he last six weeks of Lincoln’s life, which brought military victory for the North, saw the president come close to achieving what he had long sought: union on different levels. Bonds within his family tightened. Connections also strengthened between the president and his larger family: those who served in the army and navy. The winding down of the war brought the president far closer to African Americans than he had ever been before. Culturally, Lincoln enjoyed the full range of genres during these weeks, from opera and Shakespeare to sentimental poetry to popular music and satirical humor. Most important, he set the stage for a reunited nation that, as he envisaged it, would include a reconstructed South based on freedom and justice.
During the weeks just after the March 4, 1865, inauguration, Lincoln made political appointments for his new administration and watched the military news as it came in from the front. For two days, he was laid up with the flu and held cabinet meetings in his bedroom. In three successive weeks in March, he and Mary saw operas—Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha, Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and Francois-Adrieu Boieldieu’s La Dame Blanche—at Grover’s Theatre.
On March 20, General Grant invited the president to visit his headquarters at City Point, Virginia, writing, “I think the rest will do you good.”1 On Thursday, March 23, Lincoln, Mary, and Tad, accompanied by a bodyguard and an army officer, set off on the steamer River Queen to City Point, where they arrived the next evening. The family met up with Robert, who was now a captain under Grant. Over the next sixteen days, Lincoln visited battlefields and mingled with Union soldiers, sailors, and officers. He reviewed troops and went to field hospitals. In his memorable tour of the Depot Field Hospital, a sprawling array of tents and barracks covering two hundred acres, he walked from cot to cot, greeting thousands of soldiers—so many that by the end of the day his hand ached badly.2
The high point of his trip was his visit to Richmond on April 4, the day after it had fallen to Union troops. (Significantly, General Godfrey Weitzel’s Twenty-fifth Army Corps, composed of all black troops, was the first unit to invade the city.) April 4 was Tad’s twelfth birthday. A naval rowing barge, manned by twelve oarsmen, took the father and son on the James River from a navy steamer to the Richmond shore. Once on land, Lincoln took Tad by the hand and walked through the city. The day was unusually warm. Dust rose from the dry streets, and the air reeked with the acrid smoke of the burning structures and provisions that the rebels had torched before they vacated the city. The president and his son proceeded under a light guard to the house of Jefferson Davis, where the perspiring Lincoln sat in Davis’s leather-covered easy chair, had a glass of water, and met for a time with General Weitzel and a Southern representative, John A. Campbell. After spending about an hour in the house, Lincoln and Tad were taken by carriage to other parts of the city and finally to a wharf, where a rowboat took the president out to the USS Malvern, where he and his son stayed the night.
The most notable aspect of Lincoln’s Richmond visit was the response of the city’s black people, who greeted the president with frenzied enthusiasm. A freedwoman spotted the tall Lincoln in his long overcoat and stovepipe hat. When someone told her, “There is the man who made you free,” she jumped up and down, yelling, “Glory! Glory! Glory!”3 Soon her words were taken up by a mass of the formerly enslaved, who were swept up in ecstasy. To them, Lincoln was a liberating god. Hats, handkerchiefs, and scarves waved in the air, as the freed people cheered and shouted: “Glory to God! glory! glory! glory!”; “I thank you, dear Jesus, that I behold President Lincoln!”; “Bless the Lord, there comes the Messiah. There is Massa Abram Lincoln sure enough!” At one point, an elderly black man walked up to Lincoln and prayed aloud for his safety. To the shock of a white person present, Lincoln raised his hat and bowed to the man.
The joyful blacks pressed so close to Lincoln that it took a full hour for him, Tad, and their military escorts to walk from the shore to Davis’s house, a distance of only a mile. When he and his son emerged from the house and got into a waiting carriage, the African Americans were still there, and they followed him for the rest of his Richmond tour, beyond a statue of Washington and the Libby Prison to the wharf, to be rowed out to the Malvern.
Lincoln’s tour was exhilarating for him but anxiety producing for officers assigned to him, who feared he would be assassinated at any moment. The unrestrained enthusiasm of Richmond’s blacks made the situation especially volatile because the white Southerners who remained in the city were disgusted by the sight of the Yankee president being worshipped and touched by black people. As a reporter noted, “Abraham Lincoln was walking their streets; and, worst of all, that plain, honest-hearted man was recognizing the ‘niggers’ as human beings by returning their salutations!”4 Later that day, Lincoln confronted this hostile attitude when an old political acquaintance, the Jacksonian Democrat Duff Green, visited him on the Malvern. Lincoln smiled and extended his hand to Green, who refused to take a hand “red with blood,” which had “cut the throats of a thousand of my people.”5 Green hissed, “I do not know how God and your conscience will let you sleep at night after being guilty of the notorious crime of setting the niggers free.”6 Green continued to vilify the president, who, according to one observer, berated Green harshly, although another witness said that Lincoln remained silent and dismissed Green from his presence.7 (Given Lincoln’s customary behavior, the latter account seems probable.)
Reportedly, there was another man that evening who wanted to see the president. Lincoln was informed that there was a man on the shore who wanted to be brought by boat out to the Malvern in order to deliver a military dispatch from a general to the president. But the man, who insisted on seeing Lincoln in person, had no military credentials. Highly suspicious, the commander of the Malvern, Admiral David Dixon Porter, ordered sailors to bring the man out to the ship and, once aboard, to handcuff him. Sailors rowed to fetch the man, but by the time they reached shore, he had fled. Porter, who had seen the man through his binoculars, later testified that the man was “without a doubt” John Wilkes Booth.8
Whether or not Porter was correct, we do know that Booth, who shared Duff Green’s attitude toward Lincoln, would have been horrified by the intimacy exhibited that day between the president and African Americans. Booth had already missed the chance to kill Lincoln at the inauguration on March 4. He was pursuing his goal relentlessly.
Another chance came soon enough. This time, Booth would not bungle it.
LINCOLN’S LAST DAY
April 14, 1865. Good Friday that year. Washington, DC, was giddy with triumph. It had been exactly four years since the Confederates had seized Fort Sumter. With Lincoln’s advice from a distance, a four-year anniversary ceremony was held that day in South Carolina, in which General Robert Anderson, who had surrendered to the rebels in 1861, raised the US flag over the fort before a large crowd.
In the capital city, Lincoln reconnected that day with his immediate family and planned for his and the nation’s future.
Always affectionate to Tad, he had recently shown extra kindness to the boy. Having taken Tad with him on the trip to City Point, after their return to Washington on April 10, he requested military souvenirs for him from cabinet members. “Tad wants some flags. Can he be accommodated[?]” he wrote Edwin Stanton, and to Gideon Welles: “Let Master Tad have a Navy sword.”9 On the fourteenth he would give Tad a special treat by letting him to go to Grover’s Theatre to see Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp.
Lincoln’s twenty-one-year-old son, Captain Robert Lincoln, visiting Washington from the Virginia front, breakfasted with the president on the fourteenth, and told him details of Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House. One can almost hear Robert’s account: the dignified, white-bearded fifty-eight-year-old Lee, in full Confederate regalia, rode up on his gray horse Traveller, dismounted, entered Wilmer McLean’s brick house, talked terms with the cigar- puffing, forty-two-year-old Grant, who was shabbily dressed and wearing dirty boots. After three hours, the defeated but proud Lee emerged from the building, mounted Traveller, soberly tipped his cap after Grant and other officers had lifted their hats to him, and rode off. After his son had told the story, Lincoln looked at a portrait of General Lee that Robert had brought with him and remarked, “It is a good face. It is the face of a noble, brave man. I am glad that the war is over at last. If he bonded that day with his son, Lincoln also enjoyed special happiness with Mary. On an afternoon carriage ride around the city, she said she had never seen him so “supremely happy.” She remarked, “Dear Husband, you almost startle me, by your great cheerfulness.” He replied, “And well I may feel so, Mary, I consider this day, the war has come to a close. We must both be more cheerful in the future—between the war & the loss of our darling Willie—we have both been very miserable.”11 Happy memories poured forth. The Springfield home, the law office, his adventures on the law circuit, the green bag in which he used to carry his papers—familiar images from the past revived the warmth between the husband and wife.12 Looking to the future, they agreed they would travel, perhaps to Europe or out to California
California also came up in a meeting he had that day with the Indiana congressman Schuyler Colfax, who planned to visit the Golden State soon. Lincoln told Colfax that the mines of California could help pay off the nation’s war debt. The president gave the congressman a message for the miners. “Visit all the mining regions,” he said. “Tell the miners I have not forgotten them or their interests—tell them that I look to them to redeem this nation from its great debt— . . . that the government will do all it can to hasten the development of the vast wealth hid in their mountain sides and along their valleys.”14 The president who had fostered economic nationalism by creating a big-spending government during the war was thinking about bolstering the nation’s specie reserves.
He was also thinking about the reconstruction of the South. One of the unknowns of history is how Lincoln would have handled Reconstruction had he lived. Once toward the end of the war he gave out a conservative signal, but it turned out to be a momentary anomaly.
His interest in restoring the Union quickly led him in early April to hint to the Virginian John Campbell that the state’s former Confederate legislature, which now was in flight, could be brought back to Richmond to help terminate Southern military activities. The prospect of a reconvened Confederate legislature appalled Lincoln’s cabinet, especially Edwin Stanton. Lincoln realized he had taken precipitate action. Campbell had already begun to call back the Virginia lawmakers when Lincoln sent instructions to General Weitzel in Richmond that he had not meant that he would recognize the Confederate legislature as “a rightful body,” with the power to “settle all differences with the federal government.” Lincoln said he had only allowed “the gentlemen who have acted as the legislature of Virginia in support of the rebellion” to stifle Southern resistance to Union forces.15 Lincoln quickly withdrew his offer to Campbell.
The war, overall, had radicalized Lincoln’s view of future race relations in America. On the surface, his stated plan for Reconstruction seemed more conservative than that of Radical Republicans, because he asked that only 10 percent of registered Louisiana voters swear loyalty to the Union before the state was readmitted to the Union, while radicals like Benjamin F. Wade and Henry Winter Davis demanded that 50 percent of Louisianans take the loyalty oath. But his plan, which mandated emancipation, accorded with his goal of restoring union with freedom as efficiently as possible. His attorney general had argued in 1862 that American-born blacks were citizens under the Constitution. Lincoln took important strides toward calling for black citizenship in his March 1864 letter to the Louisianan Michael Hahn, saying that giving blacks the vote would help “keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom,” and in his last speech, on April 11, 1865, in which he called publicly for limited suffrage for African Americans.16
His lack of programmatic statements on Reconstruction reflected his experimental approach. He was ready to adapt to developing circumstances. By April 1865 he had reached a progressive place on Reconstruction. There can be little doubt that he would not have followed the pattern of his successor, Andrew Johnson, who at first seemed tough on ex-Confederates but then quickly reversed course, issuing numerous pardons to white Southerners and restricting the rights of African Americans. An ex-slaveholder and an unapologetic white supremacist, Johnson resuscitated states’ rights after the war and held that the federal government had no business forcing black citizenship on the South.17
Lincoln, in contrast, saw the complexity of reconstruction and possessed a deep social conscience that Johnson lacked. For his entire political life, Lincoln had been forging unity and direction out of apparent chaos. He had done so with the fragmented Illinois Whig Party, with the political shards that became the Republican Party, and, as president, with his diverse cabinet and generals. He faced another muddle in Reconstruction, which was, he said in his last speech, “fraught with great difficulty” because “we must begin with, and mould from, disorganized and discordant elements.”18 Not only were there conflicting views of it within his own party (conservatives called for leniency to the South, radicals for vindictive punishment), but as Lincoln said, “so great peculiarities pertain to each state; and such important and sudden changes occur in the same state” that “no exclusive, and inflexible plan can safely be prescribed as to details and colatterals [sic].” He was certain of one thing: the resolution must come from above—that is, from the federal government. He and the congressional radicals agreed on this point, though he assigned principal power to the executive branch, while the Radicals emphasized Congress’s role. He and they agreed on what he called “the restoration of the national authority throughout all the States.”19 Indeed, he literally equated a powerful central government with Reconstruction in his last speech, where he said the problem of the day was “the re-inauguration of the national authority—reconstruction.” Because in the same speech he recommended that “the elective franchise” be given at least to blacks who were “very intelligent” or who had served in the military, we see that he was prepared to flex the government’s muscles in order to guide the nation toward civil rights.
That is how the antislavery radicals who were present at his last cabinet meeting, held in the early afternoon of April 14, interpreted his attitude. His attorney general, James Speed, wrote that Lincoln “very cheerfully” took up Reconstruction, admitting that he had been wrong in bringing up the reconvening of Virginia’s legislature and that he now wanted to treat the South strictly. Speed wrote his fellow radical Salmon Chase, “He never seemed so near our views.”20 Edwin Stanton, also present at the meeting, believed that the president now fully supported suffrage for blacks.21
Other radicals felt the same way. The abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, a former critic of Lincoln’s, wrote around that time, “I think we have reason to thank God for Abraham Lincoln,” noting that “he has grown continually.”22 Senator Charles Sumner, who had once complained of Lincoln’s slowness on civil rights, wrote, “The more I have seen of the Prest the more his character has risen in certain respects.”
Although we cannot know for certain how Lincoln would have acted in the postbellum years, it is significant that Schuyler Colfax, with whom he discussed Reconstruction at length on his final day, was a strong advocate of rights for African Americans.
Colfax, who would become vice president under U. S. Grant, was an ardent supporter of citizenship for blacks and a leader of Radical Reconstruction. As early as 1850, as a Whig speaker at Indiana’s state constitutional convention, he had denounced legislators who “declare the negro a brute, by excluding him from the commonest, the poorest, the humblest privileges of human beings”; he insisted that his associates must treat blacks “with humanity, and not to crush them as you would vermin out of your sight.”23 As Speaker of the US House of Representatives between 1863 and 1869, Colfax played a prominent role in the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment and in the impeachment proceedings against President Johnson. At a time when the House Speaker did not customarily cast votes for congressional bills, he demanded that his vote be counted on behalf of the Thirteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the Fourteenth Amendment.24
Dedicated to improving the Constitution, Colfax also shared Lincoln’s reverence for the Declaration of Independence. In November 1865 he went so far as to say, “The Declaration of Independence must be recognized as the law of the land, and every man, alien and native, white and black, protected in the inalienable rights of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ The blacks must be protected in their rights of person and property, to sue in court and to testify.”25 Like Lincoln, Colfax believed that the Constitution embodied the Declaration’s ideal of human equality. General Lew Wallace called Colfax’s 1865 speech “the greatest act of Colfax’s life,” because “it was at once accepted by Republicans in Congress as their programme of Reconstruction.” Wallace added, “If Abraham Lincoln earned immortality as the great Emancipationist, Schuyler Colfax should share the glory, for it was he who first moved to protect the freeman in his freedom.”26 Colfax himself, however, gave the glory to Lincoln. In a eulogy to the murdered president, he declared that Lincoln would “live in the grateful hearts of the dark-browed race he lifted from under the heel of the oppressor to the dignity of manhood.
