Given the progressive thrust of the speech, it is no wonder that those who responded to it most passionately were African Americans. A kind of political sermon, the address had the call-and-response rhythms of an evangelical service. Standing behind and above Lincoln on the Capitol steps were black people who murmured “Bless the Lord!” after almost every sentence.89
Among the African Americans in the audience was Frederick Douglass. During the inauguration ceremony, Andrew Johnson spotted Douglass in the crowd and gave him an instinctive look of “bitter contempt and aversion,” which he quickly tried to cover up with “a bland and sickly smile.” Douglass muttered to a friend who stood nearby, “Whatever Andrew Johnson may be, he certainly is no friend of our race.”90 Lincoln made an altogether different impression on Douglass that day. At a White House reception that evening, Douglass made his way to Lincoln, despite having trouble getting past entrance guards because of his color. The president called out, “Here comes my friend Douglass.” The two grasped hands, and Lincoln told Douglass he had seen him in the audience during his address. The president said, “There is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours. I want to know what you think of it?” Douglass replied, “Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.”91
Sacred for African Americans—but how about for others who heard the address or read it in one of its many newspaper reprintings? The overall response was glowing, though some conservatives sharply attacked the address. Lincoln knew that it would not sit well with everyone. He wrote, “I expect [the speech] to wear as well—perhaps better than—any thing I have produced; but I believe it is not immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.”92
Antislavery reviewers were ecstatic. The National Anti-Slavery Standard raved, “Every year Abraham Lincoln grows stronger and stronger in the Anti-Slavery faith. His Inaugural this time is what might fall from the lips of a Garrison.” Garrison’s newspaper, The Liberator, which had once denounced Lincoln because of his apparent caution on slavery, described the Second Inaugural as a singular event in American history:
For once, a President of the United States . . . quotes from Scripture in the interest of justice. He imitates so closely the language and reasoning of the Abolitionists, that the American Anti-Slavery Society itself might suspect him of plagiarism, and search its records for identical utterances. All honor to Abraham Lincoln, that on the day of his re-inauguration, he contemplates but two objects in the universe—the slave and his Maker. All honor and long life!93
And so Lincoln, who had once criticized Garrisonian abolitionists as extreme, by 1865, when a nation without slavery seemed imminent, allowed his long-standing hatred of slavery to come out in a way that delighted the Garrisonians. If Garrison had once publicly burned a copy of the Constitution because he considered it a proslavery document, Lincoln had directed a hard war that opened the way to the amendment that made the Constitution unequivocally antislavery.
The Second Inaugural Address possessed the combined piety and human-rights advocacy of Oliver Cromwell and other Puritan revolutionaries, along with a gentle quality they lacked. The New York Times described a common response to the Second Inaugural: “Many pronounced it a Cromwellian speech, but it had one peculiarity, which Cromwell’s speeches never had—a tone of perfect kindness and good will to all, whether enemies or political opponents.”94
There were some, however, who did not approve the antislavery passion and humaneness of the Second Inaugural. The New-York Freeman’s Journal, a leading Catholic newspaper, bitterly castigated the reinstalled Lincoln as the “greatest official in the new Puritan Nation,” whose administration was merely a “Puritan, Bare Bones, Rump concern” and whose drunken buffoon of a vice president was well suited “to preside over this Puritan Senate.”95 The New York World found Lincoln’s pairing of divine justice with antislavery fervor in his speech as a revival of the nefarious ideals of that latter-day Puritan, John Brown. The World reporter confessed that he read the speech “with a blush of shame,” saying it was a pity that a “divided, suffering nation” was “mocked at in its calamity by a prose parody of ‘John Brown’s Hymn’ from the lips of its chosen Chief Magistrate.”96
Undergirding such criticism was racism. A California newspaper said that “these puritans” who again “called to the bloody throne” their war mongering president had perverse racial attitudes: “In their passion and frenzy they hug the negro with renewed affection, treat him with profound respect, and give him position in the highest and most sacred tribunals of our nation.”97
Racism had raised its head during the inauguration ceremony. The fervent response by blacks to Lincoln’s address riled some white members of the crowd. After the speech, there was a chaotic milling in which blacks were injured. “It is a wonder no one was killed there,” the New York Herald reported. “The darkey suffered most. Soldiers knocked negro women roughly about and called them very uncomplimentary names. . . . Every negro boy got an extra push on account of his color.”98
Also ominous that day were portents of assassination. Frederick Douglass had been so worried about the possibility of Lincoln’s being murdered that during the parade he watchfully followed the presidential carriage, unaware that Mrs. Lincoln was inside it without her husband, who had gone earlier to the Capitol to sign bills. Douglass later reported, “I felt then that there was murder in the air, and I kept close to his carriage on the way to the Capitol, for I felt that I might see him fall that day. It was a vague presentiment.”99
Douglass’s fears were justified. In the audience at Lincoln’s inaugural address was a twenty-six-year-old actor who loathed Lincoln’s message. John Wilkes Booth had been plotting against Lincoln for at least nine months. His original plan of kidnapping the president and taking him South in order to exchange him for Confederate prisoners had been recently obviated by General Grant’s restoration of prisoner exchanges. Booth had murder on his mind. He and some of his fellow conspirators were present at Lincoln’s speech. At one point the movement of the crowd had brought him within striking distance of the president. Booth later said, “What a splendid chance I had to kill the President on the 4th of March!”100
A Southern loyalist and a white supremacist, the Maryland-born Booth regarded Lincoln as a devilish tyrant whose reelection presaged a horrid racial reversal in America. These views were common among Lincoln haters. Why did Booth cling to them so obsessively, and how was he able to act on them with deadly success in a Washington theater six weeks after the second inauguration?
Without understanding the context of the Lincoln assassination—its immediate background and its cultural repercussions—we can’t fully understand Lincoln’s meaning for America
