribune crowded around Lincoln and asked about the speech. In response, Lincoln started to write out what he had said. The effects of a moving train made the task difficult, and at the beginning of the fifth sentence, Lincoln handed the paper to John Nicolay, who took up the task of writing while Lincoln dictated.
Lincoln, after delivering his farewell address in Springfield, tried to write it down on a bumpy train. He finally dictated it to John Nicolay, who completed writing the brief speech.
Back in Springfield, Lincoln’s friend James Conkling described the audience’s response to Lincoln’s farewell remarks when he wrote his son, Clinton, a good friend of Bob Lincoln’s, the next day. As for the crowd, “Many eyes were filled to overflowing.” Of “Mr. Lincoln,” his “breast heaved with emotion and he could scarcely command his feelings sufficiently to commence.”
In the next day’s paper, Edward L. Baker editorialized in the Journal, “We have known Mr. Lincoln for many years; we have heard him speak upon a hundred different occasions; but we never saw him so profoundly affected, nor did he ever utter an address which seemed to us so full of simple and touching eloquence.”
Lincoln’s farewell words did not stay in Springfield. His remarks appeared in newspapers the next day and in Harper’s Weekly. Citizens in large cities and small towns across America were eager to know more about this gangly rail splitter from the West who was about to become their president.
LINCOLN’S JOURNEY TO WASHINGTON would provide his first opportunity to speak to the American people since his election three months earlier. He would see and be seen by more people in more places than any American president before him. After Lincoln’s extended silence, politicians, press, and ordinary people were eager to take his measure. Yet his speeches on his journey from Springfield to Washington have usually been overlooked or undervalued.
Seward had urged Lincoln in December 1860 to make the long trip through some of the most populous states, from the prairies of Illinois, across central Indiana and Ohio, down to Cincinnati to the Southern border on the Ohio River. In Cleveland and Pittsburgh, Lincoln would encounter people on the western border of the urban-industrial edge of an expanding America. He would arrive in New York in a region settled by New England Yankees and proceed through the center of the state to New York City. He looked forward to his visit to Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the birthplace of the nation. The twelve-day trip would cover 1,904 miles over the tracks of eighteen separate railroads. Lincoln’s itinerary called for him to arrive in the nation’s capital to a gala reception late on Saturday afternoon, February 23, 1861, ten days before his inauguration.
The events of the twelve days took on the festive moods of a carnival, a political rally, and a religious revival. Between the major cities, the train would make numerous stops at small towns decorated with American flags. Lincoln would say again and again that the celebrations were not about a person, but about an office and a nation. He insisted that the guest lists should not be partisan. In that spirit, he invited supporters of Stephen Douglas, John Breckinridge, and John Bell to ride with him.
Whatever the original reasons for the journey, by the time of Lincoln’s departure from Springfield it had become controversial. Seward had long ago changed his mind about the wisdom of the trip. He wrote on December 29, 1860, informing Lincoln of a Southern plot to seize the capital on or before March 4. Seward stated, “I therefore renew my suggestion of your coming earlier than you otherwise would—and coming in by surprise—without announcement.” Lincoln did not take Seward’s counsel and continued planning his extended preinaugural trip. Nicolay wrote that Lincoln “had no fondness for public display,” but well understood “the importance of personal confidence and live sympathy” between a leader and his constituents.
AS IF LINCOLN’S TRAIN TRIP to Washington were not drama enough, a second train with another president-elect departed on the same day, February 11, 1861, bound for his own inauguration. Only one week before Lincoln’s departure, on February 4, delegates from six Southern states gathered in Montgomery, Alabama, to begin the task of hammering out a new nation. Four days later, this Confederate convention adopted a provisional constitution. The next day, they unanimously elected a provisional president, Jefferson Davis, and a provisional vice president, Lincoln’s friend Alexander Stephens of Georgia.
Starting on February 11, 1861, all eyes across the nation were fixed on not one but two trains. After departing from Springfield, Lincoln’s moved slowly east through Indianapolis, Columbus, and Pittsburgh toward Washington. Davis, after leaving his plantation, Brierfield, in Mssissippi, was carried by boat to Vicksburg, and then traveled by train in a roundabout route to Jackson, Chattanooga, and Atlanta, and then west toward Montgomery, the Confederate capital. The public’s fascination with these two journeys to two capitals was chronicled in the New York Times on February 11, 1861, in two columns placed side by side:
The New Administration The New Confederacy
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LINCOLN’S TRAIN ARRIVED at its first overnight stop at Indianapolis right on schedule at 5 p.m. on February 11, 1861. Governor Oliver P. Morton, Indiana’s first native-born governor, welcomed Lincoln who, on the first of many occasions, had to reply extemporaneously to welcoming words by a local politician. In his remarks Lincoln offered what would become an oft-repeated demur: “I do not expect, upon this occasion, or on any occasion, till after I get to Washington, to attempt any lengthy speech.”
Lincoln referred to himself as an “accidental instrument.” He would work with this metaphor in several ways in the days ahead. In Indianapolis, he restricted his responsibility as president by saying his role was “temporary” and “for a limited time.” His real purpose, he said, was to encourage the responsibilities ordinary citizens must ask of one another.
During an evening reception for members of the Indiana legislature, Lincoln grew impatient as he asked for the speeches that he had entrusted to his son. The boy and the bag were missing. When Robert, who was being called “the Prince of rails” by his young friends, finally arrived, he explained that he had left the oilcloth bag with the hotel clerk. Lincoln bid a hasty departure to the reception, and his long legs carried him quickly down the stairs to the hotel lobby. Burrowing through the pile of luggage, Lincoln attacked the first bag that looked like his, but it surrendered only a dirty shirt, playing cards, and a half-empty whiskey bottle. He quickly discovered his bag and recovered the copies of the inaugural address and other speeches, the whole episode good for a laugh at the end of an exhausting day.
While in Indianapolis, Lincoln gave Orville H. Browning, who had accompanied Lincoln on the train, one of the copies of his inaugural address. Upon his return to Springfield, Browning wrote his response to Lincoln. He made a single proposal, which he wrote at the bottom of the page of Lincoln’s text. He suggested that Lincoln “modify” the passage: “All the power at my disposal will be used to reclaim the public property and places which have fallen; to hold, occupy and possess these, and all other property and places belonging to the government, and to col
lect the duties on imports; but beyond what may be necessary for these, there will be no invasion of any State.”
Browning told Lincoln, “On principle the passage is right as it now stands. The fallen places ought to be reclaimed. But cannot that be accomplished as well, or even better without announcing the purpose in your inaugural?” He suggested revising the sentence to delete the clause, “to reclaim the public property and places which have fallen.”
JEFFERSON DAVIS’S PRESIDENTIAL TRAIN pulled into Jackson, Mississippi, on the evening of February 11, 1861. Encircled by well-wishers, he spoke at the capitol to an audience that “occupied every available inch of space.” Davis declared that he deplored war but would face it “with stern serenity of one who knows his duty and intends to perform it.” He asserted that England and France will “not allow our great staple to be dammed up within our limits.” Finally, if war came, Davis promised to “go forward … with a firm resolve to do his duty as God might grant him power. ”
THE PRESIDENTIAL SPECIAL arrived in Columbus on February 13, 1861, punctually at 2 p.m. Lincoln went directly to the capitol, where he addressed the Ohio legislature. In his prepared remarks he said, “I have not maintained silence from any want to real anxiety. It is a good thing that there is no more than anxiety, for there is nothing going wrong. … We entertain different views upon political questions, but nobody is suffering anything.”
Lincoln’s remark “there is nothing going wrong” added to the controversy that was building toward his inauguration. Supporters contended that his remarks were part of a strategy to diminish public alarm. Critics argued that Lincoln’s remarks exposed a president-elect out of touch with the forces gearing up for civil war.
Meanwhile, Jefferson Davis traveled through Mississippi and Alabama on February 14, 1861, the firing of cannons welcoming him at many stops. In Stevenson, in northeastern Alabama, he told the crowd he expected the border states to become part of the Confederate States of America within sixty days. He also declared that “England will recognize us, and … grass will grow in the northern cities where the pavements have been worn off by the tread of commerce.” Davis concluded by saying he “hopes for peace but is prepared for war.”
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