AFTER HIS REELECTION, Lincoln, thinking of the future, determined to pass an amendment that would abolish slavery for all time. One of the problems facing any amendment was the fact that the Constitution had been amended only twice since the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791. There had been no new amendments for sixty years. Lincoln had remained silent as debates over various proposed amendments on slavery went forward in the winter and spring of 1864. On June 15, 1864, a proposed Thirteenth Amendment failed to receive the necessary two-thirds majority, falling short by thirteen votes in the House.
In November 1864, Republicans generated a strong majority in Congress, but the Thirty-ninth Congress would not convene for four months. Republican leaders counseled Lincoln to be patient and rely on future action by the new Congress. Another option would be to call a special session of Congress, as Lincoln had done in July 1861. He decided against both alternatives.
Rather, with formal debate in the old Congress due to begin in less than two months in January 1865, Lincoln went into action. In his first four years as president, Lincoln had not often become involved in the day-to-day legislative processes of the Congress. But now he turned his full attention to a renewed effort to pass a Thirteenth Amendment. He and Secretary of State Seward selected various Democratic congressmen and lobbied them to change their votes. The fact that Lincoln was not willing to wait a mere four months to pass this antislavery amendment is the best indication of his full commitment to end slavery.
The House of Representatives scheduled a final vote on January 31, 1865. The Thirteenth Amendment read:
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Spectators packed the Capitol’s galleries, including African-Americans of all ages. Charles Douglass, Frederick Douglass’s oldest son, who had served in the famous Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Infantry, took a seat in the gallery.
The clerk called the roll. The final tally was 119 to 56 in favor, with eight members absent. The House erupted in shouts and cheers. People in the galleries held one another in joy. Both blacks and whites wept. Charles Douglass wrote his father, “I wish that you could have been here, such rejoicing I have never before witnessed (white people I mean).”
Lincoln joined the celebration the next day. Even though the Constitution did not require a president to sign a constitutional amendment, he took great pleasure in signing the Thirteenth Amendment and greeting serenaders at the White House. Immediately, Lincoln was criticized by foes in Congress and the press as wielding unseemly presidential power.
That evening, February 1, 1865, in response to a serenade at the White House, Lincoln spoke with passion. One phrase captured Lincoln’s sentiments on this momentous occasion: “This amendment is a King’s cure for all the evils.”
This illustration in Harper’s Weekly depicts the joyous scene in the House of Representatives at the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment on January 31, 1865.
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THE CRY FOR PEACE was mounting from all sides. Desertions from Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia reached pandemic quantities: fully 8 percent in both January and February. Morale on the Union homefront was not much better. Death and terrible wounds, so often resulting in amputations, were diminishing support for Grant and the Army of the Potomac.
Lincoln was wary of these calls for peace, which he believed would either doom his twin goals of Union and emancipation, or unwittingly prolong the war. In his annual message to Congress on December 5, 1864, Lincoln had stated that Jefferson Davis “would accept nothing short of severance of the Union—precisely what we will not and cannot give. His declarations to this effect are explicit and oft repeated. He does not attempt to deceive us. He affords us no excuse to deceive ourselves.” Lincoln told Congress: “Between him and us the issue is distinct, simple, and inflexible. It is an issue which can only be tried by war, and decided by victory.”
In early January 1865, sensitive to the charges that he was not making every effort to end the war, Lincoln, against his better judgment, allowed his friend Francis P. Blair to undertake a peace mission to Richmond. The elder Blair, once a friend of Jefferson Davis, arrived in Richmond on January 11 determined to use many keys to open doors to peace. In one scenario, Blair and Davis talked about the possibility of the Union and Confederate armies joining together to drive the French from Mexico, which they had occupied since 1862. In the end, the Confederate president gave Blair a letter to take to Lincoln saying he would appoint commissioners “to secure peace to the two countries.”
Davis’s letter to Blair confirmed Lincoln’s doubts about negotiation. Lincoln sent Blair on a return mission to Richmond armed with his own letter, which stated clearly that he would be willing to receive commissioners to secure peace, but only “to the people of our one common country.”
But Davis was also under pressure from Confederate leaders; he agreed to appoint three commissioners who were each advocates of negotiation: Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy; John A. Campbell, assistant secretary of war; and Robert M. T. Hunter, Confederate senator from Virginia. Davis, however, reduced any possibilities of success by tenaciously insisting on Southern independence.
Lincoln and Stanton initially refused to meet with the Confederate commissioners because of Davis’s language about two countries. Lincoln finally agreed that it would look impolite if he did not meet with the three commissioners.
On February 3, 1865, Lincoln and Secretary of State Seward met Stephens, Campbell, and Hunter on Lincoln’s steamer, the River Queen, at Hampton Roads off the tip of the Virginia peninsula. Lincoln remembered Alexander Stephens fondly from their time together in the Thirtieth Congress, which helped engender an air of cordiality aboard the ship. The participants agreed to keep no notes of the meeting, which lasted four hours.
Stephens took the lead in asking Lincoln, “Well, Mr. President, is there no way of putting an end to the present trouble, and bringing about a restoration of the general feeling and harmony … between the different States and Sections of the country?” Stephens carefully avoided Davis’s language of two countries. Lincoln replied directly: “There was but one way that he knew of, and that was, for those who were resisting the laws of the Union to cease that resistance.” Stephens, the shrewd politician that Lincoln remembered, attempted to change the trajectory of the conversation by speaking of the “Continental question.” He referred to Francis Blair ’s discussion in Richmond about the Union and Confederate armies joining together to force the French from Mexico.
Campbell asked Lincoln what could be the terms of Reconstruction if the Southern states agreed to rejoin the Union. Lincoln replied that once armed resistance ceased, the Southern states “would be immediately restored to their practical relations to the Union.” The president told the commissioners that he could not negotiate as long as the South persisted in its armed aggression against the Union. When Hunter tried to counter with a history lesson that Charles I of England had negotiated with enemy forces, Lincoln replied, “I do not profess to be posted in history. On all such matters I will turn over to Seward. All I distinctly recollect about the case of Charles I, is, that he lost his head at the end.” The Hampton Roads conference, as Lincoln told Congress a week later, “ended without result.”
ON FEBRUARY 1, 1865, General Sherman led his sixty thousand troops north out of Savannah. Slicing up through South Carolina, his veteran soldiers pummeled the state they knew had been the seedbed of secession with even greater destruction than they inflicted on Georgia. Lincoln understood this aggressive military destruction as necessary to end the Confederacy’s resistance. To celebrate Sherman’s victories in Charleston, South Carolina, and Wilmington, North Carolina, Lincoln, three weeks later, ordered a nighttime illumination
in the capital on February 22, George Washington’s birthday.
Meanwhile, the Army of the Potomac remained in front of Petersburg, twenty-five miles south of Richmond. Petersburg, with its five railroads and important connecting roads, was the key to sustaining the Confederate capital. In what would become the longest siege in American warfare, Grant slowly cut the rail and roads into Petersburg. The Confederates, reduced to defensive warfare, hung on as Lee, forever reading Northern newspapers, still hoped the Northern population would grow tired of this endless war. The siege had begun in June 1864, and although Grant and Meade had slowly tightened the noose in more than two hundred days of trench warfare, they still remained on the outside looking in. Grant lived in fear that Robert E. Lee would one day disappear and try to link up with General John Bell Hood further south.
At the end of February, Union general Edward Ord and Confederate general James Longstreet talked about possibilities for peace in a conversation during an exchange of prisoners. Longstreet took this conversation back to Lee, who wrote to Grant on March 3, 1865, the day before Lincoln’s second inauguration, proposing to meet and enter into “an interchange of views” aimed at “the possibility of arriving at a satisfactory adjustment of the present unhappy difficulties.” Lincoln, through Stanton, immediately wrote Grant. “The President directs me to say to you he wishes you to have no conference with General Lee unless it be for the capitulation of Gen. Lee’s army, or on some minor, purely military matter.” He then articulated Lincoln’s political leadership position. “He instructs me to say that you are not to decide, discuss, or confer upon any political question. Such questions the President holds in his own hands; and will submit them to no military conferences or conventions.” Despite Lincoln’s unbounded confidence in Grant, he reiterated through Stanton what he had determined at the beginning of the war—he alone would decide national policy, which, because he was also commander in chief, encompassed military policy.
WASHINGTON HAD NEVER SEEN so many people, as travelers converged on the capital for Lincoln’s second inauguration. With March 4, 1865, approaching, apprehension mingled with hope. Rumors abounded that desperate Confederates, now realizing that defeat was imminent, would attempt to abduct or assassinate the president. Stanton took extraordinary safety measures. Roads leading to Washington had been heavily picketed by Union soldiers for some days. Sharpshooters positioned themselves on the buildings that would ring the inaugural ceremonies.
The president, assaulted by critics for much of the war, was finally receiving recognition for his political leadership. Supporters rejoiced that recent events vindicated him. The Illinois State Journal in Springfield declared in its March 4, 1864, editorial, “All honor to Abraham Lincoln through whose honesty, fidelity, and patriotism, those glorious results have been achieved.” The Chicago Tribune editorialized, “Mr. Lincoln has slowly and steadily risen in the respect, confidence, and admiration of the people.” The Washington Daily Morning Chronicle urged Mr. Lincoln to crow a bit. “We shall not be surprised if the President does not, in the words he will utter this morning, point to the pledges he gave us in his inaugural of 1861, and claim that he has not departed from them in a single substantial instance.”
Inauguration Day dawned with incessant rain. In the early morning, fog continued to hang over the city as the crowd began arriving at the east entrance of the Capitol. The streets oozed with soft mud, described by locals as “black plaster.” Gale winds whipped through the city uprooting trees. Police estimates placed the crowd between thirty thousand and forty thousand. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the arriving throng was present “in force sufficient to have struck terror into the heart of Lee’s army (had the umbrellas been muskets).”
The ceremonies would not differ greatly from Lincoln’s first inaugural. Yet, there were some differences. Instead of the small clusters of soldiers present in 1861, large numbers of soldiers were present all through the city. Ever-increasing numbers of Confederate deserters were visible. In February alone twelve hundred and thirty-nine disheartened Confederate soldiers had arrived in the capital.
The presence of so many blacks in the inaugural crowd particularly struck the correspondent for the Times of London. He estimated that “at least half the multitude were colored people. It was remarked by everybody, stranger as well as natives, that there never had been such crowds of negroes in the capital.”
At 11:40, the rain suddenly ceased and rifts in the clouds revealed an azure sky. Washington camera artist Alexander Gardner stood ready to record the event for posterity. The second inaugural address would be the only occasion in which Lincoln was photographed delivering a speech. Subject to the limitations of a craft and technology still in its young adulthood, the photo shows Lincoln’s face but not clearly.
This photograph for years mislabeled as the grand review of the army in May 1865, is now understood to be a photo of the crowd at Lincoln’s second inaugural. Notice the large presence of soldiers in the crowd.
From the podium, the president recognized in the crowd Frederick Douglass. After meetings with the president in 1863 and 1864, Douglass had come to hear what Lincoln would say with the end of the war in view.
Behind Lincoln, only thirty-five feet away, stood the actor John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln had seen Booth perform at Ford’s Theatre in The Marble Heart on November 9, 1864, a week before he traveled to Gettysburg. The dashing twenty-six-year-old Booth, five feet eight inches tall, with black hair and a black mustache, had first won fame as a Shakespearean actor in Southern theaters, especially Richmond. Booth, seething with hatred, had come to the Second Inaugural with his own dark motives: He had been working on a plan to abduct Lincoln and take him to Richmond.
When Lincoln was introduced, the crowd exploded in expectation. The president rose from his chair and stepped out from beneath the shelter of the Capitol. At fifty-six, he looked much older than his years. Precisely as he began to speak, the sun broke through the clouds. Many persons, at the time and for years after, commented on this celestial phenomenon. Michael Shiner, an African-American mechanic in the naval shipyard in Washington, recorded his awe in his diary entry for March 4, 1865. “As soon as Mr. Lincoln came out the wind ceased blowing and the rain ceased raining and the Sun came out and it became clear as it could be and calm.”
In the highly charged atmosphere of wartime Washington, with soldiers everywhere, politicians and newspaper editors had speculated on what Lincoln would say were his latest plans for reconstruction. Would he use his rhetorical skills to hit hard at his opponents in the South and North? Should the Confederate States of America be treated as a conquered nation? How did one distinguish between the innocent and the guilty, between citizens and soldiers? What about the slaves? They had been emancipated, but what about the question of suffrage?
Lincoln began his finest address in a subdued tone.
At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.
In the impersonal language of the first paragraph, Lincoln lowered expectations with the words “less,” “little,” and “no.” He started more like an observer than the main actor and directed the focus of his remarks away from himself by speaking in a passive voice. After the first paragraph he would use no more personal pronouns.
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war.
All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.
In the second paragraph, we first hear Lincoln’s political vision. His primary rhetorical strategy was the use of inclusive language. Over and over again in the sentences of the second paragraph, he used the adjectives “all” and “both.” How the crowd would have cheered if Lincoln had chosen to demonize the South. Lincoln, instead, imputed the best possible motives to the supposed enemy.
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
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