on the morning of february 15, 1861, Lincoln spoke from the balcony of the Monongahela House in Pittsburgh to a crowd of five thousand standing under umbrellas. After Columbus, he was determined to sidestep questions about an impending civil war and instead spoke about the tariff, a topic of great importance in Pennsylvania. He declared that because there was no direct taxation, a tariff was necessary. “The tariff is to the government what a meal is to the family.” In speaking about protections for home industries, Lincoln stated, “I must confess I do not understand the subject in all its multiform bearings.”
Villard characterized the Pittsburgh speech as “the least creditable performance” of the entire trip. “What he said was really nothing but crude, ignorant twaddle.” He believed that this speech proved Lincoln to be “the veriest novice in economic matters.”
Next, Lincoln backtracked to Cleveland. Here he was entering greater New England, for the northern tier of Ohio was settled by westward-moving Yankees from the New England states. New England, and by extension northern New York and northern Ohio, were the regions that supported abolitionism most strongly. Cheering spectators stood in deep mud along Euclid Street. Lincoln told the assembled crowd, “Frequent allusion is made to the excitement at present existing in our national politics, and it is as well that I should also allude to it here. I think that there is no occasion for any excitement. The crisis, as it is called, is altogether an artificial crisis.”
These remarks only fueled the controversy begun in Columbus. Did the president-elect not understand the escalating crisis?
The nation’s greatest orator read the daily newspaper reports of Lincoln’s speeches. Edward Everett, a native of Massachusetts, had served with distinction in a multiplicity of offices for over four decades. He began as a young professor at Harvard in 1819 and later returned as president of the nation’s oldest college. Everett served Massachusetts as congressman, senator, and governor and represented the United States as secretary of state and minister to England. On February 15, 1861, he wrote in his diary, “These speeches thus far have been of the most ordinary kind, destitute of everything, not merely of felicity and grace, but of common pertinence.” Everett, who believed that speeches were a mirror revealing the character of the person, had formed an opinion about Lincoln. “He is evidently a person of very inferior cast of character, wholly unequal to the crisis.”
LINCOLN LEFT CLEVELAND on the morning of February 16, 1861. The train traveled east again, through Ohio and across the northwest corner of Pennsylvania. Entering New York, the Presidential Special chugged along the shore of Lake Erie. The first stop was Westfield, where a banner was stretched across the tracks emblazoned, “Welcome Abraham Lincoln to the Empire State.”
He told the crowd that several months earlier he had received a letter from a “young lady” from Westfield. His correspondent recommended that he “let his whiskers grow, as it would improve my personal appearance.” Lincoln had accepted her counsel, and now he wished to know if she was present in the crowd. A small boy cried out, “There she is Mr. Lincoln.” Grace Bedell, a blushing eleven-year-old girl with dark eyes, stepped from the crowd, and President-elect Lincoln gave her several hearty kisses “amid the yells of delight from the excited crowd.”
Lincoln arrived in Buffalo in the afternoon. Exhausted, at the half-way point of his long train trip, he rested on the Sabbath, attending church the next day with former president Millard Fillmore. Across the street from Lincoln’s hotel, a banner on the Young Men’s Christian Association building was inscribed with words of reply to Lincoln’s farewell remarks at Springfield: “We Will Pray For You.”
Lincoln, upon his arrival in Westfield, New York, asked to see Grace Bedell, the young girl who had written to tell him he would look better in whiskers.
JEFFERSON DAVIS ENDURED his longest day of traveling and speaking on February 16, 1861. Arriving in Atlanta at about four o’clock in the morning, he spoke at midmorning, taking aim at Northern abolitionism, especially “its systematic aggression upon the constitutional rights of the South for the last forty years.”
After the speech, Davis boarded his special car on the Atlanta and West Point Railroad and headed west across Georgia. During the day he stopped to speak in Fairburn, Palmetto, Newman, Grantville, LaGrange, and West Point. At each stop he was greeted by women waving their handkerchiefs. Entering Alabama, the Davis train stopped for speeches at Opelika and Auburn. A correspondent for the New York Tribune reported that Davis would give elements of the same speech several times during his many stops. Davis arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, at 10 p.m. at the completion of his eight-hundred-mile train trip.
On Monday, February 18, 1861, while Lincoln’s train traveled through the Mohawk Valley toward Albany, Lincoln learned that Jefferson Davis had taken the oath of office as provisional president of the Confederate States of America, and Alexander Stephens the oath of office as vice president. In Montgomery, Davis gave his inaugural address from the portico of the Alabama capitol building, which was now the capitol of the Confederacy. Without a national anthem, the band played “La Marseillaise,” the national anthem of France.
Davis spoke to his fellow Southerners, to the citizens of the United States, and to foreign nations who had a vital interest in the availability of cotton. He never mentioned Lincoln. The speech was remarkably mild; some in the audience had expected to hear a trumpet call to war. As for oratory, the second sentence of the address was typical.
Looking forward to the speedy establishment of a permanent government to take the place of this, and which by its greater moral and physical power will be better able to combat with the many difficulties which arise from the conflicting interests of separate nations, I enter upon the duties of the office to which I have been chosen with the hope that the beginning of our career as a Confederacy may not be obstructed by hostile opposition to our enjoyment of the separate existence and independence which we have asserted, and, with the blessing of Providence, intend to maintain.
This sentence of one hundred words reveals the limitations of Davis’s leadership. The sentences would only get longer as the speech unfolded. The contrast to Lincoln’s economy of language and rhetorical artistry would become even more apparent in the four years to come.
LINCOLN ARRIVED IN NEW YORK CITY on Tuesday, February 19, 1861, at 3 p.m. with what had to be mixed emotions. He was returning to the scene of his triumph at Cooper Union the previous winter, but though he had carried the state in the election, he received less than 35 percent of the vote in the city.
An apprehensive crowd estimated at more than two hundred thousand greeted Lincoln. One astute observer was Walt Whitman, the young poet who was in the midst of negotiations with a Boston publisher to bring out an expanded third edition of his Leaves of Grass. Whitman found himself on the top of a Broadway omnibus stalled in traffic. He took the measure of Lincoln for the first time.
I had, I say, a capital view of it all, and especially of Mr. Lincoln, his look and gait—his perfect composure and coolness—his unusual and uncouth height, his dress of complete black, stovepipe hat pushed back on the head, darkbrown complexion, seam’d and wrinkled yet canny-looking face, black, bushy head of hair, disproportionately long neck, and his hands held behind him as he stood observing the people.
Whitman wrote of Lincoln, “He look’d with curiosity upon that immense sea of faces, and the sea of faces return’d the look with similar curiosity.”
The poet spied hostility as well as curiosity and admiration in the crowd. “Many an assassin’s knife and pistol lurk’d in hip or breast-pocket there, ready, as soon as break and riot came.”
Another interested eyewitness was George Templeton Strong. Strong, a lawyer, Episcopal vestryman, and trustee of Columbia College, was a careful observer of political events. In 1835, at age fifteen, he began to write in uniform blank books every evening before he went to bed. He wrote for the next forty years. The diary, ultimately comprising nearly four and a half million
words, would remain unknown to the public for more than fifty years after Strong’s death in 1875. A supporter of Seward, Strong had been following Lincoln’s trip as it wound its way toward New York. He wrote an appraisal in his diary. “Lincoln is making little speeches as he wends his way towards Washington, and has said some things that are sound and credible and raise him in my esteem.” However, Strong confided, “But I should have been better pleased with him had he held his tongue altogether.”
Strong walked uptown on Broadway the next afternoon to join the crowd welcoming Lincoln. Later that evening Strong recorded in his diary, “The great rail-splitter’s face was visible to me for an instant, and seemed a keen, clear, honest face, not so ugly as his portraits.”
AFTER LINCOLN HAD SPENT more than a week on the Presidential Special, newspapers across the North and South began to weigh in with their assessments of his preinaugural speeches. The Baltimore Sun, with ardent Southern sympathies, offered the opinion, “He approaches the capital of the country more in the character of a harlequin,” or a character in a comedy. “There is that about his speechification which, if it were not for the gravity of the occasion, would be ludicrous.” The pro-Lincoln Chicago Tribune countered, “The wiseacres who indulge in criticism of the verbal structure of Mr. Lincoln’s recent speeches” were off the mark. The Tribune’s defense pointed out that former presidents George Washington and Andrew Jackson did not have the “gift of gab” when asked to speak extemporaneously.
Yet some pro-Lincoln editors were worried. Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican, had been enthusiastic about Lincoln when he heard him speak in Boston in 1848, and the paper had supported Lincoln in the 1860 election. But Bowles was concerned as he read reports of Lincoln’s speeches. On February 26, 1861, he wrote to Henry L. Dawes, a member of Congress from Massachusetts, of his discouragement both with Lincoln and the disagreements rankling the Republican Party. Bowles told Dawes, “Lincoln is a ‘simple Susan.’ ”
Among Republicans in Congress trepidation abounded. In several speeches, when Lincoln seemed to be supporting coercion of the South, his words were taken to be a refutation of Seward’s efforts at conciliation. In other speeches, Lincoln seemed to point toward a policy of moderation. Questioners wondered whether Lincoln was wavering in his position or even certain of his own opinion.
Charles Francis Adams, the son and grandson of presidents, whom Seward would soon propose to Lincoln to become minister to England, was deeply concerned. He confided to his diary on February 20, 1861, “[Lincoln’s speeches] betray a person unconscious of his position as well as the nature of the contest around him.” Adams thought that Lincoln was “good-natured, kindly,” but he considered the president-elect “frivolous and uncertain.” In Adams’s evaluation, Lincoln’s speeches “put to flight all notions of greatness.”
THE PRESIDENTIAL SPECIAL departed New York at 9:05 a.m. on February 21, 1861, reaching Trenton, the state capital of New Jersey, at 11:50 a.m. Speaking in the Senate chamber, Lincoln told the legislators that of all the accounts of the “struggles for liberties,” none remained so fixed in his mind as Washington crossing the Delaware and winning the battle at Trenton on December 26, 1776.
At Indianapolis, Lincoln had spoken of himself as an “accidental instrument.” At Trenton, he changed his meaning and his metaphor: “I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people.” Lincoln often pointed to his humble beginnings, but his depiction of the American people as an “almost chosen people” is one of his most enigmatic phrases. The concept that Americans were God’s chosen people arrived with the Puritans. This identity flourished in the eighteenth century and, whether in secular or religious versions, undergirded the revolutionary generation that founded a new nation in 1776. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Americans added the sense of “manifest destiny,” the right and duty to inhabit and civilize the whole of the continent to promote the great experiment in democracy.
Lincoln never clarified “almost.” Is his qualification an allusion to slavery? In an era of absolutes, whether sponsored by abolitionists or secessionists, Lincoln could live comfortably with the uncertainties facing an “almost chosen people.”
Lincoln reached Philadelphia at 4 p.m. on Thursday, February 21, 1861. In response to greetings from Mayor Alexander Henry, Lincoln declared his fidelity to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. “All my political warfare has been in favor of the teachings coming forth from that sacred hall.” Lincoln used fiery imagery from the Psalms to swear his allegiance: “May my right hand forget its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if ever I prove false to those teachings.”
The next day, the booming of cannon and the ringing of church bells announced the celebration of the birthday of George Washington. Early in the morning, Lincoln traveled by carriage to Independence Hall where he participated in the raising of the new American flag with thirty-four stars, the final star for Kansas, which had been admitted as a state on January 29, 1861. Lincoln told the huge crowd, “I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”
Lincoln, bareheaded, raised the flag at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. F. DeBourg took this photograph just after sunrise on George Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1861.
He had offered this sentiment a number of times since his reemer-gence into politics in 1854, but Lincoln must have taken special delight in affirming his loyalty to the Declaration of Independence at the place where the sacred document was signed more than eighty-four years before. To underline his commitment to this principle, he told his audience, “I would rather be assassinated on the spot than to surrender it.”
On the previous evening, Lincoln had been startled to learn of a plan to kill him before he could reach Washington. In his room at the Continental Hotel, Lincoln met Allan Pinkerton, a Chicago detective whose company worked for the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad. Pinkerton informed Lincoln that his detectives had uncovered a plot to assassinate him as his train car was pulled by horses through the streets of Baltimore in the middle of the day. Pinkerton insisted that no one in the presidential party be told of the plot and that Lincoln take a train for Washington that night. He refused. He insisted on keeping his date at Independence Hall.
Lincoln left Philadelphia at 9 a.m. for the 106-mile trip to Harris-burg, the state capital of Pennsylvania. Governor Andrew Curtin met Lincoln and took him to the state capitol, where he addressed the legislature in joint session.
At dusk, the plans for Lincoln’s secret trip to Washington were put into action. Instead of traveling with his usual stovepipe hat, Lincoln wore a soft Kossuth hat given to him in New York. At Philadelphia, Lincoln boarded a sleeping car, accompanied by only Pinkerton and Ward Hill Lamon, his Illinois lawyer friend and now bodyguard, but no one slept. Lincoln was so tall that he “could not lay straight in his berth.” The train arrived in Baltimore at about 3:30 a.m., and Lincoln’s car was transferred to the Camden Street Station, where he boarded a Baltimore and Ohio train and waited in the dark for thirty minutes before departing at 4:15 a.m. for Washington. Lincoln arrived at the Baltimore and Ohio depot at New Jersey Avenue and C Street at six in the morning, almost ten hours ahead of his scheduled late-afternoon arrival and reception. He arrived in Washington virtually alone, unannounced and unrecognized.
Allan Pinkerton, a Chicago detective who uncovered a plot to assassinate Lincoln in Baltimore, accompanied the president-elect on a secretive night journey to Washington.
Lincoln, exhausted from his twelve-day train trip, went to Mathew Brady’s studio probably the day after his arrival in Washington. Alexander Gardner took five poses of a president-elect deep in thought.
CHAPTER 17
We Must Not Be Enemies February 1861–April 1861
THE MYSTIC CHORDS OF MEMORY, STRETCHING FROM EVERY B
ATTLEFIELD, AND PATRIOT GRAVE, TO EVERY LIVING HEART AND HEARTH-STONE, ALL OVER THIS BROAD LAND, WILL YET SWELL THE CHORUS OF THE UNION, WHEN AGAIN TOUCHED, AS SURELY THEY WILL BE, BY THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
First inaugural address, March 4, 1861
S THE SUN WAS ABOUT TO RISE OVER WASHINGTON ON SATURDAY morning, February 23, 1861, Abraham Lincoln, arriving incognito at the Baltimore and Ohio railway depot, was met by a party of one. Congressman Elihu B. Washburne stepped out from behind a pillar, “caught hold of Lincoln,” and exclaimed, “Abe, you can’t play that on me.” Allan Pinkerton, on Lincoln’s left, “hit the gentleman with a punch,” causing Washburne to stagger back. The detective, worried that the plot to smuggle the president-elect through Baltimore in the middle of the night had been discovered, stepped toward what he assumed was an assailant, when Lincoln intervened. “Don’t strike him—that is my friend Washburne.”
Indeed, Washburne, Lincoln’s Republican colleague from Galena, Illinois, had discovered Lincoln’s new schedule from William Seward’s son, Frederick. Seward had intended to meet Lincoln at the station, but overslept. With calm restored, Washburne arranged for a carriage to take Lincoln to the Willard Hotel at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Fourteenth Street. Because of his unexpected early arrival, the hotel gave Lincoln temporary quarters before lodging him later that day in Parlor Suite 6, consisting of two bedrooms and two parlors on the corner of the second floor overlooking the White House.
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