When Brooks expressed surprise that the president had a manuscript from which to read, he explained: “It is true that I don’t usually read a speech, but I am going to say something to-night that may be important. I am going to talk about reconstruction, and sometimes I am betrayed into saying things that other people don’t like. In a little off-hand talk I made the other day I used the phrase ‘Turned tail and ran.’ ” Senator Sumner “was very much offended by that, and I hope he won’t be offended again.”18 As Lincoln read from his text, Brooks held up a candle so that he could see it. After finishing each page, the president let it fall to the floor, where Tad energetically scooped it up. (Upon completing his remarks, Lincoln quipped to Brooks: “That was a pretty fair speech, I think, but you threw some light on it.”)19
As the president spoke from a window of the White House, his wife and Clara Harris, daughter of New York Senator Ira Harris, stood at a nearby window chatting so loudly that they nearly drowned out the president. Initially, the crowd tolerated this unbecoming behavior, but in time some people emphatically told the noisemakers to quiet down. Disconcerted by their shushing, Lincoln feared that something he said had given offense. But he soon realized that no disrespect was meant and, with “an expression of pain and mortification which came over his face as if such strokes were not new,” continued reading his speech.20
Instead of delivering the expected triumphal paean to the conquering Union army and navy, he dwelt at length on the problems of Reconstruction, explaining how he and General Banks had labored to make Louisiana a model for the other seceded states. Frankly allowing that some Radical criticism of their handiwork was valid, he dismissed as “a merely pernicious abstraction” the question of whether the rebellious states were in or out of the Union. Some Radicals insisted that by seceding, the Confederate states had reverted to the status of territories and could therefore be governed by Congress. Lincoln resisted that line of argument, asserting that he and the Radicals “agree that the seceded States, so called, are out of their proper practical relation with the Union; and that the sole object of the government, civil and military, in regard to those States is to again get them into that proper practical relation. I believe it is not only possible, but in fact, easier, to do this, without deciding, or even considering, whether these states have even been out of the Union, than with it. Finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad. Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relations between these states and the Union; and each forever after, innocently indulge his own opinion whether, in doing the acts, he brought the States from without, into the Union, or only gave them proper assistance, they never having been out of it.”
To strengthen this rhetorical appeal for Republican unity, Lincoln offered the Radicals an important substantive concession. Hitherto he had expressed support for black suffrage only in private. Now, fatefully, he made that support public: “It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.” To be sure, he acknowledged, the Louisiana Legislature had not availed itself of the opportunity afforded it by the new state constitution to enfranchise blacks, but “the question is not whether the Louisiana government, as it stands, is quite all that is desirable. The question is ‘Will it be wiser to take it as it is, and help to improve it; or to reject, and disperse it?’ ‘Can Louisiana be brought into proper practical relation with the Union sooner by sustaining, or by discarding her new State Government?’ ” Putting it another way, he asked: “Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is to the fowl, shall we sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it?”
Months later Frederick Douglass acknowledged that though Lincoln’s call for black suffrage “seemed to mean but little” at the time, it actually “meant a great deal. It was just like Abraham Lincoln. He never shocked prejudices unnecessarily. Having learned statesmanship while splitting rails, he always used the thin edge of the wedge first—and the fact that he used it at all meant that he would if need be, use the thick as well as the thin.”21 Owen Lovejoy used this same image to describe Lincoln’s approach to emancipation. In dealing with slavery, he had inserted the thin edge of the wedge in March 1862 (with the recommendation to help compensate those Border States adopting gradual emancipation), drove it in deeper in 1863 (with the Emancipation Proclamation), and fully drove home the thick part in 1865 (with the Thirteenth Amendment.) Even before March 1862, Lincoln had worked behind the scenes to persuade Delaware to emancipate its slaves. So it was with black suffrage. In 1864, Lincoln had privately urged Governor Hahn to enfranchise at least some blacks in Louisiana. In 1865, he publicly endorsed the same policy. To be sure, Louisiana was a special case, for a number of educated blacks lived in New Orleans. Possibly Lincoln did not mean to extend suffrage to uneducated blacks in other states, but that seems unlikely, for if he wanted to enfranchise only educated blacks, he would not have suggested that black soldiers, regardless of educational background, be granted voting rights.
One member of Lincoln’s audience did not underestimate the importance of Lincoln’s call for limited black suffrage. Upon hearing the president’s words, a handsome, popular, impulsive, 26-year-old actor named John Wilkes Booth turned to a friend and declared: “That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through!”22 He added: “That is the last speech he will ever make.”23
Clearly Lincoln was moving toward the Radical position. Now that the war was over, there was no need to inveigle Confederates into surrendering by offering them exceptionally lenient peace terms. His proclaimed support for limited black suffrage was but one sign of his willingness to meet Radical critics halfway. In March, he had signed the Freedman’s Bureau Act without reservation. It established a federal agency, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, to protect the interests of the former slaves as well as white refugees. (The agency was forbidden to practice discrimination based on race; whatever benefits blacks enjoyed were to be afforded to whites equally and vice versa.) No longer would liberated blacks work under the supervision of provost marshals and treasury agents; the legislation even held out the promise, somewhat vaguely, of land redistribution. Lincoln’s concern all along, according to chaplain John Eaton, “was to illustrate the capacity of these [black] people for the privileges, duties and rights of freedom.”24
Moreover, Lincoln suggested that he was willing to compromise on Reconstruction policy. On April 10, he told Governor Pierpont “that he had no plan for reorganization, but must be guided by events.”25 Stanton testified that Lincoln at war’s end had not “matured any plan.”26 While he hoped that Congress would seat Louisiana’s senators and congressmen, in his April 11 speech he acknowledged that conditions varied from state to state and that “no exclusive, and inflexible plan can safely be prescribed as to details and colatterals. Such exclusive, and inflexible plan, would surely become a new entanglement. Important principles may, and must, be inflexible.” As for the Louisiana government, he said that although he had promised to sustain it, “bad promises are better broken than kept” and he would “treat this as a bad promise, and break it, whenever I shall be convinced that keeping it is adverse to the public interest.” He closed with a tantalizing hint: “it may be my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South. I am considering, and shall not fail to act, when satisfied that action will be proper.”27
What Lincoln meant in those closing remarks is not clear, but three days later at a cabinet meeting he “said he thought he had made a mistake at Richmond in sanctioning the assembling of the Virginia Legislature & had perhaps been too fast in his desires for early reconstruction.”28 He made a similar remark to House Speaker Schuyler Colfax, confessing that he was “not sure that it was wise” and that it “was a doubtful experiment
at best.”29 Commenting on that cabinet meeting, pro-Radical Attorney General James Speed remarked to Salmon P. Chase that the president never “seemed so near our views.”30
Reconstruction Policies: The Last Cabinet Meeting
Despite his ill-advised decision to let the Virginia Legislature reconvene, Lincoln shared the Radicals’ desire to keep the old leadership class of the South from returning to power. In Louisiana he had worked to block reactionaries’ attempts to gain positions of authority, and presumably he would do so in other states. As Frederick Douglass plausibly speculated in December 1865, if Lincoln had lived, “no rebels would hold the reins of Government in any one of the late rebellious states.”31
Lincoln was not disposed to withdraw his support for amnesty for most Confederates. According to Gideon Welles, he “dreaded and deprecated violent and revengeful feelings, or any malevolent demonstrations toward those of our countrymen who were involved, voluntarily or involuntarily, in the rebellion.”32 But what should be done with the Confederate leaders? He told Grant that he hoped that they would slip out of the country without his knowledge. Similarly, in response to Postmaster General William Dennison’s query about letting Rebel eminenti escape, Lincoln said: “I should not be sorry to have them out of the country; but I should be for following them up pretty close, to make sure of their going.”33 In discussing the possibility of capturing Jefferson Davis, Mrs. Lincoln allegedly exclaimed: “Don’t allow him to escape the law! He must be hanged.” The president replied: “Let us judge not that we be not judged.”34 When asked if he should order the arrest of Jacob Thompson, who had been a Confederate agent in Canada as well as James Buchanan’s secretary of the interior, Lincoln replied: “no, I rather think not. When you have got an elephant by the hind leg, and he’s trying to run away, it’s best to let him run.”35
But what if prominent Confederates did not emigrate? Lincoln told Schuyler Colfax “that he did not want their blood, but that we could not have peace or order in the South … while they remained there with their great influence to poison public opinion.” To encourage them to flee, he suggested that military authorities “inform them that if they stay, they will be punished for their crimes, but if they leave, no attempt will be made to hinder them. Then we can be magnanimous to all the rest and have peace and quiet in the whole land.”36 Lincoln did not indicate what he would recommend if they still refused to take the hint.
Though the president was moving in their direction, some Radicals remained hostile to his Reconstruction policy, especially his willingness to grant amnesty. Noah Brooks reported that “the extremists are thirsting for a general hanging, and if the President fails to gratify their desires in this direction, they will be glad, for it will afford them more pretexts for the formation of a party which shall be pledged to ‘a more vigorous policy.’ ”37
The subject of amnesty came up at a cabinet meeting on April 14. According to Welles, Lincoln expressed the hope that “there would be no persecution, no bloody work, after the war was over. None need expect he would take any part in hanging or killing those men, even the worst of them. Frighten them out of the country, open the gates, let down the bars, scare them off,” he said, gesturing as if he were shooing sheep. “Enough lives have been sacrificed. We must extinguish our resentments if we expect harmony and union.”38 Stanton reported that Lincoln “spoke very kindly of General Lee and others of the Confederacy” and showed “in marked degree the kindness and humanity of his disposition, and the tender and forgiving spirit that so eminently distinguished him.”39 (Lincoln habitually referred to the Confederacy’s president and its leading general as “Jeffy D” and “Bobby Lee.”)40
At the April 14 cabinet meeting, with Grant in attendance, Lincoln stressed that Reconstruction “was the great question now before us, and we must soon begin to act.”41 At his request, Stanton had drafted an executive order establishing temporary military rule in Virginia and North Carolina, restoring the authority of federal laws, to be enforced by provost marshals. (It did not deal with the sensitive issue of black suffrage, for as Stanton explained to Charles Sumner on April 16, “there were differences among our friends on that subject, and it would be unwise, in his judgment, to press it in this stage of the proceedings.”)42 When Stanton read this projet to his colleagues, Welles objected to lumping Virginia and North Carolina together in a single military district. The navy secretary noted that the administration had recognized the Pierpont regime in Virginia as the legitimate government of the Old Dominion during the struggle over West Virginia statehood. Lincoln “said the point was well taken” and “that the same thing had occurred to him and the plan required maturing and perfecting.” Therefore he instructed Stanton “to take the document, separate it, adapt one plan to Virginia and her loyal government—another to North Carolina which was destitute of legal State authority and submit copies of each to each member of the Cabinet.”43 He added that the federal government “can’t undertake to run State governments in all these Southern States. Their people must do that,—though I reckon at first some of them may do it badly.”44 He asked Stanton to supply copies of the modified proposal to his colleagues and suggested that the document be discussed at the next scheduled cabinet meeting. Lincoln expressed relief that Congress had adjourned until December. For several months no more filibusters led by obstructionists like Charles Sumner, in league with Border State Conservatives, could thwart the will of the congressional majority.
Turning to military matters, Lincoln predicted the imminent arrival of important news, for the previous night he had had what he called “the usual dream which he had preceding nearly every great and important event of the war. Generally the news had been favorable which succeeded this dream, and the dream itself was always the same.” He explained that “he seemed to be in some singular, indescribable vessel, and that he was moving with great rapidity towards an indefinite shore; that he had this dream preceding Sumter, Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, Stone River, Vicksburg, Wilmington, etc.” Grant interrupted, observing emphatically that “Stone River was certainly no victory, and he knew of no great results which followed from it.” Lincoln replied that “however that might be, his dream preceded that fight.” He continued: “I had this strange dream again last night, and we shall, judging from the past, have great news very soon. I think it must be from Sherman,” for “[m]y thoughts are in that direction, as are most of yours.”45
The cabinet found Lincoln in exceptionally good spirits. Stanton, who thought the president seemed “very cheerful and hopeful,” remarked: “That’s the most satisfactory Cabinet meeting I have attended in many a long day.” He asked a colleague: “Didn’t our chief look grand today?”46 He later remarked that “Lincoln was grander, graver, [and] more thoroughly up to the occasion than he had ever seen him.”47 Frederick Seward, substituting for his bedridden father, recalled that the president wore “an expression of visible relief and content.”48 Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch “never saw Mr. Lincoln so cheerful and happy as he was on the day of his death. The burden which had been weighing upon him for four long years, and which he had borne with heroic fortitude, had been lifted; the war had been practically ended; the Union was safe. The weary look which his face had so long worn, and which could be observed by those who knew him well, even when he was telling humorous stories, had disappeared. It was bright and cheerful.”49 To James Harlan, secretary-of-the-in terior-designate, Lincoln seemed “transfigured,” for his customary expression of “indescribable sadness” had abruptly become “an equally indescribable expression of serene joy, as if conscious that the great purpose of his life had been achieved.”50 Similarly, Mary Lincoln reported that her husband was “supremely cheerful” and that during their afternoon carriage ride, his “manner was even playful.” She remarked to him, laughingly, “you almost startle me by your great cheerfulness.” He responded: “and well I may feel so, Mary, I consider this day the war, has come to a close. We must both, be more cheerful in the future—b
etween the war and the loss of our darling Willie—we have both, been very miserable.”51
Decision to Attend Ford’s Theatre
The previous evening, Lincoln had been too sick with a headache to take a carriage ride with his wife, who wished to see the brilliant illuminations celebrating Lee’s surrender. Grant, at Lincoln’s request, had agreed to accompany her. As she and the general entered their carriage, a crowd that had gathered outside the White House repeatedly shouted “Grant!” Taking offense, Mrs. Lincoln instructed the driver to let her out, but she changed her mind when the crowd also cheered for the president. This happened again and again as the carriage proceeded around town. The First Lady evidently thought it inappropriate that the general should be cheered before her husband was. The next day, Grant declined the president’s invitation to join him and Mrs. Lincoln to attend a performance of Our American Cousin, for he feared incurring her displeasure once more. Moreover, Mrs. Grant informed her husband that she did not wish to be around the First Lady after the unpleasantness at City Point three weeks earlier. (Later, Mrs. Grant told Hamilton Fish “that she objected strenuously to accompanying Mrs. Lincoln.”)52 Grant said “we will go visit our children … and this will be a good excuse.”53 When the First Lady’s messenger announced that the presidential carriage would call for her and her husband at 8 P.M., Julia Grant curtly informed him that they would not be in town that night. And so they were rolling along aboard a train headed toward New Jersey while the Lincolns’ carriage rumbled toward Ford’s Theatre.
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