Lincoln Part 56

It was a remarkably impersonal address. After the opening paragraph, Lincoln did not use the first-person-singular p.r.o.noun, nor did he refer to anything he had said or done during the previous four years. Notably lacking from his brief account of how the war began was any attribution of blame. "All dreaded it-all sought to avert it." But one of the parties to the conflict-throughout, he carefully avoided referring to the South or the Confederacy-"would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish." Interrupted by a burst of applause at this point, Lincoln continued, "And the war came." Slavery was, "somehow, the cause of the war." It was the one inst.i.tution that divided the nation. The people of both sections had shared values; they "read the same Bible, and pray to the same G.o.d, and each invokes His aid against the other." In his one deviation from impartiality between the sections, Lincoln felt obliged to remark that "it may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just G.o.d's a.s.sistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces," but he promptly added, "Let us judge not that we be not judged."

Lincoln then sought, both for himself and for the American people, an explanation of why the war was so protracted. His answer showed no trace of any late-at-night anguish over his own responsibility for the conflict. If there was guilt, the burden had been shifted from his shoulders to those of a Higher Power. The war continued because "the Almighty has His own purposes," which are different from men's purposes. This, Lincoln said later, was "a truth which I thought needed to be told," because to deny it was "to deny that there is a G.o.d governing the world."

He might have put his argument in terms of the doctrine of necessity, in which he had long believed; but that was not a dogma accepted by most Americans. In an earlier private meditation he had concluded that it was "probably true-that G.o.d wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end," thinking it "quite possible that G.o.d's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party" to the conflict. But that was too gnostic a doctrine to gain general credence. Addressing a devout, Bible-reading public, Lincoln knew he would be understood when he invoked the familiar doctrine of exact retribution, the belief that the punishment for a violation of G.o.d's law would equal the offense itself. Quoting from Matthew, he announced, "Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!" That warning might seem to apply only to slaveholders, but Lincoln had consistently held Northerners as well as Southerners responsible for introducing slavery and for protecting it under the Const.i.tution. Consequently, as G.o.d now willed to remove the offense of slavery, he gave "to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came."

How long, then, would the war last, and when would retribution cease? In the summer of 1864, Lincoln had said that the war might go on for three more years. More recently he had spoken of another year, or at least another hundred days, of fighting. Now he offered no promises. Early in the address he said flatly, "With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured." Returning to the subject, he made no firmer pledge: "Fondly do we hope-fervently do we pray-that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pa.s.s away." Then he went on to add one of the most terrible statements ever made by an American public official: "Yet, if G.o.d wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.'"

This was a harsh doctrine, but it was one that absolved both the South and the North of guilt for the never ending bloodshed. And, by leaving the execution of this sanguinary judgment to the Almighty, Lincoln could turn in his final paragraph to the more limited responsibilities of mortals. Here he had a chance to voice his deeply held sense of the nation's debt to those who had fought, suffered, and died in the army and navy. Recently he had expressed that feeling in a beautiful letter to Mrs. Lydia Bixby, a Boston widow who, he was told, was "the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle." "I pray that our Heavenly Father may a.s.suage the anguish of your bereavement," he wrote her, "and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom." Now he returned to that theme, promising "to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan."

With soaring eloquence Lincoln concluded his address: "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as G.o.d gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds;... to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations."

After immense applause, Lincoln turned to Chief Justice Chase, and, laying his right hand on an open page of the Bible, repeated after him the oath of office, ending with an emphatic "So help me G.o.d!" He then kissed the Bible and, as a salvo of artillery boomed and the crowd cheered, he began his second term.

Except for Copperhead journals like the Chicago Times, which denounced the speech as "so slip shod, so loose-joined, so puerile" that "by the side of it, mediocrity is superb," most newspapers gave Lincoln's second inaugural address a respectful if somewhat puzzled reception. In general, English editors praised it more highly than did the Americans. But the Washington National Intelligencer felt the President's final words, "equally distinguished for patriotism, statesmanship, and benevolence," deserved "to be printed in gold."

Lincoln was not troubled that his address was not immediately popular. He recognized that "men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them." But he was pleased when it received praise. He positively beamed when Frederick Dougla.s.s, who was in the throng at the White House reception after the inauguration, p.r.o.nounced it "a sacred effort." As Lincoln told Thurlow Weed, he expected it "to wear as well as-perhaps better than-any thing I have produced." "Lots of wisdom in that doc.u.ment, I suspect," he said as he filed away his ma.n.u.script.

VII

Lincoln was so exhausted after the inauguration ceremonies that he took to his bed for a few days. There was nothing organically wrong. Despite his sedentary work, he continued to be a physically powerful man, but he often felt terribly tired. For some time he had been losing weight, and strangers now noted his thinness rather than his height. Though he was only fifty-six, observers at the second inauguration thought he looked very old. His photographs showed a face heavily lined, with sunken cheeks. Joshua Speed, who had not seen the President for some time, was shocked to find him looking so "jaded and weary." "Speed," said Lincoln, "I am a little alarmed about myself; just feel my hand." It was, remembered Speed, "cold and clammy," and his feet were obviously cold, too, for he put them so near the fire that they steamed.

Mary worried about his health. "Poor Mr. Lincoln is looking so brokenhearted, so completely worn out," she told Elizabeth Keckley, her dressmaker, "I fear he will not get through the next four years." For months she had been urging her husband to keep a lighter schedule, and in order to get him away from his desk she encouraged him to go to the theater frequently. He attended both Grover's Theatre on E Street between Thirteenth and Fourteenth streets, and Ford's Theatre on Tenth Street, between E and F streets. Usually Mary accompanied him, but occasionally he went with Tad or with one or both of his secretaries, and occasionally the Lincolns made up a small party of friends to occupy the presidential box. He enjoyed all sorts of theatrical entertainment, including Barney Williams, the blackface minstrel and Irish comedian, and he attended numerous plays that were little noted nor long remembered, like Leah, starring Avonia Jones, and The Marble Heart, featuring the brilliant young actor John Wilkes Booth.

Shakespeare's plays appealed to him most. As a boy, he had memorized the soliloquies contained in William Scott's Lessons in Elocution, and in Springfield he owned and frequently read his own copy of Shakespeare's works, but he had never seen Shakespeare performed on the stage until he became President. After that he rarely missed an opportunity. In February and March 1864, at one of the most dangerous periods of the war, he took time off from his duties to see the great tragedian Edwin Booth perform in Richard III, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet.

He enjoyed them all. Shakespeare's wit delighted him, and he was enchanted by the magic of his language. The great tragedies, with their stories of linked ambition and guilt, especially appealed to him. As an often lonely leader, he found it easy to identify with Shakespeare's heroes; he could sympathize with their fears and understand their anxieties. "It matters not to me whether Shakespeare be well or ill acted," he remarked; "with him the thought suffices." Still, he had decided ideas about how the plays should be performed. He insisted, for instance, that the choicest part of Hamlet was not the familiar "To be or not to be" soliloquy but King Claudius's meditation "O my offence is rank, it smells to heaven."

Once his fondness for Shakespeare led to an embarra.s.sment. In August 1863, after seeing James H. Hackett as Falstaff in Henry IV, he wrote the actor commending his performance and expressing the hope that he would have a chance to make his personal acquaintance when he next performed in Washington. The President went on to say that he had never read some of Shakespeare's plays but that he had gone over others-mentioning King Lear, Richard III, Henry VIII, Hamlet, and Macbeth-"perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader." "I think nothing equals Macbeth," he added. "It is wonderful." Though the letter was intended to be personal, Hackett printed and distributed it, and newspapers had a field day, criticizing the President as would-be dramatic critic. To Hackett's apology Lincoln replied that the hostile comments "const.i.tute a fair specimen of what has occurred to me through life." He added, in one of his most perfectly balanced sentences: "I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it."

Mary Lincoln also tried to divert her husband by going with him to concerts and the opera. The President was so impressed by the singing of Felicita Vestvali-"Magnificent Vestvali," as the newspapers called her-that he attended her long-forgotten musical play called Gamea, or the Jewish Mother not once but twice, and within a week returned to hear her in two other musical dramas. After 1863, when New York opera companies began offering a special Washington season, the Lincolns were regular patrons. They attended performances of Gounod's Faust, Weber's Der Freischutz, and Flotow's Martha, among others. Few of the President's comments on the music were recorded, but in March when he heard The Magic Flute, he remarked to Colonel James Grant Wilson that the exceptionally large, flat feet of one of the leading female singers meant "the beetles wouldn't have much of a chance there!" During most of the opera, Wilson recalled, the President "sat in the rear of the box leaning his head against the part.i.tion, paying no attention to the play and looking... worn and weary." When Wilson asked if he was enjoying the opera, Lincoln replied: "Oh, no, Colonel; I have not come for the play, but for the rest. I am being hounded to death by office-seekers, who pursue me early and late, and it is simply to get two or three hours' relief that I am here." But when Mary asked if he would like to leave before the ending, he said: "Oh, no, I want to see it out. It's best when you undertake a job, to finish it."

When he was too tired to be diverted by either drama or opera, the President was able to forget his work and his worries only during the carriage rides Mary arranged to take with him several afternoons a week. These were times for quiet conversation, when Lincoln remembered the past and planned for the future. Though he was only into the first weeks of his second term, he looked forward to the end of his administration, when, he told Mary, he wanted to take the whole family to Europe. After that "he intended to return and go to California over the Rocky Mountains and see the prospects of the soldiers etc. etc. digging gold to pay the National debt." He was not sure where they would ultimately make their home. Earlier he had always talked of returning to Springfield and practicing law, but now he thought less about settling than of "roving and travelling."

Lincoln could afford to think in rosy terms of the future. Unaware of the very considerable debts Mary had acc.u.mulated, he was confident that he and his wife were comfortably provided for. His estate had been worth about $15,000 in 1861, but it had grown rapidly during the war years. Most of his expenses while living in the White House were covered by congressional appropriations, so that he was able to save the bulk of his $25,000 annual salary and invest it in Treasury notes or certificates of deposit. Interest and premiums on this paper, which amounted to nearly $10,000 over four years, he promptly reinvested. Because he did not have time properly to manage his funds-indeed, at the time of his death there were four uncashed salary warrants in his desk-he turned to Chase for advice, and in June 1864 brought over to the Secretary's desk "a confused ma.s.s of Treasury notes, Demand notes, Seven-thirty notes, and other representatives of value" and asked for help in reinvesting his funds in government bonds. By April 1865 he owned, in addition to his house in Springfield, two hundred acres of land in Iowa, a town lot in Lincoln, Illinois, and nearly $60,000 in government securities-not an inconsiderable sum, and one certain to double in the next four years.

During these few quiet weeks after the second inauguration, the Lincolns had a chance to talk about Robert, who was now in the army. After graduating from Harvard in 1864, the President's oldest son wanted to enlist. Indeed, he had been under considerable pressure to do so for some time, because critics did not hesitate to brand him a "shirker," who was "old enough and strong enough to serve his country." But his mother was afraid; she had already lost two sons, and she grew hysterical at the possibility of losing another. When her husband tried to intercede for the boy, she replied, "Of course, Mr. Lincoln, I know that Robert's plan to go into the Army is manly and n.o.ble and I want him to go, but oh! I am frightened he may never come back to us." Unwilling to do anything to upset his wife's precarious emotional balance, Lincoln encouraged Robert to go to Harvard Law School, but when he came home for the Christmas vacation in 1864, he was determined to "see something of the war before it ends." In January, finally overcoming Mary's resistance, Lincoln, writing "as though I was not President, but only a friend," asked whether Grant could give Robert "some nominal rank" and allow him to join his military family. Promptly Grant welcomed the young man and commissioned him a captain. Grant made sure that Robert was not exposed to danger, and his princ.i.p.al duty was to escort visitors to the Army of the Potomac from one place to another.

VIII

On March 20, at Mrs. Grant's prompting, General Grant invited the President to come down to army headquarters at City Point for a few days, suggesting that the rest would do him good. Lincoln accepted immediately, adding that Mrs. Lincoln "and a few others" would come with him. Despite a furious gale, the Lincolns, accompanied by Tad, Mary Lincoln's maid, White House guard William H. Crook, and Captain Charles Penrose, a.s.signed by Stanton to protect the President, boarded the River Queen and sailed down the Potomac on March 23.

They were eager to get away from Washington, which Mary thought was a place filled with their enemies and which Lincoln knew was a city filled with office-seekers. They wanted to learn how Robert was faring in the army. And, most of all, they needed rest.

They did not get much of it at City Point, where they were welcomed with a round of lunches, dinners, receptions, parties, and dances. Tad probably had the best time. Aboard the River Queen his "investigating mind led him everywhere," and, Crook reported, he "studied every screw of the engine and knew and counted among his friends every man of the crew." Once on land, he was a special pet of the soldiers, and he was allowed to accompany his father everywhere.

Though Lincoln was unwell aboard the River Queen, he began to feel better once he was away from Washington and from the press of office-seekers. On his first day at City Point he rode out on a special train to General Meade's headquarters, where he saw evidence of recent fighting, heard a terrific Union bombardment of the Confederate lines at Petersburg, and witnessed an attack by the Sixth Corps on the enemy picket line. The next morning he had a chance to greet General Sheridan's troops, which had cleaned the Confederates out of the Shenandoah Valley and had come to a.s.sist Grant in the final campaign against Richmond. That afternoon he reviewed part of General Edward O. C. Ord's Army of the James at Malvern Hill. On another day Lincoln visited the army field hospital at City Point, where for more than five hours he moved from tent to tent, greeting each patient, pausing at the bedside of the seriously ill or wounded, and making a point of shaking hands with the hospitalized Confederates.

He had very little time for relaxation, and his "very care-worn and fatigued appearance" reappeared whenever he let his guard down. In particular, Mary reported, he found that the visit to the hospital, "although a labor of love, to him, fatigued him very much." But the cheers of the troops that he reviewed and the demonstrations of the sailors on the vessels he pa.s.sed in the James River were exhilarating, and he gained strength from the scent of coming victory.

On the whole, the Union soldiers and their officers were pleased by their President. To be sure, the very superior young Boston aristocrat Colonel Theodore Lyman, attached to Meade's headquarters, found him "the ugliest man I ever put my eyes on," with an offensive "expression of plebeian vulgarity in his face"; but after some conversation with the President, Lyman concluded he was "a very honest and kindly man," who looked "much like a highly intellectual and benevolent Satyr." "I never wish to see him again," the colonel dismissed his commander-in-chief, "but, as humanity runs, I am well content to have him at the head of affairs."

Mary Lincoln had a bad time on the trip down the Potomac on the River Queen. Highly nervous, she was greatly upset when her husband made the mistake of telling her that he dreamed the White House was on fire, and she insisted on sending not one but two telegrams to Washington to be sure everything was all right. At army headquarters she felt out of place, and the few other women who were present, like Julia Grant and Mary Ord, seemed not to pay sufficient deference to the wife of the President of the United States. Lincoln, intent on fulfilling his many obligations, gave her too little attention and a.s.sumed that she could cope in his absence. She could not.

When Ord's troops were to be reviewed at Malvern Hill, the President and most of the men rode ahead on horseback, leaving Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Grant to proceed in an ambulance over roads calf-deep in mud. A sudden jolt bounced the ladies against the top of the carriage, crushing their bonnets and b.u.mping their heads. Mary, who had never fully recovered from her 1863 carriage accident, probably had an attack of migraine. When she finally arrived at the site of the review, she discovered that it had begun without her. Her husband was riding down the lines accompanied by Mrs. Ord, a strikingly handsome young woman, whose appearance must have reminded Mary that she had now become corpulent and her face heavy, with permanent down-turned lines. When Mrs. Ord rode up to pay her respects, Mary, now hysterical, "positively insulted her, called her vile names ..., and asked what she meant by following up the President."

That night before the guests at dinner aboard the River Queen, Mary repeatedly attacked her husband for flirting with Mrs. Ord and demanded that General Ord be removed from command. Deeply mortified, the President tried to ignore his wife's remarks, but she continued her tirade of abuse until late in the night. For the next several days, ill and embarra.s.sed, she spent most of her time in her cabin, and on April 1, to her husband's undoubted relief, she went back to Washington, leaving Tad with his father.

Once his wife was out of the picture, Lincoln could reveal that recreation was not his only object in going to City Point. His greatest worry now was that Union generals might let victory slip through their hands. Grant, preparing to launch the final a.s.sault of the Army of the Potomac against Petersburg, felt that the President's anxiety was unwarranted. So did Sherman, who had now pushed into the Carolinas and was so sure of success that he felt able to leave his army and come up to City Point for a final conference on strategy. But Lincoln had had too many experiences with overconfident commanders, and he knew how wily and dangerous the Confederates still were. Again and again during his two weeks at the front, he expressed concern that Lee might break away from Grant, lead his forces into North Carolina, where they could join the remnants of the Confederate army again under Joseph E. Johnston, and either fight another great battle or escape south to continue the war. He feared that Johnston might slip out of Sherman's grasp and "be off South again with those hardy troops of his." "Yes," he told the general, "he will get away if he can, and you will never catch him until after miles of travel and many b.l.o.o.d.y battles."

Equally important was the President's determination to keep control of any peace negotiations generally thought to be in the offing. Old Francis P. Blair on his mission to Richmond had made the dangerous suggestion that Grant and Lee should get together to talk about peace terms, and the Confederate commissioners at Hampton Roads had worked through Grant to secure the conference they desired with the President. More recently, Lee had directly approached Grant asking "an interchange of views" on "the subjects of controversy between [the] belligerents," and the President had been obliged to tell his commanding general that he must "have no conference with General Lee unless it be for the capitulation of General Lee's army." "Such questions," Lincoln directed, "the President holds in his own hands, and will submit them to no military conferences or conventions."

Lincoln was not just ordering the generals to follow protocol; he wanted to make sure that any negotiations led not merely to a suspension of fighting but to a peace that would ensure his war aims of Union, Emanc.i.p.ation, and at least limited Equality. His worst fear, which he repeatedly expressed, was that once the Confederate armies were defeated Southern soldiers "would not return to their homes to accept citizenship under a hated rule; and with nothing but desolation and want through the South, the disbanded Confederate soldiers would be tempted to lawlessness and anarchy." Consequently his objective was to secure not merely peace but reconciliation. Bringing Grant, Sherman, and Admiral David D. Porter together for a conference aboard the River Queen on March 28, Lincoln discussed the approaching end of the war and talked of offering the most generous terms in order to "get the deluded men of the rebel armies disarmed and back to their homes." "Let them once surrender and reach their homes," he said, "[and] they won't take up arms again. Let them all go, officers and all, I want submission, and no more bloodshed.... I want no one punished; treat them liberally all round. We want those people to return to their allegiance to the Union and submit to the laws."

CHAPTER TWENTY - ONE

I Will Take Care of Myself

The visit to City Point rejuvenated Lincoln. Once he was away from the nagging pressures of Washington, his health returned. Buoyed by the adulation of the soldiers and exhilarated by the sense that final victory over the Confederacy was at hand, he had a new sense of strength. After his visit to the army hospital, where he shook hands with patients for several hours, a surgeon expressed fear that his arm must ache from the exertion. The President smiled and, saying that he had "strong muscles," picked up a heavy ax that lay beside a log. He chopped away vigorously for a few minutes and then, taking the ax in his right hand, extended it horizontally, holding it steady without even a quiver. After he left, some strong soldiers attempted to duplicate his feat but failed.

Lincoln had every right to be pleased with himself. After four exhausting years he was now fully master of the almost impossible job to which he had been elected. The only Chief Executive elected for two terms since Andrew Jackson, he was unquestionably the choice of the American people, not a minority or accidental President. He headed an administration, and a bureaucracy, that followed his leadership. As party leader, he commanded overwhelming support in both houses of Congress. He was commander-in-chief of the largest military and naval forces the country had ever raised, and at last they were functioning with machinelike efficiency. The United States Navy controlled the ocean and, after the capture of Fort Fisher, off Wilmington, North Carolina, in January, was strangling the Confederacy with its blockade. As Sherman's tough Western army cornered Joseph E. Johnston's weakened forces in North Carolina, Grant was moving to the south of Petersburg and Richmond. On April 1 he launched an attack with Sheridan's dismounted cavalry and Gouverneur K. Warren's Fifth Corps that crumpled Lee's right flank in the battle of Five Forks and almost encircled Petersburg. Lee warned Jefferson Davis that he must be prepared to flee Richmond.

Lincoln wanted to be in on the finish. On April 3, learning that Petersburg had been evacuated, he closely followed the federal troops as they entered the city. The Secretary of War was horrified by the risk he was taking. "Allow me respectfully to ask you," Stanton scolded, "to consider whether you ought to expose the nation to the consequence of any disaster to yourself in the pursuit of a treacherous and dangerous enemy like the rebel army." But Lincoln, elated to learn that the Confederate government had fled and Richmond was in Union hands, brushed aside the warning. "I will take care of myself," he promised Stanton.

I

On April 4, as soon as the navy had removed most of the Confederate torpedoes in the James River, Lincoln set out with a small party to visit Richmond. When the U.S.S. Malvern, Admiral Farragut's flagship, could not pa.s.s a line of obstructions the Southerners had placed in the river, the President transferred to a shallow-draft barge, pulled by the tugboat Glance. After the strong river current forced the Malvern against a bridge, the tugboat was detached to rescue it, and twelve sailors rowed Lincoln's barge upstream. The President was amused. "Admiral," he said to David D. Porter, who was in his party, "this brings to my mind a fellow who once came to me to ask for an appointment as minister abroad. Finding he could not get that, he came down to some more modest position. Finally he asked to be made a tide-waiter. When he saw he could not get that, he asked me for an old pair of trousers." "But it is well to be humble," Lincoln concluded.