Abraham Lincoln

by Thomas Keneally

  The next day, the entire city, or nearly so, celebrated. The fine actor John Wilkes Booth, who had been a sour witness to Lincoln’s second inauguration, did not share in the national festivity. On the night of April 11 the crowd spilled onto the White House lawn; there were serenades and a demand for a speech by the president. The peace brought “joyous expression which could not be restrained,” said Lincoln. But now the question of Reconstruction lay ahead. “Nor is it a small additional embarrassment that we, the loyal people, differ among ourselves as to the mode, manner, and means of reconstruction.” He reminded them of the situation in Louisiana, where a Union legislature was opposing the idea of the franchise for blacks. He pondered aloud about the case there on the lawn, and as a result there was merely polite applause when he finished. The puzzled response daunted him. John Wilkes Booth witnessed this evening event as well. Booth came from a Maryland family of actors, and his elder brother, Edwin, was a noted member of the profession. Edwin was said to have saved Robert Lincoln from an accident at a New Jersey train station and was a devout Union man. John Wilkes Booth had chosen to live in the North throughout the war, but hated Lincoln as an American version of Caesar, the destroyer of genuine republican values. Lincoln had most recently seen Booth act in Washington in the tragedy The Marble Heart, and did not know how passionately the actor hated him. Booth had set up a cadre of agents, including the Confederate spy John Surratt, whose mother owned a boardinghouse in Georgetown, and they had pursued a plan to kidnap Lincoln on the road from the Soldiers’ Home to Washington on the night of March 30, and hold him to ransom for the South’s independence. But Lincoln’s carriage had failed to appear, and now Booth set his group to kill Secretaries Stanton and Seward. He himself would look to the tyrant.

  In the second week of April, Mary, in Lamon’s company, mentioned that he looked dreadfully solemn. Lincoln explained that he had a dream which had haunted him. “About ten days ago I retired very late,” said Lincoln, according to Lamon:

  I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I had left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along . . . Determined to find the cause of the state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards. . . . “Who is dead in the White House?” I demanded of one of the soldiers. “The president,” was his answer; “he was killed by an assassin!” Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd.

  “That is horrid,” Mary said. “I wish you had not told it.” But Lincoln reassured her that the dream meant it was someone else who would be attacked, not him, for dreams were never literal.

  On April 14, Good Friday, the day of the Savior’s crucifix-ion, there was a cabinet meeting, which General Grant attended. It dealt extensively and heatedly with Reconstruction, but its general mood was exultant. The Lincolns were going to the theater that night, too, since John Ford of Ford’s Theatre had sent tickets to Laura Keene’s benefit performance of the farce Our American Cousin. In the remaining hours of Good Friday, Lincoln issued a number of pardons and reprieves. At about five the Lincolns rolled out of the White House gate on the way to the Navy Yard, and Lincoln told Mary, “We must both be more cheerful in the future; between the war and the loss of our darling Willie, we have been very miserable.” There was a note of poignancy in that “must both be more cheerful.” He saw, however, his second term ending in peace, and then they might go out to California, and visit the Holy Land.

  They were back at the White House between six and seven to eat dinner. Mary tried to beg off going to the theater, which they had arranged to attend with Senator Harris’s daughter and her fiancé, Major Rathbone. But Lincoln said that though he was tired himself, he needed a good laugh. Before they set off Lincoln and a detective dashed over to the War Department to see if there had been any news of the expected localized Confederate surrender in North Carolina. Then he and Mary got into the presidential carriage. Mary wore a gray silk dress and a bonnet, and Lincoln his overcoat and white kid gloves. They would collect Miss Harris and Major Rathbone on the way to the theater. At eight-thirty the Lincolns and their guests alighted from the carriage and moved into the theater. The audience gave him a standing ovation. To the strains of “Hail to the Chief,” the president and his party made their way to the state box, above the stage.

  The play began. The president was absorbed. Onstage the American cousin who had gone back to England and outraged his British relatives was crying, “Don’t know the manner of good society, eh? Wal, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—you sockdologizing old mantrap.” It was at that time that Booth reached the presidential box, ready to kill Lincoln with one shot. He had climbed the staircase from the lobby to the dress circle, sidled past the back row of spectators, among whom the chief reaction was one of annoyance, and flashed a card at the White House footman. The Washington policeman who was supposed to be guarding Lincoln in his box had gone to the front of the dress circle, and Booth being a familiar thespian face, the footman let him go inside to the president. Booth immediately put a single-shot Derringer behind Lincoln’s head, by the left ear. The shot entered the left side of Lincoln’s skull and exited the right. The assassin then slashed Major Rathbone’s arm with a dagger, and climbed down to the stage by the theater curtain, catching a spur in the fabric and falling heavily, cracking his shin. On stage he yelled, “Sic semper tyrannis!” and perhaps, “The South shall be free!” Some of the audience wondered if these expletives were part of the play, since Booth was such a well-known actor. Major Rathbone and Miss Harris were both screaming at people to stop Booth, but Booth was not stopped. He escaped to Virginia over the Anacostia Bridge, but would be shot dead two weeks later when the authorities set fire to a tobacco barn near Port Royal in which he was hiding.

  An army surgeon came into the box to attend to the president, and tried to clear his throat. The surgeon gave him artificial respiration and massaged the area of his heart. His heart did pick up, but the army surgeon murmured, “His wound is mortal, it is impossible for him to recover.” Mary cried, “Oh, my God, and have I given my husband to die?” Fearful that Lincoln would die at once if he was placed upright, the doctor demanded that he be kept horizontal.

  Across Tenth Street from the theater was a boardinghouse, and one of the boarders called out that the president could be brought and laid out there. Carried into the boardinghouse, Lincoln lay across a four-poster bed in a back room. Mary, who had followed, cried that she must get Taddie to come—he loved Taddie so, and Taddie’s voice would revive him. The doctors, knowing that it could not be so, led her to a front parlor. Robert arrived, as did John Hay, General Halleck, Secretaries Welles and Stanton, and Senator Sumner. Robert saw that his father’s eye was bloated and the eye socket bruised. Sumner held the president’s hand as he died. Stanton, weeping, immediately set up a court of inquiry there in the boardinghouse. Mary, visiting the at least moribund if not dead Lincoln, cried, “Love, live but one moment to speak to me once—to speak to our children.” The actress Laura Keene, star of Our American Cousin, kept her company and tried to console her during the time she was not actually at Lincoln’s bedside. He expired at 7:22 A.M. the next morning. For lack of Lincoln, it was Stanton who said the apposite thing: “Now he belongs to the ages.”

  He had become the bloodied nation incarnate.

  SOURCES

  THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN PAPERS at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., co
nsist of some twenty thousand Lincoln General Correspondence documents, both outgoing and incoming correspondence, speeches, and drafts of proclamations—the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, among them—and some printed material. The earliest letters date from 1833 and run through to postmorten documents to 1916, though naturally enough the bulk of the papers comes from the period 1850-65. Series 1 of the papers consists of documents gathered by Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln. Series 2 are papers gathered by Lincoln’s secretary John Nicolay, and Series 3 consists of material from other and more recently gathered sources. I have spent some time in the Library of Congress on other errands, but I live a global distance from it, and reside a four-and-a-half-hour drive from copies of the Library of Congress microfilms held at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. Thus it was a delight to find that the Library of Congress has now been able, through the generosity of benefactors, to place a substantial part of its Lincoln holdings, sixty-one thousand images (some visual items and documents, each page of a document counting as an image), online. It does seem, at least to this lay reader, that they have given us virtually every significant document, and even some ephemera as well.

  Many of the documents accessible in microfilmed manuscript at the Library of Congress appear in printed form elsewhere. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited in 8 volumes by Roy H. Basler (1953), with two subsequent supplementary volumes (1974, 1990), is the ultimate printed source on Lincoln. It is also available in electronic form. It was preceded by an abridged collection, Abraham Lincoln, His Speeches and Writings, in 1946, and this is still easily available in a paperback edition. An earlier and famous Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, in 2 volumes, edited by Lincoln’s secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay, appeared in 1894.

  A printed primary source on the Civil War is the U.S. War Department’s The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, in 128 volumes, 1880- 1901. Here, among numberless military reports, dispatches, memorandums, and returns of casualties can be found Lincoln’s pungent exchanges with generals. Using secondary sources as a guide, the reader can track down Lincoln’s graphic style to its place amid the mass of military clichés, evasions, triumphs, and desperations of his commanders.

  But a third powerful element in the military equation was the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, led by Senators Benjamin Wade and Zachariah Chandler. The Joint Committee disapproved both of Lincoln’s conduct of the war and of much of the senior officer corps, which it saw as riddled with secessionist sentiment. Its Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War was issued in three volumes in 1863, followed by another three in 1865. In these volumes we can see the Joint Committee trying frequently to force Lincoln’s hand on action to be taken or appointments to be made.

  After the campaign biographies of 1860, and those rushed forth soon after his assassination, the first credible biography of Lincoln is that of J. G. Holland, Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1866. It is well detailed but hagiographic, and seems in part bent on defending Lincoln against those who accused him of not being “respectable” and of having lacked a settled Christian faith. Lincoln’s friend and self-appointed bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon, published The Life of Abraham Lincoln in 1872. This book was actually written not by Lamon but by Chauncey Black, son of President Buchanan’s attorney general, and on the basis of materials and oral testimonies acquired by Lamon but gathered by Lincoln’s last law partner, William Herndon. Herndon himself had found it not to Springfield’s or the Lincoln family’s taste when he produced some of this material in the form of lectures. Originally Lamon intended to produce a second volume covering Lincoln’s presidency, but the first, raising matters of illegitimacy, marital unease, and theological doubt, became an object of abomination in the United States, not least to Mary Todd and Robert Todd Lincoln, and the second volume never appeared.

  At last redoubtable William Herndon himself produced Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, having to it a credible and gritty texture, in 1889. For me one of the great values of the works of Holland, Lamon, and Herndon was that these were men who had lived in Lincoln’s world, particularly in Lincoln’s Sangamon County and Springfield. They understood at first hand the politics, the class issues, the tension between antislavery and racism (often in the same soul), and the whole fragile apparatus of backwoods civilization.

  Since Herndon’s book there has raged an intense and never-ending conflict over the veracity of his sources, many of whom, by 1889, had already followed or were preparing to follow their great friend and acquaintance into the darkness. All the issues of contemporary testimony versus objective evidence or likelihood are brilliantly brought into focus by Douglas I. Wilson’s Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln, 1998, a book that, by testing the legends and oral accounts, gives us the breathing pre-1860 Lincoln. Similarly Wilson’s 1997 collection of essays, Lincoln Before Washington, New Perspectives on the Illinois Years, deals with issues as diverse as Lincoln’s readings in the Library of Congress during his time as a congressman; Lincoln’s relationships with Joshua Speed, Mary Todd, and Ann Rutledge; and echoes and dissonances between his political life and thought and Jefferson’s.

  For many foreign and indeed American readers of my age, their first extended contact with the Lincoln story was by way of Carl Sandburg, whose rich and rhapsodic prose seemed to echo Aaron Copland’s music in its evocations of pioneer life and politics. Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (2 volumes), 1926, and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (4 volumes), 1940, still make splendid symphonic reading, though they are regarded by professional historians as uncritical in relation to the sources.

  My favorite general, modern biography of Lincoln is With Malice Toward None by Stephen B. Oates, 1977. It seems to combine scholarship with a lively style and a welcome gift for place and character, and I recommend it as a starting place for general readers. Lincoln’s life was so complex that a useful tool to have by one’s elbow for keeping track of his legion of acquaintances, friends, relatives, place holders, opponents, and so on is Mark E. Neely’s The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia, 1984.

  Allen C. Guelzo’s Abraham Lincoln, Redeemer President, 1999, is a superb work that, though a biography in a fully adequate sense, places all the incidents of Lincoln’s life in their philosophical, cultural, and theological context. Guelzo’s work makes of Lincoln’s story not merely a record of political and other deeds but a high expression of the conflict of ideas of the time. Guelzo’s explanation of Lincoln’s uneasy relationship to the old and new schools of Presbyterianism, and Lincoln’s spiritual torment over the doctrine of predestination, add greatly to the understanding of Lincoln’s soul. The impact of Lincoln’s reforms, and their philosophical basis, is similarly examined in James M. McPherson’s book of essays, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, 1991. With a debt to Guelzo and McPherson in particular, I have tried in my brief account to reproduce a sense of Lincoln’s governing political principles, since ideas such as those passed on by Henry Clay add a dimension to Lincoln’s public and private life that would otherwise go unexplained amid all the incidents.

  It is obvious that both Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln were complicated and fretful souls. Lincoln seems to have been a sometimes acute depressive, whereas Mary exhibited a bipolar volatility. Perhaps the most famous work on Abraham’s psyche is Leon Pierce Clark’s Lincoln, a Psychobiography. Roy P. Basler considered it too glibly Freudian, tracing, for example, “Lincoln’s development of a powerful super-ego . . . to its Freudian source in father-fear.”

  As for Lincoln’s remarkable, all-transforming rhetoric, Garry Wills places the Gettysburg Address in its complex cultural and historic context in Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, 1992.

  On the fascinating subject of the Lincoln marriage, apart from Herndon and other sources, we have Katherine Helm’s The True Story of Mary, Wife of Lincoln, 1928. This account, full of i
ncident and written by Emilie Helm’s daughter, is influenced by the quarrel between Mary and her half-sister Emilie. Ruth Painter Randall’s Mary Lincoln: Biography of a Marriage, 1953, defends Mary’s roles in courtship and marriage, and is thus hostile to Herndon and others who depicted Mary as a virago and the marriage as “an ice cave.” Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography by Jean A. Baker, 1987, is a skilled modern narrative of Mary Todd’s life from childhood to the bitterest end of her widowhood.

  For Washington in the mid-eighteenth century, I had recourse to Charles Dickens’s ironic if not scathing portrait in American Notes, which I read in a 1996 edition of the original 1842 work. Washington in Lincoln’s Time, by journalist and Lincoln friend Noah Brooks (edited by Herbert Mitgang), 1958, is valuable both as testimony and as a palpable record of place and time. So is L. A. Go-bright’s Recollection of Men and Things at Washington During the Third of a Century, Washington, 1869. Mary S. C. Logan’s Thirty Years in Washington; Or, Life and Scenes in Our National Capital, 1901, and Mary Clemmer Ames’s Ten Years in Washington, 1874, are explicit in their praise and condemnation of a capital in which there were plentiful subjects on both counts. The extent to which the South called the shots socially in Washington in the 1840s and 1850s, and thus the extent to which Mary and Abraham would, during his term as a congressman, have been considered outsiders, can be gauged from such memoirs as that of Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut’s A Diary from Dixie, 1905; from Virginia Clay’s A Belle of the Fifties: Memoirs of Mrs. Clay of Alabama (edited by Ada Sterling), 1905; and from Sara Agnes Pryor’s Reminiscences of Peace and War, New York, 1904.

  One of Lincoln’s secretaries, William O. Stoddard, wrote a series of vivid and engaging sketches of the Lincoln household, Lincoln’s visitors, and his work habits in Inside the White House in War Times: Memoirs and Reports of Lincoln’s Secretary (edited by Michael Burlingame), 2000. To see, from a trance medium’s point of view, the scale of the spiritualist shenanigans Lincoln permitted in the White House for the sake of Mary’s stability, there is a hair-raising account in Nettie Colburn Maynard’s Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist? Curious Revelations from the Life of a Trance Medium, 1891.