when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine,
That all the world shall be in love with night.
—William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
The death of Abraham Lincoln by an assassin’s bullet engulfed the nation in sorrow. The exultation of just days before, wrote one reporter, was now “exchanged for boundless grief.”1 The war itself had not been atonement enough for the nation’s sins, many believed. Now, for the first time in the history of the Republic, a president had been killed while in office. On April 18, a procession of twenty-five thousand people viewed Lincoln’s body at the White House, the coffin resting on a magnificent catafalque called the “Temple of Death.” A military funeral was held in the East Room, attended by six hundred government and military officials; Mary remained upstairs, however, too distraught to attend. Lincoln’s pastor, Dr. Phineas Gurley, gave the funeral sermon. “It was a cruel, cruel hand,” he said,
that dark hand of the assassin, which smote our honored, wise, and noble President, and filled the land with sorrow. But above and beyond that hand is another which we must see and acknowledge. It is the chastening hand of a wise and faithful Father. He has given us this bitter cup. And the cup that our Father has given us, shall we not drink it? . . . Though our beloved President is slain, our beloved country is saved. And so we sing of mercy as well as of judgment. Tears of gratitude mingle with those of sorrow. While there is darkness, there is also the dawning of a brighter, happier day upon our stricken and weary land. God be praised that our fallen Chief lived long enough to see the day dawn and the daystar of joy and peace arise upon the nation. He saw it, and he was glad.2
Dr. E. H. Gray, the chaplain of the Senate, closed with a prayer for peace and justice. Across the nation some twenty-five million people attended services with similar messages.
A day later, as church bells tolled and bands played dirges, forty thousand mourners followed the fourteen-foot-long hearse down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol Rotunda. Leading the procession was the same detachment of black soldiers that had been the first to occupy Richmond. Behind the hearse came Lincoln’s favorite horse, riderless, Lincoln’s boots reversed in the stirrups. Next came a carriage holding Robert and Tad, and then General Grant and cabinet members, clergymen, marshals, and twenty-two honorary pallbearers. Following were waves of military units, all marching to the slow cadence of muffled drums. Hundreds of convalescent soldiers, many on crutches, hobbled along as best they could or stood at attention on the curbs. From the windows and rooftops of homes, shops, and offices, mourners watched solemnly, tearfully, their mood black as the festoons that hung from government buildings. Perhaps most impressively, four thousand African American residents of Washington, wearing high silk hats and white gloves, held hands and walked side by side to the Capitol.
Lincoln lay in state in the Rotunda for twenty-four hours as tens of thousands of people filed past the open coffin to pay their last respects. On Friday morning, April 21, one week after his murder, Lincoln’s body was placed on a funeral train that took him, along with the disinterred remains of his son Willie, on a seventeen-hundred-mile journey back to Springfield. The train essentially retraced Lincoln’s route of 1861, when he had come to Washington for his first inauguration, passing through Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Cleveland, Chicago, and other places. There were twenty cities in all, twenty solemn processions, and twenty funerals. By May 4, when Lincoln was at last entombed at Springfield’s Oak Ridge Cemetery, some one million people had said their final good-byes.
• • •
At length the nation’s grief gave way to reverence, and sorrow gave way to esteem. No sooner had Lincoln been laid to rest, no sooner had the conspirators who brought about his death been caught and punished, no sooner had the new president begun to feel the monumental weight that now rested on his shoulders than the nation began to understand just what it had lost. Not since Washington, perhaps, or Jefferson, had the country been led by such a man. He was Honest Abe, a modern-day Moses, the Great Emancipator, Father Abraham. What other person could have guided America through the storm of civil war? Americans had come to rely on Lincoln, Walt Whitman thought, and his “idiomatic western genius.” “Jesus Christ died for the world,” said a New York minister. “Abraham Lincoln died for his country.”3 In life he was underappreciated and often misunderstood. In death he was transformed to martyr, to legend, and to myth. The transformation continues to this day.
Lincoln had always possessed a powerful ambition. He sensed it from his earliest years, when he realized that he could do better—that he had to do better—than carve a living out of hardscrabble farming. Embarrassed by his lack of schooling, he took on the task of educating himself. He tried his hand at a variety of positions in New Salem, but always his ambition drove him further ahead. Eventually he found intellectual fulfillment as an attorney, an occupation that allowed him to stretch his mind and match his wits with other learned men. And then he found an outlet for his considerable talents in politics, where he could not only polish his oratorical skills but organize and lead those of similar feelings on questions of the day.
But politics was more than a vehicle for Lincoln to fulfill his personal and professional objectives. He dedicated his efforts not just to gain higher office but to benefit the greater good as well. His purpose in public life, always, was to assist and promote the interests of his fellow humans. He worked on behalf of his constituency, his state, his country. Though his political party changed, he did not waver from some of the key Whig principles that inspired him—the “Great American System” of governmental support for industry, commerce, internal improvements, and education. Lincoln aspired to political greatness, framing everything he did as a statesman with an eye to posterity.4
He believed in meritocracy, the idea that all Americans should have the opportunity to prove themselves, to fulfill their own potential as he had done. True equality meant that every American should have the same chance to drink “from the cup of liberty.” An American, to Lincoln, was simply a citizen who, regardless of ancestry or race or station in life, believed in the democratic principles upon which the Republic was founded. The promise of the Declaration of Independence—that all men are created equal—was “the father of all moral principle.” It represented the idea that fairness and justice must govern relations between government and citizens.
Speaking at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on February 22, 1861, Lincoln told his listeners: “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” Lincoln, of course, had great respect for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but it was the Declaration of Independence, with Jefferson’s soaring rhetoric, that most stirred his heart and patriotic zeal. He saw the Declaration as a charter of liberty for all humanity. Jefferson authored the sentiment; Lincoln demanded that it be given true meaning.
He was willing to compromise with the slave states but never wavered in his determination to block the extension of slavery into the territories. His refusal to recognize the right of secession of any state was matched by his determination to prevent the spread of slavery. Save the Union, yes, by all means. But that Union must include liberty for all.
Coming to Washington in 1861, he was determined to preserve the Union. Every president exercises great power and expects to do great things. But no other president faced the challenges Lincoln faced. He successfully gauged Northern popular sentiment, that secession—the essence of anarchy, he called it—was an indignation that could not be allowed to stand. He had great confidence in the American people. Indeed, he believed that the Unionists in the South would convince their hotheaded friends that secession was a misguided reaction to political dissatisfaction. Ultimately he recognized that loyalists were the government’s greatest asset, and that through their sustained effort the rebels would be defeated. The great powers—the unprecedented powers—he exhibited as a war president depended ultimately on public support and justification, on his “harnessing the potent force of popular nationalism.”5 And, he asked, “Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better, or equal, hope in the world?”6
Lincoln did not start the war. Faced with the choice between disunion and war, he chose the latter. But once begun, he vowed to finish it, and on his terms. There would be no compromise and no negotiation. He remained focused on carrying out his two most important goals: the preservation of the Union and the elimination of slavery. He seized the historic moment, as the historian Richard Carwardine wrote, “as an instrument of a providential purpose.”7 For what began as a war to preserve the Union (and in fact always remained so) became something else as well: a war for human dignity, for equality, for the freedom of an entire race of Americans. His vision was that the promise of the Declaration of Independence should finally be fulfilled. The great patriots of the Revolution had won freedom for America; now would come freedom for all Americans.
At Gettysburg, Lincoln made this clear. The brave men, “these honored dead” who had given “the last full measure of devotion,” must not have died in vain. It was “for us the living” to carry on the “unfinished work,” the “great task remaining before us.” That task was nothing more than a second Revolution, “a new birth of freedom” to shine as a beacon to the whole world.
The war that Lincoln fought gave rise to a new definition of liberty. Prior to the Civil War, liberty was thought to be the restraint of government from tyrannizing the individual. After the war, liberty was something that the government helped to provide; it was the broadening of individual empowerment (particularly, of course, for blacks). The historian James McPherson points out that this redefinition of liberty, and of the role the government must play in fostering it, was a direct result of Lincoln’s recognition that the abolition of slavery had to become a war aim if the promise of the first American Revolution was to be fulfilled.8
Through war, the union of states became a nation. Gone forever was the South’s concept of the Republic: a government of limited powers that worked primarily to protect (white) property owners, and a social order predicated on family, kinship, and tradition. In its place came a strong centralized government that promoted industrial development, competition, and free-labor capitalism. Government would go on to play a much more significant role in the lives of average Americans, as evidenced by the national Constitution itself. Eleven of the first twelve amendments to the Constitution limited the powers of the national government; after 1865, six of the next seven amendments expanded those powers, always with a lesser governing role for the states.
• • •
What can be gained from further study of Lincoln’s life and times? How does he inspire us today?
In Lincoln we see what is possible. We look to the humble circumstances of his birth, the disappointments that marked his middle years, and the unlikely rise from relative obscurity to presidential power. He struggled through his prejudices and emerged a better man. From reasoned, sober introspection he found a strength and determination that enabled him to overcome repeated disappointment. There was no time to lose faith in himself. He took solace in his family and he believed in the sanctity of the institutions in which he toiled. He asked profound questions. He was determined to leave the world a better place for his existence. He worked, every day, to fulfill his potential. We examine his life and we wonder what we can make of our own.
In Lincoln we see the essence of leadership. He inspired a people and an army by steady, measured resolve. He mobilized and energized the nation by appealing to the best and highest of ideals; that is, he convinced the nation that “a more perfect Union”—a Union of justice and freedom—was worth fighting for.
He grew, sometimes painfully, with the task before him. He was not afraid to acknowledge his mistakes. Perseverance was his greatest asset; from “noble effort,” one biographer noted, came “great strength.”9 He spoke beautifully, sometimes majestically. It is doubtful that we have ever had a president who cared so much about every single word he spoke or wrote. In eulogizing Henry Clay he might have been describing himself: “He did not consist of . . . elegant arrangements of words and sentences; but rather of that deeply earnest and impassioned tone, and manner, which can proceed only from great sincerity and a thorough conviction . . . of the justice and importance of the cause.”10
In Lincoln we see the decency of popular government. Its role, then as now, was “to elevate the condition of men . . . to afford all, an unfettered start, in the race of life.” The war was a “People’s contest,” he said, because upon its outcome depended the proposition that the will of the majority must prevail. To him democracy was an experiment that the world had not seen before; it had been successfully established and administered, but now it had to be maintained against “a formidable attempt to overthrow it.” Lincoln knew that other nations were watching events in America closely, and anxiously. America’s promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was nothing less than the hope of the world.11
In Lincoln we see the challenge for the future. He passed from life to history, but the history was, and is, ours to make.12 He wished for the “kindly spirit” of America, “a Union of hearts and hands as well as of States.”13 He knew that America had a destiny to fulfill: true democracy, where man is neither master nor slave; equality for all, the “central idea” of the Republic; and liberty, the cause of which “must not be surrendered at the end of one, or even one hundred defeats.”14 Since Lincoln’s time there have been many defeats, but many more victories. The “better angels of our nature” still guide us as we struggle to achieve democracy, equality, and liberty. Lincoln’s life, and his death, gave Americans a new impulse of patriotism—of love of country—that reverberates today.
• • •
Abraham Lincoln is revered throughout the world, but he is, of course, particularly celebrated in America. For 150 years every schoolchild has learned the lessons of his life. Lincoln saved the Union. He freed the slaves. He went from a log cabin to the White House. He knew the difference between right and wrong. He was not perfect, but he was a good man, kind and honest, simple in his tastes, magnanimous in his feeling. He won the war and then looked to welcome erring brothers back into the fold of America.
Abraham Lincoln holds the highest place in American history. General William T. Sherman said, “Of all the men I ever met, he seemed to possess more of the elements of greatness, combined with goodness, than any other.”15 He was our greatest president, against whom all others will forever be measured. We wish our leaders could be more like him; we wish we all could be. There has never been an American story like Abraham Lincoln’s.