Team of Rivals

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

  Browning focused on one imprudent passage that he feared would be seen in the South as a direct “threat, or menace,” and would prove “irritating even in the border states.” Lincoln had pledged: “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….” Browning suggested he delete the promise to reclaim what had already fallen, such as Fort Moultrie or Castle Pinckney, limiting himself to “hold, occupy, and possess” what was still in Union hands. “In any conflict which may ensue between the government and the seceding States,” Browning argued, “it is very important that the traitors shall be the aggressors, and that they be kept constantly and palpably in the wrong.” Though in a number of private conversations during the long secession winter Lincoln had expressed his determination to take back the fallen properties, he accepted Browning’s argument and took out the promise to reclaim places that the seceding states had already taken.

  Of all who read the draft, it was Seward who had the largest impact on Lincoln’s inaugural address. Seward had read the initial draft with a heavy heart. Though he believed Lincoln’s argument for the perpetuity of the Union was “strong and conclusive,” he felt that the bellicose tone of the text would render useless all the hard work, all the risks taken during the previous weeks to stop the secession movement from expanding. Working on the draft for hours, seated in his favorite swivel chair, Seward wrote a long, thoughtful letter to Lincoln that contained scores of revisions. Taken together, his suggested changes softened the tone of the draft, made it more conciliatory toward the South.

  Lincoln’s text had opened on a forceful note, pledging himself “bound by duty…upon the plainest grounds of good faith” to abide by the Chicago platform, without “liberty to shift his position.” Since many seceders considered the Chicago platform one of the touchstones of their withdrawal from the Union, this was clearly a provocative beginning. Even Bates had lambasted the Chicago platform as “exclusive and defiant…needlessly exposing the party to the specious charge of favoring negro equality.” Seward argued that unless Lincoln eliminated his words pledging strict adherence to the platform, he would “give such advantages to the Disunionists that Virginia and Maryland will secede, and we shall within ninety, perhaps within sixty, days be obliged to fight the South for this capital…. In that case the dismemberment of the republic would date from the inauguration of a Republican Administration.” Lincoln agreed to delete the reference to the Chicago platform entirely.

  Seward also criticized Lincoln’s pledge to reclaim fallen properties and to hold those still belonging to the government. He suggested that the text refer more “ambiguously” to “the exercise of power.” Lincoln had already planned to change the text as Browning advised, so he ignored this overly compromising suggestion and retained his pledge to “hold, occupy and possess” the properties still belonging to the federal government, including Fort Sumter.

  Seward’s revisions are evident in nearly every paragraph. He qualified some, removed rough edges in others. Where Lincoln had referred to the secession ordinances and the acts of violence as “treasonable,” Seward substituted the less accusatory “revolutionary.” With the Dred Scott decision in mind, Lincoln warned against turning the “government over to the despotism of the few men [life officers] composing the court.” Seward deleted the word “despotism” and elevated the Court to read “that eminent tribunal.”

  Lincoln had decried the idea of an amendment to the Constitution to ensure that Congress could never interfere with slavery in the states where it already existed. “I am, rather, for the old ship,” he had written, “and the chart of the old pilots.” Lincoln’s stance put Seward in a difficult position; at Lincoln’s behest, he had introduced the controversial resolution that called for the amendment in the first place. Lincoln’s reversal now would leave Seward exposed. Treading carefully, Seward suggested that Lincoln acknowledge a diversity of opinion surrounding the proposed amendment, and that his own views would only “aggravate the dispute.” As it happened, Lincoln went further than Seward had suggested. In the early hours of the night before the inauguration, Congress, in its final session, had passed the proposed amendment “to the effect that the federal government, shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States.” In light of this action, Lincoln reversed his position yet again. He revised his passage to say that since Congress had proposed the amendment, and since he believed “such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express, and irrevocable.”

  Seward’s greatest contribution to the tone and substance of the inaugural address was in its conclusion. Lincoln’s finale threw down the gauntlet to the South: “With you, and not with me, is the solemn question of ‘Shall it be peace, or a sword?’” Seward recommended a very different closing, designed “to meet and remove prejudice and passion in the South, and despondency and fear in the East. Some words of affection—some of calm and cheerful confidence.” He suggested two alternate endings. Lincoln drew upon Seward’s language to create his immortal coda.

  Seward suggested: “I close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies but fellow countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly they must not, I am sure they will not be broken. The mystic chords which proceeding from so many battle fields and so many patriot graves pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation.”

  Lincoln proceeded to recast and sharpen Seward’s patriotic sentiments into a concise and powerful poetry: “I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, 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.” Most significant, Seward’s “guardian angel” breathes down on the nation from above; Lincoln’s “better angels” are inherent in our nature as a people.

  AFTER PLACING HIS FINISHING TOUCHES on the final draft, Lincoln read the speech to his family. Then he asked to be left alone. Several blocks away, Seward had finished reading the morning newspapers and was getting ready to go to the Capitol when a chorus of voices outside attracted his attention. Hundreds of devoted followers were assembled in front of his house. Moved by the spirit of the serenade, Seward spoke to them with emotion. “I have been a representative of my native State in the Senate for twelve years, and there is no living being who can look in my face and say that in all that time I have not done my duty toward all—the high and the low, the rich and the poor, the bond and the free.”

  Perhaps this show of popular support softened the wrenching realization that his chance had come and gone. When a congressman argued with him that a certain politician would be disappointed if he didn’t get an appointment in the new administration, Seward lost his composure: “Disappointment! You speak to me of disappointment. To me, who was justly entitled to the Republican nomination for the presidency, and who had to stand aside and see it given to a little Illinois lawyer!”

  As the clock struck noon, President Buchanan arrived at the Willard to escort the president-elect to the ceremony. Lincoln, only fifty-two, tall and energetic in his shiny new black suit and stovepipe hat, presented a striking contrast to the short and thickset Buchanan, nearly seventy, who had a sorrowful expression on his aged face. As they moved arm in arm toward the open carriage, the Marine Band played “Hail to the Chief.” The carriage made its way up Pennsylvania Avenue, while cheering crowds and hundreds of dignitaries mingled uneasily with the hundreds of troops put in place by General Scott to guard against an attempted assassination. Sharpshooters looked down from wind
ows and rooftops. Cavalry were placed strategically throughout the entire route.

  Along the way, an ominous sound was heard. “A sharp, cracking, rasping sort of detonation, at regular intervals of perhaps three seconds” set everyone’s nerves on edge, the Washington Evening Star reported. The perplexed police finally identified the sound as issuing from the New England delegation. They wore their customary “pegged” shoes, with heavy soles designed for the ice and snow of the north country. In the more temperate climate of Washington, the “heat and dryness of the atmosphere” had apparently “shrunk the peg timber in the foot-gear excessively, occasioning a general squeaking with every movement, swelling in the aggregate” when the delegation marched in step.

  As the day brightened, Washington, according to one foreign observer, “assume[d] an almost idyllic garb.” Though the city “displayed an unfinished aspect”—with the monument to President Washington still only one third of its intended height, the new Capitol dome two years away from completion, and most of the streets unpaved—the numerous trees and gardens were very pleasing, creating the feel of “a large rural village.”

  The appearance of Lincoln on the square platform constructed out from the east portico of the Capitol was met with loud cheers from more than thirty thousand spectators. Mary sat behind her husband, their three sons beside her. In the front row, along with Lincoln, sat President Buchanan, Senator Douglas, and Chief Justice Taney, three of the four men Lincoln had portrayed in his “House Divided” speech as conspiring carpenters intent on destroying the original house the framers had designed and built.

  Lincoln’s old friend Edward Baker, who had moved to Oregon and won a seat in the Senate, introduced the president-elect. Lincoln made his way to the little table from which he was meant to speak. Noting Lincoln’s uncertainty as to where to place his stovepipe hat, Senator Douglas reached over, took the hat, and placed it on his own lap. Then Lincoln began. His clear high voice, trained in the outdoor venues of the Western states, could be heard from the far reaches of the crowd.

  Having dropped his opening pledge of strict fealty to the Chicago platform, Lincoln moved immediately to calm the anxieties of the Southern people, quoting an earlier speech in which he had promised that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” He turned then to the controversial Fugitive Slave Law, repeating his tenet that while “safeguards” should be put in place to ensure that free men were not illegally seized, the U.S. Constitution required that the slaves “shall be delivered upon claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.” Although he understood that the Fugitive Slave Law offended “the moral sense” of many people in the North, he felt compelled, under the Constitution, to enforce it.

  Lincoln went on to make his powerful case for continued federal authority over what he insisted, “in view of the Constitution and the laws,” was an “unbroken” Union. While “there needs to be no bloodshed,” he intended to execute the laws, “to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion—no using of force against, or among the people anywhere….

  “Physically speaking, we cannot separate,” Lincoln declared, prophetically adding: “Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides, and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions, as to terms of intercourse, are again upon you….

  “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors.”

  He closed with the lyrical assurance that “the mystic chords of memory…will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely as they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

  At the end of the address, Chief Justice Taney walked slowly to the table. The Bible was opened, and Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as the sixteenth President of the United States.

  “THE MANSION was in a perfect state of readiness” when the Lincolns arrived, Mary’s cousin Elizabeth Grimsley observed. “A competent chef, with efficient butler and waiters, under the direction of the accomplished Miss Harriet Lane, had an elegant dinner prepared.” As Buchanan bade farewell, he said to Lincoln, “If you are as happy, my dear sir, on entering the house as I am in leaving it and returning home, you are the happiest man in this country.” After some hasty unpacking, the Lincolns dressed for the Inaugural Ball, held in the rear of the City Hall, in a room referred to as the Muslim Palace of Aladdin “because of the abundance of white draperies trimmed with blue used in its decoration.” Brightened by five enormous chandeliers, the room accommodated two thousand people, though the hooped crinolines worn by the women took up a good deal of space. Seward was there with his daughter-in-law Anna. Chase was accompanied by the lovely Kate. Still, this night Mary shone as the brightest star. “Dressed all in blue, with a necklace and bracelets of gold and pearls,” she danced the quadrille with her old beau Stephen Douglas and remained at the ball for several hours after the departure of her exhausted husband.

  While the party was still in full swing, word of Lincoln’s inaugural speech was making its way across the country, carried by telegraph and printed in dozens of evening newspapers. In Auburn, Frances and Fanny waited in suspense throughout the night for the paper to arrive. Finally, Fanny heard a sound downstairs and raced to find out the news. “What an inappreciable relief,” Fanny wrote in her diary when she read that the ceremony went off without violence. “For months I have felt constant anxiety for Father’s safety—& of course joined in the fears so often expressed that Lincoln would never see the 5th of March.” The news traveled more slowly west of St. Joseph, Missouri, where the telegraph lines stopped. Dozens of pony express riders, traveling in relays, carried the text of the address to the Pacific Coast. They did their job well. In a record time of “seven days and seventeen hours,” Lincoln’s words could be read in Sacramento, California.

  Reactions to his speech varied widely, depending on the political persuasion of the commentators. Republican papers lauded the address as “grand and admirable in every respect,” and “convincing in argument, concise and pithy in manner.” It was “eminently conciliatory,” the Philadelphia Bulletin observed, extolling the president’s “determination to secure the rights of the whole country, of every State under the Constitution.” The Commercial Advertiser of New York claimed that the inaugural was “the work of Mr. Lincoln’s own pen and hand, unaltered by any to whom he confided its contents.”

  In Northern Democratic papers, the tone was less charitable. A “wretchedly botched and unstatesmanlike paper,” the Hartford Times opined. “It is he that is the nullifier,” the Albany Atlas and Argus raged. “It is he that defies the will of the majority. It is he that initiates Civil War.” Not surprisingly, negative reactions were stronger in the South. The Richmond Enquirer argued that the address was “couched in the cool, unimpassioned, deliberate language of the fanatic…pursuing the promptings of fanaticism even to the dismemberment of the Government with the horrors of civil war.” In ominous language, the Wilmington, North Carolina, Herald warned that the citizens of America “might as well open their eyes to the solemn fact that war is inevitable.”

  But beneath the blustery commentary in the majority of Southern papers, the historian Benjamin Thomas notes, the address “won some favorable comment in the all-important loyal slave states” of Virginia and North Carolina. This was the audience Seward had targeted when he told Lincoln to soften the tone of his speech. Indeed, Seward was greatly relieved, not only because he realized many of his suggestions had been adopted, but because Lincoln’s conciliatory stance had given him cover with his critics in Congress. He could now leave the Senate,
he told his wife, “without getting any bones broken,” content with having provided a foundation “on which an Administration can stand.”

  Likewise, Charles Francis Adams, Sr., felt that a great burden had been lifted from his shoulders when Lincoln accepted the controversial amendment that prevented Congress from ever interfering with slavery. Having sponsored the amendment in the House, to the great dismay of the hard-liners, Adams now felt that he had “been fully justified in the face of the country by the head of the nation as well as of the Republican party…. Thus ends this most trying period of our history…. I should be fortunate if I closed my political career now. I have gained all that I can for myself and I shall never have such another opportunity to benefit my country.”

  Of the reactions to the inaugural speech, perhaps the most portentous came from within the Republican Party itself. Radicals and abolitionists were disheartened by what they considered an appeasing tone. The news of Lincoln’s election had initially provided some desperately needed hope to the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

  The dramatic life of the former slave who became an eloquent orator and writer was well known in the North. He had been owned by several cruel slaveholders, but his second master’s kindly wife had taught him to read. When the master found out, he stopped the instruction immediately, warning his wife that “it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read…there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave…. It would make him…discontented and unhappy.” These words proved prescient. Young Douglass soon felt that “learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy.” He fervently wished that he were dead or perhaps an animal—“Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking!” Only the faraway hope of escaping to freedom kept him alive. While waiting six years for his chance, he surreptitiously learned to write.