by Shelby Foote
Next night he was back, as promised, and they were there to hear him in their thousands, packed shoulder to shoulder on the White House lawn and looking up at the same window. Off in the drizzly distance, Arlington House — R. E. Lee’s former home, long since commandeered by the government he had defied — glittered on its hillside beyond the Potomac, illuminated tonight along with all the other public buildings, while nearer at hand, gilded with light from torches and flares, the Capitol dome seemed to float like a captive balloon in a gauzy mist that verged on rain. To one observer yesterday, seeing him for the first time, Lincoln “appeared somewhat younger and more off-hand and vigorous than I should have expected. His gestures and countenance had something of the harmless satisfaction of a young politician at a ratification meeting after his first election to the Legislature. He was happy, and glad to see others happy.” Tonight, though, he was different. Appearing after Tad had once more warmed the crowd by flourishing the Confederate banner, he seemed grave and thoughtful, and he had with him, by way of assuring that he would “not make a mistake without at least trying carefully to avoid it,” a rolled-up manuscript he had spent most of the day preparing. What he had in mind to deliver tonight was not so much a speech as it was a closely written document, a state paper dealing less with the past, or even the present, than with the future; less with victory than with the problems victory brought. The crowd below did not know this yet, however, and Noah Brooks — a young newsman who was slated to replace one of his private secretaries — saw “something terrible in the enthusiasm with which the beloved Chief Magistrate was received. Cheers upon cheers, wave after wave of applause rolled up, the President patiently standing quiet until it was over.”
“Fellow Citizens,” he said at last. Holding a candle in his left hand to light the papers in his right, he waited for new cheers to subside, and then continued. “We are met this evening not in sorrow but in gladness of heart. The evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond, and the surrender of the principal insurgent army, give hope of a righteous and speedy peace whose joyous expression cannot be restrained.” Cheered again, he sought relief from the difficulty of managing both the candle and his manuscript by signaling to Brooks, who stood behind one of the window drapes beside him, with what the journalist called “a comical motion of his left foot and elbow, which I construed to mean that I should hold his candle for him.” With both hands free to grip the sheaf of papers, and Brooks extending the light from behind the curtain, he went on with his speech, dropping each read page as he began the next. Unseen by the crowd, Tad scrambled about on the balcony floor to catch the sheets as his father let them flutter down. “Another, another,” he kept saying impatiently all through the reading, heard plainly because of a hush that soon descended on the celebrants on the lawn below.
Referred to afterwards by Brooks as “a silent, intent, and perhaps surprised multitude,” they were in fact both silent and surprised, but they were more confused than they were intent. Until Lincoln began speaking they had not supposed tonight was any occasion for mentioning sadness, even to deny it, and as he continued along other lines, equally unexpected at a victory celebration, their confusion and discomfort grew. After this brief introduction, scarcely fitting in itself, he spoke not of triumphs, but rather of the problems that loomed with peace; in particular one problem. “By these recent successes,” he read from the second of the sheets that fell fluttering to his feet, “the reinauguration of the national authority — reconstruction — which has had a large share of thought from the first, is pressed much more closely upon our attention. It is fraught with great difficulty. Unlike the case of a war between independent nations, there is no authorized organ for us to treat with — no one man has authority to give up the rebellion for any other man. We simply must begin with, and mold from, disorganized and discordant elements. Nor is it a small additional embarrassment that we, the loyal people, differ among ourselves as to the mode, manner, and means of reconstruction.”
This then was his subject — “the mode, manner, and means of reconstruction” — and he stayed with it through Tad’s retrieval of the last dropped sheet, addressing himself less to his listeners, it seemed, than to the knotty problem itself, and in language that was correspondingly knotty. For example, in dealing with the claim that secession, while plainly illegal, had in fact removed from the Union certain states which now would have to comply with some hard-line requirements before they could be granted readmission, he pronounced it “a merely pernicious abstraction,” likely to “have no effect other than the mischievous one of dividing our friends” left and right of the stormy center. “We all 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.”
In regard to the new state government in Louisiana, which had the support of only ten percent of the electorate, he acknowledged the validity of criticism that it was scantly based and did not give the franchise to the Negro. All the same, though he himself wished its constituency “contained fifty, thirty, or even twenty thousand [voters] instead of only twelve thousand, as it does,” and though he preferred to have the ballot extended to include the blacks — at least “the very intelligent” and “those who serve our cause as soldiers” — he did not believe these shortcomings invalidated the present arrangement, which in any case was better than no arrangement at all. “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.” For one thing, the state legislature had already voted to ratify the 13th Amendment, and the sooner its authority was recognized by Congress, the sooner all men would be free throughout the land. He had thought long and hard about the problem, as well as about various proposals for its solution, “and yet so great peculiarities pertain to each state, and such important and sudden changes occur in the same state, and withal, so new and unprecedented is the whole case, that no exclusive and inflexible plan can safely be prescribed as to details and collaterals.… In the present ‘situation,’ as the phrase goes, it maybe 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.”
That was the end, and he let it hang there, downbeat, enigmatic, inconclusive, as perfunctory and uncertain, even in its peroration, as the applause that followed when his listeners finally understood that the speech — if that was what it had been — was over. Tad gathered up the last sheet of manuscript, and as Lincoln stepped back into the room he said to Brooks, still holding the candle out from behind the window drape: “That was a pretty fair speech, I think, but you threw some light on it.” Down on the lawn, the misty drizzle had turned to rain while he spoke, and the crowd began to disperse, their spirits nearly as dampened as their clothes. Some drifted off to bars in search of revival. Others walked over to Franklin Square to serenade Stanton, who might do better by them.
Not that there were no repercussions. There were, and they came fast — mostly from disaffected radicals who contended that secession had been a form of suicide from which no state could be resurrected except on conditions imposed by them at the end of the struggle now drawing rapidly to a close. Differing from Lincoln in this, or at any rate on what those terms should be, they believed they saw clearly enough wh
at he was up to. Congress would not meet again until December, and he had it in mind to unite the people behind him, between now and then, and thus confront his congressional opponents with an overwhelming majority of voters whom he would attract to his lenient views by a series of public appeals, such as the one tonight from the high White House window or last month’s inaugural, adorned with oratorical phrases as empty as they were vague. “Malice toward none” had no meaning for them, as here applied, and “charity for all” had even less; for where was the profit in winning a war if then you lost the peace? They asked that with a special urgency now that they had begun to suspect the Administration of planning to neglect the Negro, who was in fact what this war had been about from start to finish. Lincoln’s reference tonight to a possible limited extension of the franchise to include those who were “very intelligent” only served to increase their apprehension that the cause of the blacks was about to be abandoned, possibly in exchange for the support of certain reactionary elements in the reunited country — not excluding former Confederates — in putting together a new and powerful coalition of moderates, unbeatable at the polls for decades to come. One among those perturbed was Chase, who had written this day to his former chief of his fears in regard to that neglect. The most acceptable solution, he said, was “the reorganization of state governments under constitutions securing suffrage to all citizens.… This way is recommended by its simplicity, facility, and, above all, justice,” the Chief Justice wrote. “It will be hereafter counted equally a crime and a folly if the colored loyalists of the rebel states shall be left to the control of restored rebels, not likely in that case to be either wise or just, until taught both wisdom and justice by new calamities.”
Lincoln found the letter on his desk when he came into the office next morning, and Chase followed it up with another, that same Wednesday, midway of Holy Week, suggesting an interview “to have the whole subject talked over.” Others had the same notion; Charles Sumner, for example. He had not heard the speech last night, but his secretary reported that it was “not in keeping with what was in men’s minds. The people had gathered, from an instructive impulse, to rejoice over a great and final victory, and they listened with respect, but with no expressions of enthusiasm, except that the quaint simile of ‘the egg’ drew applause. The more serious among them felt that the President’s utterances on the subject were untimely, and that his insistence at such an hour on his favorite plan was not the harbinger of peace among the loyal supporters of the government.” The Massachusetts senator felt this, too, and regretted it, his secretary noted; “for he saw at hand another painful controversy with a President whom he respected, on a question where he felt it his duty to stand firm.” Already his mail was filled with urgings that he do just that. “Magnanimity is a great word with the disloyal who think to tickle the President’s ear with it,” a prominent New Yorker wrote. “Magnanimity is one thing. Weakness is another. I know you are near the throne, and you must guard its honor.” A Boston constituent knew where to fix the blame: on Lincoln, whose reconstruction policy was “wicked and blasphemous” in its betrayal of the cause of freedom by his failure to take the obvious next step after emancipation. “No power but God ever has or could have forced him up to the work he has been instrumental of, and now we see the dregs of his backwardness.”
Mainly these were old-line abolitionists, men with a great capacity for wrath. Ben Wade, for one, expressed the hope that such neglect would goad the southern blacks to insurrection. “If they could contrive to slay one half of their oppressors,” he asserted, “the other half would hold them in the highest regard, and no doubt treat them with justice.” But even this was mild compared to the reaction that followed disclosure that Lincoln had authorized John A. Campbell to reassemble the Virginia legislature, composed in part of the very men who had withdrawn the Old Dominion from the Union in the first place. As it happened, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War was down at Richmond now, aboard the steamer Baltimore, and one of its members went ashore this morning to get the daily papers. He came back, much excited, with a copy of the Richmond Whig, which carried an Address to the People of Virginia by some of the legislators then about to assemble. Moreover, Weitzel had indorsed it, and Wade went into a frenzy at this evidence of official sanction for the outrage. Fuming, he declared — “in substance, if not in exact words,” a companion afterwards testified — “that there had been much talk of the assassination of Lincoln; that if he authorized the approval of that paper … by God, the sooner he was assassinated the better!” Others felt as strongly about this development, which seemed to them to undo all they had worked for all these years. Zachariah Chandler, according to the same report, “was also exceedingly harsh in his remarks,” and none of the other members took offense at the denunciations.
In Washington, the Secretary of War was apparently the first to get the news. He went at once to Lincoln, then to Sumner, who wrote Chase: “I find Stanton much excited. He had a full and candid talk with the President last eve, and insisted that the proposed meeting at Richmond should be forbidden. He thinks we are in a crisis more trying than any before, with the chance of losing the fruits of our victory. He asks if it was not Grant who surrendered to Lee, instead of Lee to Grant. He is sure that Richmond is beginning to govern Washington.”
But Lincoln by then had revoked his authorization for the Virginians to assemble. At a cabinet meeting the day before, he had found Stanton and Speed vehement in their opposition, and none of the rest in favor of creating a situation in which, as Welles pointed out, “the so-called legislature would be likely to propose terms which might seem reasonable, but which we could not accept.” To these were added the protests of various other advisers, by no means all of them die-hard radicals. Lincoln considered the matter overnight — aside, that is, from the time he spent delivering his speech from the balconied window — and though, as he said, he rather fancied the notion of having the secessionists “come together and undo their own work,” at 9 o’clock Wednesday morning he telegraphed Weitzel a question and a suggestion: “Is there any sign of the rebel legislature coming together on the basis of my letter to you? If there is any sign, inform me of what it is; if there is no such sign you may as [well] withdraw the offer.”
Although it was true he had no wish just now for a knockdown drag-out fight with either wing of his party, his decision to revoke what he called his ‘offer’ was in fact less political than it was practical in nature. The conditions under which it had been extended no longer obtained; the gains sought in exchange had since been won. His purpose in approving Campbell’s proposal, just under a week ago, had been to encourage Virginia’s legislators, in return for certain “remissions” on his part, to withdraw her troops from the rebel armies and the state itself from the Confederacy. Grant had accomplished the first of these objectives on Palm Sunday — the formal surrender ceremony was getting under way at Appomattox Courthouse even as Lincoln’s telegram went over the wire to Weitzel — and the second scarcely mattered, since there was no longer any sizeable body of armed graybacks within the borders of the Old Dominion. So much for that. As for the problem of keeping or breaking his promise to Campbell, that was merely personal; which was only another way of saying it didn’t count. “Bad promises are better broken than kept,” he had said in his speech the night before, with reference to assurances he had given those who set up the provisional Louisiana government. “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.” And so it was in this case; he simply labeled the promise ‘bad’ — meaning profitless — and broke it.
When he heard from Weitzel that afternoon that “passports have gone out for the legislators, and it is common talk that they will come together,” Lincoln wired back a definite order that their permission to assemble be revoked. He prefaced this, however, with some lawyerly explication of the events leading up to his decision, which he said was based on st
atements made by Campbell in a letter informing certain of the prospective legislators what their task would be in Richmond. He had talked the matter over with the President on two occasions, the Alabama jurist declared, and both conversations “had relation to the establishment of a government for Virginia, the requirement of oaths of allegiance from the citizens, and the terms of settlement with the United States.” Lincoln flatly denied this in his sundown wire to Weitzel. “[Judge Campbell] assumes, as appears to me, that I have called the insurgent legislature of Virginia together, as the rightful legislature of the state, to settle all differences with the United States. I have done no such thing. I spoke of them not as a legislature, but as ‘the gentlemen who have acted as the Legislature of Virginia in support of the rebellion.’ I did this on purpose to exclude the assumption that I was recognizing them as a rightful body. I dealt with them as men having power de facto to do a specific thing; to wit, ‘to withdraw the Virginia troops and other support from resistance to the general government.’… I meant this and no more. Inasmuch however as Judge Campbell misconstrues this, and is still pressing for an armistice, contrary to the explicit statement of the paper I gave him, and particularly as Gen. Grant has since captured the Virginia troops, so that giving a consideration for their withdrawal is no longer applicable, let my letter to you and the paper to Judge Campbell both be withdrawn, or countermanded, and he be notified of it. Do not allow them to assemble; but if any have come, allow them safe-return to their homes.”