Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Accounts of the public’s reaction varied. Some sources reported that onlookers, who were mostly men, cheered him cordially but not enthusiastically. But one woman who observed the procession recorded in her diary that there was “great enthusiasm,” and another wrote that Lincoln “was obliged to ride with his hat off, so continual was the cheering and waving of handkerchiefs.”157 At the Astor House, Walt Whitman observed Lincoln descend from his carriage. The poet was impressed with the president-elect’s “perfect composure and coolness—his unusual and uncouth height, his dress of complete black, stovepipe hat push’d back on the head, dark-brown complexion, seam’d and wrinkled yet canny-looking face, black, bushy head of hair, disproportionately long neck, and his hands held behind as he stood observing the people.”158 During a reception Lincoln met the superintendent of police, John A. Kennedy, whom he greeted warmly: “I am happy to express my thanks and acknowledgements to you, Sir, for the admirable arrangements for the preservation of order. I can assure you that they were much appreciated.” When Kennedy replied that he was merely doing his duty, Lincoln said: “Yes; but a man should be thanked for doing his duty right well.”159

  Importuned by the crowd outside, Lincoln stepped to the balcony and made his customary nonspeech, during which he betrayed no signs of hoarseness and seemed remarkably self-possessed. When complimented on his brief statement, he replied: “There was not much harm in it at any rate.”160 The Lincolns dined with Hannibal Hamlin and his wife, who were also en route to Washington. When oysters on the half-shell were served, the president-elect regarded them with some puzzlement and said ingenuously, “Well, I don’t know that I can manage these things, but I guess I can learn.”161

  After dinner Lincoln consulted with leading politicians and businessmen. When queried about his plans to deal with secession, he said he never crossed a river until he reached it. Weed and others eager to placate the South were “much crosser than bears” at Lincoln’s unwillingness to endorse a compromise.162 Disappointed by his interview with the president-elect, Weed told Seward: “The conversation was confined to a single point, in relation to which I have no reason to suppose that he listened with profit. … My solicitude in reference to the Country is not diminished.”163

  Next morning, Lincoln breakfasted with the wealthy merchant Moses Grinnell and twenty-nine other business leaders, who urged the appointment of Cameron as secretary of the treasury. The stock market rose because the president-elect hobnobbed with conservative Wall Streeters rather than with Radicals. Grinnell hoped the breakfast “may do some good; at all events, I kept him from having the Greel[e]y clique around him.”164

  Further raising the hopes of compromisers was Lincoln’s response to the official welcome extended by Mayor Fernando Wood, who wished to appease the secessionists and had openly called for New York to follow their lead and declare itself a “free city.” A member of the presidential entourage was struck by the contrast between the two men: Lincoln, “tall, gaunt and rugged, with angular, rough-hewn features, but a kindly expression, unpolished in manner and ungraceful in speech, but evidently sincere and genuine,” little resembled Wood, “erect and agile, with a perfectly smooth face, easy graceful manners and fine address, but with a countenance as devoid of any indication of his thoughts and as free from the least sign of impulse or genuineness of any kind.”165 At 11 A.M., Lincoln visited City Hall, where Wood, with customary blandness, delivered a jeremiad about the woeful condition of business in the city: “All her material interests are paralyzed. Her commercial greatness is endangered. She is the child of the American Union. She has grown up under its maternal care, and been fostered by its paternal bounty; and we fear that if the Union dies, the present supremacy of New-York may perish with it. To you, therefore, … we look for a restoration of fraternal relations between the States—only to be accomplished by peaceful and conciliatory means.”166

  Observers murmured disapproval of Wood’s rudeness, but Lincoln took no offense. Seemingly preoccupied, he listened to these remarks with a dreamy look in his eye, smiled pleasantly when Wood finished, drew himself up to his full height, and responded in a voice weakened by a cold. His reply was unscripted, for upon arriving in New York, he admitted, apropos of his scheduled meeting with the mayor: “I haven’t any speech ready. I shall have to say just what comes into my head at the time.”167 What came into his head were these remarks: “In reference to the difficulties that confront us at this time, and of which your Honor thought fit to speak so becomingly, and so justly, as I suppose, I can only say that I fully concur with the sentiments expressed by the Mayor. In my devotion to the Union, I hope I am behind no man in the Union. … There is nothing that can ever bring me willingly to consent to the destruction of this Union, under which not only the commercial City of New-York, but the whole country has acquired its greatness, unless it would be that thing for which the Union itself was made. I understand a ship to be made for the carrying and preservation of the cargo, and so long as the ship can be saved, with the cargo, it should never be abandoned. This Union likewise should never be abandoned unless it fails and the possibility of its preservation shall cease to exist, without throwing passengers and cargo overboard. So long, then, as it is possible that the prosperity and liberties of this people can be preserved in the Union, it shall be my purpose at all times to preserve it.”168

  When the doors opened to admit the public, they tumbled in pell-mell, reminding onlookers of the onrush of a breached reservoir, the tapping of a beer barrel, or the popping of a champagne cork. As these well-wishers pressed toward him, Lincoln tossed off a characteristic pun: “They are members of the Press.” After shaking thousands of hands, he backed away and merely bowed to the multitude as it passed by. He made an exception for women, explaining that “their hands don’t hurt me,” and for veterans of the War of 1812. He shook 2,000 hands and bowed 2,600 times in two hours. When a gentleman suggested that he might be unanimously reelected, Lincoln replied: “I think when the clouds look as dark as they do now, one term might satisfy any man.” Said another: “I must shake hands with you, because they say I look like you,” prompting Lincoln to quip: “I take it that that settles that you are a good looking man.” Upon leaving City Hall, Lincoln reportedly told the mayor “that, without intending any disparagement of others, he considered his (Mr. Wood’s) speech the most appropriate and statesmanlike yet made on a like occasion, and that he (Mr. Lincoln) indorsed every word of it.” Among political leaders of the city, this well-publicized comment was viewed as one of his most meaningful statements, for in conjunction with his formal reply to the mayor, it indicated that the president-elect might support compromise.169 Lincoln seemed to be further distancing himself from his tough Indianapolis speech.

  When one of the mayor’s staff suggested to Lincoln that he might don a mask and participate incognito in the party scene of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera, then playing in town, the president-elect replied: “No, I thank you. The papers say I wear a mask already.”170 That evening he attended a performance of the opera, ironically the only one in the standard repertoire about the assassination of an American political leader. Arriving after the overture had begun, he quietly slipped into his seat unnoticed by the crowd. As the music proceeded, however, his presence was detected, and all eyes turned from the stage to his box, where he sat stroking his freshly grown whiskers. At the end of the opening act, the large audience cheered him lustily, shouting his name, waving hats and handkerchiefs. Calm and collected, he rose, bowed, and “gave one the idea of power, stern, rugged and uncompromising; but still there was in the smile something gentle, benevolent and kindly, giving the assurance that justice would be tempered with mercy, and that stern principle would be leavened with that wisdom which springs from a knowledge of the human heart and a sympathy with human weakness.”171 When the curtain rose on act two, the cast and chorus interpolated a spirited rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, at the close of which a huge American flag descended from the flies, to
uching off a frenzy of patriotic enthusiasm. Lincoln was deeply moved.

  Back at the Astor House, he was treated to more music by Verdi when a band serenaded him with selections from Nabucco and Il Trovatore. Too fatigued and unwell to respond, Lincoln asked Hannibal Hamlin, who had joined him that afternoon, to do the honors. Adding to the decibel level at the Astor House was a clutch of men who stood in the hallway near Lincoln’s room bellowing throughout the night. In the morning he appeared quite tired, saying “he had slept scarcely at all.”172

  In New York, Lincoln impressed some leading Democrats, among them an alderman and a judge. The former “said he had seen Lincoln & liked the man, said he was much better looking & a finer man than he expected to see; and that he kept aloof from old politicians here & seemed to have a mind of his own.” The latter remarked that the president-elect “has an eye that shows power of mind & will & he thinks he will carry us safely.”173 At the other end of the political spectrum, an abolitionist minister deemed Lincoln “a clever man, & not so bad looking as they say.” He “is not stiff; has a pleasant face, is amiable & determined,” and should “deliver our country from the thral[l]dom of imbecility, knavery & slavery.”174

  Some men in the Astor House discussed the president-elect: “We have now a President who will show that he is at the head of a Government, not a political committee.”

  “He isn’t a handsome man, but he don’t look weak.”

  “If his backbone is strong as his arm, we shall have someone to rely on.”175

  A guest at another leading hotel was less enthusiastic. Lincoln “is making an ass of himself,” he told a friend. It was “disgusting, and exceedingly humiliating … that we have become so degenerate, as to forward an obscure ignoramus like the President Elect—to the highest position in the known world.”176

  Resuming the Hard-line Stance

  On February 21, the presidential party crossed the Hudson River into New Jersey, where Lincoln dashed the hopes of soft-liners who had found encouragement in his previous day’s remarks to Mayor Wood. En route to Trenton, he appeared moody as he sat silent amid the elegant surroundings of his special car. In Newark, he took note of the effigy of a black-bearded man with a whip in his hand hanging from a beam and bearing a label, “The Doom of Traitors.”177

  At the state capitol, Lincoln addressed the General Assembly, emphasizing a theme he had hinted at in his Indianapolis speech ten days earlier. Speaking in a soft, conversational voice, he said: “I shall do all that may be in my power to promote a peaceful settlement of all our difficulties. The man does not live who is more devoted to peace than I am. [Cheers.] None who would do more to preserve it. But it may be necessary to put the foot down firmly.” John Hay reported that while delivering that last sentence, “with great deliberation and with a subdued intensity of tone,” he “lifted his foot lightly, and pressed it with a quick, but not violent, gesture upon the floor.” Another observer noted that as he delivered that line, “his shoulders seemed to straighten, and his eye to kindle.” Hay wrote that he “evidently meant it. The hall rang long and loud with acclamations. It was some minutes before Mr. Lincoln was able to proceed.”178 George Alfred Townsend recalled that in “the shouts and cheers and yells and shrieks,” one “could hear not only the resolution of battle, but the belief that there was now going to be a fight. The South had bluffed so long” that the Republicans were finally “resolved on a war, and did not mean to waste any time about taking up the gage of battle.”179 When the cheering died down, Lincoln “bent forward, and with a smile and manner that is both inimitable and indescribable,” asked the legislators, “if I do my duty, and do right, you will sustain me, will you not?”180 Hay noted that there “was a peculiar naiveté in his manner and voice, which produced a strange effect upon the audience. It was hushed for a moment to a silence which was like that of the dead. I have never seen an assemblage more thoroughly captivated and entranced by a speaker than were his listeners.”181

  These bold remarks seemed to clash with the more moderate tone Lincoln had adopted since his Indianapolis address. The reception at Trenton and the reaction to his appearances over the past few days evidently convinced him that the North favored the hard-line policy that he himself preferred.

  Before the New Jersey State Senate, Lincoln reminisced about his youth: “away back in my childhood, the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a small book, such a one as few of the younger members have ever seen, ‘Weems’ Life of Washington.’ I remember all the accounts there given of the battle fields and struggles for the liberties of the country, and none fixed themselves upon my imagination so deeply as the struggle here at Trenton, New-Jersey. The crossing of the river; the contest with the Hessians; the great hardships endured at that time, all fixed themselves on my memory more than any single revolutionary event; and you all know, for you have all been boys, how these early impressions last longer than any others. I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for. I am exceedingly anxious that that thing which they struggled for; that something even more than National Independence; that something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come; I am exceedingly anxious that this Union, the Constitution, and the liberties of the people shall be perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made, and I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle.”182

  As he prepared to leave the capitol, Lincoln was mobbed and “set upon as if by a pack of good natured bears, pawed, caressed, punched, jostled, crushed, cheered, and placed in imminent danger of leaving the chamber of the assembly in his shirt sleeves, and unceremoniously at that.” After lunching at a collation (referred to as a “cold collision” by one New Jersey legislator), the entourage left for Philadelphia, where it arrived at 4 P.M. to find a crowd of 100,000 exuberant people braving the extreme cold and disregarding the threat of a snowstorm. Upon detraining, Lincoln and his party quickly became caught up in great confusion, for the local committee, like so many of its counterparts in other cities, proved inept, bustling about aimlessly. Chaos prevailed as the party tried to enter the waiting carriages. Poor Lincoln, sitting in an open barouche, had to shiver for over half an hour as the flustered committeemen yanked his traveling companions from vehicles to which they had not been assigned. At the Continental Hotel, he reiterated his earlier remarks about the artificiality of the crisis, though he carefully added that “I do not mean to say that this artificial panic has not done harm.”183

  The Possibility of Assassination

  That night, after the customary reception, which exhausted him, Lincoln received alarming news that assassins planned to kill him as he passed through Baltimore on February 23. The bearer of this warning, a well-known Chicago detective and friend of Norman B. Judd, Allan Pinkerton, had been hired by the head of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad, Samuel M. Felton, to investigate rumors that his line would be sabotaged as Lincoln’s train rolled along its tracks to Washington. Felton and others had been alerted by an unnamed Baltimorean that a group in the Monumental City planned to set fire to a bridge as Lincoln’s train approached it, then attack the cars and kill the president-elect. Earlier, Felton had received similar warnings from the prominent social reformer, Dorothea Dix.

  Baltimore was known as “Mobtown” for its bloody history of political violence. In the fall of 1856, as Know-Nothing clubs battled their Democratic opponents, 14 people were killed and 300 injured. Thereafter the two leading clubs—the Blood Tubs and the Plug Uglies—maintained the tradition of partisan mayhem in that “murder-haunted town,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes called it.184 When President-elect Buchanan passed through it en route to his inauguration in 1857, thugs insulted him.

  While in Baltimore with some of his agents, Pinkert
on inadvertently learned of serious plots to assassinate the president-elect while he was changing trains. The entourage was scheduled to arrive at the depot of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore line and depart from the depot of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, over a mile distant. As the party made its way between the two stations, conspirators planned to create a disturbance drawing off the police and then, as a crowd surged around the carriages, kill Lincoln. On February 12, Pinkerton wrote Judd, informing him of the danger and recommending a change in Lincoln’s itinerary. In Philadelphia, Judd met with Pinkerton and Felton, who laid out the substantial evidence they had accumulated about the Baltimore plot.

  Convinced by their presentation, Judd summoned Lincoln to hear Pinkerton’s case. The president-elect, according to Pinkerton, “listened very attentively, but did not say a word, nor did his countenance … show any emotion. He appeared thoughtful and serious, but decidedly firm.”185 He inquired about details of the plot and asked Pinkerton for his opinion. The detective said he anticipated that a deadly assault would be made and cited several reasons for so thinking: the murderous expressions of reckless men who were prepared to sacrifice their lives to kill a supposed tyrant; the disloyalty of police superintendent George P. Kane; and the dangers presented by large crowds (such as the one in Buffalo that injured Major Hunter, or the one in Columbus that nearly crushed the president-elect). Lincoln remained silent for a while. When Judd and Pinkerton urged him to take the train to Washington that very night, the president-elect insisted that he must fulfill his obligation to raise a flag over Independence Hall the next morning and then address the Pennsylvania State Legislature in Harrisburg.