The Zealot and the Emancipator

by H. W. Brands

  The compromisers gained momentum even so. Lincoln decided he had to speak up a bit more. He wrote to Thurlow Weed, who had arranged a meeting of governors. “Tell them you judge from my speeches that I will be inflexible on the territorial question; that I probably think either the Missouri line extended, or Douglas’ and Eli Thayer’s Popular Sovereignty would lose us everything we gained by the election,” Lincoln said. As for the immediate question: “I believe you can pretend to find but little, if anything, in my speeches, about secession; but my opinion is that no state can, in any way lawfully, get out of the Union, without the consent of the others; and that it is the duty of the president, and other government functionaries to run the machine as it is.”

  Congress continued its work, prompting Lincoln to engage more directly. A Senate “Committee of Thirteen” began crafting a grand compromise on the order of the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850. Lincoln warned against anything that hinted at retreat from the Republican platform. He certainly wouldn’t endorse any such thing. “It would make me appear as if I repented for the crime of having been elected, and was anxious to apologize and beg forgiveness,” he said in a confidential letter to John Gilmer, a North Carolina congressman. Yet lest the committee run away without him, he outlined three acceptable provisions of a compromise: “That the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution ought to be enforced by a law of Congress, with efficient provisions for that object, not obliging private persons to assist in its execution, but punishing all who resist it, and with the usual safeguards to liberty, securing free men against being surrendered as slaves. That all state laws, if there be such, really, or apparently, in conflict with such law of Congress, ought to be repealed; and no opposition to the execution of such law of Congress ought to be made. That the federal Union must be preserved.”

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  HE REACHED tentatively across the growing rift between North and South. Newspapers brought word that Alexander Stephens of Georgia had given an anti-secession speech in his state’s legislature. Lincoln knew Stephens from Congress in the 1840s. They were both Whigs then, and both had opposed the war against Mexico. Of Stephens, Lincoln had written to William Herndon, “I take up my pen to say that Mr. Stephens of Georgia, a little, slim, pale-faced consumptive man, with a voice like Logan’s”—Stephen Logan was an eminent Springfield lawyer—“has just concluded the very best speech of an hour’s length I ever heard. My old, withered, dry eyes are full of tears yet.” A dozen years later Lincoln hoped he and Stephens still shared an approach to national issues; the reports of the recent speech suggested they did. He sent a query to Stephens about the speech. “If you have revised it, as is probable, I shall be much obliged if you will send me a copy,” he said.

  Stephens replied that he had not had time to revise the speech but that the version reported in the papers was accurate enough. Lincoln hadn’t really cared about the wording of the speech; he wanted an excuse to strike up a correspondence. “Your obliging answer to my short note is just received, and for which please accept my thanks,” he responded. “I fully appreciate the present peril the country is in, and the weight of responsibility on me.” Crucial to Lincoln’s calculations about the South was an accurate estimate of Southern sentiment. He knew that the hotheads commanded the headlines at present, but what about the ordinary people of the South? What did they think? “Do the people of the South really entertain fears that a Republican administration would, directly, or indirectly, interfere with their slaves, or with them, about their slaves?” asked Lincoln. “If they do, I wish to assure you, as once a friend, and still, I hope, not an enemy, that there is no cause for such fears. The South would be in no more danger in this respect than it was in the days of Washington. I suppose, however, this does not meet the case. You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us.”

  Stephens answered in similar vein. “Personally, I am not your enemy—far from it; and however widely we may differ politically, yet I trust we both have an earnest desire to preserve and maintain the Union,” he said. “When men come under the influence of fanaticism, there is no telling where their impulses or passions may drive them. This is what creates our discontent and apprehensions.” As evidence of the fanaticism, Stephens cited “such reckless exhibitions of madness as the John Brown raid into Virginia, which has received so much sympathy from many, and no open condemnation from any of the leading members of the dominant party.” Stephens urged Lincoln to calm what passions he could. “In addressing you thus, I would have you understand me as being not a personal enemy, but as one who would have you do what you can to save our common country. A word fitly spoken by you now would be like ‘apples of gold in pictures of silver.’ ”

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  THIS ENCOURAGEMENT FROM Stephens, a Southern friend of the Union, caused Lincoln to reconsider his reticence. Two long months now stood between him and his inauguration; until then he had no authority. But his power grew by the day. He wasn’t yet president, but he would be president. His promises—or threats—mattered.

  This was especially true given the vacuum of power in the White House in the meantime. No lame-duck president was ever lamer than James Buchanan, whose party and policies had been rejected at the ballot, and who himself pronounced secession unconstitutional but disclaimed executive authority to resist it. “Secession is neither more nor less than revolution,” Buchanan declared. Yet only Congress, and not the president, possessed the authority to act against secession. “Apart from the execution of the laws, so far as this may be practicable, the executive has no authority to decide what shall be the relations between the federal government and South Carolina. He has been invested with no such discretion.”

  Lincoln read Buchanan’s statement and realized the wreck of the Union might be a fait accompli by the time he was inaugurated. Alexander Stephens’s plea for “a word fitly spoken by you now” was a signal to say something before it was too late.

  But what could he say? That had been the problem, and it remained the problem. He took another small step toward a public statement following a secret visit by Duff Green, a onetime Jacksonian who had broken with Jackson to side with John Calhoun in the nullification crisis of the early 1830s and eventually became an intimate of James Buchanan. Green was nearly seventy, with white hair and a long beard that made him look like Father Time; apparently the journalists who had staked out Lincoln’s home and office mistook him for an old farmer. At any rate they ignored him. The question Green brought to Lincoln was how far the president-elect might go toward reassuring the South that his administration didn’t intend the destruction of slavery.

  “My dear Sir,” Lincoln responded in a letter addressed to Green but meant for moderate Southerners. “I do not desire any amendment of the Constitution. Recognizing, however, that questions of such amendment rightfully belong to the American people, I should not feel justified nor inclined to withhold from them, if I could, a fair opportunity of expressing their will thereon.” In other words, Lincoln wouldn’t support an amendment guaranteeing the future of slavery in the slave states, but neither would he oppose it. He went further. “I declare that the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the states, and especially the right of each state to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of powers on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depends. And I denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any state or territory, no matter under what pretext, as the gravest of crimes.” This last was the condemnation of John Brown that Alexander Stephens had asked for.

  Yet Lincoln remained cautious. “I am greatly averse to writing anything for the public at this time, and I consent to the publication of this only upon the condition that six of the twelve Unite
d States senators for the states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and Texas”—the states thought likeliest to join South Carolina in secession—“shall sign their names to what is written on this sheet below my name, and allow the whole to be published together.” The statement Lincoln stipulated read, “We recommend to the people of the states we represent respectively to suspend all action for dismemberment of the Union at least until some act deemed to be violative of our rights shall be done by the incoming administration.”

  Nothing came of Lincoln’s offer. “I regret your unwillingness to recommend an amendment to the constitution which will arrest the progress of secession,” Green answered, after returning to Washington and consulting those to whom Lincoln’s proposal was aimed. “The fact of my having been to Springfield having been published”—the reporters had eventually caught on—“I have deemed it expedient to publish a statement which will probably appear in the New York Herald of tomorrow. I have endeavored to so frame my remarks as to give no offense to you.” Green was as good as his word; the statement in the Herald registered Green’s understanding that Lincoln intended to “administer the government in such a manner as to satisfy the South.” But Southern senators had no wish to align themselves openly with the leader of the Republicans, and Lincoln’s letter never appeared in public.

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  THE FAILURE OF his effort at compromise caused Lincoln to dig in his heels. “What is our present condition?” he asked rhetorically in a letter to a Pennsylvania Republican congressman. “We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance the government shall be broken up unless we surrender to those we have beaten, before we take the offices. In this they are either attempting to play upon us, or they are in dead earnest. Either way, if we surrender, it is the end of us, and of the government. They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum. A year will not pass till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union. They now have the Constitution, under which we have lived over seventy years, and acts of Congress of their own framing, with no prospect of their being changed; and they can never have a more shallow pretext for breaking up the government, or extorting a compromise, than now. There is, in my judgment, but one compromise which would really settle the slavery question, and that would be a prohibition against acquiring any more territory.”

  Lincoln’s tone suggested that such a prohibition was out of the question. In fact Daniel Webster had recommended precisely this approach during the war with Mexico in the 1840s: no new territory, no debate over whether the new territory would be slave or free.

  But Lincoln wasn’t going to be the one to make such an offer. He had won, he was going to be president, and he wasn’t going to be blackmailed by the losers. Lest his position be misinterpreted, he told a visitor, in words intended for publication, “I will suffer death before I will consent or will advise my friends to consent to any concession or compromise which looks like buying the privilege of taking possession of this government to which we have a constitutional right; because, whatever I might think of the merit of the various propositions before Congress, I should regard any concession in the face of menace the destruction of the government itself.”

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  THIS REMAINED LINCOLN’S POSITION through the time he left Springfield for Washington. His route would serve as a victory lap through states that had elected him. But first he bade Springfield farewell. “My friends,” he said. “No one not in my situation can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trusting in Him, who can go with me and remain with you and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.”

  Lincoln traveled by train across Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Ohio again—including Hudson, where John Brown had his antislavery epiphany—Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland. He addressed the crowds that gathered at every stop. He spoke himself hoarse without conveying anything but thanks and determined optimism. “Let us believe, as some poet has expressed it, ‘Behind the cloud, the sun is still shining,’ ” he told one whistle-stop gathering.

  The optimism came hard. On the last leg of the trip he learned from Allan Pinkerton, a detective hired by the railroad that carried him, of an assassination plot in Baltimore. On his own time Pinkerton was an abolitionist and an admirer of John Brown. Pinkerton’s Chicago home had sheltered Brown and the slaves Brown liberated from Missouri on their way to Canada. Pinkerton raised money for Brown, and according to family lore had told his son, on Brown’s departure, “Look well upon that man! He is greater than Napoleon and just as great as George Washington.”

  Pinkerton held Lincoln in less esteem, for now at any rate. But his job was to get the president-elect to Washington alive. Secessionists were rife in slave-state Maryland, and some appeared determined to kill Lincoln before he could be inaugurated. Lincoln agreed to a secret change to his published travel plans and slipped through Baltimore in disguise.

  After the story broke, Lincoln second-guessed his decision as suggesting a lack of courage, at a moment when courage was most needed. Allan Pinkerton, despite having orchestrated the ruse, thought John Brown would have acted more boldly.

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  FINALLY LINCOLN COULD SPEAK openly. Finally he must speak openly. Inauguration day started early for Lincoln, who woke at five at Willard’s Hotel. He ate breakfast and then had his son Robert read aloud the draft address Lincoln had written. He adjusted the prose to suit his ear and set the draft aside. From the windows of the hotel he could see the preparations that had been made to ensure that the transfer of power went smoothly. Lincoln had received the word of Winfield Scott, the commanding general of the army, that there would be no trouble. “Present my compliments to Mr. Lincoln when you return to Springfield,” Scott had told an envoy Lincoln had sent to Washington to inquire about security arrangements. Lincoln had gotten threats from paramilitary types in Maryland and Virginia he judged Scott should know about. Scott listened and told the envoy Lincoln needn’t worry. “Say to him that I’ll look after those Maryland and Virginia rangers myself. I’ll plant cannon at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and if any of them show their heads or raise a finger I’ll blow them to hell.”

  Lincoln didn’t see cannons this morning, but he did see soldiers. Scott had mustered several companies of troops who now stood armed beside their horses, ready to leap into the saddle at the moment trouble surfaced. Other cavalrymen patrolled the streets and avenues, scanning the crowds for malcontents. Special policemen lined Pennsylvania Avenue, the route Lincoln would take to and from the ceremony.

  No less conspicuous were roving gangs of “Wide Awakes,” young men who had joined Republican clubs around the country and rallied for Lincoln and other Republican candidates. Being young and male, they not infrequently tangled with Democratic counterparts, bloodying noses, breaking bones and occasionally inflicting and receiving more serious wounds. They liked to think they had elected Lincoln in November, and now in March thousands had come to see him installed—and to forestall any shenanigans by Democrats. On their heads they wore black caps; over their shoulders they threw capes that left their arms free for what arms might have to do. If this had not been their party’s day, they would have seemed more than a little threatening; as it was, the police and soldiers watched them carefully.

 
A few drops of rain fell in the early morning, but the approach of noon brought a northwest wind that cleared the sky even as it stirred the dust of the many streets that remained unpaved. The air was cool without being cold. It would be a fine day to inaugurate a new president.

  James Buchanan thought so. Buchanan left the White House for the last time shortly before noon; his open carriage drove the quarter mile to Willard’s, where Lincoln got in. Mounted troops surrounded the vehicle, shielding the president-elect from possible snipers. Buchanan’s only worry for himself was that he might be hit by a stray bullet; no one cared enough to want him dead. He claimed some credit for having held the Union together as long as he had, but the last three months had been a disaster. The six states Lincoln had tried to negotiate with had left the Union; the seven seceding states—including South Carolina—had formed the Confederate States of America. Buchanan couldn’t transfer authority to Lincoln soon enough.

  Lincoln impressed few with the figure he cut. An observer who had met him previously detected a change for the worse. “He was completely metamorphosed—partly by his own fault, and partly through the efforts of injudicious friends and ambitious tailors,” the observer said. “He was raising (to gratify a very young lady, it is said) a crop of whiskers, of the blacking-brush variety, coarse, stiff and ungraceful; and in so doing spoiled, or at least seriously impaired, a face which, though never handsome, had in its original state a peculiar power and pathos. On the present occasion the whiskers were reinforced by brand-new clothes from top to toe; black dress-coat, instead of the usual frock, black cloth or satin vest, black pantaloons and a glossy hat evidently just out of the box. To cap the climax of novelty, he carried a huge ebony cane, with a gold head the size of an egg. In these, to him strange, habiliments, he looked so miserably uncomfortable that I could not help pitying him.”