The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln

by Abraham Lincoln

  After disposing of business matters, Lincoln lay down on the old sofa which had been his favorite resting place. He spoke for several hours, recalling scenes from the past and joking about some of the ridiculous incidents that had taken place during their practice together. Finally the time came for him to go. He mentioned the weatherbeaten signboard that carried the firm name. “Let it hang there undisturbed,” he said to Herndon. “Give our clients to understand that the election of a President makes no change in the firm of Lincoln and Herndon. If I live, I’m coming back some time, and then we’ll go right on practicing law as if nothing had ever happened.”

  The next morning dawned rainy and cheerless. The Presidential train was to leave early, and Mrs. Lincoln and the children were to be on it. Something went amiss. According to the story told by a New York newspaper correspondent, Mary Lincoln quarreled with her husband that morning over a political appointment she wanted him to make. When the time for departure came, she was lying on the floor of her hotel room, screaming with hysterical rage that she would not leave for Washington unless her husband granted her wishes.

  The President-elect entered his carriage without his family. He was driven through the muddy streets to a railroad station that was only a few blocks away from his old home. This was supposed to be his day of triumph, the auspicious beginning of a progress toward fame and success. The rain poured down as he rode through the familiar streets of Springfield; it drummed on the roof of his carriage and streaked down the window glass, obscuring the faces of people who had gathered along the sidewalks to see him pass.

  Many of his old friends were at the railroad station. Some of them doubtless inquired about Mrs. Lincoln, and the man whose heart was breaking at this miserable farewell to his own past had to parry off their questions and explain elaborately that she had changed her plans. He went through the waiting room to the platform, where he was greeted with cheers. Soldiers lined his passageway; friends stopped him to shake hands for the last time.

  Heavily, tiredly, he mounted the steps to the observation platform at the end of the train. He stood for a moment at the rail, looking in silence at the people he had known so well—people whose lives had been so long intertwined with his. Then he spoke to them out of the fullness of his heart:

  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 everything. 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. Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance, I cannot fail. Trusting in Him who can go with me, and remain with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.

  The rain fell fast upon him, glistening on his cheeks as he spoke. The engine whistle blew. He turned and went into the car, and the train moved off toward Washington, toward civil war and death.

  The people of Springfield waited, standing bareheaded in the rain, watching the train recede into the distance. They were never to see their fellow-townsman alive again.

  The train bearing the President-elect and his party headed east, stopping on the way at Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Buffalo, Albany and New York. Mrs. Lincoln and the children joined the train at Indianapolis. Mary Todd was not to be done out of the glory of social receptions and kowtowing. The route had been carefully planned, and Lincoln had to speak at all the scheduled stops—and at some of the unscheduled ones, for huge crowds came to see the train even when it halted at some wayside station to take on fuel and water. The speeches he made on this journey are among the worst of his career. He was determined not to say anything that might be construed as a declaration of policy, so he spoke only a few banal words. The situation in the South was becoming more dangerous every day; he wanted to see what would happen; and he felt that he had to wait until he took office before he could express himself on any stand.

  On February 18, when Lincoln was on his way through New York State, he received word that Jefferson Davis had been inaugurated President of the Confederate States of America. Lincoln made no comment, but rode on grimly, knowing that on March 4, he would be faced with a problem of a rival government already in power on United States territory. The slaveholders, whose reckless course of action he had observed all his life, had struck the long-threatened blow at the Union, and they had struck at a moment when the whole defense of the Union would be thrust upon him. He had already composed his inaugural address and was carrying it with him on the train. “Physically speaking, we cannot separate,” he had written in Springfield. “We cannot remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them.… Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws can among friends? 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.” And he had written, at the end of his address, a question addressed to the people of the South which he had couched in forthright and uncompromising terms:

  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. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect and defend it.” You can forbear the assault upon it, I cannot shrink from the defense of it. With you, and not with me, is the solemn question of “Shall it be peace or a sword?”

  New York City was a Democratic stronghold; the reception awaiting him there was a purely formal one, lacking in enthusiasm or spontaneous warmth. One man who saw him said: “As the carriage in which he sat passed slowly by on the Fifth avenue, he was looking weary, sad, feeble and faint. My disappointment was excessive; so great, indeed, as to be almost overwhelming. He did not look to me to be the man for the hour.”

  New Jersey, too, was hostile territory; it was the one free state that had voted against him. Yet, when he addressed the State Assembly in Trenton, he spoke more frankly than he had at any time on his journey. Events in the South were becoming more and more ominous, and he was evidently making up his mind as to what course he must take, for he said that he, a man devoted to peace and with no malice toward any section, might find it “necessary to put the foot down firmly.” And he was cheered when he said this.

  THE FIRST ASSASSINATION PLOT

  When he arrived in Philadelphia he received word of the first of the many plots that were to be made against his life. Allan Pinkerton, the famous detective, was waiting for him. Pinkerton’s agents had found out that the President-elect was to be attacked as he passed through Baltimore. Their information did not sound unreasonable; Baltimore was a city known for its Southern sympathies and its gangs of “plug-uglies” who could be hired for any purpose from illegal voting to actual murder. Pinkerton wanted Lincoln to proceed at once to Washington in secrecy. This Lincoln was unwilling to do, since he had speaking engagements the next day in Philadelphia and Harrisburg. It was agreed that he should leave Harrisburg the next evening and go on to Washington from there in order to arrive ahead of his scheduled time. Later in the evening, Frederick Seward arrived from Washington carrying messages from his father and from General Scott, commander of the Army, warning Lincoln of the Baltimore plot which they had heard about from other sources.

  The President-elect attended a flag-raising ceremony at Independence Hall in the morning, and the words he spoke on that occasion indicate the threats of death that were hanging over him. He went on to Harrisburg, and there, as he had arranged, he left the Governor’s dinner, too
k a carriage and was rapidly driven outside the town, where a special train was awaiting him. Telegraph wires were cut so no one could signal ahead that he was on board. As soon as he arrived in Philadelphia, he was put into a closed carriage and driven around the city until it was time for the Washington train to leave.

  He entered the sleeping-berth and went to bed immediately. The train proceeded on to Baltimore, where it arrived at three-thirty in the morning. Baltimore, at that time, had a curious railroad situation which made it an ideal place in which to attempt an assassination. Trains coming from the north had to stop at a terminal on one side of the city; their cars were detached and drawn through the streets by horses to the southern terminal, making it easy for armed men to attack the cars while they were in slow transit through the roughest part of the city. (Less than two months later trains were held up at this spot, and men of the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment were killed as they tried to reach the southern terminal.)

  No one knew that Lincoln was on the train this night, so the passage across Baltimore was made without trouble. The train pulled into Washington at six o’clock in the morning, and the man who was about to be inaugurated President of the United States entered the city unknown and unheralded. He was driven to Willard’s Hotel where he was to stay until he went to the White House.

  Mrs. Lincoln and the rest of the party came through Baltimore later in the day without molestation. The conspirators—if they did exist—had evidently found out that the President-elect was already in Washington. Just how real the Baltimore plot was we shall never know. Certainly there were men in the South who had openly discussed the possibility of preventing the inauguration, and in December, the Richmond Examiner had printed the query: “Can there not be found men bold and brave enough in Maryland to unite with Virginians in seizing the Capital in Washington?” All this may have been mere gasconade, but irrefutable and tragic stands the evidence of April 14, 1865, in denial of all theories that Abraham Lincoln had nothing to fear while he was President.

  On the evening of Lincoln’s arrival in Washington, Stephen A. Douglas called upon the President-elect to talk with him about the impending crisis. Just before he left, he took Lincoln’s hand and said: “You and I have been for many years politically opposed to each other, but in our devotion and attachment to the Constitution and the Union we have never differed—in this we are one—this must and shall not be destroyed!”

  Lincoln spent the ten days between his arrival in Washington and his inauguration conferring with members of his prospective Cabinet, calling on President Buchanan, and visiting the Supreme Court, the House of Representatives and the Senate. Some of the Southern Senators refused to be presented to him, but in general there was little unpleasantness, for the issues involved were too grave to be expressed in such petty ways.

  He consulted with Douglas and with Seward on the wording of his inaugural address, and changed several parts of it in order to make it more palatable to the South. Ntably he changed the ending, taking a suggested paragraph of Seward’s and transmuting its dull language into poetry. The “peace or a sword” ending now became:

  I am loath 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 battlefield 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 natures.

  Shortly before noon on March 4, the carriage of President Buchanan stopped in front of Willard’s Hotel. The weak-faced old man, looking like a figure from one of Dickens’ novels, went into the hotel to meet his successor. The two men came out together and rode down Pennsylvania Avenue under a cavalry guard that kept close to the carriage. Riflemen were stationed on housetops; soldiers lined the broad square in front of the Capitol and stood under the speaker’s platform. Artillery pieces were drawn up in the streets around the Capitol, and a long covered wooden passageway had been built to protect the Presidential party on its way to the speaker’s platform.

  The Capitol dome was unfinished; huge pieces of iron needed in its construction were standing around the square; scaffolding ran across the front of the portico. On the platform the great men of the nation were assembled to attend the ceremony. Abraham Lincoln came forward to the front of the speaker’s stand, looking very uncomfortable in his new clothes. He held his hat in one hand and a large gold-headed cane in the other. He managed to put the cane away in a corner; as he tried to find a place for his hat, Douglas smiled, took it and held it for him. Then, reading from manuscript, Lincoln began his carefully prepared inaugural address.

  There were about thirty thousand people assembled in the square. They heard Lincoln’s plea for peace and conciliation, and applauded without great enthusiasm when he finished. Chief Justice Taney, the eighty-four-year-old head of the Supreme Court, stepped forward in great agitation to administer the oath of office for the last time in his long career which dated from Jackson’s administration. He was the man whom public opinion held responsible for the Dred Scott decision; he and Buchanan and Douglas had been named by Lincoln as conspirators in the effort to extend slavery into the territories. The ancient black-robed figure was shaking as he held up the Bible on which the oath was to be sworn. Abraham Lincoln spoke the words that made him President of the United States. A signal was given to a field-battery stationed a mile away. The distant guns roared out in celebration; the smoke from their firing drifted over the city; the crowds in the square dispersed; and the new President drove to the White House to take over the responsibilities of office.

  The Lincoln who entered the White House that day seems at first like a very different person from the Illinois politician who had left Springfield a few weeks before. He had mingled with the leading men of the nation and been treated by them as a person of high importance; he had been exposed to danger and the possibility of sudden death; he had the biggest job in the country to fill under conditions that were without precedent—no other President before or since has had to face the problems awaiting Lincoln when he entered the White House. It is a mistake, though, to feel that he had suddenly become transformed into another person. Actually he was the same Lincoln, the same melancholy country man fond of jokes and story-telling, the same clever politician and lawyer who could hold his own in a debate or persuade a jury. The highest office he had previously occupied was that of Congressman and he had been not too successful in it. The great position of power that was now his was to call out of him all the ability that had so far been latent; he was to concentrate in the next four years what would amount to several lifetimes for ordinary men. He knew that he had reached the peak of his career; there could be nothing more ahead of him after the Presidency. No circumstances could be more favorable for testing the mettle of a man—strong men rise to the occasion and become stronger; the weak give way, as Buchanan had done, and become miserable failures. It was all or nothing now.

  The first indication of strength that Lincoln showed was in the selection of his Cabinet. He surrounded himself with the best men he could get. The three most important men in his Cabinet had all been his rivals in the race for the Presidential nomination. His Secretary of State was William H. Seward and his Secretary of the Treasury was Salmon P. Chase. They were both far in advance of Lincoln in their attitude toward slavery; they were both positive men, strong-willed and ambitious. His Attorney General, Edward Bates of Missouri, was an elderly man with a great legal reputation. His Postmaster General, Montgomery Blair, also was famous in the law—he had been the attorney for Dred Scott, and had made a national reputation for himself as a fearless advocate. All these men had been chosen by Lincoln; the other three Cabinet members were necessary compromise selections. Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, had been selected by the Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin, for geographical reasons—he represented New England in the Cabinet. Simon Cameron
of Pennsylvania, as Secretary of War, and Caleb Smith of Indiana, as Secretary of the Interior, had been given their places to fulfill the unauthorized promises made at Chicago by Lincoln’s campaign managers.

  Someone from the Lower South was badly needed in the Cabinet, but Lincoln had found it impossible to get any prominent man to serve. This was a great disappointment to him, but he had done the best he could in selecting his Cabinet under the extraordinarily difficult circumstances of sectional dispute and political expediency. He had to work with the material he could get, and he had made his own selections without any fear of rivalry or any consideration of personal favoritism.

  This willingness to work with the best man for the job was one of Lincoln’s greatest political virtues. When he was thinking of using Chase in his Cabinet, a friend in Springfield had warned him that Chase considered himself a bigger man than Lincoln. “Well,” said Lincoln, “if you know of any other men who think they are bigger than I am, let me know. I want to put them all in my Cabinet.” When the time came for him to appoint a new Secretary of War to replace Cameron, he chose Edwin M. Stanton, despite the fact that Stanton had once treated him with contempt during a law trial in which they both served as attorneys on the same side, and had often shown that he had very small respect for Lincoln as President.

  SUMTER AND SEWARD

  Lincoln showed his strength in his Cabinet appointments; he showed his weakness and vacillation in the policy—or lack of one—followed during his first month in office. There can be no doubt that he seriously underestimated the degree to which secession had proceeded in the South. Even though a new government had been set up there and a Confederate President inaugurated, he still felt that it might be possible to save the Union, to hold the South by peaceable means. The whole spirit of his first inaugural address shows this. He believed the South felt the same veneration for the United States that he himself did. Love of country was strong in the generation of men that had followed the leadership of Jackson, Clay and Webster. But Lincoln did not take Calhoun, who had been the leading statesman of the South, into sufficient account. Calhoun had stood for his state rather than his country, and local attachments outweighed national patriotism among many Southern people.