Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  This hard-line speech, though couched in mild terms, thrilled the crowd, which shouted: “That’s the talk!” and “We’ve got a President now!” John Hay reported that Lincoln’s delivery was as impressive as the substance of his remarks. His voice was “clear” and “sonorous,” and his “colloquial” style “singularly effective.” There was, Hay said, “something inspiring in the individual presence of the man. His manners are simple almost to naiveté; he has always a friendly, sometime a jocose word for those who approach him; but beneath all this, the resolute, determined character of the man is apparent.”20

  The Northern press carried Lincoln’s address, which Congress and the public regarded as a sign that he would resist secession. According to Henry Villard, the speech was “of the greatest significance, although it deals more in intimations than in definite assertions.”21 In Cincinnati, the speech “created an immense sensation,” for it was “looked upon as a decided coercion pronunciamento” and a “declaration of war against the South.”22 William L. Hodge, a Louisianan who would be appointed assistant secretary of the treasury months later, reported that Lincoln’s “foolish,” “uncalled for,” and “unfortunate” Indianapolis speech was “doing vast mischief” in Washington, where the president-elect’s best friends deprecated it. It was, Hodge claimed, having a “very unfortunate” effect on the Peace Conference and Unionists in Virginia.23

  Southern senators and congressmen, indignant at the Indianapolis speech, threatened to block all legislation, including the means to pay the government’s expenses. Many of their constituents inferred that Lincoln would dispatch troops to enforce the law. Southern newspapers criticized the “reckless boldness” of the speech, which “breathed of war” and amounted to “sporting with fire-balls in a powder magazine.”24 The New Orleans Crescent belittled Lincoln’s use of rhetorical questions: “Mr. Lincoln betrays an utter inability to rise to the dignity of his subject. He resorts to the indirect and unsatisfactory and undignified expedient of asking questions of the populace before him, instead of coming out like a man, and saying flatly what he means. Too timid to express boldly his sentiments, he resorts to the roundabout way of putting interrogatories, thereby suggesting what he would not declare openly—and then, for fear of its being considered too great a committal, reminding the people that they must recollect he was only asking questions, not expressing opinions!”25

  Northern papers, in contrast, defended Lincoln’s position as the only one that duty permitted. “Other ground than this the President elect could not take, if he would regard his oath ‘to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution,’ unless he were to regard it as in fact the rope of sand which another construction has seemed to make it,” observed the Boston Daily Advertiser.26 The New York Tribune hailed Lincoln’s speech as a welcome indication of his resolve to insist that if concessions were to be offered, the South had to make them. Should Lincoln’s implied insistence on collecting the revenues and retaking federal facilities lead to war, so be it, declared the New York Evening Post: “if war comes, it must be made by the South; but let the South understand, when it does come, that eighty years of enterprise, of accumulation and of progress in all the arts of warfare have not been lost upon the North.”27 The New York Herald, however, condemned the speech for exhibiting “the obstinacy of an intractable partisan” and proclaiming “a line of policy adverse to union and to peace, and eminently adapted, not only to enlarge, strengthen and consolidate the new Southern republic, but to destroy the hopes of law and order of the North in a wasting civil war.”28 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper worried that some passages were “capable of a terrible misconstruction.”29 Seward’s friends, surprised by the belligerent tone of the Indianapolis address, sent a telegram asking if it were genuine. Thurlow Weed left Washington immediately after reading Lincoln’s remarks, and Cassius M. Clay warned that “Lincoln will have to modify his Indiana speech so as to hold onto the status quo—a blow struck to regain lost forts will unite the South.”30 Lincoln had evidently intended to give this speech to the Indiana Legislature on the following day, but that event was canceled.

  The fatigue caused by a reception the night before may have been responsible for the change in plans; there the president-elect’s “coolness under the terrific infliction of several thousand hand-shakings” prompted Hay to remark that “he unites to the courage of Andrew Jackson the insensibility to physical suffering which is usually assigned to bronze statues.” The young assistant secretary judged that “the rack, the thumb screw, King James’s boot, the cap of silence, with all the other dark and recondite paraphernalia of torture, become instruments of cheerful and enlivening pastime, beside the ferocious grip and the demoniac wrench of the muscular citizen of the West.” Lincoln’s prankish son Robert made matters worse by standing outside the hotel and guiding dozens of mischievous lads to shake the hand of his unsuspecting father. Because the ordeal almost prostrated Lincoln, his advisors resolved to keep future receptions short.

  Things did not go smoothly at the Indiana capital. Like many other committees in charge of arrangements, Indianapolitans proved imperfect. Outsiders appropriated the carriages designated for the presidential party, compelling most of the entourage, clutching their luggage, struggle through the crowds to the Bates House. Hay found that the hotel’s “halls, passages, and rooms have been congested with turbulent congregations of men, all of whom had too many elbows, too much curiosity, and a perfectly gushing desire to shake hands with somebody—the President, if possible; if not, somebody who had shaken hands with him.”31 Chaos reigned in the dining room, where Lincoln had to sit twenty minutes before being served. Waiters mishandled orders, spilled sugar down patrons’ backs, and brought biscuits to those ordering ham and pickles to those requesting tea. The mayhem amused Lincoln.

  The president-elect was emphatically not amused when his son misplaced a carpetbag containing the only copies of his inaugural address. Robert, not yet 18 years old, had accepted an invitation by fellow adolescents to see the city’s sights, and carelessly left the precious bag with a hotel desk clerk. When asked about the location of the valise, Robert replied to his father in a tone of “bored and injured virtue.” A “look of stupefaction” came over Lincoln’s face as he heard what the lad had done, “and visions of that Inaugural in all the next morning’s newspapers floated through his imagination,” according to Nicolay. “Without a word he opened the door of his room, forced his way through the crowded corridor down to the office, where, with a single stride of his long legs, he swung himself across the clerk’s counter, behind which a small mountain of carpetbags of all colors had accumulated.” With a little key, the president-elect began opening all the black bags, much to the surprised amusement of onlookers. Eventually, he discovered his own carpetbag, which he took charge of thereafter. Ward Hill Lamon testified that he “had never seen Mr. Lincoln so much annoyed, so much perplexed, and for the time so angry.” He added that Lincoln “seldom manifested a spirit of anger toward his children—this was the nearest approach to it I had ever witnessed.”32

  Conciliatory Speeches in Cincinnati

  The next morning, Mrs. Lincoln arrived in Indianapolis a few moments before the presidential train departed for Cincinnati. En route to the Queen City she impressed one observer unfavorably. As a gentleman with a newspaper passed by her, she asked: “Is that a Cincinnati paper you have in your hand?” When assured that it was, she queried: “Does it say anything about us?” Taken aback by her self-importance, he was reminded of “an honest Dutchman, who had unexpectedly been elevated to the position of major of the militia. When the result of the election was known, his children wanted to know if they would now all be majors. ‘No, you fools,’ indignantly replied the mother, ‘none but your daddie and me.’ ”33 Lincoln’s gloom lifted this day, the fifty-second anniversary of his birth. “He has shaken off the despondency which was noticed during the first day’s journey,” John Hay informed readers of the New York World. As the presid
ent-elect prepared to leave Indianapolis, some Illinois friends bade him farewell and returned home. Among them were Jesse K. Dubois and Ebenezer Peck, who embraced him vigorously, clipped a lock of hair as a souvenir, and urged him “to behave himself like a good boy in the White House.”34 Illinois Democrats satirically recommended that the hair be preserved as a state treasure. As the train sped along at 30 miles per hour, huge crowds at each station greeted the president-elect with wild cheering. At one stop, Lincoln indulged his well-wishers with some brief remarks in which he took his customary modesty to extreme lengths. “You call upon me for a speech,” he told the residents of Lawrenceburg, Indiana. “I have been selected to fill an important office for a brief period, and am now, in your eyes, invested with an influence which will soon pass away; but should my administration prove to be a very wicked one, or what is more probable, a very foolish one, if you, the PEOPLE, are but true to yourselves and to the Constitution, there is but little harm I can do, thank God!”35

  Approaching Cincinnati in midafternoon, the train was forced to halt by a crowd so large that it spilled onto the tracks. Police had to clear the way into the depot. As Lincoln proceeded to his hotel—a ride in an open carriage lasting two and a half hours—he was hailed by more than 50,000 people lining the streets. A future president, Rutherford B. Hayes, reported that there “was a lack of comfort in the arrangements, but the simplicity, the homely character of all was in keeping with the nobility of this typical American.”36 Another witness described a source of that discomfort: Lincoln was “standing erect with uncovered head, and steadying himself by holding on to a board fastened to the front part of the vehicle. A more uncomfortable ride than this, over the bouldered streets of Cincinnati, cannot well be imagined. Perhaps a journey over the broken roads of Eastern Russia, in a tarantass [a low-slung, horse-drawn carriage informally known as a “liver-massaging device”], would secure to the traveller as great a degree of discomfort. Mr. Lincoln bore it with characteristic patience.”37 Hay noticed that all windows were thronged, “every balcony glittered with bright colors and fluttered with handkerchiefs; the sidewalks were packed; even the ledges and cornices of the houses swarmed with intrepid lookers-on.” There “were flags everywhere where there were not patriots; and patriots everywhere there were not flags.”38 Adorning hotels and other buildings were large signs with such hawkish mottos as “The Union Must and Shall Be Preserved,” “Welcome to the President of Thirty-Four States,” “The Time Has Come When Demagogues Must Go Under,” and “The Security of a Republic Is in the Maintenance of the Laws.”39 As the carriage slowly proceeded, a heavy-set German sitting atop a gigantic beer barrel hoisted his stein of lager and shouted to the president-elect: “God be with you. Enforce the laws and save our country. Here’s your health.”40

  From the balcony of his hotel, Lincoln gave a much less confrontational speech than the one he had delivered at Indianapolis. (Indeed, for most of the trip he toned down his rhetoric, perhaps because of the unfavorable press response to his remarks at the Indiana capital.) He quoted the conciliatory words he had addressed to Kentuckians when he spoke at Cincinnati two years earlier: “When we do, as we say, beat you [in an election], you perhaps want to know what we will do with you. I will tell you, so far as I am authorized to speak for the opposition, what we mean to do with you. We mean to treat you, as near as we possibly can, as Washington, Jefferson, and Madison treated you. We mean to leave you alone, and in no way to interfere with your institution; to abide by all and every compromise of the constitution, and, in a word, coming back to the original proposition, to treat you, so far as degenerated men (if we have degenerated) may, according to the examples of those noble fathers—Washington, Jefferson and Madison. We mean to remember that you are as good as we; that there is no difference between us, other than the difference of circumstances. We mean to recognize, and bear in mind always, that you have as good hearts in your bosoms as other people, or as we claim to have, and treat you accordingly.” He declared that “in my new position, I see no occasion, and feel no inclination, to retract a word of this.”41

  These conciliatory remarks pleased compromise enthusiasts. “Every word is so carefully selected with direct reference to the affairs of Government that their soothing, quieting influence cannot fail to be felt,” predicted an Indiana woman.42 The Philadelphia Pennsylvanian approved of the “different tone” of this speech compared with his Indianapolis address, although the paper thought he was rather condescending toward Kentuckians.43 To a local rabbi, Lincoln seemed like “a country squire for the first time in the city” who would “look queer in the white house, with his primitive manner.”44

  That evening Lincoln dodged an opportunity to address the secession crisis when he received a serenade from more than 2,000 German workingmen who urged him to stand by his antislavery principles: “We trust, that you, the self-reliant because self made man, will uphold the Constitution and the laws against secret treachery and avowed treason.”45 Instead of replying directly to those remarks, Lincoln dwelt on immigration, homestead laws, and the American dream. He began by explaining why he would avoid talking about the subject that was on everyone’s mind: “I deem it my duty—a duty which I owe to my constituents—to you, gentlemen, that I should wait until the last moment, for a development of the present national difficulties, before I express myself decidedly what course I shall pursue. I hope, then, not to be false to anything that you have to expect of me.” Such reticence contrasted sharply with the spirit of his Indianapolis speech.

  Lincoln then waxed philosophical, endorsing the cardinal principle of the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham: “I hold that while man exists, it is his duty to improve not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating mankind; and therefore, without entering upon the details of the question, I will simply say, that I am for those means which will give the greatest good to the greatest number.” Turning to a subject that he seldom treated, he praised homestead legislation, to which the German delegation had alluded in its address: “in so far as the Government lands can be disposed of, I am in favor of cutting up the wild lands into parcels, so that every poor man may have a home.” He spoke about his vision of the just society and the role of immigrants in it: “In regard to the Germans and foreigners, I esteem them no better than other people, nor any worse. [Cries of good.] It is not my nature, when I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles—the oppression of tyranny—to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke, than to add anything that would tend to crush them. Inasmuch as our country is extensive and new, and the countries of Europe are densely populated, if there are any abroad who desire to make this the land of their adoption, it is not in my heart to throw aught in their way, to prevent them from coming to the United States.”46

  The evening reception in Cincinnati was an ordeal. For forty-five minutes Lincoln shook hand after hand until he finally excused himself. On the whole, the event in the Queen City was a success. Rutherford B. Hayes told a relative that the “impression he made was good. He undoubtedly is shrewd, able, and possesses strength in reserve.” Prophetically Hayes added, “This will be tested soon.”47

  Unfortunate Speech in Columbus

  On February 13, the train proceeded to Columbus, where Lincoln was scheduled to address the state legislature. Although quite tired and feeling somewhat ill, he conversed freely with other passengers. Speaking of the demands that the South made on the North, he was reminded of a squabble between his two younger sons. “One of them had a toy that the other wanted and demanded it in terms emphatic and boisterous. At length he was told to let his brother have it in order to quiet him. ‘No, sir,’ was the sturdy response, ‘I must have it to quiet myself.’ ”48 Because Lincoln was a bit hoarse from speaking outdoors so often, his friends tried to keep him from further unnecessary oratory, but he could not resist saying a few words at stops along the way. In Xenia, a large crowd, including ma
ny blacks, greeted him with especially intense enthusiasm. After his remarks, he found it difficult to return to the train as the crowd pressed forward to touch his hand.

  Upon arriving at the Ohio capital, Lincoln found it jammed with people swarming in from the countryside. At the depot, many thousands boisterously welcomed the train with loud huzzahs. Hay invited his New York readers to imagine “a quiet inland city of the second class suddenly transformed into your own bustling, jostling Broadway, with—and here the comparison fails—smiling faces and holiday attire, stores and dwellings gaily decorated, the pavements neither muddy nor dusty, the atmosphere balmy as spring, music falling upon the ear and military display greeting the eye.”49 The local Republican paper noted that Lincoln’s manner “told how deeply he was affected by the enthusiasm of the people.”50 At the statehouse, the legislature’s solemn reception of the president-elect so moved him that he was, according to one observer, “hardly able to do himself justice in his reply to the address of the President of the Senate; but the earnestness and conscientiousness that plainly shone on his face effected more with the audience than words could.”51 The words Lincoln chose were unfortunate. He clumsily tried to play down the seriousness of the crisis: “there is nothing going wrong. It is a consoling circumstance that when we look out there is nothing that really hurts anybody. We entertain different views upon political questions, but nobody is suffering anything.”52

  Critics jumped on these remarks. An indignant New York congressman asked rhetorically: “Have not our forts and vessels been seized, our arsenals invaded, and our mints robbed, by men and States in arms?”53 The president-elect was “a fool” for uttering “sheer nonsense,” wrote a Philadelphian; “everybody about here is ‘hurt,’ and ‘suffering,’ and everything is ‘wrong’ in the eyes of everyone except these robber republicans, who have ruined the country and now pretend that all is right, when 6 states are forming an independent government.”54 Conservative newspapers scolded Lincoln for betraying “a most lamentable degree of ignorance touching the revolutionary evils of the day.” How, they asked, could he possibly ignore the “sweeping bankruptcy of our merchants, the stoppage of our manufactories, the universal stagnation of trade, and the tens of thousands of poor laboring people thrown out of employment by the unrest of the times”?55 Not all journals were so harsh. The Philadelphia Press charitably speculated that Lincoln must have been thinking of the rural West rather than the urban East. Some interpreted the president-elect’s remarks as a stiff-back declaration. Journalist Henry M. Smith reported that Lincoln “left the inference very strong on the minds of his hearers that there was nothing to compromise—as the North had done no wrong to any man or section, and proposed doing nothing worse than maintaining the Union, upholding the Constitution and executing the laws.”56 At least one Columbus resident who did not view the speech that way told Lincoln, “you’ve got to give them rebels a hotter shot than that before they’re licked.”57