uring the 1860 presidential race, a leading Southern magazine remarked sourly that if Lincoln won the election, the White House would be soon occupied by “a vulgar partisan of John Brown.”1 Lincoln’s public distancing of himself from Brown prior to the election had failed to impress Southerners. They sensed that he hated slavery just as much as John Brown had. They were right, although he wanted to combat it through the electoral process, not through violence. His victory on November 6, 1860, meant that an antislavery Republican would take office in March. Southern states opted for secession, starting with South Carolina on December 20, 1860. By February 1861, seven states had formed the Confederate States of America, with its own constitution, which protected slavery and its extension into the territories. The provisional Confederate States Congress chose as the Confederacy’s provisional president the ex–US senator from Mississippi Jefferson Davis, who was inaugurated on February 18. His presidency was confirmed in a Southern general election on November 6. His vice president was Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia.
Stephens, Lincoln’s former Whig friend and fellow member of the congressional Young Indians in 1848, initially resisted secession and gave a speech before the Georgia legislature on November 14, 1860, calling for the South to remain in the Union. Stephens at first assured his fellow Southerners that Lincoln was a safe choice for the presidency, for he had no intention to interfere with slavery where it existed. On November 30, Lincoln wrote Stephens asking him to send him a copy of the speech. After reading it, Lincoln assured Stephens that the North had no designs on slavery. Stephens asked Lincoln to make some public statement that would cool sectional tensions, but Lincoln said the issue stood on a firm moral distinction: “You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted.”2
It all came down, then, to moral judgment: your higher law versus my higher law.
So Stephens soon made clear his higher law: slavery was a God-ordained institution, and the South was right to separate from the Union in order to protect it. The Confederacy’s “cornerstone,” he announced in a landmark speech of March 1861, “rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”3
In response, not once did Lincoln waver from his belief in the wrongness of slavery. Not once did he lose faith in the absolute sanctity of the Union. Many of those around him were willing to compromise on principles that for him provided a firm backbone. Lincoln demonstrated an unyielding adherence to the nonextension of slavery in the face of politicians who wanted to sacrifice this principle in order to save the Union.
Those over the years who have argued that the Civil War could have been avoided if a solution to the crisis had been reached beforehand ignore the fact that between December 1860 and the outbreak of the war in April 1861 some two hundred efforts at compromise were proposed.4 All proved futile.
For Lincoln, any attempt to compromise that permitted the spread of slavery raised the possibility of unchecked centrifugalism—the ever-extending reach of the slave power. The compromise plan introduced to Congress in December 1860 by Lincoln’s old Whig friend from Kentucky John J. Crittenden included six proposed constitutional amendments and four congressional bills, most aimed at appeasing the South. Crittenden called for a restoration of the Missouri Compromise, stipulating that the 36 degrees 30 minutes parallel, dividing free from slave territory, be extended to the Pacific. Other parts of the compromise toughened the Fugitive Slave Act and promised the permanent protection of slavery where it already existed through a constitutional amendment. Lincoln took special umbrage at the 36 degrees 30 minutes proposal, which allowed for the expansion of slavery. If Southerners were granted this concession, he wrote, they would demand possession of Cuba within a year and soon thereafter would be “filibustering for all [territory] South of us, and making slave states of it.”5 He was hardly alone in his feelings about the Crittenden measures, which failed to pass in Congress.
He also responded negatively to the peace conference held in Washington on February 4, 1861. One hundred thirty-one delegates from twenty-one states gathered to discuss possible solutions to the national crisis. The convention agreed on seven proposals that resembled the Crittenden compromise and, like it, went nowhere.
It was clear that compromise on slavery of the type reached in 1820 over Missouri and in 1850 over the western territories was now impossible. Lincoln remained intent on curbing the expansion of slavery, and he knew that the South was equally determined to protect and expand slavery, even to the extent of destroying the American Union. How was he, as incoming president, going to deal with the seceded Southern states, whose number increased as the months passed? He pondered the question while in Springfield in the months between his election in November and his departure for Washington in February 1861. His long train ride east, with many stops along the way, gave him the opportunity to test out various strategies for confronting the secession crisis.
TESTING, HEDGING, AND PERFORMING
During the weeks before his trip to Washington, DC, Lincoln wrapped up personal and business matters in Illinois. In late January, he visited his seventy-three-year-old stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, who lived near Charleston in Coles County, Illinois. The farewell was emotional. She predicted (correctly) that she would not see him again. A friend of Lincoln’s reported, “She embraced him when they parted & Said she would never be permitted to see him again that she[’]d felt that his enemies would assassinate [him]. He replied No No Mama (he always called her Moma) they will not do that trust in the Lord and all will be well. We will See each other—again.”6 While in Coles County he also met other relatives, visited his father’s grave, and gave directions for a stone marker.7
Returning to Springfield on February 1, he settled his finances and arranged to appear at towns and cities along his route east. On the evening of February 6, he and Mary held a reception at their home, which was “thronged by thousands up to a late hour.”8 Having arranged to rent out their house during their time in Washington, the family moved on February 8 into rooms at a hotel, the Chenery House. Two days later Lincoln went to his law office, where he discussed unfinished law cases with his partner and told him to leave up the sign “Lincoln and Herndon” until he returned after his presidency.
In the early morning of a stormy February 11, he gave a farewell speech to a thousand people who had gathered at Springfield’s small railroad station to bid him goodbye. In the wind and sleet, trembling with feeling as he stood on the platform of the train’s rear car, he told the crowd that he had lived in Springfield for more than a quarter of a century and had raised sons there, one of whom had died. He might never return to Springfield, he said prophetically. He was now about to take on a burden greater than even Washington had faced. Without God’s help, he said, he could not succeed, but with it, he could not fail.
He had arranged with Mary that he would go by train to Indianapolis, where she and their sons would join him the next day. Those traveling with him included David Davis, Ward Hill Lamon, Norman B. Judd, his secretaries John Hay and John G. Nicolay, the drill instructor Elmer Ellsworth, and other friends, associates, and guards.
The thirteen-day trip, covering nearly two thousand miles and making dozens of stops in seven states, witnessed Lincoln by turns testing, hedging, and making a spectacle of himself.
At various stops, he tested out different approaches to addressing the national situation. In his first important speech, at Indianapolis, he tried combining topical humor with seriousness. He jokingly said the South was as devoted to the Union as was a free-love spouse to fidelity or a sick person who took homeopathic pills to getting cured. He then became firm. He emphasized the federal government’s obligation to keep control of US forts, collect import duties, and regulate the mails in the South. Despite the current talk about “coercion” and “invasion,” he said, no coercion was involved in the government carrying out its normal functions throughout the nation.9 As for secession, it was by definition illegal. A state had the same right to secede from the Union as a county from a state: that is, no right at all. Since when, he asked, does a minority have control over the majority? The whole is greater than the part. The Union is greater than the individual state.
The Indianapolis speech, which was printed in newspapers nationwide, proved divisive. Lincoln received telegraphs from Washington reporting “both strong approbations and remonstrations” of it.10 The Northern press, in general, praised it. The New-York Tribune called it “skillful, judicious, and adapted to give encouragement and hope to those who heard it.”11
But the South viewed the speech very differently. “This speech will be read throughout the South to-day with the greatest alarm,” one paper announced. “The Cotton States will look upon it as a tocsin of war, and will take immediate measures to resist the shock.” All “peace measures . . . are knocked into a cocked hat by this war speech,” as Lincoln’s proposed retaking of US forts in the South “will take any amount of hard fighting and a large draft upon the blood and treasure of the country.”12
Southern papers took the moral high ground, connecting Lincoln’s images with the crude isms of the North. In an article titled “A Good Prospect of War,” a Georgia newspaper intoned, “With the characteristic vulgarity of his party, he compares the old doctrine of States Rights to ‘free love,’ one of the isms of his own clime, only less detestable than Abolitionism, and sneers at the idea of a free people exercising the rights of self-government in any other form than as the vassals of the Federal—i.e., Black Republican—government.”13 A Richmond journalist pilloried Lincoln as “a canting, ill-bred, indecent old man,” whose “want of all dignity must disgust all Americans,” with his “illustrations drawn from ‘free love, passional attraction,’ and homeopathic pills!”14 A Charleston, South Carolina, paper insisted that “Lincoln’s vulgar, insidious, and unmistakable coercion speech,” with its “filthy allusion to free love,” meant that the South must seize Forts Sumter and Pickens now instead of waiting for them to surrender.15
Lincoln a fanatical devotee of Northern isms who was proclaiming war on the South? This was exactly how he did not want to be viewed. Therefore, for the remainder of the trip, he steered clear of controversial statements. Instead, he offered reassurances. At his stops in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia, he said, “[T]here really is no crisis,” only an “artificial” one that would disappear “if the great American people will only keep their temper, on both sides of the line.”16 Southerners were still citizens under the Constitution, he said. Their rights were protected. The North returned their runaways to them. “Why all this excitement?” he asked. “Let it alone and it will go down of itself.”
He sometimes dispensed bromides. At Columbus, he said, “There is nothing going wrong. It is a consoling circumstance that when we look out there is nothing that really hurts anybody. . . . [N]obody is suffering anything. This is a most consoling circumstance, . . . all we want is time, patience and a reliance on that God who has never forsaken this people.”17 In Pennsylvania he proclaimed himself in line with that state’s Quaker heritage, founded on “peaceful principles.” He declared that “no one of the Friends” who originally settled there or have since lived there “has been or is a more devoted lover of peace, harmony and concord than my humble self.”
At most stops he hedged, evading direct political statements altogether. He had been publicly silent during the campaign and since the election. He had feared that anything he said might disrupt the national situation. Overtures to the South of the kind that Crittenden was making would betray his basic beliefs and his party’s platform. On the other hand, overly harsh words about the South could alienate the border states and push them into the Confederacy. His safest tactic now was silence. As he told an audience at one stop, “I have been occupying a position, since the Presidential election, of silence, of avoiding public speaking, of avoiding public writing. I have been doing so because I thought, upon full consideration, that was the proper course for me to take.”18
At most of his train stops, he did not comment on politics. He gave excuses. He was tired. His voice was hoarse (actually, he did have a cold during part of the trip). And a line that got many laughs: if he spoke at all the stops, he would not reach Washington until after the inaugural.
If he hedged or was silent, how could he make an impact on Northerners whose loyalty he counted on? Through much of the trip, he relied on the kind of spectacle that Barnum had popularized.
In effect, he put himself on exhibit. At several stops, he successfully performed his ugly man act. Typical were his remarks to “a large crowd of ladies.” Addressing them, he said, “I am glad to see you; I suppose you are glad to see me, but I certainly think I have the best of the bargain. (Applause.)”19 Sometimes he put himself and his wife on comic display. The six-foot-four-inch Lincoln and his five-foot-two-inch wife made a kind of giant-dwarf show, as when they appeared at a Pennsylvania depot, where he told his viewers that they now saw “the long and the short of it!”; this caused “a loud burst of laughter, followed by enthusiastic cheers as the train moved off.” In Cleveland, where he wearied of shaking hands and decided to bow as the crowd filed by, he felt that he was “on exhibition,” while the people acted as though “they were assisting at an animal show” or “were engaged in a grotesque ceremony of mock adulation.”20
He made a spectacle of expressing public thanks to Grace Bedell, the twelve-year-old upstate New York girl who had written him four months earlier suggesting that he would look better with a beard. When the train stopped at her town, Westfield, he asked about the “young lady” who had encouraged him to grow whiskers. Grace, “a beautiful girl, with black eyes,” was pointed out to Lincoln, who met her and “gave her several hearty kisses, . . . amid the yells of delight from the excited crowd.”21
In Manhattan, Lincoln engaged in a different kind of spectacle. Walt Whitman was present when Lincoln arrived in front of his hotel, the Astor House. The president-elect emerged from his carriage, stretched his long limbs, and gazed casually at the thousands of spectators who had come to see him. “There were no speeches, no compliments, no welcome—as far as I could hear, not a word said.” The “sober, unbroken silence,” Whitman surmised, reflected the fact that Lincoln was not popular in Manhattan, a city with commercial ties to the South that had recently considered seceding from the Union. Whitman sensed that “many assassin’s knife and pistol lurked in hip or breast-pocket there.” Nevertheless, Whitman wrote, “there was a dash of comedy, almost of farce,” as Lincoln looked curiously at his viewers and they looked curiously at him. Cool and relaxed, Lincoln walked slowly up the Astor House steps and disappeared through the entrance, “and the dumb-show ended.”22
While in New York, Lincoln and his family became directly associated with P. T. Barnum, who sought out Lincoln at the Astor House and said, “Don’t forget, you ‘Honest Old Abe’; I shall rely upon you and I advertise you.”23 A notice was published saying that Lincoln would visit his Broadway Museum. He didn’t go, but Mary went with Robert, who reportedly found special fascination in “What Is It?,” the alleged link between humans and simians that cartoonists liked to compare with his father.
Lincoln made a spectacle of patriotism when he spoke at Trenton, New Jersey, where he recalled Washington’s crossing the Delaware and making his famous surprise attack on the Hessians, and at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, the site of the nation’s founding, where he praised the Declaration of Independence and raised a flag.
There was something far deeper in his Philadelphia appearance than patriotic spectacle. For Lincoln, the Declaration signified, above all else, human equality. Should the nation ever lose touch
with that ideal, then it was not worth saving. There was a dark edge to his words that day. He said that he often had thought about “the dangers” the Founders faced in forging the Declaration, and “the toils” endured by the officers and soldiers who fought for it. They fought not just for separation from England but for “something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time”—for the “promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. (Cheers.)”24
The Revolutionary generation had fought for that principle, and many died for it. He, too, was ready to die for it. Twice in the speech, he mentioned his own death. “I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world,” he said, if as president he could preserve that principle. But “it will be truly awful,” he declared, if that principle were lost. Then the shocker: “I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.” In closing: “I may, therefore, have said something indiscreet, but I have said nothing but what I am willing to live by, and, in the pleasure of Almighty God, die by.”
Why the references to death? And why did Lincoln apologize for saying “something indiscreet”? We get a clue from a negative response to the speech by a Democratic journalist who commented that Lincoln at Philadelphia “declared he would ‘rather be assassinated on the spot’ than abandon his idea of negro independence and negro equality.”25 What the journalist recognized was the radical egalitarianism—a belief in the equality of all people, regardless of race or nationality—that Lincoln’s reading of the Declaration implied.
Was Lincoln making an unusually radical statement on race as a kind of existential outcry, being fully honest when faced with the prospect that he was just about to die? The journalist thought so; he wrote that the death imagery Lincoln used in asserting the rights of black people was connected to his fear of imminent assassination.
The possibility of assassination haunted Lincoln. He predicted to several of those close to him that he would meet a sudden and violent end. There was justification for his fears. His private secretary John Nicolay wrote, “His mail was infested with brutal and vulgar menace, and warnings of all sorts came to him from zealous or nervous friends.”26 One anonymous missive came to him early in 1861 that read, “May the hand of the devil strike you down before long—You are destroying the country. Damn you—every breath you take.”27 About the same time, a grammatically challenged A. G. Frick threatened an unusual mode of assassination: “[I]f you don’t Resign we are going to put a spider in your dumpling and play the Devil with you you god or mighty god dam sundde of a bit[c]h go to hell and kiss my Ass suck my prick and call my Bolics your uncle Dick goddam a fool and goddam Abe Lincoln who would like you goddam you excuse me for using such hard words with you but you need it you are nothing but a goddam Black nigger.”28
During the White House years, few days went by without Lincoln receiving a threatening letter.29 He generally ignored the threats. He considered most of them hot air, and he had the fatalistic view that there was no effective defense against a determined assassin.
But during his Philadelphia visit, the threat seemed real, and defense was available.
On the evening before the speech at Independence Hall, he was informed that there was a plot to assassinate him in Baltimore during his trip between Philadelphia and Washington. The detective Allan Pinkerton, who had been spying with five operatives in Baltimore for weeks, reported to Lincoln that secessionist thugs led by an Italian barber, Cypriano Ferrandini, would try to kill him after he emerged from his train to travel between depots in Baltimore. A separately verified warning of a Baltimore plot came from Washington, sent by William Henry Seward through his son Frederick
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