Lincoln pointed out that the sum he proposed was simply the cost of continuing the war for another one or two hundred days, “to say nothing of the lives lost and property destroyed.” Still, the cabinet was adamant. “You are all against me,” Lincoln said, his voice filled with sadness. “His heart was so fully enlisted in behalf of such a plan that he would have followed it if only a single member of his Cabinet had supported him,” Usher thought. Had Seward been there, Usher mused, “he would probably have approved the measure.” Without a trace of support among his colleagues at the table, Lincoln felt compelled to forsake his proposition, which, in any event, as Jefferson Davis had made clear, was unacceptable to the Confederacy. So the war would continue until the South capitulated.
MEANWHILE, THE WAR FRONT continued to generate good news for the Union. After capturing Savannah, Sherman had headed north to Columbia, reaching the state capital of South Carolina on February 17. Columbia’s fall led to the evacuation of Charleston. Stanton ordered “a national salute” fired from “every fort arsenal and army headquarters of the United States, in honor of the restoration of the flag of the Union upon Fort Sumter.” In Washington, the National Republican noted, “the flash and smoke were visible from the tops of buildings on the avenue, and the thunder of the guns was heard in all parts of the city.” That evening, Lincoln was in “cheerful” spirits as he relaxed with Seward, Welles, and General Hooker in his office. “General H. thinks it the brightest day in four years,” Welles recorded in his diary.
The following day, however, Browning found Lincoln “more depressed” than he had seen him in the four years of his presidency. His low spirits were probably caused by the pending execution of John Yates Beall, a former Confederate captain who had been tried and found guilty as a spy. In the fall of 1864, when Confederate agents based in Canada were pursuing plots to disrupt the draft and influence the elections, Beall had led a team of raiders in a daring and elaborate scheme to commandeer Union ships in the Great Lakes area, destroy railroad lines, and liberate Confederate prisoners in Ohio. The commander of the army in New York State, General John A. Dix, was unyielding in his belief that Beall must be executed as an example to others.
But Beall came from a prominent Virginia family, and a wide array of supporters petitioned Lincoln for clemency, including Orville Browning, Monty Blair, eight dozen congressmen, and six United States senators. They argued that Beall was acting as a commissioned officer in the Confederate army and should not be treated as “a robber, brigand, and pirate.” The case troubled Lincoln greatly, but he felt compelled to support General Dix. “I had to stand firm,” he told an acquaintance a few weeks later, “and I even had to turn away his poor sister when she came and begged for his life, and let him be executed, and he was executed, and I can’t get the distress out of my mind yet.”
The week before his second inaugural on March 4, Lincoln announced that he would “not receive callers (except members of the Cabinet) for any purpose whatever, between the hours of three and seven o’clock p.m.” He needed solitude to work on his inaugural speech. “The hopeful condition of the Union cause” had brought thousands of visitors to Washington, the National Republican reported. They were anxious not only to partake of the inaugural revelries but to share in the general elation that pervaded the capital. The city was so overcrowded that the parlors of all the leading hotels “were occupied by ladies and gentlemen, sitting up all night because no beds could be found for them.”
Frederick Douglass decided to join “in the grand procession of citizens from all parts of the country.” Blacks had been excluded from previous inaugural festivities, but with soldiers of both races “mingling their blood,” it seemed to him that “it was not too great an assumption for a colored man to offer his congratulations to the President with those of other citizens.” The evening before the inauguration, he visited Chase’s Sixth Street home. There, he later recalled, he helped Kate “in placing over her honored father’s shoulders the new robe then being made in which he was to administer the oath to the reelected President.” As he looked at the new Chief Justice, Douglass recollected the “early anti-slavery days” of their first acquaintance. Chase had “welcomed [him] to his home and his table when to do so was a strange thing.”
The steady rain on the morning of March 4 did not dampen the spirits of the estimated fifty thousand citizens gathered at the Capitol to witness the inauguration. Invited guests poured into the Senate chamber for the first part of the ceremony, which included a farewell address by the outgoing vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, and the swearing in of Andrew Johnson. Shortly before noon, a stir in the galleries revealed the arrival of the “notables”—generals, governors, the justices of the Supreme Court, the cabinet members, led by Seward, and finally, the president himself, whose chair was positioned in the middle of the front row. Mary Lincoln was seated in the Diplomatic Gallery, surrounded by members of the foreign ministries. “One ambassador was so stiff with gold lace,” Noah Brooks observed, “that he could not sit down except with great difficulty and had to unbutton before he could get his feet on the floor.”
After Hamlin delivered a graceful farewell address, Andrew Johnson rose to take the oath. His face was “extraordinarily red,” his balance precarious. He appeared to observers to be “in a state of manifest intoxication.” For twenty long minutes, he spoke incoherently, repeatedly declaring his plebeian background and his pride that such a humble man “could rise from the ranks, under the Constitution, to the proud position of the second place in the gift of the people.” Pivoting to face the Supreme Court justices, he reminded them that they also derived their “power from the people.” Then he spoke to the members of the cabinet, insisting they, too, were “creature[s]” of the people. He addressed each secretary by name—Mr. Seward, Mr. Stanton, and down the ranks—until he reached Gideon Welles, whose name he could not remember. Seemingly nonplused, he turned to someone near him and loudly inquired, “What’s the name of the Secretary of the Navy?” Continuing his tirade, he ignored Hamlin’s pointed reminder that “the hour for the inauguration ceremony had passed.”
The crowd stirred uneasily, and the men on the dais tried with varying success to conceal their dismay. “Stanton looked like a petrified man,” Noah Brooks observed. “All this is in wretched bad taste,” Speed whispered to Welles. “The man is certainly deranged.” Welles whispered to Stanton that “Johnson is either drunk or crazy.” Dennison, the new postmaster general, “was red and white by turns,” while Justice Samuel Nelson’s jaw “dropped clean down in blank horror.” Seward and Lincoln alone appeared unruffled. Seward remained as “serene as summer,” charitably suggesting to Welles that Johnson’s performance was a by-product of “emotion on returning and revisiting the Senate.” Lincoln listened in silence, “patiently waiting” for the harangue to end, his eyes shut so that no one could discern his discomfort. “You need not be scared,” he said a few days later; Johnson had “made a bad slip” but was not “a drunkard.”
When Johnson finished at last, the audience proceeded outside to the east front of the Capitol for the inaugural ceremony. As the president appeared on the platform, observed Noah Brooks, “the sun, which had been obscured all day, burst forth in its unclouded meridian splendor and flooded the spectacle with glory and light.” It seemed to many, including the superstitious Lincoln, an auspicious omen, as did the appearance of the newly completed Capitol dome, topped with the statue of Freedom.
If the spirited crowd expected a speech exalting recent Union victories, they were disappointed. In keeping with his lifelong tendency to consider all sides of a troubled situation, Lincoln urged a more sympathetic understanding of the nation’s alienated citizens in the South. There were no unbridgeable differences, he insisted: “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us
judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”
In his Springfield speech a decade earlier, Lincoln had maintained that he could not condemn the South for an inability to end slavery when he himself knew of no easy solution. Now the president suggested that God had given “to both North and South, this terrible war” as punishment for their shared sin of slavery. Speaking with “the eloquence of the prophets,” he continued, “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’”
Drawing upon the rare wisdom of a temperament that consistently displayed uncommon magnanimity toward those who opposed him, he then issued his historic plea to his fellow countrymen: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
More than any of his other speeches, the Second Inaugural fused spiritual faith with politics. While Lincoln might have questioned the higher force that shaped human ends, “as he became involved in matters of the gravest importance,” his friend Leonard Swett observed, “a feeling of religious reverence, and belief in God—his justice and overruling power—increased upon him.” If his devotion were determined by his lack of “faith in ceremonials and forms,” or by his failure “to observe the Sabath very scrupulously,” Swett added, “he would fall far short of the standard.” However, if he were judged “by the higher rule of purity of conduct, of honesty of motive, of unyielding fidelity to the right,” or by his powerful belief “in the great laws of truth, the rigid discharge of duty, his accountability to God,” then he was undoubtedly “full of natural religion,” for “he believed in God as much as the most approved Church member.”
His address completed, the president turned to Chief Justice Salmon Chase, who administered the oath of office. The crowd cheered loudly, the artillery fired a round of salutes, the band played, and the peaceful ceremony drew to a close.
That evening the gates of the White House were opened for a public reception attended by “the largest crowd that has been here yet,” according to Nicolay. The president was reported to be “in excellent spirits” as he tirelessly shook the hands of the more than five thousand people who came to show their respect and affection. “It was a grand ovation of the People to their President,” Commissioner French observed, and Mary vowed “to remain till morning, rather than have the door closed on a single visitor.” French estimated that Lincoln shook hands “at the rate of 100 every 4 minutes.”
Frederick Douglass would always remember the events of that evening. “On reaching the door, two policemen stationed there took me rudely by the arm and ordered me to stand back, for their directions were to admit no persons of my color.” Douglass assured the officers “there must be some mistake, for no such order could have emanated from President Lincoln; and that if he knew I was at the door he would desire my admission.” His assumption was later confirmed when he discovered there were “no orders from Mr. Lincoln, or from any one else. They were simply complying with an old custom.” The impasse continued for a few moments, until Douglass recognized a gentleman going in and asked him to tell the president that he was unable to gain entry. Minutes later, the word came back to admit Douglass. “I walked into the spacious East Room, amid a scene of elegance such as in this country I had never before witnessed.”
Douglass had no difficulty spotting Lincoln, who stood “like a mountain pine high above the others,” he recalled, “in his grand simplicity, and home-like beauty. Recognizing me, even before I reached him, he exclaimed, so that all around could hear him, ‘Here comes my friend Douglass.’ Taking me by the hand, he said, ‘I am glad to see you. I saw you in the crowd to-day, listening to my inaugural address; how did you like it?’” Douglass was embarrassed to detain the president in conversation when there were “thousands waiting to shake hands,” but Lincoln insisted. “You must stop a little, Douglass; there is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours. I want to know what you think of it?”
For a moment these two remarkable men stood together amid the sea of faces. Lincoln knew that Douglass would speak his mind, just as he always had. “Mr. Lincoln,” Douglass said finally, “that was a sacred effort.” Lincoln’s face lit up with delight. “I am glad you liked it!” he replied.
A few days later, Lincoln provided his own assessment to Thurlow Weed, predicting that the address would “wear as well as—perhaps better than—any thing” he had written, though he did not believe it would be “immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.” Just as Lincoln surmised, the speech drew criticism from several quarters. The Democratic New York World faulted Lincoln for his “substitution of religion for statesmanship,” while the Tribune charged that the stern biblical overtones would impede any chance for peace.
Many others, however, recognized the historic weight of the address. “That rail-splitting lawyer is one of the wonders of the day,” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., wrote to his father in London. “The inaugural strikes me in its grand simplicity and directness as being for all time the historical keynote of this war.” The London Spectator, previously critical of Lincoln, agreed with young Adams, judging the address as “by far the noblest which any American President has yet uttered to an American Congress.”
Praise for the speech mingled with praise for Lincoln himself. The Spectator suggested that it was “divine inspiration, or providence” that brought the Republican Convention in 1860 to choose Lincoln the “village lawyer” over Seward. Congressman Isaac Arnold overheard a conversation between a celebrated minister and an unidentified New York statesman, whom one historian suggests was likely William Henry Seward himself. “The President’s inaugural is the finest state paper in all history,” the minister declared. “Yes,” the New Yorker answered, “and as Washington’s name grows brighter with time, so it will be with Lincoln’s. A century from to-day that inaugural will be read as one of the most sublime utterances ever spoken by man. Washington is the great man of the era of the Revolution. So will Lincoln be of this, but Lincoln will reach the higher position in history.”
Perhaps the most surprising contemporaneous evaluation of Lincoln’s leadership appeared in the extreme secessionist paper the Charleston Mercury. “He has called around him in counsel,” the Mercury marveled, “the ablest and most earnest men of his country. Where he has lacked in individual ability, learning, experience or statesmanship, he has sought it, and found it…. Force, energy, brains, earnestness, he has collected around him in every department.” Were he not a “blackguard” and “an unscrupulous knave in the end,” the Mercury concluded, “he would undoubtedly command our respect as a ruler…. We turn our eyes to Richmond, and the contrast is appalling, sickening to the heart.”
The editors of the Mercury would have been even more astonished if they had an inkling of the truth recognized by those closer to Lincoln: his political genius was not simply his ability to gather the best men of the country around him, but to impress upon them his own purpose, perception, and resolution at every juncture. With respect to Lincoln’s cabinet, Charles Dana observed, “it was always plain that he was the master and they were the subordinates. They constantly had to yield to his will, and if he ever yielded to them it was because they convinced him that the course they
advised was judicious and appropriate.”
CHAPTER 26
THE FINAL WEEKS
AS LINCOLN BEGAN his second term, “he was in mind, body, and nerves a very different man,” John Hay observed, “from the one who had taken the oath in 1861. He continued always the same kindly, genial, and cordial spirit he had been at first; but the boisterous laughter became less frequent year by year; the eye grew veiled by constant meditation on momentous subjects; the air of reserve and detachment from his surroundings increased.”
Four years of relentless strain had touched Lincoln’s spirit and his countenance. The aged, wearied face in the life-mask cast by Clark Mills in the spring of 1865 barely resembled the mold Leonard Volk had taken five years earlier. In 1860, noted John Hay, “the large mobile mouth is ready to speak, to shout, or laugh; the bold, curved nose is broad and substantial, with spreading nostrils; it is a face full of life, of energy, of vivid aspiration.” The second life-mask, with its lined brow and cavernous cheeks, has “a look as of one on whom sorrow and care had done their worst…the whole expression is of unspeakable sadness and all-sufficing strength.”
That inner strength had sustained Lincoln all his life. But his four years as president had immeasurably enhanced his self-confidence. Despite the appalling pressures he had faced from his very first day in office, he had never lost faith in himself. In fact, he was the one who had sustained the spirits of those around him time and again, gently guiding his colleagues with good humor, energy, and steady purpose. He had learned from early mistakes, transcended the jealousy of rivals, and his insight into men and events had deepened with each passing year. Though “a tired spot” remained within that no rest or relaxation could restore, he was ready for the arduous tasks of the next four years.