AFTERMATH AND LEGACY
What did John Wilkes Booth hope to gain through his murderous plot? We get a clue from a conversation he had with John Coyle, a bookkeeper at the anti-Lincoln National Intelligencer, on the morning of his crime. He asked Coyle what would happen if Lincoln was killed. Coyle told him Andrew Johnson would then become president. And how about if Johnson was killed as well? Coyle said vaguely that Americans would be left with “anarchy or whatever Constitution provides.”97 Louis Weichmann, a War Department clerk who knew Booth and later wrote a book about the assassination, was horrified by the thought of what would have happened had Booth and his cohorts succeeded in killing Lincoln, Johnson, Seward, and Grant. According to the Constitution’s line of succession, the presidency would go to the president pro tempore of the Senate, Lafayette Foster of Connecticut, until a new president was chosen under the due forms of law. Weichmann stated that this was all that “would have stood between our government and absolute anarchy or destruction. The human mind recoils in horror at the contemplation of the possibility of the success of such a scheme.”
Anarchy, destruction. That’s what Booth hoped for. Ironically, his effort to create chaos by murdering Lincoln had the opposite effect. No death in history did more to unify Americans than did that of Abraham Lincoln.
That was Walt Whitman’s point in his lecture “The Death of Abraham Lincoln,” which he delivered often between the Civil War and his death in 1892.98 A nation, Whitman noted, is defined by its deaths. Whenever a great person dies, that person becomes a strong unifying force. The “final use,” Whitman wrote, “of a heroic-eminent life—especially of a heroic-eminent death—is its indirect filtering into the nation and the race, and to give . . . a cement to the whole people, subtler, more underlying, than anything in written constitution, or courts or armies—namely, the cement of a death identified thoroughly with that people.” The “heroic-eminent death” has the greatest power of all to “condense—perhaps only really lastingly condense—a Nationality.”
This does not mean that all Americans came together in grief over Lincoln’s death. As Martha Hodes shows, the immediate reactions were remarkably varied, ranging from sincere grief to vindictive glee.99 Those who welcomed the grim news included the South Carolina diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut, who called the assassination “a warning to tyrants,” and the former Virginia governor Henry Wise, who considered John Wilkes Booth an avenging angel who had killed “an inhuman monster.”100 Robert H. Crozier, a former Confederate colonel, in his 1869 book The Bloody Junto, or The Escape of John Wilkes Booth, likened Booth to one of “ancient semigods,” who was “providentially ordered, to save an already ruined country from the lowest depths of political and social degradation.”101 There is a tradition of Booth worshipping, from avid relic gatherers just after the assassination to the Confederate veteran Joseph Pinkney Parker, who in 1904 erected a monument with the words “In honor of John Wilks [sic] Booth / For killing old Abe Lincoln,” to Izola Forrester, allegedly the granddaughter of Booth, who wrote in a 1937 book that “you cannot but feel a deep love for [Booth],” to the Southern radio host and former Rand Paul aide Jack Hunter, who said that he personally raised a toast on every May 10, Booth’s birthday, to Lincoln’s assassin, about whom Hunter declared, “John Wilkes Booth’s heart was in the right place.”102
A corollary tradition, Lincoln hating, has been kept alive by some Americans, mainly right-wing neo-Confederates, who view Lincoln as a violent despot and a flouter of the Constitution who initiated a dangerous ascendancy of black people, destroying the idyllic Old South in the process.103
Nor did Lincoln’s death repair social or cultural division for everyone. The Puritan-Cavalier myth fed into the conflicts of Reconstruction. Radical Northerners said that now that victory was theirs, the Puritan force ruled America. “The rebellion is crushed!” announced a Boston paper. “It is settled that Plymouth, and not Jamestown, is to be the nation’s watchword; the Puritan and not the Cavalier, to be master and pilot here.”104 A Maine preacher declared, “The Puritan has conquered the Cavalier.”105 Such Puritan rhetoric bolstered the Radical Republican program of taking stiff measures against ex-Confederates while supporting emancipated blacks in the South. Opponents of the Radicals answered in kind. The Copperhead Samuel Cox declared that “the Puritan element . . . made war” and now will not permit national unity: “It denounces [Andrew] Johnson as it did Jackson and Jefferson.”106 The president of the South Carolina state convention asked Southerners to “resolve before high heaven that the land which was once the home of the Huguenot and the Cavalier shall never be ruled by the Puritan and the African!”107
The Puritan/Cavalier distinction diminished over time; by the end of the nineteenth century it was largely discarded in the spirit of reunion between the North and the South. The memory of Lincoln was a key factor in the reunion; he was thought to blend the values of the North and the South. Henry Grady’s 1886 speech announcing that the quintessentially average American had been Abraham Lincoln—“the sum of the Puritan and Cavalier,” with “the virtues of both”—opened the way for others who used Lincoln as a model for Grady’s idea that “people of all sections” now saw themselves as “citizens of the same country, members of the same government,— . . . all united now, and united forever.”108 This outlook echoed Whitman’s point that Lincoln’s death provided a “cement to a whole people” more fundamental than “constitutions.” To this day, there is no president who is as more beloved or respected than Lincoln. People on opposite sides of the political spectrum embrace him.
As the Jim Crow period showed, however, there is a danger in political opponents joining together in reverence for Lincoln. A homogenized, nonsectional Lincoln fit all too easily into the mentality of Jim Crow. Henry Grady and other New South spokespersons were white supremacists who placed the apparently moderate Lincoln firmly in their own camp. D. W. Griffith’s virulently racist film The Birth of a Nation (1915) likewise said that with the death of Lincoln the South had lost its “best friend,” resulting in the Radical Republicans’ bringing on a nightmarish period of black supremacy during Reconstruction until the KKK and the Southern redeemers came to the rescue.
This ultraconservative appropriation of Lincoln was highly misleading. We should recall that in Lincoln’s day the Republicans were, in most respects, the progressive party, while the Democrats were the conservatives. Although Lincoln was not as outwardly radical as Republicans such as Thaddeus Stevens or Charles Sumner, inwardly he was just as progressive as they were. He realized that a president, in order to effect change in a deeply divided time, must strike a balance publicly between the left and the right. To avoid deepening an already gaping political and cultural rift, the president must maintain a moderate public position and move at a cautious pace—unless, that is, an immediate crisis such as the secession of eleven states calls for decisive use of presidential war powers. By launching military attacks and periodically suspending habeas corpus, Lincoln did act decisively. But on the issue of slavery, the president waited to act until he felt that the majority of citizens were ready for dramatic change. A lawyer friend of Lincoln’s, Christopher C. Brown, said, “Lincoln was a radical—fanatically so—& yet he never went beyond the People. Kept his views & thoughts to himself.—ie he never told all he felt.”109
“He never went beyond the People.” Brown was hardly alone in pointing out Lincoln’s very close attention to the popular will. Herndon said similarly, “As a politician and a statesman he took no
steps in advance of the great mass of our people.” Before acting, he “made observations, felt the popular pulse; and when he thought that the people were ready he acted, and not before.”110 He did not go beyond the people because, in his very soul, he was one of them. He knew them well—their lives, their tastes, their hopes. The people respected him as Father Abraham, but they loved him as Abe. Honest Abe. Uncle Abe. Old Abe. The epithets were interchangeable. Average folk lined up to see Abe in the White House. He made regular visits to wounded and dying soldiers in the war hospitals. “Uncle Abe is very popular—a shrewd, firm, clear & strong man,” wrote a clergyman in 1862.111 Even the snobby George Templeton Strong admitted in 1863, “Uncle Abe is the most popular man in America today. The firmness, honesty, and sagacity of the ‘gorilla despot’ may be recognized by the rebels themselves sooner than we expect, and the weight of his personal character may do a great deal toward restoration of our national unity.”112 When the president visited a field hospital during his visit to City Point shortly before his assassination, it was Abe whom the wounded soldiers recognized. A Pennsylvania soldier wrote, “Old Abe passed through on a shake hands with all the patients.”113 A New Yorker reported, “Uncle Abe gave us each a word of cheer.”
“Never told all he felt.” Silence and restraint were Lincoln’s ways of not inflaming already heated political passions. Underneath, he was, in Christopher Brown’s words, “fanatically radical,” but at all costs, he avoided flagrant pronouncements, insults, and one-upmanship. Instead, he used constitutional means of achieving his progressive goals.
One of these goals was to create an activist government that would help Americans economically. With all his faith in free enterprise and self-help, he wrote that the government must do not only what people “can not do, at all” but also what they “can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.”114 This is a remarkably expansive vision of governmental power. In Illinois in the 1830s, he had backed huge government projects for roads, canals, and railroads—what today would be called infrastructure. As president, he applied his vision of government-funded infrastructure to the nation by signing into law the Pacific Railway Act of 1862. The transcontinental railroad was completed when the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads were joined at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory, in May 1869. Another of his governmental interventions was the Homestead Act, which opened up tremendous expanses of federal land for inexpensive settlement—a virtual handout of real estate, designed especially for the poor. Yet another government project he signed into law was funding for land grant colleges, which over the years have provided higher education for millions of Americans, many of them people of color. The False Claims Act of 1863 (aka Whistleblower Law or the Lincoln Law) provided a powerful legal weapon over the years that has enabled whistleblowers to expose fraud and corruption in the government. The National Currency Act of 1863 and the National Banking Act of 1864 centralized and regularized the American financial system. The Revenue Act of 1861 introduced the federal income tax. A fair tax from the start, because it did not affect the lower or lower-middle classes, it became truly progressive in 1864 by creating two brackets with increasingly higher tax rates for annual incomes above $5,000 and $10,000 (substantial incomes for that time).
Lincoln’s activist government drove the war effort. A main reason government spending increased tenfold between 1861 and 1865 was the cost of funding a war that rose from $1.5 million a day in 1861 to $3.5 million daily by 1865.115 Despite waste and a certain amount of corruption, the Union war machine worked efficiently, as Lincoln’s cabinet, despite infighting, proved capable of sustaining the Union’s forces on land and at sea. Lincoln and other officials tried out a series of less-than-stellar generals before arriving at the powerful Grant-Sherman-Farragut triad of 1864–65. Lincoln made advances toward civilized war by distributing copies of Francis Lieber’s war code, which anticipated the Geneva Convention by prohibiting cruelty, protecting prisoners of war, and insisting on the emancipation of enslaved persons when encountered.
If Lieber’s code brought a moral dimension to the practice of war, Lincoln brought a similar spirit to the presidency. He dedicated himself to restoring the Union not only through economics, war, and politics but through culture. The humor and storytelling for which he was famous struck his critics as unpresidential but won the hearts of millions and showed that American humor, usually formless or grotesque, could be ethical and instructive. Religion was high on his list for cultural cohesion. He approved “In God We Trust” for American currency, placed the nation “under God” at Gettysburg, and considered adding a religious amendment to the Constitution. Along with a respect for religion went a remarkable tolerance. He embraced people of all faiths and little faith, from the Jewish podiatrist Issachar Zacharie to the Methodist bishop Matthew Simpson and the Quaker Eliza Gurney to the freethinker/spiritualist Robert Dale Owen. Though he personally embraced no church or creed, Lincoln read the Bible, was consoled by it, and tapped it for images that gave his speeches unusual resonance. Responding to the collective agony of war, he issued more proclamations of religion or thanksgiving than any other president. His 1863 proclamation of National Thanksgiving initiated a yearly family ritual in late November that became official when Franklin Roosevelt signed the Thanksgiving Holiday Bill in 1941. Domesticity also permeated Christmas in new ways during Lincoln’s presidency, in large part because the popular illustrator Thomas Nast invented the modern Santa Claus and used the pathos of war to accentuate the joy of family togetherness during soldiers’ furloughs.
Nast also featured family life in perhaps his most stirring Civil War picture: The Emancipation of the Negroes, January 1863—the Past and the Future. A celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation, the picture is separated into three sections. In the left portion, Nast shows the horrors of slavery: fugitives running through a swamp, an enslaved man being sold away from his family, a female being whipped, and a man being branded. The right side of the illustration shows the benefits of emancipation and imagines the lives of freedmen after the war. One group of African Americans sends its children to a public school, another group lines up at a cashier to pick up paychecks, while others befriend their former master or reunite with a lost child. At the heart of Nast’s picture is the African American family, with the mother cooking, the father playing with his baby while four siblings surround them. Lincoln appears in a superimposed portrait in the foreground and in a picture on the wall behind the family—a testament to the fact that his Emancipation Proclamation, though issued under the aegis of military necessity, had tremendous moral and emotional impact on African Americans. Nast’s black people are not caricatures or stereotypes. They are fully human—respectable, dignified, and, most important, together in freedom.
The shared humanity that suffused Nast’s picture also impelled Lincoln to direct his presidency toward equality and justice. In no area was his government as active as in the area of slavery and race. Lincoln’s military commanders led the way in emancipation by accepting fugitive blacks as contraband as early as 1861—followed soon by Congress’s passage of the Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862. James Ashley and other congressional Republicans opened the way to Radical Reconstruction with a bill in 1862. During the next two years, Lincoln established a progressive reconstruction policy in his suggestions for the readmission of Louisiana to the Union without slavery and with citizenship and education for African Americans. He publicized his radical position on slavery and race in language so carefully regulated and persuasive that it did not offend most people. His public letters on Copperheadism and African Americans in the military were so precisely worded that they made their liberal point firmly yet without much controversy. His Gettysburg Address highlighted equality through winning eloquence, and his Second Inaugural aligned the fight against slavery with God’s justice. At challenging points in the war, he ordered John Brown–like infiltrations of the South in order to forcibly liberate the enslaved. Amending the Constitution to abolish slavery absorbed much of his energy as the war proceeded. Even Congress’s approval of the Thirteenth Amendment in January 1865 did not lead him to abandon his vigorous military pursuit of emancipation. Meanwhile, his personal bonding with African Americans such as Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, Sojourner Truth, and Elizabeth Keckly reflected the genuine humanity behind his antislavery activism.
After Lincoln’s assassination, Martin Delany proposed a monument to Lincoln—a kneeling African woman shedding millions of tears for the murdered Great Emancipator. Although Lincoln would have appreciated Delany’s tribute, he would not have wanted people to wallow in tears. He would have wished them to take inspiration from his example and work together to create a more just future.
That goal was captured in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, designed by the architect Henry Bacon and opened in 1922. Inspired by the Athenian Parthenon, the ancient seat of democracy, Bacon created a monument that represented Lincoln’s devotion to national unity. Its thirty-six Doric columns stand for the number of states in 1865. Its terrace is made of Massachusetts granite, the upper steps and outside façade of Colorado marble, the inner walls and columns of Indiana limestone, the ceiling tiles of Alabama marble, and the Lincoln statue of Georgia marble.116
With its neoclassical columns, three inner chambers, and huge marble statue of the seated Lincoln, who would measure twenty-eight feet if standing, the Memorial delivers a message of grandeur. It suggests Father Abraham. But the statue itself gives a different impression. The tousled hair, the overarching brows and wrinkled, hollow cheeks; the mole on the edge of the right cheek; the odd lips, thin on top, bulging on the bottom right; the rumpled clothing and rough boots, the oversize ears and hands and feet— this is the ordinary, approachable Lincoln in a typical state of thoughtful abstraction, caught expertly by the sculptor Daniel Chester French. This is Abe, thinking things over and ready to burst out with a joke or a story—or with an enduring speech like the Gettysburg Address or the Second Inaugural, inscribed on the walls of the Memorial.
Langston Hughes memorably captured the spirit of the statue in his 1926 poem “Lincoln Monument: Washington”:
Let’s go see Old Abe
Sitting in the marble and the moonlight,
Sitting lonely in the marble and the moonlight,
Quiet for ten thousand centuries, old Abe.
Quiet for a million, million years.
Quiet—
And yet a voice forever
Against the
Timeless walls
Of time—
Old Abe.
Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered before a quarter of a million people from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, guided Old Abe’s voice toward the future. “Five score years ago,” King said, “a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.”117 Lincoln’s decree “came as a “joyous daybreak” for millions of enslaved people. But since then, America had betrayed Lincoln’s ideals. Injustice still prevailed. King envisioned a time when “all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’” Affirming national unity, King declared, “With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”
These inspiring words bring us back to Lincoln. At America’s most divided time, Lincoln pushed hard toward justice while keeping the whole nation foremost in his mind. He progressed cautiously, shrewdly, inexorably. With honesty. With humility. With winning humor. And in the end, with his thoughts on all Americans, regardless of party, religion, or race.
His principled vision and his disarming modesty remain an inspiration to everyday Americans and political leaders alike.
Freedom. Equality. Justice for everyone—even for the most marginalized or oppressed—contained within one nation.
This was Abe, in his democratic fullness.
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