by H. W. Brands
Booth didn’t deliver this speech in public, but its themes festered as the war developed. Lincoln became the arch villain in Booth’s drama. “He is Bonaparte in one great move,” Booth told his sister in 1864. “That is, by overturning this blind republic and making himself a king. This man’s reelection which will follow his success, I tell you, will be a reign!” After Lincoln indeed was reelected, Booth harked back to his moment with John Brown. The story improved in Booth’s telling. “When I aided in the capture and execution of John Brown—who was a murderer on our Western border, and who was fairly tried and convicted before an impartial judge and jury of treason, and who, by the way, has since been made a god—I was proud of my little share in the transaction, for I deemed it my duty and that I was helping our common country to perform an act of justice. But what was a crime in poor John Brown is considered (by themselves) as the greatest and only virtue of the whole Republican party. Strange transmigration, vice to become a virtue, simply because more indulge in it. I thought then, as now, that the abolitionists were the only traitors in the land. And that the entire party deserved the fate of poor old Brown.”
Booth plotted his—and the South’s, as he saw it—revenge against Lincoln. He conspired to kidnap Lincoln and carry him off to the South. But as Confederate forces lost ground in the months after Lincoln’s reelection, the difficulty of reaching Confederate territory increased, and the conspiracy shifted to assassination. Booth now likened Lincoln to Julius Caesar, and himself to Brutus. “If the South is to be aided it must be done quickly,” he wrote. “It may already be too late. When Caesar had conquered the enemies of Rome and the power that was his menaced the liberties of the people, Brutus arose and slew him. The stroke of his dagger was guided by his love of Rome.”
Booth’s dagger was in fact a pistol. On the evening of April 14—five days after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses Grant at Appomattox Court House, effectively ending the war—he shot Lincoln in the back of the head at Ford’s Theatre in Washington.
Booth escaped the theater on horseback and fled Washington through Maryland and Virginia. A broken leg, from landing awkwardly on the stage, slowed him and then compelled him to find a doctor. A manhunt filled several days; at last he was cornered in a barn in Virginia.
Perhaps his memory of John Brown made him hope for arrest and trial; with his dramatic training he could imagine delivering a speech as memorable as Brown’s closing statement to the Charles Town court. Or maybe Booth didn’t think about that at all, or changed his mind, for when soldiers closed in, he refused their demand that he surrender, and was fatally shot.
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LINCOLN DIED the day after he was shot. And death linked him to John Brown in a way their lives never had.
Some in the South, sharing Booth’s bitterness, applauded the killing, but many others feared Union reprisals for the murder. Jefferson Davis, on learning the news, remarked, “I certainly have no special regard for Mr. Lincoln, but there are a great many men of whose end I would much rather hear than his.”
Southern blacks had special cause for worry. Effective emancipation for slaves in the Confederacy awaited the arrival of Union forces. And even then it didn’t always come at once. William Sherman recalled a moment on the march through Georgia when his soldiers were pitching camp. “I walked up to a plantation house close by, where were assembled many negroes, among them an old, gray-haired man, of as fine a head as I ever saw,” Sherman wrote. “I asked him if he understood about the war and its progress. He said he did; that he had been looking for the ‘angel of the Lord’ ever since he was knee-high, and, though we professed to be fighting for the Union, he supposed slavery was the cause, and that our success was to be his freedom.” Sherman asked the man if the other slaves in that area held the same view. “He said they surely did. I then explained to him that we wanted the slaves to remain where they were, and not to load us down with useless mouths, which would eat up the food needed for our fighting men; that our success was their assured freedom; that we could receive a few of their young, hearty men as pioneers; but that, if they followed us in swarms of old and young, feeble and helpless, it would simply load us down and cripple us in our great task.” Sherman recalled the result. “I believe that old man spread this message to the slaves, which was carried from mouth to mouth, to the very end of our journey, and that it in part saved us from the great danger we incurred of swelling our numbers so that famine would have attended our progress.”
A consequence of the forbearance of the slaves was that at war’s end their hopes for the arrival of the “angel of the Lord” were greater than ever. But suddenly, with Lincoln’s killing, their freedom was in doubt. Few slaves knew more than a smattering about Andrew Johnson, but a white slave-owner from Tennessee couldn’t be expected to have much sympathy for black folks. “The colored people express their sorrow and sense of loss in many cases with sobs and loud lamentations!” a South Carolina schoolteacher wrote in her diary. “Secesh come back; we’re going to be slaves again,” recently liberated black men and women were heard saying.
The laments in the North were less personal but more openly aired. In meeting halls and churches across the North, Lincoln was eulogized by hundreds of speakers. He was shot on Good Friday and died on Saturday; on Easter Sunday preachers drew the connection to Jesus, whose resurrection they were celebrating. None suggested that Lincoln would rise from the dead, but many prayed that his death might foreshadow the rebirth of the nation after its searing trial. “Without the shedding of blood is no remission,” said a Cincinnati divine, in words borrowed from Saint Paul and echoed by many that day.
Lincoln himself had raised the issue of blood atonement in his second inaugural address. Now his own blood was part of the reckoning, and his link to John Brown more compelling. Brown had foretold blood atonement while becoming one of the first sacrifices; Lincoln at the time had resisted the concept for his country and scarcely imagined it for himself. But he made decisions whose consequences included a bloodletting far greater than anything Brown had envisioned, and finally his own death. Brown was a first martyr in the war that freed the slaves, Lincoln one of the last.
More slowly than Brown and more tentatively, Lincoln had summoned heaven to justify his actions. Brown professed to know that God was on his side; Lincoln only hoped He was. “If God wills” was Lincoln’s preferred construction; the president didn’t presume to commit the Almighty. But over the course of the war, as the carnage mounted, he felt compelled to call on heaven for moral support.
Did he question his own actions? Did he ask if there could have been another way? Almost constantly, and until the end. No one tried harder and more persistently than Lincoln to find a nonviolent path to freedom for the slaves. From his first call for compensated emancipation in the District of Columbia, while a member of Congress, to his last offer of the same to the Southern states, even on the verge of congressional approval of the Thirteenth Amendment, he fondly hoped and fervently prayed that money might spare blood in expiating America’s original sin. But those who hadn’t heeded John Brown wouldn’t heed Brown’s reluctant successor, and the slaughter continued, until the last drops of blood—including Lincoln’s own—were shed.
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IN ONE OF LINCOLN’S final speeches, to the crowd applauding the approval of the Thirteenth Amendment by Congress, the president reminded his listeners that the work of emancipation wouldn’t be finished until the amendment had been ratified by the states. The war had made emancipation possible, but the peace might yet make it unconstitutional, if the Constitution itself weren’t changed.
Ratification arrived more swiftly, and by different means, than he guessed. Lincoln’s martyrdom imbued ratification with an irresistible urgency, and within eight months of his death the required three-quarters of the states had approved. American slavery was no more.
The end of slavery didn’t imply
full black freedom. Southern states enacted “black codes” that reinstituted slavery in all but name. The Radical Republicans who took control of Reconstruction after Lincoln’s death overturned these, but violence by the Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups and the oppressive system of sharecropping kept most blacks from enjoying anything like the freedoms taken for granted by whites. W. E. B. Du Bois, writing decades later, declared, “Slavery was not abolished even after the Thirteenth Amendment. There were four million freedmen and most of them on the same plantation, doing the same work that they did before emancipation.”
Frederick Douglass saw things differently, not least because he had been a slave. Douglass appreciated the injustice black men and women still suffered in the South, but he understood the monumental importance of removing them from the realm of property and remaking them, with the additional help of the Fourteenth Amendment, into citizens. The basic law of the land had long been against them; now it was on their side, even if its promises too frequently went unenforced.
Douglass traveled to Harpers Ferry in 1881, to speak at Storer College, an institute for former slaves and their children, which had recently established a John Brown Professorship. The mere existence of such a college, not to mention the naming of a professorship for John Brown, reminded Douglass what progress had been made in the years since he had tried to talk Brown out of his suicidal mission to this very place. Douglass recounted the violent deeds of that time, to an audience who knew Brown by name but not much more. “It certainly is not a story to please, but to pain,” Douglass acknowledged. “It is not a story to increase our sense of social safety and security, but to fill the imagination with wild and troubled fancies of doubt and danger.” Yet it could not have been otherwise. “The bloody harvest of Harper’s Ferry was ripened by the heat and moisture of merciless bondage of more than two hundred years. That startling cry of alarm on the banks of the Potomac was but the answering back of the avenging angel to the midnight invasions of Christian slave-traders on the sleeping hamlets of Africa.” Douglass candidly recalled his own refusal to join Brown’s mission. “His zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine. It was as the burning sun to my taper light. Mine was bounded by time; his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.”
Brown’s incandescence had kindled the nation, Douglass said. “The armies of the nation have found it necessary to do on a large scale what John Brown attempted to do on a small one.” Yet opinion on Brown was still divided. He had subverted a state; innocent people had been killed. “Brown assumed tremendous responsibility in making war upon the peaceful people of Harper’s Ferry,” Douglass said.
But Brown had his reasons. “In his eye a slave-holding community could not be peaceable but was, in the nature of the case, in one incessant state of war. To him such a community was not more sacred than a band of robbers; it was the right of any one to assault it by day or night.” Brown saw no hope for change by moral or political means. “He knew the proud and hard hearts of the slave-holders, and that they never would consent to give up their slaves till they felt a big stick about their heads.”
The raid on Harpers Ferry had freed no slaves. “Did John Brown fail?” asked Douglass. He considered the matter. “He certainly did fail to get out of Harper’s Ferry before being beaten down by United States soldiers. He did fail to save his own life, and to lead a liberating army into the mountains of Virginia.”
But this posed the wrong question. John Brown did not go to Harpers Ferry to save his life. “The true question is, Did John Brown draw his sword against slavery and thereby lose his life in vain? And to this I answer ten thousand times: No! No man fails, or can fail who so grandly gives himself and all he has to a righteous cause.” John Brown, in losing his life, set in motion events that succeeded better than he ever dreamed. “If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery,” Douglass said. “John Brown began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free republic. Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes and compromises. When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was cleared. The time for compromises was gone; the armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union; and the clash of arms was at hand. The South staked all upon getting possession of the federal government, and failing to do that, drew the sword of rebellion and thus made her own, and not Brown’s, the lost cause of the century.”
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THE QUESTION HAD BEEN: What does a good man do when his country commits a great evil? John Brown chose the path of violence, Lincoln of politics. Yet the two paths wound up leading to the same place: the most terrible war in American history. Brown aimed at slavery and shattered the Union; Lincoln defended the Union and destroyed slavery.
Was one path more right, or more righteous, than the other? Brown’s path had the advantage of immediacy; it was soul-satisfying to him, perhaps to his followers who lost their lives pursuing his vision, and definitely to those who praised him from a safe distance. Lincoln’s path had the advantage of legitimacy; cloaked in the Constitution, even when he stretched that venerable fabric, Lincoln’s accomplishment possessed authority that could come only from America’s founding document, now amended.
Constitutional authority wasn’t everything, as the postwar experience of the former slaves showed. Most Southern slaveholders weren’t any more convinced of the evil of their ways by Lincoln than they had been by Brown. Union arms, not Union arguments, overthrew slavery. Brown was perhaps right, by the time he said it, that only blood would purge America of slavery. The South was not to be talked out of slavery. Yet Lincoln was certainly right in making violence a last resort. It mattered to the North, if not to the South, that Lincoln fought for the Union first and for emancipation only later. A war begun to end slavery would likely have lost the Union, by failing to engage Northern Democrats and other skeptics on the race question. But a war begun to save the Union could, and did, end by destroying slavery.
Frederick Douglass never warmed to Lincoln the way he did to John Brown. “He was preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men,” Douglass told an audience at a ceremony marking the eleventh anniversary of Lincoln’s death. “He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country.” Lincoln opposed the extension of slavery into the federal territories, but he did so for the good of whites, not of slaves. And he protected slavery in the South during the early part of the war. “He was ready to execute all the supposed guarantees of the United States Constitution in favor of the slave system anywhere inside the slave states. He was willing to pursue, recapture and send back the fugitive slave to his master, and to suppress a slave rising for liberty, though his guilty master was already in arms against the government.” Speaking to the whites in his mixed audience, Douglass declared, “First, midst and last, you and yours were the objects of his deepest affection and his most earnest solicitude. You are the children of Abraham Lincoln.” Turning to the blacks: “We are at best only his step-children, children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity.”
And yet Lincoln did more good for the black race than any American before him. “Though the Union was more to him than our freedom or our future, under his wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood.” Lincoln could not have done other than he had done—he could not have been other than he was—and served the black race so well. “Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to
rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical and determined.”
And at the crucial moment Lincoln dealt the decisive blow for liberty. “Can any colored man, or any white man friendly to the freedom of all men, ever forget the night which followed the first day of January, 1863, when the world was to see if Abraham Lincoln would prove to be as good as his word? I shall never forget that memorable night, when in a distant city”—Boston—“I waited and watched at a public meeting, with three thousand others not less anxious than myself, for the word of deliverance.” Thousands of heads in Douglass’s audience nodded agreement, recalling where they had been on that historic evening. “Nor shall I ever forget the outburst of joy and thanksgiving that rent the air when the lightning brought to us the Emancipation Proclamation. In that happy hour we forgot all delay, and forgot all tardiness.” The only thing that mattered was the historic deed. “We were thenceforward willing to allow the president all the latitude of time, phraseology and every honorable device that statesmanship might require for the achievement of a great and beneficent measure of liberty and progress.”