Possibly their enthusiasm made the President pause, for he announced that he would not make a decision until he returned to City Point. When he got back to army headquarters, he tried to make his plan more precise, directing Weitzel to allow “the gentlemen who have acted as the Legislature of Virginia, in support of the rebellion,” to assemble at Richmond in order to “take measures to withdraw the Virginia troops, and other support from resistance to the General government.” Reporting his decision to Grant, the President added, “I do not think it very probable that anything will come of this.” The Union army, he observed sardonically, was “pretty effectually withdrawing the Virginia troops from opposition to the government” without the assistance of Campbell or other Confederate intermediaries.
At City Point the President received two pieces of news. Telegrams from Washington reported that Mary Lincoln, determined to show she had recovered from her bout of paranoia, was returning to army headquarters with a party that included Charles Sumner, the Marquis de Chambrun, a young French nobleman, Senator Harlan (whose appointment as Secretary of the Interior did not take effect until May 15) and his wife, and Attorney General Speed. At the same time, Stanton wired that Secretary Seward had been badly injured in a carriage accident and that the President ought to return to the capital. Subsequent dispatches from Stanton indicated that the Secretary of State, though seriously hurt, was in no immediate danger, and Lincoln was able to stay on at army headquarters for a few more days.
Hoping to remain until the final Confederate surrender, Lincoln carefully studied the dispatches that Grant, Sheridan, and Meade forwarded to him. He rejoiced to read Sheridan’s report that he had routed the enemy at Burke’s Station, which ended: “If the thing is pressed I think that Lee will surrender.” Promptly the President wired Grant, “Let the thing be pressed.”
But when surrender did not seem to be imminent, Lincoln and his party prepared to leave City Point on April 8. Before their departure he requested the military band on the River Queen to play the Marseillaise in honor of the Marquis de Chambrun, who, the President remarked, had to come all the way to America to hear the revolutionary song that was banned under the Second Empire. Then Lincoln asked the surprised band director to play Dixie. “That tune is now Federal property,” he announced, and it’s “good to show the rebels that, with us in power, they will be free to hear it again.”
On the slow river trip back to Washington, Lincoln was silent much of the time, absorbed in thought. He deflected any possibility of a political discussion with Sumner, who was always eager to press a Radical reconstruction program on the President, and did not mention his tentative plan to reconvene the Virginia legislature. Instead, he turned to literary subjects and for several hours read to his guests on the River Queen passages from Shakespeare. From Macbeth he chose the reflections of the king, who has murdered his predecessor, Duncan, only to be overtaken by horrible torments of mind:
... we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep
In the affliction of these terrible dreams,
That shake us nightly: better be with the dead ...
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave:
After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well,
Treason has done his worst; nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing
Can touch him further.
Then, struck by the weird beauty of the lines, Lincoln paused, as Chambrun recalled, and “began to explain to us how true a description of the murderer that one was; when, the dark deed achieved, its tortured perpetrator came to envy the sleep of his victim; and he read over again the same scene.”
II
At about sundown on April 9, Lincoln returned to a capital still celebrating the capture of Richmond and eagerly anticipating the surrender of Robert E. Lee. His first visit was to his Secretary of State, who was confined to his bed by the accident in which he had broken both his arm and his jaw. To keep Seward from trying to move his head, the President stretched out at full length across the bed and, resting on his elbow, brought his face near that of the injured man. “I think we are near the end at last,” he said, and he told of Grant’s victories and of his visit to Richmond. He proposed to issue a proclamation for a day of thanksgiving, but the Secretary whispered that he should wait until Sherman captured Joseph E. Johnston. As Seward drifted off to sleep, the President quietly left the room.
That night he learned that Lee had surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, and he immediately told Mary. At daylight the next day the firing of five hundred cannon gave the news to the entire capital. “Guns are firing, bells ringing, flags flying, men laughing, children cheering,” recorded Gideon Welles; “all, all jubilant.” Throngs of people collected around the White House, filling the north portico, the carriageways, and the sidewalks. “The crowds around the house have been immense,” Mary wrote; “in the midst of the bands playing, they break forth into singing.” Repeatedly they called for the President, and when he failed to appear, the shouting grew even louder. A great cheer rose when Tad appeared at a second-story window, waving a Confederate flag. Finally Lincoln came out to say a few words. Anticipating that there would be a more formal demonstration the following night, he told the crowd, “I shall have nothing to say if you dribble it all out of me before.” But again he asked the band to play Dixie, “one of the best tunes I have ever heard,” and joked that he had a legal opinion from the Attorney General that the song was “a lawful prize,” since “we fairly captured it.”
It was a busy day for the President, because he had to catch up the accumulated work that had piled up during his two weeks with the army. A cabinet meeting dealt with only routine business, for Lincoln apparently did not tell his associates of his conversations with Campbell in Richmond or of his tentative agreement to allow the Virginia rebel legislature to reconvene. That subject was, however, much on his mind, and he summoned Governor Pierpont, the head of the Unionist government of Virginia, for a conference. Despite all distractions, he spent much of his time composing a speech for the next day.
On April 11 it seemed that the whole city turned out to celebrate. All the government buildings and many of the private houses were illuminated. Though the evening was misty, the illuminated dome of the Capitol could be seen for miles. Across the Potomac, Lee’s home, Arlington, was brightly lit, and thousands of freedmen gathered on the lawn to sing “The Year of Jubilee.” An immense throng of people, many carrying banners, poured into the semicircular driveway leading to the north portico of the White House. After repeated loud calls, the President appeared in a second-story window just under the portico, and “cheers upon cheers, wave after wave of applause, rolled up.” Lincoln began to read from his carefully prepared manuscript in order to avoid any misunderstanding or misinterpretation of his ideas, but the light was bad. After unsuccessfully trying to hold a candle in one hand and the pages of his manuscript in the other, he beckoned to Noah Brooks, who took a place behind the draperies and held up the light while the President read. As he finished each page, he dropped it to the floor, where Tad scrambled about, collecting them and, growing restless, importuned his father for “another.”
“We meet this evening, not in sorrow, but in gladness of heart,” the President began, and he expressed hope that the recent victories “give hope of a righteous and speedy peace.” Promising a day of national thanksgiving, he offered the nation’s gratitude to “Gen. Grant, his skilful officers, and brave men.” That much was to be expected—but the rest of the address was not at all what the crowd had anticipated. “The re-inauguration of the national authority” was his principal subject, and he warned that it was going to be “fraught with great difficulty,” the more so since “we, the loyal people, differ among ourselves as to the mode, manner, and means of reconstruction.”
The larger part of his address reviewed his relationship to the reconstructed government of Louisiana and offered a
defense of that regime. It was not in every way satisfactory, he admitted, and it would be more credible if it was supported by twenty, thirty, or fifty thousand voters instead of the twelve thousand who participated in its election. But he raised the same question that he had asked Senator Trumbull during the recent session of Congress: “Can Louisiana be brought into proper practical relation with the Union sooner by sustaining, or by discarding her new State Government?” The answer, he thought, was obvious: “Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is to the fowl, we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.” And he reminded his listeners that if Louisiana was not readmitted, “we also reject one vote in favor of the proposed amendment to the national constitution.”
Lincoln never explained why he chose this forum, and this occasion, for a major statement on reconstruction, but the final sentences of his talk gave a hint of his purpose. “In the present ‘situation’ as the phrase goes, it may be my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South,” he said in conclusion, after many of his listeners had grown bored and drifted off elsewhere in search of more conventional oratory. “I am considering, and shall not fail to act, when satisfied that action will be proper.”
The meaning of that cryptic message puzzled his hearers, who guessed that he intended anything from an announcement of amnesty for all rebels to a proclamation putting the entire South under military rule to a decree imposing universal suffrage on the rebellious states.
None of these expectations was realistic. Certainly, Lincoln was not in favor of punishing the Confederates. As he said to the Marquis de Chambrun shortly after his talk, it was “his firm resolution to stand for clemency against all opposition.” He had no wish to capture and try even the leaders of the Confederacy. “He hoped there would be no persecution, no bloody work, after the war was over,” he told the cabinet. “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—making a gesture as if herding sheep. But he wished to avoid making a public pronouncement on this point. At City Point, when Sherman asked what was to be done with Jefferson Davis and the other Confederate leaders, Lincoln intimated that they ought to “escape the country,” though he could not say so openly. To make his position clear he told Sherman one of his favorite stories, about the man who declined a drink because he had taken a total-abstinence pledge and asked for lemonade instead. When a friend suggested that it would taste better with a little brandy in it, the man said he would not object if it could be added “‘unbeknown’ to him.”
Nor was he about to issue a proclamation for the general reorganization of the Southern states. The sole item on his agenda was peace, and Lincoln did not in this speech—or elsewhere—offer a broad vision of the future, outlining how the conquered South should be governed. He stipulated only that loyal men must rule. His was not the view of the Conservatives, who simply wanted the rebellious states, without slavery, to return to their former position in the Union, nor was it the view of the Radicals, who wanted to take advantage of this molten moment of history to recast the entire social structure of the South. He did not share the Conservatives’ desire to put the section back into the hands of the planters and businessmen who had dominated the South before the war, but he did not adopt the Radicals’ belief that the only true Unionists in the South were African-Americans.
Equally improbable was any announcement that African-Americans must have full political and economic equality. Lincoln had not given much thought to the role that the freedmen would play in the reorganization of the South. The stalwart service rendered by nearly 200,000 African-Americans in the military had eroded his earlier doubts about their courage and intelligence. Perhaps he still questioned whether blacks could ever achieve equality with whites in the same society, but the failure of his colonization schemes had taught him that African-Americans were, and would remain, a permanent part of the American social fabric. He believed that the more intelligent blacks, especially those who served in the army, were entitled to the suffrage. Hence he encouraged the education of the freedmen, and he supported the Freedmen’s Bureau to protect them from exploitation by their former masters. But beyond this he was not prepared to go. Unlike the Radicals, he gave no thought to dividing up the estates of the defeated Southern planters and giving each black family forty acres and a mule. He offered no opinions on school integration, interracial marriages, or social equality between blacks and whites. In April 1865 he thought these were all hypothetical questions, pernicious abstractions, which could have no other effect than to divide the friends of the Union at a time when they ought to be united in a search for peace.
The announcement he contemplated probably had to do with his plan to allow the members of the rebel legislature of Virginia to assemble in order to withdraw their state from the Confederacy. He was prepared to extend the same offer to other states. In his mind this move did not amount to recognition of the Confederate governments in these states, nor was he conceding that they had ever seceded from the Union, a point central to his thinking throughout the war. But he contemplated giving a limited recognition to interim governments for the specific purpose of withdrawing troops from the Confederate armies. He had returned from City Point with a new sense of urgency about reconstruction. He now had firsthand knowledge of the devastation wrought by the war and a fuller understanding of the suffering it had caused soldiers and civilians in the South. More strongly than ever he felt that immediate action must be taken to restore stability in the conquered region. “Civil government must be reëstablished... as soon as possible,” he told Welles; “there must be courts, and law, and order, or society would be broken up, the disbanded armies would turn into robber bands and guerrillas, which we must strive to prevent.”
Aware that his plan would arouse opposition, he intended his speech, as he told an old friend the next day, “to blaze a way through the swamp” of legal entanglements and political objections to his course. He had good reason to anticipate that Radicals would oppose his efforts in Virginia. Many of them had not accepted their defeat in the recent session of Congress. Some, like Sumner, were now implacable in their hostility to Lincoln’s plans. Aware that the President was likely to make some pronouncement on reconstruction on April 11, the senator had declined Mrs. Lincoln’s invitation to view the victory celebration from the White House. He felt that his presence at the inaugural ball had been interpreted as giving symbolic approval of the Lincoln administration, and he was not going to allow himself to be so used again. Other Radicals also continued to agitate for harsh terms toward the South. For instance, Benjamin F. Butler demanded that leaders of the rebellion should be disfranchised and disqualified from holding any public office and that “the masses, including the negroes, should have the rights of citizenship.” Chief Justice Chase, who did not give up his political interests when he joined the Court, enjoined the President to remember that “the easiest and safest way” to reorganize the Southern states was through “the enrollment of the loyal citizens without regard to complexion.”
Lincoln’s April 11 speech was an attempt to defuse such criticisms by making significant concessions to his Radical critics. Though he defended the Unionist government of Louisiana, he explicitly disavowed any claim that reconstruction was exclusively a function of the executive branch; he reminded his audience that he had from the outset “distinctly stated that this was not the only plan which might possibly be acceptable” and “that the Executive claimed no right to say when, or whether members should be admitted to seats in Congress from such States.” Admitting that he had promised General Banks to sustain the Louisiana regime, he was ready to retract it: “As bad promises are better broken than kept, I shall treat this as a bad promise, and break it, whenever I shall be convinced that keeping it is adverse to the public interest.” “But,” he cautioned, “I ha
ve not yet been so convinced.” Recognizing that Radicals objected to the Louisiana constitution because it did not give African-Americans the ballot, he declared that he shared their discontent: “I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.” This was an opinion Lincoln had previously expressed in private, but never before had any American President publicly announced that he was in favor of Negro suffrage.
III
At least one member of the crowd outside the White House that night recognized how much Lincoln was conceding to the Radicals. John Wilkes Booth fumed with hatred for the President. Born in Maryland in a slaveholding community, the twenty-six-year-old actor thought of himself as a Northerner who understood the South. He was a handsome, vain young man, the next-to-the-youngest son and his mother’s darling in her brood of ten children. He grew up on the family farm near Bel Air, Maryland, to which his alcoholic and mentally unstable father repaired between bouts of acting, and in Baltimore. Erratic attendance at several private schools in the vicinity supplied him with a smattering of learning, some elements of military drill, and a conviction that he belonged to the Southern gentry.
He seemed destined for the theater. His father, Junius Brutus Booth, and his brother Edwin were great actors; his brother Junius Booth, Jr., was a major producer; and his brother-in-law was a noted comedian. From his debut at the age of seventeen Wilkes Booth was almost constantly on the stage. He had no training, and his early performances were crude and sometimes laughable. But he constantly improved as an actor, and he learned a formidable number of roles. He looked the part of the hero. Though he was only five feet eight inches tall, he held himself erect, and his broad chest contributed to the impression of greater height. Strikingly handsome, with curly black hair and a full mustache, he had a slightly exotic look, which women often found irresistible. “He had an ivory pallor that contrasted with his raven hair,” one of them remembered, “and his eyes had heavy lids which gave him an Oriental touch of mystery.”
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