Baltimore, known as Mobtown because of gangs like the Plug Uglies and the Blood Tubs, had often been the site of political violence, as in 1857, when the visiting James Buchanan had been hissed at and pelted with stones by roughs, and in 1860, when marching Wide Awakes were assaulted with eggs and brickbats. Baltimore’s police chief, George P. Kane, said, “The Plugs on the one hand were determined on giving [Lincoln] a rousing reception, and the Tubs [a Democratic organization] were equally determined to prevent the Plugs from giving the president elect any reception at all.”31
Lincoln accepted the news of the death threat but wished to carry out his plan of participating in the Independence Hall ceremony and then going in the afternoon to the state capital, Harrisburg, to address the state legislature. At Harrisburg, he took precautions. Instead of waiting to take his scheduled train south on February 23, he went by a special train on February 22 from Harrisburg to Philadelphia. There, posing as an invalid, he bent over and was led to a semiprivate sleeping car of a passenger train by detective Kate Warne, who pretended to be his sister. He was disguised in an old overcoat, a shawl, and a soft wool hat. On the journey, he was accompanied by Warne, Pinkerton, and the burly Ward Hill Lamon, who was armed with pistols, a knife, a slungshot, and brass knuckles. The train left Philadelphia at 10:50 p.m. and arrived four and a half hours later at Baltimore, where, after an agonizing delay, Lincoln switched trains in the quiet of early morning and went on to Washington, where he arrived at 6:00 a.m. on Saturday, February 23. Mary and the boys came down later in the day on the regular train.
When news of Lincoln’s surreptitious trip got out, the press exploded in derision. The president-elect was a coward. If he was scared of some Baltimore roughs, how was he going to stand up to the Confederacy? He had proved himself a fool. An Indiana paper, in a piece on “Lincoln’s Flight,” fulminated, “The whole thing was a disgrace to the man, and a stigma upon the character of our people. We hope never to hear of such a miserable and disgusting spectacle again. Every rational man is heartily ashamed of it.”32
A New York Times reporter, Joseph Howard, disgruntled that he had been left off the inaugural train in Harrisburg, concocted the story that Lincoln had sneaked into Washington disguised in a military cloak and a Scottish cap. Satirists had a field day with the image. A Vanity Fair cartoon showed Lincoln dancing in a kilt and feathered cap: The MacLincoln Harrisburg Highland Fling. A St. Louis paper said the report of Lincoln dressed in “a military cloak and Scotch plaid” was “the first literal example of Presidential masquerading”; it was so “mixed up with the ludicrous” that “posterity will regard the extraordinary hegira as the hugest joke the Presidential joker ever perpetrated.”33
A Southern wag penned a song, “The Lincoln Dodge,” set to the tune of “Yankee Doodle,” with verses such as:
They went and got a special train
At midnight’s solemn hour,
And in a cloak and Scotch plaid shawl,
He dodged from the Slave Power.
Refrain—Lanky Lincoln came to town,
In night and wind and rain, sir,
Wrapped in a military cloak
Upon a special train, sir.
This was Barnumesque spectacle at its most embarrassing. How was Lincoln to recover his image as a solid, trustworthy leader?
Once again, Mathew Brady helped. Brady, who had a photography studio in Washington run by the young Alexander Gardner, had arranged to provide Harper’s Weekly with a photograph of the newly bearded Lincoln that would become the basis of a lithograph to appear in the magazine around the time of the inauguration. Lincoln sat for a portrait in the studio on Sunday, February 24, the day after he arrived in Washington. The Scots-born Gardner, a stout, bohemian-looking man with a dark beard and long hair, had Lincoln sit on a chair beside a table on which was an inkwell and Lincoln’s signature stovepipe hat—a reminder to viewers that his customary headwear was not a Scotch cap. This was one of seven times Lincoln would sit for Gardner.
Although the five photographs Gardner took that day were not as striking as the 1863 Gettysburg portrait (a frontal close-up of Lincoln looking directly at the camera) or the 1865 one of the gaunt, weary Lincoln (the last known picture of him), the inaugural portrait restored dignity to the much-caricatured Lincoln. In the picture, Lincoln appears calm, unexcited to the point of boredom, as though neither the national crisis nor the uproar over his recent trip has flustered him. The photograph, which was reproduced and widely disseminated, lent visual support to his statements during the trip east that the crisis was artificial and would go away on its own.
“WE MUST NOT BE ENEMIES”
The crisis, of course, was not artificial, and Lincoln knew it. A report came that an attempt on his life would be made during the inaugural parade on March 4. With several government officials promoting conciliation, on the day before the inaugural Lincoln said he was open to having a convention of all states to work out differences between the North and South.
But a repeat of the previous month’s failed Peace Convention was not to be. Nor did anything come of a constitutional amendment proposed by Thomas Corwin of Ohio, which would have prohibited Congress from interfering with slavery in a state—an exercise in redundancy because this provision was already in the Constitution.35
The morning of March 4 was cold and overcast. Lincoln spent the morning meeting with friends and cabinet appointees and looking over his speech. At noon he rode in an open carriage in a procession that led to the Capitol. Rooftop riflemen watched windows, while soldiers guarded the procession. Lincoln entered the Capitol through a boarded tunnel built for the occasion. In the Senate chamber, he witnessed the swearing in of his vice president, Hannibal Hamlin. By the time Lincoln emerged on the portico of the Capitol, a bright sun was shining. With the unfinished Capitol dome and an extended crane above him, he stood on a temporary platform and surveyed the thousands who had come to hear him. Adjusting his spectacles, he opened his manuscript and delivered a thirty-five-minute address that he hoped might heal his torn nation.36
Lincoln’s inaugural address, though conciliatory in parts, did not yield on the principles he held dear, principles that he believed had defined the nation from its founding. He had worked on the address for several weeks before leaving Springfield. Documents he studied while writing the speech, in addition to the Constitution, included George Washington’s Farewell Address (1796), Daniel Webster’s Second Reply to Hayne (1830), Andrew Jackson’s message to Congress on nullification (1833), and Henry Clay’s 1850 speech on South Carolina’s threat to secede.
The common denominator of these classic American texts was their insistence on the absolute inviolability of the Union. Washington, warning Americans to resist “every attempt to alienate any portion of our Country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts,” declared that “a government for the whole is indispensable” to the “permanency of your Union.”37 Webster averred that the federal government is not the agent of state governments but rather is “the People’s Government; made for the People; made by the People; and answerable to the People.”38 Union, Webster said, was just as sacred as liberty. Jackson declared that secession by a state “can not be acknowledged.”39 Clay insisted that the federal government must respond militarily should a state leave the Union.
While he was inspired by these previous leaders, Lincoln faced a crisis that for them had been only imaginary. By the time of his inauguration, seven Southern states had seceded; soon thereafter, four more followed, and the border states hung in the balance. The inaugural address, he knew, must be very cautiously worded. It must affirm the federal government’s resolve to save the Union without pushing the South so hard that reunion became impossible.
Wishing to fine-tune the speech, Lincoln had about a dozen copies of it printed and distributed to friends for their comments. Several of them—David Davis, Carl Schurz, and Francis P. Blair—made no substantive changes, but two, Orville Browning and William Seward, softened his tone. Browning thought Lincoln’s declared intention to “reclaim” US forts taken over by the rebels made the federal government sound too aggressive. Lincoln removed the word, saying, more mildly, that the federal power would be used “to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the
government, and to collect the duties and imposts.”40 Seward suggested thirty-three changes, twenty-seven of which Lincoln accepted, some in modified form. By far the most important was Seward’s suggestion to replace the militant closing line of the original, in which Lincoln left the question of “peace, or a sword” up to the South, with a charitable final paragraph that, in Lincoln’s reworking, became one of the most memorable passages in American oratory, as we’ll see.
On the trip east he had had a scare when the satchel containing the speech was left with a hotel clerk by seventeen-year-old Robert. Uncharacteristically furious with his son, Lincoln rushed to the clerk’s office, clambered over a counter, and sorted through a pile of bags until he found his satchel.
The inaugural address was in some ways a pastiche of the themes he had tested out in his speeches at the railway stops. His moments of hedging or silence were paralleled in the opening lines of the address, where Lincoln said he would not repeat political points laid out in the Republican Party’s platform. The inaugural’s main theme—the impossibility of secession—expanded upon the Indianapolis speech, where he said that a minority cannot overrule the majority. The inaugural’s assurance that the North would not invade the South without provocation recalled Lincoln’s praise of Quakerish “peaceful principles” in Pennsylvania.41 His promise in the inaugural to leave slavery alone where it existed and to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act if the suspected runaways received due process was one he had made at Cleveland.
But the inaugural was far more than the sum of his rail-stop speeches or of arguments made by former presidents. It succeeded as an original statement whose parts were held together by cultural elements that have been largely overlooked.
A main element of the speech, as it turned out, was a dramatic form of the higher law: one that affirmed national unity, preexistent to the Constitution and integrated into it. Lincoln’s answer to Southerners who used states’ rights to defend secession was that there is a higher law than any human law—what he called in the inaugural the “universal law” or “organic law,” “the fundamental law of all national governments.”42
Lincoln summarized this universal law concisely: no nation was formed with its own destruction in mind. Perpetuity was the goal of any nation. “It is safe to assert,” he said, “that no government proper, ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination.”43 In America, Lincoln said, national consolidation originated with the Articles of Association (1774), was made perpetual by the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Articles of Confederation (1781), and then was enacted by the Constitution (1787). The Constitution proclaimed that the aim of the people of the United States was “to form a more perfect union.” Secession, which creates a Union that is “less perfect than before,” was thus “absurd.”
In affirming permanent union as the higher law behind the nation, Lincoln rejected not only the South’s states’ rights argument but, implicitly, the many individualistic versions of the higher law that had appeared in the 1850s. Transcendentalists like Thoreau, who believed that the individual was greater than the state; reformers like Stephen Pearl Andrews, with his doctrine of Individual Sovereignty; John Brown, who resorted to individual violence to dislodge slavery; filibusters like Narciso López and William Walker, who invaded nations to the south—these and other figures had used their own higher laws to defend their actions.
While emphasizing the broader law of nations, Lincoln in the inaugural did not lose sight of the moral law that motivated him and other antislavery reformers. He said, “One section [of the nation] believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended.”44
His unwavering view that slavery was wrong qualified the concessions to the South that he made in the inaugural. When he declared that the Constitution let slavery alone where it already existed—which accounted for his nod to Corwin’s amendment, just passed by Congress—listeners were surely aware of his oft-stated belief that slavery was an evil on the path to extinction. They also must have sensed the tenuousness of his endorsement of the Fugitive Slave Act, which he undercut in the inaugural by saying that “the moral sense of the people is against the law” and that free blacks were often illegally captured and enslaved.45
To subvert the South’s position, he deployed clever rhetorical weapons, some devised by himself, others derived from the general culture. “Physically speaking,” he said, “we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them.” The United States was not, he added, like a husband and wife, who could decide to go their separate ways. The continent—the very earth itself—bound the parts of the nation together. Separation violated the law of nature.
He also appealed to divine law, though in an unusual way. His religious images in the inaugural were more nuanced than those he had used during his trip. In his farewell remarks at Springfield he had said that he could succeed only with God’s help—a banal statement that he repeated in his remarks at Buffalo and Newark. At Lafayette, Indiana, he made the equally trite comment that Americans “are bound together, I trust in christianity, civilization and patriotism” (a statement that offended some American Jews).46
In the inaugural address, he fused religion with democracy: “In our present differences, is either party without faith in the right? If the Almighty Ruler of nations, with his eternal truth and justice, be on our side, or on yours, that truth and that justice will surely prevail, by the judgment of this great tribunal, the American people.” The North and the South, he was saying, each believed that its view was supported by God. Which side was correct must be finally decided by the “great tribunal”: the people. In the 1860 election, the people had decided against slavery. In democratic America, the people’s judgment was equivalent to God’s judgment.
The address achieved a balance between the centripetal and the centrifugal of the sort Walt Whitman considered the highest aim of American democracy. Lincoln named two great dangers to the nation: despotism and anarchy. Despotism would result from an excess of centripetalism: that is, from an overbearing federal government that ignored constitutional rights of states or individuals. Anarchy, on the other hand, resulted from secession, or an overemphasis of states’ rights. “Plainly,” Lincoln declared, “the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy.”47 If a group of states separates from the Union, why cannot one or two states, by the same principle, separate from the newly formed Confederacy? Other divisions would follow. Centrifugalism would reign. Centrifugalism, in turn, invited despotism. The more confused a society is, the higher the risk of a despot seizing power under the guise of bringing things under control. It was a vicious circle. Division in a nation breeds anarchy, which in turn invites despotism.
A respect for majority rule, Lincoln argued, can hold the sections of the nation together. “Whoever rejects it,” he declared, “does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or despotism.”48
An appreciation of shared cultural values could also foster the spirit of union, he indicated. His broadest foray into culture in the inaugural address comes in its famous peroration. Consider his revisions of Seward’s suggested final paragraph, which reached out to the South.
Here is Seward:
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