The day of February 11 was damp and biting as Lincoln, accompanied by family and friends, headed for the Western Railroad Depot. The circuitous twelve-day trip to Washington, D.C., would permit contact with tens of thousands of citizens. He had packed his own trunk, tied it with a rope, and inscribed it simply: “A. Lincoln, White House, Washington, D.C.” His oldest son, Robert, would accompany his father on the entire trip, while Mary and the two younger boys would join them the following day.
Arriving at the train station, Lincoln discovered that more than a thousand people had gathered to bid him farewell. He stood in the waiting room, shaking hands with each of his friends. “His face was pale, and quivered with emotion so deep as to render him almost unable to utter a single word,” a reporter for the New York Herald noted. Just before 8 a.m., Lincoln was escorted to the platform of his private car. He took off his hat, requested silence, and began to speak: “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 every thing. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington…. I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.”
Many eyes, including Lincoln’s, were filled with tears as he delivered his short but moving remarks. “As he turned to enter the cars three cheers were given,” the Herald reporter observed, “and a few seconds afterwards the train moved slowly out of the sight of the silent gathering.” Lincoln would never return to Springfield.
Neither the luxurious presidential car, decorated with dark furniture, crimson curtains, and a rich tapestry carpet, nor the colorful flags and streamers swaying from its paneled exterior could lift the solemn mood of the president-elect. For most of the ride to the first major stop in Indianapolis, Villard noted, Lincoln “sat alone and depressed” in his private car, “forsaken by his usual hilarious good spirits.”
Lincoln understood that his country faced a perilous situation, perhaps the most perilous in its history. That same morning, Jefferson Davis was beginning a journey of his own. He had bade farewell to his wife, children, and slaves, heading for the Confederacy’s new capital at Montgomery, Alabama. To the cheers of thousands and the rousing strains of the “Marseillaise,” he would be inaugurated president of the new Confederacy. Alexander Stephens, Lincoln’s old colleague from Congress, would be sworn in as his vice president.
Lincoln’s spirits began to revive somewhat as he witnessed the friendly crowds lined up all along the way, buoyed by “the cheers, the cannon, and the general intensity of welcome.” When he reached Indianapolis, thirty-four guns sounded before he alighted to face a wildly enthusiastic crowd of more than twenty thousand people. They lined the streets, waving flags and banners as he made his way to the Bates House, where he was scheduled to spend the night. Knowing that here in Indianapolis, he was expected to deliver his first public speech since election, he had carefully crafted its language before leaving Springfield.
From the balcony of the Bates House, he delivered a direct, powerful talk, one of the few substantive speeches he would make during the long journey. He began by illustrating the word “coercion.” If an army marched into South Carolina without the prior consent of its people, that would admittedly constitute “coercion.” But would it be coercion, he asked, “if the Government, for instance, but simply insists upon holding its own forts, or retaking those forts which belong to it?” If such acts were considered coercion, he continued, then “the Union, as a family relation, would not be anything like a regular marriage at all, but only as a sort of free-love arrangement.” His words provoked loud cheers, sustained applause, and hearty laughter. The speech was considered a great success.
As the train rolled into Cincinnati the next day, John Hay noted that Lincoln had “shaken off the despondency which was noticed during the first day’s journey, and now, as his friends say, looks and talks like himself. Good humor, wit and geniality are so prominently associated with him in the minds of those who know him familiarly, that to see him in a melancholy frame of mind, is much as seeing Reeve or Liston in high tragedy would have been.” (Reeve and Liston were celebrated comic actors in Shakespeare’s plays.) It is interesting to note that Hay considered Lincoln’s despondency an aberration rather than the rule.
The following day, as Lincoln was fêted in the state Capitol at Columbus, Ohio, he received a telegram that the electors had met in Washington to count the votes and make his election official. For weeks, Seward and Stanton had worried that secessionists would choose this day to besiege the capital and prevent the electors from meeting. The day, Lincoln learned, had passed peacefully. “The votes have been counted,” Seward’s son Fred reported to his wife, Anna, “and the Capital is not attacked. Gen. Scott had his troops all under arms, out of sight but ready, with guns loaded, horses harnessed and matches lighted so that they could take the field at a moments notice. But there was no enemy.”
Seward himself was immensely relieved to “have passed the 13th safely,” believing, he wrote home, that “each day brings the people apparently nearer to the tone and temper, and even to the policy I have indicated…. I am, at last, out of direct responsibility. I have brought the ship off the sands, and am ready to resign the helm into the hands of the Captain whom the people have chosen.” Despite his stated intentions, Seward would make one later effort to resume the helm.
In Columbus, a great celebration followed news of the official counting of the votes. In the late afternoon, Lincoln was presented at a “full evening dress” reception at Governor Dennison’s home for members of the legislature; following dinner, he attended a lavish military ball, where it was said that he danced with Chase’s lovely daughter, Kate, much to the irritation of Mary. The image of Lincoln dancing with the twenty-year-old beauty, tall, slim, and captivating, was spoken of in hushed tones for many years afterward. In fact, the charismatic young belle could not have danced with Lincoln that evening, for she was absent from the city when the Lincolns arrived. In an interview with a reporter more than three decades later, Kate maintained that “Mrs. Lincoln was piqued that I did not remain at Columbus to see her, and I have always felt that this was the chief reason why she did not like me at Washington.”
For the rest of the trip, as the train wended its way through Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey, Lincoln said little to elaborate his position. Never comfortable with extemporaneous speech, he was forced to speak at dozens of stops along the way. He was determined not to foreshadow his inaugural address or to disturb the tenuous calm that seemed to have descended upon the country. He chose, therefore, to say little or nothing, projecting an optimistic tone that belied the seriousness of the situation. Lincoln repeatedly ignored conflicting statements in both his own “House Divided” speech and Seward’s “Irrepressible Conflict” speech, assuring his audiences that “there is really no crisis except an artificial one!… I repeat it, then—there is no crisis excepting such a one as may be gotten up at any time by designing politicians. My advice, then, under such circumstances, is to keep cool. If the great American people will only keep their temper, on both sides of the line, the troubles will come to an end.”
Throughout his journey, Lincoln endeavored to avoid any suggestion that might inflame or be used to destabilize the country before he could assume power. He simply acknowledged the cheers of the crowds, relying upon his good humor to divert attention from serious political discussion. In Ashtabula, Ohio, he playfully answered calls for Mrs. Lincoln by suggesting that “he should hardly hope to induce her to appear, as he had always found it very difficult to make her do what she did not want to.” In Westfield, New York, he kissed Grace Bedell, the little girl who had encouraged him to grow a beard.
For Mary and the boys, the trip was “a continuous carnival,�
�� with “rounds of cheers, salvos of artillery, flags, banners, handkerchiefs, enthusiastic gatherings—in short, all the accessories of a grand popular ovation.” Every glimpse of Mary or the children through the windows drew wild applause, as did the image of her smoothing her husband’s ruffled hair and giving him a kiss before they disembarked in New York City.
To those who listened attentively for any revelation of the incoming administration’s intentions, the speeches were a great disappointment. In his diary, Charles Francis Adams lamented that Lincoln’s remarks on his journey toward Washington “are rapidly reducing the estimate put upon him. I am much afraid that in this lottery we may have drawn a blank…. They betray a person unconscious of his own position as well as of the nature of the contest around him. Good natured, kindly, honest, but frivolous and uncertain.”
In fact, Lincoln was not oblivious to the abyss that could easily open beneath his feet. While he “observed the utmost caution of utterance and reticence of declaration,” John Nicolay noted, “the shades of meaning in his carefully chosen sentences were enough to show how alive he was to the trials and dangers confronting his administration.” In Trenton, for example, while he asserted that “the man does not live who is more devoted to peace than I am,” he recognized that it might “be necessary to put the foot down firmly.” At this point, Hay noted, he “lifted his foot lightly, and pressed it with a quick, but not violent, gesture upon the floor.” The audience erupted with such sustained applause that for several minutes Lincoln was unable to continue his remarks.
Lincoln again revealed his strength of will in his short address at the Astor Hotel in New York City. While he opened with a conciliatory tone, promising that he would never of his own volition “consent to the destruction of this Union,” he qualified his promise with “unless it were to be that thing for which the Union itself was made.” Two days later, speaking in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, he clarified what he meant by those portentous words. Moved by a keen awareness that he was speaking in the hall where the Declaration of Independence was adopted, he asserted that he had “never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration…. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land; but something in that Declaration” that provided “hope to the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.” If the Union could “be saved upon that basis,” he would be among “the happiest men in the world”; but if it “cannot be saved without giving up that principle,” he maintained, he “would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.”
Lincoln’s ominous mention of assassination may have been prompted by the previous day’s report of a plot to kill him during his scheduled stop in Baltimore, a city rampant with Southern sympathizers. Lincoln first received word of the plot through the detective Allan Pinkerton, responsible for guarding him on the trip, who advised him to leave Philadelphia at once and pass through Baltimore on a night train ahead of schedule to confound the conspirators. “This,” according to Ward Lamon, who accompanied Lincoln on the trip, “he flatly refused to do. He had engagements with the people, he said, to raise a flag over Independence Hall in the morning, and to exhibit himself at Harrisburg in the afternoon.”
That same afternoon, Seward’s son Fred was in the Senate gallery when a page summoned him to speak with his father at once. Meeting in the lobby, Seward handed Fred a note from General Winfield Scott carrying a similar warning of trouble in Baltimore. “I want you to go by the first train,” Seward directed his son. “Find Mr. Lincoln, wherever he is. Let no one else know your errand.” Fred immediately boarded a train and arrived at the Continental Hotel in Philadelphia, where Lincoln was staying, after ten that night.
“I found Chestnut street crowded with people, gay with lights, and echoing with music and hurrahs,” Fred recalled. Lincoln was encircled by people, and Fred was forced to wait several hours to deliver his message. “After a few words of friendly greeting with inquiries about my father and matters in Washington,” Fred remembered, “he sat down by the table under the gas-light to peruse the letter I had brought.” After a few moments, Lincoln spoke: “If different persons, not knowing of each other’s work, have been pursuing separate clews that led to the same result, why then it shows there may be something in it. But if this is only the same story, filtered through two channels, and reaching me in two ways, then that don’t make it any stronger. Don’t you see?” Then, Fred related, “noticing that I looked disappointed at his reluctance to regard the warning, he said kindly: ‘You need not think I will not consider it well. I shall think it over carefully, and try to decide it right; and I will let you know in the morning.’”
The next morning, Lincoln agreed to leave Philadelphia for Washington on the night train as soon as his engagement in Harrisburg was completed. Pinkerton insisted, against Mary’s judgment, that she and the boys should remain behind and travel to Washington in the afternoon as scheduled. Wearing a felt hat in place of his familiar stovepipe, Lincoln secretly boarded a special car on the night train, accompanied by Ward Lamon and Detective Pinkerton. All other trains were to be “side-tracked” until Lincoln’s had passed. All the telegraph wires were to be cut between Harrisburg and Washington until it was clear that Lincoln had arrived in the capital. At 3:30 a.m., the train passed through Baltimore without mishap and proceeded straight to Washington. “At six o’clock,” a relieved Lamon recalled, “the dome of the Capitol came in sight.”
It was an inauspicious beginning for the new president. Though he arrived safely, critics, including Edwin Stanton, spoke maliciously of the manner in which Lincoln had “crept into Washington.” A scurrilous rumor spread that he had entered the train in a Scotch plaid cap, Scottish kilts, and a long military cloak. “It’s to be hoped that the conspiracy can be proved beyond cavil,” wrote George Templeton Strong in his diary. “If it cannot be made manifest and indisputable, this surreptitious nocturnal dodging or sneaking of the President-elect into his capital city, under cloud of night, will be used to damage his moral position and throw ridicule on his Administration.” Lincoln regretted ever heeding General Scott and Detective Pinkerton.
The question of Lincoln’s accommodations in Washington for the ten days until his inauguration had been debated for weeks. In early December, Montgomery Blair had issued the Lincolns an invitation to stay at the Blair House on Pennsylvania Avenue, offering the very room “Genl Jackson intended to occupy after leaving the White house,” and insisting that the Blairs “would be delighted for you to begin where he left.” In the meantime, Senator Trumbull and Congressman Washburne had rented a private house for the Lincolns several blocks from the White House. When Lincoln had passed through Albany on his roundabout tour, however, Weed strongly objected. He advised Lincoln that he was “now public property, and ought to be where he can be reached by the people until he is inaugurated.”
Lincoln agreed. “The truth is, I suppose I am now public property; and a public inn is the place where people can have access to me.” A suite of rooms was reserved at the celebrated Willard Hotel, which stood at the corner of 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, within sight of the White House.
SEWARD AND ILLINOIS CONGRESSMAN WASHBURNE were appointed to greet Lincoln and escort him to the Willard. Accounts vary, however, as to whether Seward was actually there to meet the train. He wrote his wife that “the President-elect arrived incog. at six this morning. I met him at the depot.” Nevertheless, Washburne later claimed that Seward had overslept and arrived at the Willard two minutes after Lincoln, “much out of breath and somewhat chagrined to think he had not been up in season to be at the depot on the arrival of the train.”
What is certain is that Seward greeted the president-elect with “a virtuoso performance,” attempting to control his every movement and make himself indispensable to the relative newc
omer. The two men breakfasted together that morning in the Willard, choosing from an elaborate menu of “fried oysters, steak and onions, blanc mange and pâté de foie gras.” Then, after breakfast, Seward escorted Lincoln to the White House to meet with President Buchanan and his cabinet. Lincoln’s surprise call disconcerted Harriet Lane, Buchanan’s niece, who had brilliantly performed the role of hostess for her bachelor uncle. The appearance of Buchanan’s successor signaled the end of her days in the White House. Afterward, she had few kind words to say about the new couple who would occupy her former home. She likened Lincoln to the “tall awkward Irishman who waits on the door,” but insisted that the doorman was “the best looking.” About Mary, Harriet claimed, she had heard only that she “is awfully western, loud & unrefined.”
From the White House, Seward shepherded Lincoln to see General Scott. An inch taller than Lincoln and twice his weight, the old hero of the Mexican War was now scarcely able to walk. After the conversation with Scott, Seward and Lincoln drove together for an hour through the streets of Washington. Pressing issues, particularly the still-unfinished cabinet, required immediate attention. Months earlier, Lincoln had promised Weed and Seward that if John Gilmer of North Carolina would accept a seat, he would offer him a position. Seward considered the inclusion of a Unionist Southerner vital in retaining the border states, and Lincoln also considered Gilmer the best choice due to his “living position in the South.” Gilmer had failed to respond to Lincoln’s invitation to visit him in Springfield, however, and Seward had been unable to secure a positive reply.
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