Lincoln Revealed

By Allen C. Guelzo

N.H. SHEPHERD/KEYA MORGAN COLLECTION, LINCOLNIMAGES.COM

In a seven-part narrative exclusive to this LIFE illustrated biography, the prizewinning historian Allen C. Guelzo, author of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln and Douglas and the 2013 best-selling Gettysburg, for which he was awarded the inaugural Guggenheim- Lehrman Prize in Military History, looks upon Abraham Lincoln and finds the man behind the image.

PART I

An American Boy

THE HANDS ARE WHAT GIVE him away. Look closely at this photograph, taken in 1846, and the first thing that surprises you is the realization that the face staring back belongs to the 37-year-old Abraham Lincoln. It is Lincoln’s first photograph, taken by Nicholas H. Shepherd only seven years after the wondrous new process of photography had been introduced to America. There is no beard, no stovepipe hat, and none of the deep hollows and lines that the trauma of the American Civil War would carve into his face. Instead, we are looking at what might simply be an up-and-coming professional, just on the brink of a successful middle age, and ready, confident, even a little cocky. The hair is slicked sharply into place, the silken stock tie and vest are discreetly displayed, the formal shirt is fastened neatly by its studs. And there is just the faintest play of a smile on the seriously composed mouth.

But then there are the hands. Even with the slight distortion of focus imposed by Shepherd’s primitive camera, they are large, calloused and work-worn. They are the hands of a laborer, someone who had “had an axe put into his hands at once; and from that time till within his twenty­third year . . . was almost constantly handling [it],” as Lincoln wrote in an autobiographical account, referring to himself in the third person. The hands bear the marks of “stinted living” and “pretty pinching times” on the farm, and he would later sum up the message of those work-hardened hands in the brief admission “I have seen a good deal of the backside of this world.” When Charles Henry Ray, the coeditor of the Chicago Tribune, jokingly told him in 1858 that he suspected “Abe Lincoln was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth,” Ray had no idea how embarrassingly accurate he was.

EVERETT/ALAMY

Ancestry The Lincoln homestead, a brick farmhouse on 600 acres in the Shenandoah Valley, in Rockingham County, Virginia, was built in 1800 by Abraham’s great-uncle Captain Jacob Lincoln. Thomas Lincoln, the President’s father, was born in a log house on the land in 1778. Is that him in the below image? This photograph, taken in the 1840s, was sold to O.V. Flora, a Civil War veteran, by a Lincoln family member who claimed it was, but since no other known photographs of Thomas exist, the man’s identity remains unconfirmed.

BETTMANN/CORBIS

Nolin Creek The birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, a one-room cabin thought to measure about 16 by 18 feet (a 19th-century reconstruction), was part of the property purchased by his father in 1808 for $200. Called Sinking Spring Farm, it comprised 300 acres of land adjacent to Nolin Creek near Hodgen’s Mill, Kentucky. On the February day when Abe was born, his mother, Nancy, was assisted by a 20-year-old neighbor named Peggy Walters, who recalled the event this way: “Nancy had about as hard a time as most women, I reckon, easier than some and maybe harder than a few. It all came along kind of slow, but everything was regular and all right. The baby was born just about sunup on a Sunday morning.” At the time of Abraham’s birth, the Boundary Oak Tree (below), a white oak that marked the property line, was between 25 and 30 years old. Eventually growing to a massive 90 feet in height, with a trunk measuring six feet in diameter, it was considered the last living link to the President until its death in 1976.

RALPH CRANE/LIFE

HE WAS BORN IN A “MISERABLE HABITATION,” A LOG cabin on the south fork of Nolin Creek, Kentucky, two and a half miles from a straggling settlement known as Hodgen’s Mill. The Lincolns could trace a long line of American ancestors back to the Massachusetts Bay colony in the 1600s, and six generations of them had fanned westward in an ambitious and restless pursuit of land, wealth and social standing. But this all came to an abrupt end in 1786, when Abraham’s grandfather (also named Abraham Lincoln) was ambushed by marauding Indians while working a vast new tract of 800 acres in the frontier province of Kentucky. Grandfather Lincoln left five children and a widow. But since Kentucky was still governed by Virginia law, the bulk of the property went to the eldest son, Mordecai. The youngest son, Thomas, was (according to Abraham Lincoln’s sister-in-law, Emilie Todd Helm) turned “out of the house when . . . 12 years old” to fend for himself.

RALPH CRANE/LIFE

Knob Creek “My earliest recollection is of the Knob Creek place,” Abraham Lincoln wrote to Samuel Haycraft of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, on June 4, 1860. Abe’s family moved to the 228-acre farm, 10 miles from Nolin Creek, when the boy was two and a half and stayed until he was not quite eight. He had some pleasant memories of his years there: picking berries, planting a garden and swinging an axe to build fences similar to the one shown in the photo of the reconstructed home at left. He also experienced sadness: His baby brother, Thomas, died there when he was only three days old. And there was a scare: While playing in the creek (below) after a heavy rain, seven-year-old Abe lost his footing and might have drowned if not for his friend Austin Gollaher, who extended a tree limb to rescue the flailing boy.

RALPH CRANE/LIFE

Thomas Lincoln did not fend well. Casual and indolent, he apprenticed himself to a carpenter. When he could not make carpentry pay, he turned back to farming on land bought with borrowed money and bearing an uncertain title. In 1806, he married Nancy Hanks, who was as poor as Thomas, and in 1807, their first child, Sarah, was born, followed on February 12, 1809, by a boy who was named for his grandfather Abraham.

The Nolin Creek farm was poor land, and soon the Lincolns moved to a new one on Knob Creek. Abraham Lincoln’s first memories were of the Knob Creek farm, and they were not always happy ones. “Our farm was composed of three fields,” he remembered, surrounded “by high hills and deep gorges,” and whenever “there came a big rain in the hills, the water would come down through the gorges and spread all over the farm.”

RALPH CRANE/LIFE

Kentucky Life This re-created interior of the Knob Creek cabin is a step up from the Lincolns’ actual home, which featured furnishings far more meager than those shown here. The family lived there until 1816, and though Abraham would never again live in Kentucky, his connection remained. He later married Mary Todd of Lexington, and during the Civil War he viewed his home state as crucial to the Union’s victory. “I hope to have God on my side,” he said, “but I must have Kentucky.”

It did not help, either, that increasing amounts of Kentucky land were being bought up by slave owners, who could use their slaves to achieve large-scale production with which small farmers like Thomas Lincoln could never hope to compete. These big planters did not hesitate to fish for defects in their neighbors’ land titles, and Thomas Lincoln was embroiled in legal challenges to ownership of his own land. After a third child was born to the Lincolns and then died, Thomas Lincoln had had enough.

Abandoning Kentucky, Thomas moved his family across the Ohio River into Indiana. Not only was slavery banned in Indiana (by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787), but the land had been surveyed by the federal government, which could convey sure title of ownership. The government land was also for sale on easy terms, and Thomas bought 160 acres of it in Perry County. But he had to chop his way through southern Indiana’s thick forest canopy of oak, hickory and hazel just to get there, and then had to clear the land to build a crude shelter. Abraham Lincoln would remember that he had “never passed through a harder experience” than helping his father hack a path through the thickets. In a straggling attempt years later at poetry, he wrote:

When first my father settled here,
’Twas then the frontier line:
The panther’s scream, filled night with fear
And bears preyed on the swine.

Nor did the Lincolns’ troubles end once a cabin had been built and chinked with clay. In the fall of 1818, Nancy Lincoln fell ill from drinking the tainted milk of a cow that had eaten lethal white snakeroot, and she died. Thomas could not be both father and mother, and Nancy’s cousin Dennis Hanks saw how quickly the Lincoln children became, in his words, “wild—ragged and dirty.” In the fall of 1819, Thomas returned to Kentucky to seek out Sarah Bush Johnston, a 30-year-old widow with three children of her own, whom he had once courted, and brought her back to Indiana as his wife. “She was,” wrote her grandson-in-law A.H. Chapman, “a woman of great energy, of remarkable good sense, very industrious, & saving & also very neat & tidy in her person & Manners & Knew exactly how to Manage children.”

Sarah Lincoln at once became the saving of Abraham Lincoln. “I dressed Abe and his sister up” so that they “looked more human,” and that was only the start. The boy not only returned her affection, but eventually came to look on his stepmother with more love than stepmothers, in legend, are ever supposed to hope for. “Abe never gave me a cross word or look and never refused in fact, or Even in appearance, to do any thing I requested him,” she said long afterward. “His mind & mine—what little I had seemed to run together—move in the same channel . . . he loved me truly.”

Even more, Sarah noticed in 10-year-old Abraham the spark of an intelligence utterly absent from the stolid and easygoing Thomas Lincoln. Abraham’s stepsister Matilda Johnston said that “Abe was not energetic Except in one thing—he was active & persistent in learning—read Everything he Could.” A dog-eared copybook that he filled with practice tables and problems contained his first stab at composition:

Abraham Lincoln
his hand and pen
he will be good but
God knows when

GENE AHRENS/ALAMY

Perry County Thomas, having decided to move his wife and children to Indiana, received the equivalent of $300 for the Knob Creek farm: $20 in cash and the rest in whiskey. And with that the family departed for Perry County in the southern part of the state, where Thomas would build a house on land he’d bought from the federal government. “We reached our new home about the time the state came into the Union,” Abraham would write in his 1859 autobiography. “It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up.”

The boy was smart—eager to read, quick at remembering. “Abe could Easily learn & long remember,” said his stepmother, Sarah. He even dared to upstage his father. “When strangers would ride along & up to his father’s fence,” recalled Dennis Hanks, “Abe always, through pride & to tease his father, would be sure to ask the stranger the first question, for which his father would sometimes knock him a rod.”

Thomas Lincoln had still more occasions to beat his son as the boy grew. By the time Lincoln was 12 years old, the garrulous Dennis Hanks remembered, he had become “a Constant and I may Say Stubborn reader, his father having Sometimes to slash him for neglecting his work by reading.”Thomas Lincoln dismissed “eddication.” There were few schools in frontier Indiana, and Thomas was unable—and probably unwilling—to pay for more than a year’s worth of schooling for his son. “My father,” Lincoln quipped in later years, wanted him to have “a thorough education,” but Thomas Lincoln’s idea of “thorough” was “to have me cipher through the rule of three.”

The crack between the two Lincolns widened as the boy grew into adolescence. Thomas Lincoln was an officer of the Little Pigeon Creek Separate Baptist Church, the Separate Baptists being a sect of fundamentalists whose stark embrace of the doctrine of predestination—that God wills every event that occurs—extended even to declining support for missionaries and a professional clergy. But young Abraham wanted nothing to do with his father’s religion. “Abe had no particular religion,” Sarah Lincoln told an interviewer, “[he] didn’t think of that question at that time, if he ever did—He never talked about it.”

He also wanted nothing to do with his father’s world of work. “His father taught him to work,” Abraham Lincoln informed an Indiana neighbor, “but never learned him to love it.”Or at least not work on the farm. Thomas Lincoln regularly hired out his son to other farmers but pocketed the proceeds the boy was paid, something the son resented as a form of slavery. “I used to be a slave,” he complained years afterward, and his most cherished memory from his youth was the day he earned his first silver half-dollars on his own.He had “constructed a little flatboat” on the Ohio River that he used to ferry two men and their trunks out to a passing steamboat, and each flipped him “a silver half-dollar.” Years later, as President, Lincoln would describe that as “a most important incident in my life . . . I, a poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day”—and it was his. “The world seemed wider and fairer before me.”

RALPH CRANE/LIFE

Mothers Lost and Gained Abraham was nine years old when his beloved mother succumbed to a mysterious illness called “the milk-sick” that swept through the region. After her death, “the widowed husband was undertaker,” Henry Ketcham writes in The Life of Abraham Lincoln. “With his own hands he ‘rived’ the planks, made the coffin, and buried Nancy Hanks, that remarkable woman.” A wooden slab marked her grave until it was replaced by a tombstone in 1879. Afterward, as Ketcham reports, “The father was not able to do woman’s work as well as his wife had been able to do man’s work, and the condition of the home was pitiable indeed.” Pitiable, that is, until Abraham’s stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln (below, late in her life), arrived with her three children. “She brought the sweet spirit of an almost ideal motherhood into the home, giving to all the children alike a generous portion of her mother-love,” according to Ketcham. “She kept them from bad habits and retained their affection to the last.”

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CLASSIC IMAGE/ALAMY

Readin’, Writin’ and Cipherin’ Mainly self-taught, Abe received a grand total of one year of formal education—all his father was willing to pay for. A page from his mathematics lessons—designed to teach children “cipherin’ to the rule of three”—is shown above. He is also thought to have done his calculations in the dirt and on a wooden shovel.

PART II

Striking Out on His Own

THOMAS LINCOLN WAS IN his fifties when, in 1830, he decided to move again, this time from Indiana to Illinois. Land there was cheaper, and he had to think about how he would support himself and his wife in their later years. Abraham accompanied them, towering over his father at six feet three or four inches in height and weighing a sturdy 210 pounds, by one estimate. But he had no intention of doing more than getting his parents settled. He turned 21 that year, and once the Lincolns had set up a new cabin and farm on the banks of the Sangamon River, Abraham struck out on his own, hiring himself out to navigate flatboats of goods downriver to the Mississippi, and thence to New Orleans. He would never return to farming—or any other aspect of his father’s life.

RALPH CRANE/LIFE

The Sangamon In 1831, 22-year-old Abraham and two friends piloted a flatboat down the Sangamon River en route to New Orleans. As they approached the small settlement of New Salem, Illinois, the boat got stuck on a milldam (above), and that gave the townspeople their first opportunity to observe Lincoln’s ingenuity. Taking charge, he borrowed an auger from the village cooper shop, drilled a hole in the bow of the boat to let the water out, then plugged it back up and pushed the vessel over the dam so the three men could continue on their way.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Ann Rutledge Among the 100 townspeople in New Salem was Ann Mayes Rutledge, a woman four years younger than Abe who was “a beautiful girl and as bright as she was beautiful,” according to her cousin James McGrady Rutledge. Indeed, she was the only girl to attend the town’s school. She met Lincoln when he boarded at her father’s tavern, and though this has never been proved beyond a doubt, many believe she became his first girlfriend, maybe even his fiancée. At the least, he may have been fond enough of her to give her his copy of Kirkham’s Grammar —although the words “Ann M. Rutledge is now learning grammer [sic]” at the top may not have been in his hand. He did visit her on her deathbed after she became seriously ill, possibly with typhoid fever, in 1835. “I can never forget how sad and broken-hearted Lincoln looked when he came out of the room after the last interview with Annie,” her sister, Nancy, said. Of Abraham Lincoln, their brother John Rutledge said, “A better man never lived.”

RIVERS WOULD ALWAYS BE ABRAHAM Lincoln’s friends, as indeed they were friends to every aspect of American commerce by the 1830s. The United States began its life as a farm economy, partly because land was so much cheaper in America than in Europe, and partly because America’s colonial masters, the British, preferred to see their American colonies as food producers for British industry rather than developers of industries of their own.

However, once the Americans achieved their independence from Britain in 1783, it became a very good question whether it would be wise for the new United States to remain so entirely reliant on farming. Although Thomas Jefferson had written that “those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people,” Jefferson’s great critic, Alexander Hamilton, believed that a nation without any manufacturing or financial base would be easy prey to the European empires that still surrounded it on every side in the Western Hemisphere. As the first secretary of the treasury, Hamilton laid out an energetic plan for using federal tax revenues to build credit on foreign financial markets and create a national bank that could use that credit to pump funds into American manufacturing.

Hamilton’s plans horrified and enraged Jefferson, who believed that “substantial and genuine virtue” lived only in the heart of “the husbandman.” The “cultivators” who produced their own clothing, food and shelter themselves could never be reduced to the level of “tools” for politicians and the “caprice of customers.” From that argument sprang most of the debates that dominated the first 80 years of the life of the United States. It was also an argument that was won in political terms by Jefferson and those who followed him as the Democratic Party. The national bank Hamilton founded was allowed to close when its charter expired in 1811, and the charter of a second national bank was vetoed by Jefferson’s great successor Andrew Jackson.

But in economic terms, the argument was actually won by Hamilton, and by Henry Clay. In 1834, Clay resurrected Hamilton’s agenda with his American System—a program of government-funded “internal improvements” (roads, canals, bridges, harbors), a new national bank system and protective tariffs to shield American manufacturing from the dumping of cheap British imports on American markets. And from his seat in the U.S. Senate, Clay built an entirely new political party, the Whigs, to promote it.

Fighting on Clay’s side were two irresistible facts:

• In 1812, Jefferson’s Democrats rushed into a war with Britain, confident they would defeat their old masters a second time and cart off Canada as their reward. Instead, American armies, which lacked factories to supply them with weapons and equipment, were soundly and repeatedly drubbed by British forces, despite Britain’s distraction with their larger wars with the French tyrant Napoleon Bonaparte. Even stalwart Democrats were forced to rethink the folly of policies that, in effect, left the United States defenseless.

• Britain’s emergence as the world’s premier industrial power was built on the back of innovations—the steam engine, the textile mill, the railroad—that could easily be copied by inventive Americans. Even as Abraham Lincoln was poling a flatboat down the Mississippi, flatboats were being replaced by steamboats, which could cut the costs and time of ­moving goods along rivers to a pittance. And there weren’t only ­rivers—canals could be dug where rivers did not run, and railroads could be laid down where neither rivers nor canals flowed.

Farmers like Thomas Lincoln who had once been content merely with farming now had markets full of dazzling new goods brought within ready reach; and farmers who fancied the temptations of those markets would turn to selling their produce, rather than simply consuming it, in order to raise the cash the markets demanded. To service those wants, a new middle class of merchants, bankers, shopkeepers, mill owners and investors was coming rapidly into existence, and the Whig Party would be there to represent this constituency.

FROM THE FIRST, IT WAS THE WHIGS WHO captured Abraham Lincoln’s loyalty, because they offered what he wanted most: the chance for self-transformation, a movement out of the slatternly, windowless drudgery that Thomas Jefferson had mistaken for pastoral virtue. What made the American republic “at once the wonder and admiration of the whole world,” Lincoln would say, was that “every man can make himself.” We expect “to give all a chance” to better themselves, a chance for “the weak to grow stronger, the ignorant, wiser; and all better, and happier together.” No one could have believed more fervently than Abraham Lincoln in what a later century would call the American Dream. The mission of the American republic was “to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” This, said Lincoln, is what “gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.”

In February 1831, Lincoln embarked on his own voyage of self-improvement by hiring himself out to an entrepreneur named Denton Offutt to transport a flatboat of goods down the Mississippi. He so impressed his new employer with his handling of the business that when Offutt opened a store in the up-and-coming Sangamon River town of New Salem, Illinois, he offered Lincoln a job as a store clerk. Lincoln cut an ungainly figure in the eyes of Joseph Richardson of New Salem, who thought him “bony and raw.” Elizabeth Herndon, another resident, recalled him wearing “a suit of grey jeans clothes and a stovepipe hat.” But ungainly or not, he was a meticulous clerk, and Mentor Graham, New Salem’s schoolteacher, estimated that Lincoln “performed the duties with great facility—much fairness and honesty & impartiality.”

Lincoln also gained a reputation for comic storytelling, and his surprising physical strength tempted Offutt to show off his clerk as proof of his store’s credentials. This nearly backfired when Offutt recklessly offered to pit Lincoln against Jack Armstrong, a leader of New Salem’s local rowdies, in a wrestling match. The match ended in a hard-fought draw, but it won Lincoln a moral victory, since Armstrong announced, “Abe Lincoln is the best fellow that ever broke into this settlement.”When a dispossessed band of Sauk and Fox Indians led by Black Hawk attempted to reclaim tribal lands in northern Illinois in 1832, the 68-man militia company called up from New Salem elected Lincoln as their captain, “a success which,” he admitted, “gave me more pleasure than any I have had since.”

The opportunity to improve, however, was always balanced by the threat of failure. By the time Lincoln was released from militia service in July, Offutt’s store had gone bankrupt and Lincoln was unemployed. He went into business with a partner, William Berry, and opened his own store, with goods bought on credit. But Lincoln and Berry fared no better than Offutt, and in a short time this new venture “winked out” as well, leaving Lincoln with debts amounting to $1,100.

His friends in New Salem wangled an appointment for him as local postmaster, which he supplemented with odd jobs until 1833, when the county surveyor of Sangamon County offered Lincoln a job as an assistant. Although Lincoln knew nothing about surveying, he promptly threw himself into a crash course on the topic out of the two standard textbooks, Robert Gibson’s Treatise on Practical Surveying and Abel Flint’s System of Geometry and Trigonometry. He submitted his first survey in January 1834 and spent the next two years refereeing boundary disputes and laying out plots for real estate speculators.

None of this diminished his popularity in New Salem, and in 1834, Lincoln parlayed that popularity into a seat in the Illinois state legislature, representing Sangamon County. He had made a bid for the legislature in 1832, but the Black Hawk War had taken him off the stump during the campaign season, and he’d finished a lackluster eighth among 13 candidates. This time, he had the backing of local Whigs and announced that he would run on a platform “in favor of a National Bank” and “in favor of the internal improvement system, and a high protective Tariff.” And on August 4 he was elected.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

The Black Hawk War When a Native American named Black Hawk, chief of the Sauk and Fox tribes, led several hundred braves into Illinois, ostensibly to plant corn, Governor John Reynolds called for white males between the ages of 18 and 45 to drive them out. Lincoln enlisted in the militia three times, for a total of 51 days of rather uneventful service. He neither fought nor witnessed any fighting, later joking, “I did not break my sword, for I had none to break, but I did bend my musket pretty bad on one occasion . . . and though I never fainted from loss of blood, I can truly say I was often very hungry.” Scenes from Lincoln’s first war: A painting depicting Lincoln returning from the war (above), a campaign map from 1832 (below), and a letter Lincoln wrote stating that Nathan Drake had served as a private in the company he commanded (bottom).

ABRAHAM LINCOLN PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

PICTURE HISTORY

RALPH CRANE/LIFE

Lincoln the Surveyor Abraham knew nothing about surveying, but that didn’t prevent him from getting a job as a surveyor. As he later wrote, he “procured a compass and chain, studied Flint, and Gibson a little, and went at it,” surveying roads, farms and towns. Below: Lincoln’s survey of Huron, Illinois. One place he might’ve studied: the home of Henry Onstot, the town cooper (above, his workshop). Lincoln and Onstot’s eldest son, Isaac, were close friends and often read together by the fire.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

CLASSIC IMAGE/ALAMY

The Alden Hull Letter February 14, 1843 Lincoln’s years of making friends as a postmaster, shopkeeper and surveyor served him well as a politician. In this letter to fellow legislator Alden Hull, he uses the strategy of a “mixer,” as Carl Sandburg later described him. “In a finely frank way he asks Hull to be for him, offers irresistible compliments, and then swiftly, whimsically, and with a hint of melancholy, brings [the letter] to a close,” Sandburg wrote in 1925. “It is the most revealing piece of correspondence that has come to light on the methods of personal approach used by the early political Lincoln.”

The letter reads:

Springfield, Feby. 14– 1843.

Friend Hull,

Your county and ours are almost sure to be placed in the same congressional district—I would like to be its Representative; still circumstances may happen to prevent my even being a candidate. If, however, there are any whigs in Tazewell who would as soon I should represent them as any other person, I would be glad they would not cast me aside until they see and hear further what turn things take.

Do not suppose, Esq. that in addressing this letter to you, I assume that you will be for me against all other whigs; I only mean, that I know you to be my personal friend, a good whig, and an honorable man, to whom I may, without fear, communicate a fact which I wish my particular friends (if I have any) to know.

There is nothing new here now worth telling.

Your friend as ever

A. Lincoln

ALAN COPSON/AWL IMAGES/GETTY

The Lincoln-Berry Store Above: A replica of the store. The nickname “Honest Abe” may well have originated in the Lincoln-Berry general store (located in the center of New Salem, on the map below), which the future President co-owned with William Franklin Berry, the son of a Presbyterian minister. As legend has it, Lincoln once took 6¼ cents too much from a customer, then walked three miles to return the money. He is also said to have dissuaded customers from buying alcohol, tobacco and goods of poor quality—and of being so friendly and talkative that some folks never got around to making their purchases. Yes, Abe was more sociable than he was business-savvy, perhaps one reason the store failed to succeed, leaving Lincoln with debts it took him years to pay off.

GRANGER

PART III

In Springfield

LINCOLN SERVED FOUR terms in the Illinois state legislature, all of them as a Whig. He was instrumental in moving the state capital from Vandalia to Springfield (and then moved himself to Springfield), funding a new canal to link Chicago with the Illinois River (and thus the Mississippi) and writing legislation to create an Illinois state bank. He was, said his law partner Stephen T. Logan, “as stiff as a man could be in his Whig doctrines,” and Rowan Herndon, another New Salem villager, believed that Henry Clay “was his favorite of all the great men of the Nation.”

ROBERT SHAW/FIRELIGHT

The Legislator After Kaskaskia and before Springfield, the city of Vandalia served as the second capital of Illinois, from 1820 to 1839. For three of those years (1836 to 1839), the building above was home to the state Senate and House of Representatives. Abraham Lincoln earned $4 a day as a member of the legislature—“more than I had ever earned in my life,” he told a friend. In Vandalia, Lincoln and eight other colleagues from Sangamon County (known as the Long Nine because all of them were at least six feet tall) led the effort to move the state capital to Springfield. They succeeded, and it was there in the Hall of Representatives (below) that Lincoln made several well-remembered speeches, including the one on June 16, 1858, that included the words “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

ROBERT SHAW/FIRELIGHT

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The Lawyer A stroll through Lincoln’s Springfield (above) might have included a stop at Chatterton’s jewelry store, where Abe bought a gold wedding ring for his wife-to-be and had it engraved with the words “Love Is Eternal.” A bit farther down the street was Irwin’s general store, which was co-owned by Robert Irwin, who was also Lincoln’s banker, and sold “Staple & Fancy Goods, Bonnets of Every Style, Leghorn & Palmetto Hats, Boots, Shoes, Hardware, Cutlery & Groceries.” A ledger found many years later showed that Lincoln and his wife, Mary, spent a total of $1,885.46 there over the course of 10 years. Still farther down the street was Lincoln’s law office, which he shared first with Stephen T. Logan and then with William Henry Herndon. Below: Lincoln distributed these cards to potential clients, advertising himself as an “Attorney and Counsellor at Law.”

PICTURE HISTORY

But to be a Whig in Illinois in the 1830s was to be perpetually in a political minority, since all but the central counties of the state were strongly tinged with Jacksonian Democratic loyalties. Lincoln needed some better professional base than the meager rewards of surveying and the post office to sustain him. And so, like many other aspiring politicians, he turned to law.

Because there were only a handful of law schools in the entire nation in the 1830s, and only one was west of the Appalachians, the conventional training for lawyers was similar to an apprenticeship. An aspiring lawyer spent several months “reading law” under the tutelage of a practicing lawyer, and then secured a license, often based on nothing more substantial than “general intelligence.” During his militia service in the Black Hawk War, Lincoln had come under the eye of a Kentucky-born lawyer named John Todd Stuart, who shrewdly took the young man’s measure and, as Lincoln recalled, “encouraged A. [to] study law” with him. Lincoln “borrowed books of Stuart,” bought a secondhand copy of William Blackstone’s classic law textbook and “went at it in good earnest.” In 1836, after a perfunctory examination, he was duly licensed and, once he moved from New Salem to Springfield, installed as Stuart’s junior partner.

Becoming a lawyer provided Lincoln with his first significant financial rewards. Although “politics was his heaven,” law was never far removed from politics, and lawyering provided a far more predictable economic future. It was also a profession closely linked to Whig principles, since lawyers were emerging as the chief protectors of commerce and contract in the young republic. Over the next 24 years, Lincoln would move through two more partnerships—as junior partner with Stephen T. Logan from 1841 to 1844, and then as senior partner with William Henry Herndon from 1844 onward—and devote himself almost entirely as a trial lawyer to civil and commercial litigation. He would handle more than 5,600 cases, at least a thousand of them involving jury trials, at nearly every level of the court system—justice of the peace, county court, state circuit court, state supreme court, federal district court, even the U.S. Supreme Court.

Lincoln was not a legal Robin Hood. Less than 8 percent of his cases involved criminal proceedings. By far, the bulk of his practice was devoted to the protection of property, through contract enforcement, debt collection, divorce, foreclosure and trespass. In the 1850s, as railroads began laying mile after mile of track across Illinois, Lincoln soon became an important figure in cases defending them against the protests of dispossessed squatters and unhappy shareholders. Between 1854 and 1859, he represented the Illinois Central Railroad’s interests in more than 50 cases, and eventually earned the business of almost every other railroad in Illinois. “I never found him unwilling to appear in behalf of a great ‘soulless Corporation,’” remarked one railroad lawyer, Henry Clay Whitney. “Much as we deprecated the avarice of great corporations,” chuckled Herndon, “we both thanked the Lord for letting the Illinois Central Railroad fall into our hands.” By the 1850s, Lincoln was earning an average of $3,000 a year from his practice, 10 times what an ordinary working man might expect to bring home.

In the Courthouse Lincoln was a politician who became a lawyer, rather than the reverse, and he became one by doing what was required of him under Illinois law: “obtain a certificate procured from the court of an Illinois county certifying to the applicant’s good moral character.” He obtained his at the Illinois Supreme Court. A “jack of all trades” who accepted both civil and criminal matters (an engraving of a dustup appears below), his fees generally ranged from $5 to $20 per case—though he did charge the Illinois Central Railroad $5,000 to handle a tax case. For five months out of the year, he left Springfield and traveled by horseback with other attorneys and a judge to try cases throughout the Eighth Judicial District in Central Illinois. One of the stops on his route was a primitive courtroom in Decatur (bottom). At another, the Beardstown courthouse (above), 45 miles from Springfield, he defended William “Duff” Armstrong, the son of a close friend, who was accused of murder. Although an eyewitness claimed to have seen Armstrong kill a man under the light of a full moon, Lincoln introduced an almanac as evidence—a procedure known as “judicial notice,” common now but not then—showing that the moon wasn’t, in fact, full that night. Armstrong was acquitted. And for winning what was arguably his most famous case, Lincoln charged no fee.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

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NO ONE WHO KNEW LINCOLN IN THOSE years would have seen much trace of the backwoods boy from Kentucky. Anyone who would later imagine that “Lincoln calmly sat down and gathered his robes about him, waiting for the people to call him, has a very erroneous knowledge of Lincoln,” warned Herndon. “He was always calculating, and always planning ahead. His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.”

The personal aspect of that “little engine” was reflected in the woman he married in 1842, Mary Todd. “Lincoln had a strong if not a terrible passion for women, he could hardly keep his hands off [them]” Herndon remembered. But from his first day in New Salem, Lincoln was agonizingly self-conscious of his lack of social grace, fearing that “I should not know how to behave myself,” and this frequently kept him in the shadows of other people’s romances.

That did not keep him, however, from wooing the daughter of New Salem’s tavern keeper, Ann Rutledge, or, after her death, the sister of his landlord, Mary Owens. What was noticeable in both instances, though, was that Rutledge and Owens represented moves up the social ladder. The same pattern held true in 1840 when Lincoln was introduced to Mary Todd, who was not only John Todd Stuart’s cousin but the daughter of a wealthy Kentucky merchant and the sister-in-law of Ninian W. Edwards, the head of the most influential Whig family in Illinois. Herndon thought she was a holy terror—“imperious, proud, aristocratic, insolent, witty, and bitter”—everything that Lincoln was not. Yet she also saw what her cousin had seen in Lincoln, a rough-edged diamond with talent enough to soar. “Miss Todd was thoroughly in earnest in her endeavors to get Mr. Lincoln,” remarked one of Lincoln’s friends, the lawyer and future U.S. senator Orville Hickman Browning, and “[she] did most of the courting.”

The path to the wedding nearly ended when Lincoln, at the last moment, backed out. But friends patched up the wrecked engagement, and in November 1842, Abraham and Mary were married in the Edwards home in Springfield. By the time Lincoln had his first photograph taken, the couple had two children—Robert and Edward—and had acquired a one-and-a-half-story home at Eighth and Jackson streets in Springfield.

Although he protested that “I am now and always shall be the same Abe Lincoln that I always was,” there was no denying that his new Todd connections gave a silent boost to his political visibility. He left the state legislature after his fourth term in 1842 and set about planning to run for Congress from the new Illinois Seventh District, the one district in Illinois that could guarantee favorable odds for winning a seat for a Whig.

His main difficulty in the district did not stem from any accusations that he represented the Whig business “aristocracy” but from his lack of religious credentials. Lincoln, even in Springfield, had never joined a church; he had never been baptized nor professed any sort of religious creed. (If anything, John Todd Stuart was disturbed by how his onetime partner had acquired a somewhat racy reputation among the legal guild as “an avowed and open infidel” who “sometimes bordered on atheism.”) Without a blush, Lincoln’s Democratic opponent, Peter Cartwright, made sure the pious settlers of the Seventh District learned that Lincoln was an “infidel” who could not honorably swear “so help me God” on the Bible and whose promises could therefore never be trusted.

Infidel or not, Lincoln could not afford to lose votes over religion, and in response to Cartwright, he circulated a notice through the district, admitting “I am not a member of any Christian Church” but also asserting “I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christians in particular.” The notice shrewdly concentrated on what Lincoln had not said about religion, without ever actually stating what he did (or didn’t) believe. It must have worked, because Lincoln won a landslide 56 percent of the vote and on December 2, 1847, Abraham Lincoln arrived in Washington to take up his seat in the House of Representatives as a member of the 30th Congress.

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Marriage “Who is that man?” Mary Ann Todd (above) reportedly said upon seeing Abraham Lincoln for the first time at a ball in 1839. Although much was made of the differences between the two in age, family background, education level and temperament, they were reportedly devoted to each other. “His heart is as large as his arms are long,” she said of him. Perhaps it was actually their similarities that bonded them: They were united in their intellectual curiosity, devotion to family and opposition to slavery. And they’d both known sorrow, having lost their mothers at young ages—Mary, at age six, even younger than Abraham. And so, on November 4, 1842, the two were married (below, their license) with about 30 people attending and the bride wearing a white dress with a floral pattern. Bottom: A daguerreotype of Mrs. Lincoln by Nicholas H. Shepherd, taken in Springfield in 1846.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

ABRAHAM LINCOLN PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

FROM THAT HEIGHT, NEARLY EVERYTHING seemed to turn downward for Lincoln. Mary Lincoln and her two sons accompanied him and moved with him into Mrs. Ann Sprigg’s boardinghouse, across from the Capitol. But Mary’s hopes to “loom largely” (as David Davis, the presiding judge of the Eighth Judicial District Court, sarcastically described her) did not fit easily beside the status of a back-row freshman congressman, and in April 1848 she and the boys left for her family home in Kentucky. Although Abe kept up his usual public good humor, enlivening the dinner table he shared with six other congressmen with “amusing jokes, anecdotes, and witticisms,” his family’s departure left him privately miserable in “this old room.”

The United States was then in the last months of the Mexican–American War, which the Whigs had bitterly criticized as a ploy by Democratic President James K. Polk to ensure war-fever popularity. Lincoln took the floor of the House of Representatives on December 22 to join the anti-Polk chorus, delivering a stinging rebuke of Polk’s war policy. He followed that speech with two more that denounced the war as “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President.” Lincoln’s attacks on Polk won him applause from his fellow Whigs in Congress. But criticizing a President in time of war is a perilous tactic, and back in the Seventh District, even loyal Whigs paled at the angry eruptions from political meetings that savaged Lincoln as the “Benedict Arnold of our district.”

In 1849, Lincoln was quietly replaced as the Whig nominee for the Seventh District seat. Even his applications for a federal job with the incoming Whig administration of newly elected President Zachary Taylor met with failure. The best he was offered was the governorship of the remote Oregon Territory, and Mary made it plain that she would not go there. “Lincoln is undoubtedly the most unfortunate politician that has ever attempted to rise in Illinois,” jeered a Democratic newspaper. “In everything he undertakes, politically, he seems doomed to failure.”

Lincoln returned to Illinois in March 1850. He had followed the Whig party program and only ended up damaging his own hopes for future political success. Although he acknowledged that he had been “always a Whig in politics, and generally on the Whig electoral tickets, making active canvasses,” he was now “losing interest in politics” as a means of advancement. He turned back to “the practice of the law with greater earnestness than ever before,” to the point where, he wrote of himself, “his profession had almost superseded the thought of politics in his mind.”

And then, as if to loop further gloom around him, his three-year-old son, Edward, died after a lingering illness on February 1, 1850. The family buried the child under a headstone marked “Of such is the kingdom of Heaven,” and for the first time in his life, the shield of Lincoln’s wisecracking “infidel” status began to weaken. The pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Springfield, a Scot named James Smith, presided at the funeral and then listened patiently as Lincoln tried to untangle the skeins of “Providence and revelation” and “the fundamentals of religion,” according to biographer William Eleazar Barton. Mary Lincoln, who eventually joined Smith’s church, thought that “from the time of the death of our little Edward, I believe my husband’s heart was directed towards religion.”

Yet his heart was only directed. Lincoln bent sufficiently to pay for the rental of a family pew at First Presbyterian, but he rarely occupied the pew himself. “I never heard of his entering a place where God is worshipped, and I have never yet found a person who could give me any evidence that he ever went to a [religious] meeting in the town,” complained one Springfield minister. “He often goes to the railroad shop and spends the Sabbath in reading Newspapers, and telling stories to the workmen, but not to the house of God.” When his father died the following January, Lincoln did not even attend the funeral.

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The Springfield House At the corner of Eighth and Jackson streets in downtown Springfield stood the one and only house Abraham Lincoln would ever own. “The little home was painted white and had green shutters. It was sweet and fresh, and Mary loved it. She was exquisitely dainty, and her house was a reflection of herself, everything in good taste and in perfect order,” wrote one of her nieces. When the Lincolns bought it for $1,200 in 1844, it was a one-story structure; they added the second story in 1856. Above: This photo, taken during the summer of 1860, shows Lincoln at the home with sons Willie and Tad (center, by the fence). Below: The parlor features some of the original furniture and portraits of George and Martha Washington above the mantel. Bottom: A sign and key from the home.

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The Lincolns would have two more children—William Wallace, born in December 1850, and Thomas (or “Tad”) in 1853. But Mary’s grief over “little Eddie” marked a growing unhingement in an already high-strung and temperamental woman. Born to a first family of Kentucky Whigs, Mary had no easy time running a middle-class lawyer’s household on her own; and, accustomed to the labor of slaves, Mary treated the help her husband hired to assist her in Springfield as little better than serfs, which caused them to quit in loudly complaining droves. Harriet Chapman, Lincoln’s niece, came to live in the Lincoln household, but only briefly, since she could not bear her aunt’s behavior.

Years later, she would talk happily about her famous uncle, but “would rather say nothing about his Wife, as I Could Say but little in her favor.” Jacob Taggart, the father of another neighborhood girl who quit the Lincoln household, pursued Lincoln in a smoldering rage, demanding that he “punish Mrs. Lincoln and apologize to him.” Lincoln could only put out the man’s fire by begging, “Can’t you endure this one wrong done you by a madwoman . . . while I have had to bear it without complaint and without a murmur for, lo, these last 15 years?”

As he moved into middle age, Lincoln locked more and more of his inner self away from people. He never lost his penchant for hilarious storytelling, and he had clearly become one of the more prominent lawyers in the state of Illinois. But his junior partner, William Henry Herndon, found him “hard to comprehend in all the phases of his character . . . He never wholly opened himself to mortal creatures,” and anyone “who tried to pump him always found a shut safe, well locked, and the key lost.” At times, Lincoln could be affable, friendly and sociable; at others, he could be so lost “in thought . . . that he would not notice me, though his best friend; he would walk along, his hands behind his back, not knowing where he was going nor doing.” David Davis, the presiding judge on Lincoln’s judicial circuit, thought Lincoln was “the most ­reticent—Secretive man I Ever Saw—or Expect to See.”

At first impression, Lincoln’s awkwardness and homeliness would tempt people to think that they had encountered little more than what Henry Clay Whitney called “a rough intelligent farmer.” But a little hard experience would teach them otherwise. “Any man who took Lincoln for a simpleminded man,” warned one of his fellow attorneys, Leonard Swett, “would very soon wake up with his back in a ditch.”

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The 30th Congress The Democrats held on to the Senate in the 1846 elections, but the Whigs—including newly elected congressman Abraham Lincoln of Illinois—took the House of Representatives. The Lincolns rented the Springfield house for $90 a year and made their way by stagecoach and train to Washington, where two issues dominated the day: the Mexican-American War (which would end in 1848) and slavery. Lincoln’s time in Congress was rocky: His antiwar stance earned him only derision from the people back home, who felt that the acquisition of new land justified the bloodshed. But he was introduced to members of Congress who would figure prominently during the Civil War, including his two Vice Presidents, Hannibal Hamlin and Andrew Johnson, and several future Confederate leaders, among them Jefferson Davis. When his term ended in 1849, Lincoln was offered the governorship of the new Oregon Territory but turned it down, instead resuming his travels throughout the Eighth District. Above: the Capitol in 1846.

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Eddie On March 10, 1846, Abraham and Mary welcomed their second son, Edward Baker Lincoln, who was named after Abe’s friend Edward Dickinson Baker and called Eddie. The portrait above shows him at age three, before he became ill with a high fever and coughing fits—most likely tuberculosis. After suffering for 52 days, he died on February 1, 1850—after which, it is said, Mary Lincoln’s cries could be heard throughout the house. His funeral was held the next day in the Lincoln home, and five days after that an unsigned poem about the boy’s death titled “Little Eddie” appeared in the Illinois State Journal. The final line read, “Of such is the kingdom of Heaven,” which is also the final line on the boy’s gravestone.

PICTURE HISTORY

Tad The Lincolns’ fourth and youngest son was Thomas Lincoln (above), named for the President’s father and nicknamed Tad because his father thought he resembled a tadpole at birth. John Hay, the President’s assistant secretary, wrote of the boy, “He had a very bad opinion of books and no opinion of discipline,” adding that Abraham and Mary’s approach to parenthood was to “let the children have a good time.” Perhaps unruly, he was also the sensitive child who hugged his mother after his father’s death and said, “Don’t cry so, Mamma! Don’t cry, or you will make me cry, too! You will break my heart!” Six years after that, Tad died at the age of 18. Below: A toy wagon his father made for him.

GRANGER

WILLIE: LEWIS E. WALKER/KEYA MORGAN COLLECTION, LINCOLNIMAGES.COM; ROBERT: KEYA MORGAN COLLECTION, LINCOLNIMAGES.COM

Willie Ten months after Eddie died, William Wallace Lincoln (“Willie,” named for Mary’s brother-in-law, William Wallace) was born. Described as “the most lovable boy I ever saw” by a sister of Willie and Tad’s playmates, Willie apparently didn’t enjoy the attention he received. “I wish they wouldn’t stare at us so,” he said. “Wasn’t there ever a President who had children?” He died at age 11 in 1862.

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Fido The Lincolns, when they lived in Springfield, had a beloved dog named Fido who slept on the family’s horsehair sofa and carried a newspaper in his mouth as he walked through the streets with Abe. When Lincoln was elected President, the family had a decision to make: take Fido to Washington or not? Worried that the sounds of the city would terrify him, they left him (along with the sofa) with neighbors, but not before having this portrait taken. Within a year of Lincoln’s assassination, Fido, too, was killed—stabbed by a drunken man.

Robert The eldest Lincoln son, Robert Todd Lincoln, was also the only son to live to adulthood. Against his mother’s desperate wishes, he served as a captain in Ulysses S. Grant’s Union army. “We have lost one son, and his loss is as much as I can bear without being called to make another sacrifice,” she said. Her husband replied, “Many a poor mother has had to make this sacrifice and has given up every son she had—and lost them all.” Robert survived the war and later served as secretary of war under Presidents Garfield and Arthur. He married and fathered three children, and after leaving public service he worked as a lawyer. He died in 1926.

PART IV

Worth Debating: Douglas, Slavery

ON JANUARY 4, 1854, WHILE Lincoln was attending the opening of the Illinois Supreme Court in Springfield, the Honorable Stephen A. Douglas, the Democratic U.S. senator from Illinois, was about to blow the lid off the United States.

At our nation’s founding, even before the U.S. Constitution was signed, members of the Constitutional Convention who were creating the document that would rule the American republic were uneasy about whether they ought to permit the slavery of African men, women and children under the new instrument. George Mason, a Virginia slave owner himself, denounced the “infernal traffic” in black slaves, and warned that tolerating slave labor would “bring the judgment of heaven on a country.” As it was, every state except Georgia had passed laws banning the slave trade and several had banned slavery outright; others were easing laws that permitted emancipation, and the newly enacted Northwest Ordinance barred slavery from any of the territories that would eventually become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.

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Scars of Slavery One of the most famous slavery images ever made, of a man, possibly named Peter Gordon, who escaped from a Mississippi plantation in 1863. Of the scars on his back, he said, “Overseer . . . whipped me. I was two months in bed sore from the whipping.”

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Stephen A. Douglas At five feet four inches tall, the “Little Giant”(above) must’ve seemed an odd match for the lanky Lincoln. Though it was the 1858 fight for the U.S. senatorship for Illinois that linked the two men, they’d known each other for 20 years by then, having served together in the Illinois legislature in the 1830s. Douglas even knew Mary Todd during that time. There was no denying Douglas’s popularity during the campaign (below, an elaborate parade in his honor in Chicago in August 1858). But Douglas also could not deny Lincoln’s strengths, saying this of his rival: “I’ve met him at the bar, I’ve met him on the stump, and I want to say to you, my friend, that he’s a hard man to get up against.”

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But the die-hard South Carolina delegation threatened to walk out of the Convention if the Constitution laid a hand on slavery, and so the Convention took the path of least resistance. Slavery would not be banned, but it would also not be mentioned in the new Constitution (except in one elaborate circumlocution). Meanwhile, the steady ebbing of slavery would gradually erase its presence from America on its own.

And this might have been the history of slavery in America if not for the same industrial revolution that created the new factories, mills, steamboats, canals and railroads. The commodity that fed those mills was cotton, the white gold of the transatlantic economy, and the finest soils for growing cotton were those of the American South, especially in the newly opened Mississippi River valley. And the labor that could grow it most economically was black slave labor. In embarrassingly short order, slavery went from being a pitiable relic of the pre-Revolutionary past to producing more than half of all American exports. As cotton and slavery became more profitable, slaveholders demanded new territory on which to plant the crop, and the free states became alarmed that the slave states were going to convert the sweet land of American liberty into an enormous slave camp.

The first alarm sounded in 1819 when Congress began debating Missouri’s petition for admission to the United States as a state with legalized slavery. Anxious Northerners saw Missouri as tipping the balance of power between North and South; even worse, Missouri was the first territory carved from Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase to apply for statehood, and Northern free states saw Missouri as a bellwether for the way the rest of the new territories might go. But before an explosion could wreck the Union, the Whig giant Henry Clay skillfully cobbled together a compromise in 1820 that allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state but that also banned slavery from any other portions of the Louisiana Purchase.

The nation breathed easier, but only until 1846 and the beginning of President Polk’s war with Mexico. Victorious American armies stripped Mexico of modern-day Arizona, New Mexico, California, Utah and parts of Nevada and Colorado—and thereby opened up all over again the question of whether these new territories should be slave or free.

Once again, the aging Henry Clay stepped into the breach, aided by the Illinois Democrat Stephen Douglas. A new compromise was forged, using a new ­formula—“popular sovereignty”—to defuse the situation. By the terms of popular sovereignty, the settlers who actually moved into the newly acquired Mexican territories would be allowed to determine for themselves whether they wanted to legalize slavery there or not. Popular sovereignty not only had an amiably democratic ring to it but also held out the cynical promise of getting the rumpus over slavery off the floor of Congress, where it might split the nation, and out into the vast arid stretches of the territories, where controversy could dissolve into thin air.

Popular sovereignty seemed, in fact, to work so well that Stephen Douglas wondered whether it might not also ease the logjam in Congress over organizing future territories in the old Louisiana Purchase, which was still governed by the slavery ban of the Missouri Compromise. Douglas wrote a bill for the organization of the Kansas and Nebraska territories, tersely repealing the Missouri Compromise and substituting popular sovereignty as the new organizing principle for the territories, and introduced it to the Senate.

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Battle for the Senate With its clear condemnation of slavery on moral grounds, the speech Lincoln gave in 1858 at the Illinois statehouse (below) when accepting his party’s endorsement was considered radical and risky even by his supporters. But Lincoln insisted on using the words “A house divided against itself cannot stand”—a biblical reference he knew would be instantly understood. He further articulated his views in a series of seven debates in August through October of that year (above, a depiction of one). In each, held outside on a wooden platform in front of as many as 20,000 people, one candidate spoke for an hour, followed by the other man for an hour and a half and then a 30-minute rebuttal by the first. Newspapermen had a grand time criticizing both men. “He howled, he ranted, he bellowed, he pawed dirt, he shook his head, he turned livid in the face, he struck his right hand into his left, he foamed at the mouth . . . he cursed, he exulted, he domineered,” wrote one about Douglas. He is “as queer looking as he is queer spoken,” wrote another about Lincoln. Douglas went on to win reelection, but the debates brought Lincoln national attention that would serve him well two years later.

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DOUGLAS ANTICIPATED OPPOSITION BUT not the political firestorm that erupted across the country, and especially in his home state of Illinois. And it is a good measure of how deeply the fire burned that it touched Abraham Lincoln in his political torpor, and “aroused him as he had never been before,” as he wrote of himself.

Lincoln had, in his words, “ever been opposed to slavery” from the first day his father had compelled him to hand over his teenage earnings in Indiana. In 1837, he had signed a protest in the Illinois legislature, declaring that “the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy,” and during his lone term in Congress he unsuccessfully tried to offer a bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. Slavery also cut straight across the grain of Lincoln’s passion for self-improvement. “When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life,” he said, “free society is such that he knows he can better his condition . . . I want every man to have the chance—and I believe a black man is entitled to it—in which he can better his condition.” But Lincoln assumed no role as an antislavery activist. Like so many in the Constitutional Convention long before, he had “rested in the hope and belief that it was in course of ultimate extinction,” and for 30 years, the Missouri Compromise seemed to have made that certain.

However, with the Kansas-Nebraska bill’s rollback of the Missouri Compromise, Lincoln “became convinced that either I had been resting in a delusion, or the institution was being placed on a new basis . . . for making it perpetual, national and universal.” Stephen Douglas might claim that he was doing nothing more than submitting a troublesome political question to its best political arbiters—the people of the territories—but Lincoln suspected otherwise. “This declared indifference” is a “covert real zeal for the spread of slavery,” Lincoln said in an election rally in Peoria in October, and that amounted to conspiracy to commit political fraud.

What made this “covert real zeal” even more destructive was the way it soiled the reputation of American democracy before the world. “I hate [slavery] because of the monstrous injustice” of it, Lincoln said, but furthermore, “I hate it because it . . . enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.” How could Americans embrace the Declaration of Independence and the Kansas-Nebraska bill with the same arms, without making democracy a farce? The Declaration declared that all men are created equal; Kansas-Nebraska repudiated that and declared that some men could be kept as unequals anywhere a democratic majority decided to approve it.

Douglas managed to bully the Kansas-Nebraska bill through Congress, but instead of paving the way for a placid organization of the Kansas territory, rival proslavery and antislavery militias sprang up and turned the territory into “Bleeding Kansas.” Debates in Congress not only refused to subside but resulted in brawls, drawn revolvers and the beating of one senator into insensibility. The Whig Party dissolved into quarreling splinters after the presidential election of 1856, and only the reminder that these slaves were, after all, black Africans whom all white Democrats should despise kept the Democratic Party from doing likewise. The Free North and the Slave South had become more, not less, polarized, and even Stephen Douglas felt the noose tightening around his political neck as his 1858 campaign for reelection to the Senate got under way.

LINCOLN HAD KNOWN DOUGLAS SINCE their earliest days in the Illinois legislature. Even then they had stood as opponents, Whig against Democrat, “Long Abe” against the five-foot-four-inch “Little Giant.” But Douglas’s star had always seemed to be in the ascendant, while Lincoln felt his had sunk almost out of sight: “With me, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success.” Still, Lincoln averred, he would rather be a failure and be guiltless of “the oppressed of my species . . . than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch’s brow.” When the Whig Party imploded in the mid 1850s, Lincoln attached himself to a new antislavery party, the Republicans, and in 1858, the Illinois Republicans picked Lincoln to challenge Douglas for the U.S. Senate.

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The Nomination The Republicans had a giant temporary structure built for their 1860 convention in Chicago. Called the Wigwam (above), it was designed to hold the delegates, reporters and spectators—some 10,000 in all. Lincoln needed 233 votes for the nomination—and reached 364 on the third ballot. When he received word of his victory by telegram in Springfield, he thanked the friends who’d been waiting with him and then went home to his wife. “There is a little woman on Eighth Street who will be glad to hear this,” he said, “and I guess I’ll go up and carry her the news. Below: He formally accepts the nomination.

INTERFOTO/ALAMY

Douglas had on his side the power of name recognition, a money chest filled with donations from wealthy East Coast backers and an easy opportunity to appeal to racial prejudice. Elect Lincoln, Douglas warned, and slavery would be forcibly abolished, civil war between North and South would break out, and white Illinoisans would be swamped in a flood of newly freed blacks from Missouri. “Do you desire to turn this beautiful state into a free negro colony, in order that when Missouri abolishes slavery, she can send one hundred thousand emancipated slaves into Illinois to become citizens and voters on an equality with yourselves?” Douglas roared. And the crowds roared back, No, never!

But Lincoln had some roaring of his own to do. Speaking in a high-pitched drawl that penetrated to the outer edges of even the largest crowds, and stabbing the air with, as William Henry Herndon described it, “that long bony forefinger of his to dot an idea or to express a thought,” Lincoln accused Douglas of deliberately planning to deliver the western territories into the hands of slavery. “We are now far into the fifth year, since” Kansas-Nebraska promised to put “an end to slavery agitation” and instead of easing the national controversy over slavery, Kansas-Nebraska made it worse, he said. And the controversy would get worse still, “until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.” American liberty could not continue balancing precariously between the interests of slavery and of freedom. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he said at the Illinois statehouse. The American republic “cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free,” because the unstoppable tendency of both principles meant that “it will become all one thing, or all the other.” Popular sovereignty was at best a placebo, at worst a deep ploy by Douglas to open the territories to slavery and thus win Southern support for a run for the presidency in 1860.

In a series of seven debates with Douglas across Illinois (and in 60 other separate public appearances), Lincoln hammered home the message that the real issue at stake was not whether Americans have the privilege of choosing what they want to legalize but whether they have the moral right to legalize something that is so demonstrably wrong that it rots away the fundamental principles on which the republic was built. The American Revolution had been fought to proclaim that all men were created equal. Slavery, on the other hand, fixed some men as masters and some as chattel, and took the bread earned by the chattel and gave it to the masters, as surely as any king had ever done. “No matter in what shape it comes,” Lincoln warned, “whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”

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Campaign for the Presidency Hannibal Hamlin was chosen as Lincoln’s vice presidential running mate for geographical reasons: The Republicans thought the Maine governor would provide East Coast balance to Lincoln’s midwestern ticket. (And indeed, that seems to have been all Hamlin was good for, later referring to himself as “the most unimportant man in Washington, ignored by the President, the cabinet, and Congress.”) Nineteenth-century campaign etiquette dictated that candidates do no campaigning for themselves, so Lincoln and Hamlin let their supporters travel the country stumping on their behalf (above and below, Republican paraphernalia). Their Northern Democratic opponent, however, defied tradition. After announcing a need to visit his mother, Stephen Douglas took a circuitous route through the North and South to get there, making speeches on the way. His less-than-subtle tactic prompted endless newspaper stories about “Stephen’s search for his mother” and a poem in the Portsmouth (New Hampshire) Journal that included this footnote: “It is said that Stephen did not know where or when he passed his mother; but after traveling South as far as North Carolina, he thought it best to take a ‘back-track’ and so found his mother down in Maine, past Monday.”

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UNHAPPILY FOR ABRAHAM LINCOLN, THE election of U.S. senators in 1858 was still decided by the vote of the state legislature, and Douglas had enough of a lock on the Illinois legislature to ensure that he was reelected. But the sensational impact of Lincoln’s debates had earned him wide recognition. “Seriously, Lincoln,” an old friend, Jesse Fell, consoled him, “you are getting a national reputation.”

Indeed he was. Invitations to speak, and to campaign for Republican candidates, came from Iowa, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin and Kansas. These invitations were capped off by an entreaty to speak at the Cooper Union (also known as the Cooper Institute) in New York City in February 1860, in what amounted to a tryout before the East Coast Republican leadership. It took him three days to make the trip by train from Springfield to New York, but once there, he registered at the swank Astor House hotel, purchased a new stovepipe hat and visited the Broadway photographic studio of the famous Mathew Brady, who posed him in statesmanlike fashion, one hand on a book, his shirt collar tightened up (by Brady) to conceal his overlong neck.

The speech that night at the Cooper Union was a major success, managing to energize his hearers with the confidence that the elimination of slavery put them on the side of the Founders and yet avoiding any suggestion that it should be forced upon the South. There was no talk now of divided houses. The only Republican goal was the containment of slavery, not its outright abolition. “Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation,” Lincoln said, “but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National Territories?” William Cullen Bryant, the poet and editor of the New York Evening Post, thought it was the best political speech he had ever heard in his life.

The Speech at Cooper Union “One thing may be said with certainty. Had Lincoln failed at his nerve-wracking, physically exhausting, do-or-die New York debut, history would long ago have relegated his name to the trash heap of obscurity,” Harold Holzer wrote in his book Lincoln at Cooper Union. The debut was arranged by the Young Men’s Republican Club in the fall of 1859, but Lincoln put months of work into the speech (an excerpt of which appears above) and did not actually deliver it until February 1860. Someone who was there that evening, along with 1,500 others, recalled it this way: “When Lincoln rose to speak, I was greatly disappointed. He was tall, tall, oh, how tall! and so angular and awkward that I had, for an instant, a feeling of pity for so ungainly a man.” His opinion changed as soon as Lincoln began to speak, however: “The whole man was transfigured. I forgot his clothes, his personal appearance, and his individual peculiarities. Presently, forgetting myself, I was on my feet like the rest . . . cheering this wonderful man.” The importance of that speech, and the portrait taken earlier that day (below) by Mathew Brady, cannot be underestimated. As Lincoln himself later said, “Brady and the Cooper Union speech made me President of the United States,” adding that the photograph “dispelled the opposition based on the rumours of my long ungainly figure, large feet, clumsy hands, and long, gaunt head; making me into a man of human aspect and dignified bearing.”

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The Cooper Union speech could not have been delivered at a more crucial moment. Four months before, John Brown, a Connecticut-born puritan who believed that God had designated him to lead a slave insurrection, seized control of the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, on the Potomac River. The plan was inept, and Brown and his two dozen abolitionist “soldiers” were all either killed or captured; unrepentant to the last, Brown and other survivors were hanged. But this gave no comfort to the Slave South. On the day of Brown’s funeral, Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis cried that “a thousand John Browns” were waiting in the North to do the same thing, and if slaveholders “are not to be protected in our property” by guarantees from the federal government, “we are therefore released from our allegiance, and will protect ourselves out of the Union.”

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Rally in Springfield Just because candidate Lincoln didn’t go to the people didn’t mean the people didn’t come to Lincoln. On August 8, 1860, some 80,000 swarmed Springfield for a rally in support of their man. As a parade made its way from the state capitol through the city and past the Lincoln home, the family watched from the house. The photograph above—taken by William A. Shaw, who captured the scene from the second floor of the dwelling across the street—shows Lincoln in a white suit standing by the front door, Mary watching from the first-floor window at the left and Willie on the floor above, leaning out of the second window from the left. In Shaw’s version of events, after he took the picture, he mentioned it to Lincoln, who promptly offered his root cellar as a darkroom and helped set it up.

Popular sovereignty in the territories was no longer enough to placate Southerners, nor was Stephen Douglas thought by them to be friendly enough to slavery. When the Democratic national convention met in Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1860, the Southern delegations walked out rather than support Douglas’s nomination for the presidency. The “bolters” assembled their own Southern convention and nominated John C. Breckinridge, splitting the Democratic Party in half.

The wise heads among the Republicans realized that the Democratic split was their party’s opportunity. If they nominated a radical antislavery leader, like William Henry Seward of New York or Ohio’s Salmon P. Chase, they might drive Breckinridge Democrats and Douglas Democrats back into each other’s arms. The dark horse in this running was Lincoln, who could appeal to the old Whigs and conservative Democrats who still sat on the political fence, as well as the Northern opponents of slavery. With the Republican convention slated to assemble in Chicago’s “Wigwam,” and backed by a unanimous endorsement from the Illinois state Republican convention, Lincoln enjoyed a hefty home advantage. Once assembled, Lincoln’s political allies aggressively lobbied the convention’s delegations to consider him as the only electable Republican. On May 18, after only three ballots, he pulled ahead of William Seward and captured the Republican presidential nomination.

From that moment, the result was virtually a foregone conclusion. On November 6, Lincoln won only 39 percent of the popular vote, and carried only the free states. But these states were far richer in electoral votes than any of those won by Douglas or Breckinridge, much less by a forlorn compromise party, the Constitutional Unionists. Lincoln won a crushing 180 out of 303 electoral votes, and by midnight it was clear that he would be the 16th President of the United States.

Assuming, of course, that they remained united. The day after the election, the legislature of South Carolina began debate on resolutions to call a state convention for the purpose of withdrawing from the Union. On December 20, the assembled convention proclaimed the “State of South Carolina an Independent Commonwealth.”

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The Grace Bedell Letters, October 15 and 19, 1860 Less than a month before the presidential election, an 11-year-old girl from Westfield, New York, wrote to the Republican nominee with a campaign suggestion. “I have got 4 brothers and part of them will vote for you any way and if you let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you you [sic] would look a good deal better for your face is so thin,” her letter “New York, wrote to the Republican nominee with a campaign suggestion (above)” said. Furthermore, she wrote, “all the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husband’s [sic] to vote for you and then you would be President.” In Lincoln’s charming reply (below), he asked her, “As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affection if I were to begin it now?” He nevertheless did begin it, and by the time he took office he had a full beard.

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Victory With help from a radical antislavery group Called the Wide-Awakes (above, in a campaign parade), Lincoln won the presidency. He carried all the free states (except New Jersey, which still awarded him four out of seven electoral votes). In the 15 slave states he received no electoral votes. And in 10 states, not a single person voted for him.

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Farewell to Springfield Address, February 11, 1861 With more than 1,000 people gathered at the Springfield depot to see the President-elect off to Washington, he climbed aboard the train and said goodbye with great emotion, crying as he spoke. As the train pulled away, a reporter asked Lincoln to write down the speech he’d just given. The resulting document, now in the Library of Congress, shows, in Lincoln’s wobbly handwriting (continued by his secretary John Nicolay), his depth of feeling for Springfield and its people: “My friends,” he wrote, “no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return.” He never did.

PART V

The Standard Bearer: President Lincoln

LINCOLN WAS UNDER NO illusions about the nature of his election. He had never served in any executive capacity, never commanded armies, never even been mayor of his hometown of Springfield. The Republicans had chosen him as their candidate because they could not agree on either Seward or Chase, and the nation had elected him because of the Democratic split. It was, Lincoln admitted to reporters, largely “from the fact of his having made a race for the Senate of the United States with Judge Douglas in the state of Illinois, his name became prominent, and he was accidentally selected and elected afterwards as President.”

However, anyone who assumed that Lincoln would only serve as a figurehead while the Republican party leadership managed things from backstage was headed for the same ditch that Leonard Swett had predicted would welcome those who casually underestimated Lincoln. He invited both Seward and Chase to join his presidential cabinet as secretary of state and secretary of the treasury. But when Seward assumed that this was also an invitation to take control of the entire administration, Lincoln harshly yanked him back. Chase was reduced to complaining, “We . . . are called members of the Cabinet but are in reality only separate heads of departments, meeting now and then for talk on whatever happens to come uppermost, not for grave consultation on matters concerning the salvation of the country.”

Lincoln was no more willing to allow the Southern states to dictate to him. South Carolina’s secession from the Union was quickly followed by the secessions of six more slaveholding states—Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas—and by the time Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861, the Southerners had organized themselves into a new republic, the Confederate States of America, and were demanding the turnover of all federal property within their boundaries. But in his inaugural address, Lincoln made plain that he had no intention of recognizing the legality of secession. The Constitution made the Union permanent and gave no allowance for unilateral withdrawal by any state. What the Southerners called secession was, in reality, rebellion, and his presidential oath required him to put rebellion down. Yet he hoped that some sort of reconciliation could still be achieved. Lincoln expressed his faith that “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

But the new Confederate government was already beyond recall. On April 12, Confederate troops began bombarding one of the holdout federal military installations, Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor, and compelled its surrender two days later. Lincoln answered the Confederates’ dare by imposing a naval blockade of the rebel states and calling on the loyal states for 75,000 volunteers to put down “combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” He had not been elected to preside over a civil war, but one had been thrust upon him.

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The First Inauguration Whispers of “Rebel plots” to assassinate Lincoln began circulating even before his inauguration, so security in Washington was tight on March 4, 1861. Soldiers surrounded Lincoln’s carriage as it made its way to the still-unfinished Capitol, where 25,000 people waited to see their new President sworn in (above and below). And there, on the building’s east side (the west is used now), he took the oath of office and delivered, at 3,637 words, one of the longer inaugural addresses in U.S. history. Earlier drafts of the speech had ended with a question for the South: “Shall it be peace or sword?” But the final draft struck a conciliatory note: “We are not enemies, but friends . . . Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

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GRANGER

Secession In his inaugural address, Lincoln argued that seceding from the Union was illegal, but 11 states had other ideas. The first of these, South Carolina, seceded on December 20, 1860, before Lincoln even took office. Below: The Charleston Mercury wasted no time hailing the decision, hitting the streets with a special edition at 1:30 p.m., 15 minutes after the Ordinance of Secession was passed. It wouldn’t be long before men would begin volunteering to fight for the new Confederacy. Above: Soldiers in Richmond in 1861.

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FROM THE FIRST, ALMOST NOTHING WENT right. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the U.S. Army amounted to little more than 16,000 officers and men, and most of their experience had been devoted to policing the frontier; the Navy had only 42 warships in commission. Lincoln hoped that a patriotic tidal wave of volunteers would make up in numbers what they lacked in training. But the call for volunteers pushed four more slave states—Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee—to desert to the Confederacy, and when the volunteers marched haphazardly into Virginia in July, they were dispersed with insolent ease by a Confederate army at Bull Run. The Navy was far more successful in clamping a blockade around Southern ports, which would deny the Confederates access to war supplies. But even that success had its leaden lining. The British industrial economy was critically dependent on the flow of Southern cotton to its mills, and when an overzealous Navy captain boldly seized two Confederate diplomats off the deck of a British passenger ship, the Trent, Lincoln only narrowly fended off British intervention on the side of the Confederacy.

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The War Begins The first major land battle of the Civil War was the First Battle of Bull Run, fought at Manassas, Virginia, on July 21, 1861. With the 35,000 Union troops’ defeat by the Confederacy’s 20,000 came the realization that the war wouldn’t be as easy to win as originally thought. Months later, when the Confederate troops pulled out, photographer George Barnard had his first chance to shoot the battlefield. Above: Children, two dressed like soldiers themselves, observe the troops on horseback. Two months before that battle, the first Michigan infantry received its flags in Detroit with a crowd of well-wishers in attendance. Below: Jex Bardwell’s image of the ceremony is marred by a crack across the glass negative.

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Just as he was acutely conscious of his lack of executive credentials, Lincoln also understood how little he knew about the management of war. In the wake of the Bull Run debacle, he invited George B. McClellan, who was lauded as the most gifted military thinker in America, to take command of all the Union armies. McClellan fully justified everyone’s expectations of him as an organizer and administrator, and in the spring of 1862, he achieved a military marvel by transporting a 120,000-man army by water from Washington to the very gates of the Confederate capital in Richmond, Virginia. But McClellan’s gifts did not extend to battlefield command. A substantially smaller Confederate army under Robert E. Lee drove McClellan into retreat and then turned and launched its own invasion of the North. Only the miraculous interception of Lee’s campaign orders allowed McClellan to chase Lee into a cul-de-sac between the Potomac River and Antietam Creek. Even then, after a brutal all-day battle on September 17, 1862, that left 23,000 dead, wounded and missing on both sides, McClellan limply allowed Lee’s army to escape. “He is a good engineer, all admit; there is no better organizer,” Lincoln bitterly remarked, “but having the slows, he is good for nothing for an onward movement.”

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Antietam The North won at Antietam, Maryland, in September 1862, but Lincoln wasn’t happy: His general, George McClellan, had failed to pursue Lee’s retreating army. As Henry Ketcham describes the situation in The Life of Abraham Lincoln, “The Army of the Potomac was magnificent in numbers, equipment, intelligence. In every respect but one they were decidedly superior to the enemy. The one thing they needed was leadership.” So the President paid a visit to the battlefield on October 3 to urge McClellan to attack. Here he is above, in a rare photograph of him at the front, standing tall in his stovepipe hat, facing his general—who would be replaced a month later.

After Antietam, Lincoln was through with McClellan and relieved him of command on November 7. McClellan’s replacements, however, were no improvement. Lincoln turned to a floridly bewhiskered Rhode Islander, Ambrose Burnside, who had achieved some early successes in small operations on the North Carolina coast. But Burnside nearly destroyed his own army, flinging it again and again at Confederate defenses outside Fredericksburg, Virginia. In January 1863, Lincoln replaced Burnside with the tough-talking Joseph Hooker. Hooker, too, though, led Union troops to an embarrassing debacle at Chancellorsville in May. “What will the country say?” Lincoln cried out loud to the journalist Noah Brooks, “Oh, what will the country say?”

Only in the west, in the Mississippi River valley, was Lincoln receiving anything that sounded like good news for the Union. There, a washed-out former U.S. Army officer, Ulysses S. Grant, had been given command of troops in Illinois by the governor, Richard Yates, and had turned into a surprisingly effective campaigner. In early 1862, Grant launched a lightning invasion of Tennessee that quickly captured two Confederate barrier forts, Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland, and peeled open the upper shell of the Confederacy to Union occupation. And at the other end of the Mississippi, a bold U.S. Navy flag officer, David Farragut, bluffed and bullied his way up the mouth of the river and captured the key Confederate port of New Orleans.

But even these welcome tidings had their limitations. Grant dallied alongside the Tennessee River long enough for a Confederate army to gather and strike him at Pittsburg Landing in April 1862. In a seesaw battle that lasted more than two days, Grant managed to throw the Confederates back, but only barely, and the casualty lists were the longest and most depressing of any battle thus far in the war. And even with New Orleans in his hands, Farragut had no way of opening the middle stretches of the Mississippi River around the riverside Confederate citadel of Vicksburg. With the Mississippi deadlocked, farmers and merchants in the old Northwest had no highway for the marketing of their goods and produce to the world, and they would soon enough take out their economic frustrations with the Lincoln administration in the fall 1862 congressional elections.

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Tactics As an aeronaut for the Union Army, Thaddeus Lowe had the job of gathering information about the enemy from above. On May 31, 1862, he was urgently needed to observe the Battle of Fair Oaks, Virginia. Time was of the essence, but Lowe was in a quandary: His small balloon, Constitution, was fully inflated with hydrogen, but the large balloon this task required, Intrepid, was only partially filled. Lowe later recalled his solution: “If only I could get the gas from the ‘Constitution’ into the ‘Intrepid.’ Just then I spied a ten inch camp kettle lying on the ground. Instantly I seized it and had one of my mechanics cut out the bottom. The ‘Intrepid’ was disconnected from the inflating apparatus and by means of the camp kettle attached to the ‘Constitution’ and in a very short time the gas filled the larger balloon. An hour saved!” Soldiers hold the balloon’s tethers as he takes flight (above). “I ascended to a height of a thousand feet and there witnessed the titanic struggle,” he remembered. “The whole scene of action was plainly visible and reports of the progress of the battle were constantly sent until darkness fell upon the grand but terrifying spectacle.” Besides balloons, horses, too, were vital to the effort—notably Benson’s Horse Battery of the 2nd U.S. Artillery (below, at Fair Oaks), which aided the North.

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LINCOLN’S CRITICS WOULD HAVE ANOTHER stick to beat him with that fall. Lincoln had been elected as an antislavery man, by an antislavery party. But his opposition, as well as that of most Republicans, extended only as far as preventing the further spread of slavery into the western territories. He was fully aware that the Confederates were intent on breaking up the Union to protect slavery, but he had no authority from either the Northern people at large or from the Constitution in particular to make war directly on slavery in the states. Slavery might be the root cause of the war, but secession was the Confederacy’s actual constitutional crime, and he could wage war only against secession and for the restoration of the Union. If he attempted to overstep that line, the federal judiciary, still headed by the ancient and conservative Chief Justice Roger Taney, would overturn any action he might take. “I sincerely wish that all men were free, and I especially wish for the complete abolition of slavery in this country,” he explained, “but my private wishes and feelings must yield to the necessities of my position.”

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In Camp George Meade was the general who led the Army of the Potomac before coming under Grant’s supervision. Above: His son Captain George Meade Jr. (third from left) dines with fellow officers at Brandy Station, Virginia, in April 1864. That same month, Colonel Theodore Lyman (second from right) writes to his wife of the peaceful springtime: “I suppose we may call this the lull before the hurricane, which little short of a miracle can avert.” Below: Union troops write letters from church pews while one soldier mends his clothes. The men carry sewing kits called housewives and take pride in their skill. One says he patches his trousers “as good as a heap of women would do.”

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That did not mean that he could do nothing about slavery, or that he should do nothing, especially since the Confederates were diverting their slaves into building fortifications, driving wagons and other war-­related tasks. Only half a year after his inauguration, Lincoln designed a federally funded buyout program to emancipate the slaves in the four slave states that had remained loyal to the Union—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri. If the buyout plan was adopted by the state legislatures, it would not only keep those states from bolting to the Confederacy but keep the federal judiciary from meddling in the emancipation process. “I beseech you to make the arguments for yourselves,” he pleaded. “You cannot, if you would, be blind to the signs of the times.” By the spring of 1862, even tiny Delaware had folded its arms and refused to cooperate.

GRANGER

Fredericksburg The Union Army did not fare well on the fields of Fredericksburg. After the first battle, in December 1862, more than 12,000 Federal soldiers were dead, wounded or missing. In the second battle, part of the Chancellorsville campaign and considered by many to be Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s greatest Civil War victory, the South prevailed against a Northern army more than twice its size. The victory was bittersweet, however: Lee lost his right-hand man when General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson was mortally wounded by friendly fire. Above: Battery D of the 5th U.S. Artillery at Fredericksburg in June 1863. Below: Dead soldiers atop Marye’s Heights.

GRANGER

Lincoln did have one other possibility to explore, but it was a risky one. The Constitution designates the President as “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” The laws of war were not the same as laws in times of civil peace, so it was presumed that the President, acting in his capacity as commander in chief, also possessed certain “war powers” to be used in wartime situations and for military purposes. The problem was that this had never been tested in the courts, much less explained in any detail by legal writers. But Lincoln had become convinced that “we are done throwing grass at the rebels.” He now “proposed trying stones,” and he would justify emancipating the Confederacy’s slaves as “a fit and necessary war measure.” (Never mind that this coincided perfectly with “my oft expressed personal wish that all men every-where could be free.”) On September 22, 1862, he released an Emancipation Proclamation declaring that, as of January 1, three million black slaves “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

Nanny Goats Tad Lincoln (above, with his father) was eight years old and his brother Willie was almost 11 when they moved into the White House. Gifts poured in for the young boys—among them, two goats, Nanny and Nanko. They were kept inside as pets, the mischievous brothers hitching them to carts and driving them through the halls, once even disrupting an official reception. It seems that the goats were just as mischievous as the boys. Nanko was known for digging up the bulbs planted by the White House gardener, and Nanny was discovered one day in Tad’s bed. That was the last straw, as an August 8, 1863, letter from the President (bottom) to his vacationing wife would indicate. “Tell dear Tad, poor ‘Nanny Goat’ is lost; and Mrs. Cuthbert & I are in distress about it,” he writes to Mary (below). “The day you left Nanny was found resting herself, and chewing her little cud, on the middle of Tad’s bed. But now she’s gone! . . . This is the last we know of poor ‘Nanny.’”

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Another Son Gone Abraham and Mary Lincoln were distraught when both Willie and Tad became gravely ill, most likely with typhoid fever, in early 1862. Although Tad recovered, Willie, thought to be his parents’ favorite, did not. On February 20, in the bedroom shown below, he became the second Lincoln son to die. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” said his grief-stricken father. “God has called him home. I know that he is much better off in heaven, but then we loved him so. It is hard, hard to have him die!” Tad (above, in front of the White House) lived to be 18, dying in 1871 after a series of illnesses.

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Lincoln’s Cottage “We are truly delighted with this retreat,” Mary Lincoln wrote to a friend in 1862, referring to Old Soldiers’ Home, a 34-room Gothic Revival “cottage” high on a hill three miles from the White House. Weighed down by sadness over Willie’s death and eager to escape the city’s humidity and chaos, the family occupied the house from June to November in 1862, 1863 and 1864. But the President could not escape the war. Every morning he rode his horse to the White House, accompanied by cavalry units, to fulfill his duties as commander in chief, each evening returning to Old Soldiers’ Home. Perhaps he considered his views on slavery during his rides, because it was there, at the cottage, that he drafted the Emancipation Proclamation. From there, too, he could see the raw and painful results of the war he was waging. The view from his library was of Soldiers’ Home cemetery (below), where 5,000 soldiers were buried from 1861 to 1864. Between 30 and 40 military funerals took place there each week.

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Emancipation Proclamation After completing a first draft of his Proclamation in July 1862, Lincoln convenes his cabinet and reads the document aloud to them (captured above in a painting by Francis Bicknell Carpenter). Although he’d made it clear that he didn’t want their advice on the contents, he did take one suggestion, from Secretary of State William Seward (seated across from the President), who thought Lincoln should wait to issue the Proclamation until “you give it to the country supported by military success.” Lincoln waited, issuing the edict after the victory at Antietam. Below: An elaborate reproduction of the document featuring vignettes about slavery.

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PART VI

The Turn of the Tide

ENFORCING THE PROCLAMATION would have to be a matter for the Union armies to accomplish.

But by the summer of 1863, the fortunes of the Civil War appeared to be turning in Lincoln’s direction at last. Robert E. Lee and his fabled Confederate army lunged northward again, invading Pennsylvania and setting off waves of panic as far away as Pittsburgh and New York. But in a grueling three-day battle at Gettysburg, Union forces under the command of George G. Meade stopped and threw back the Confederates. A day later, Vicksburg surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant. Four months after that, Grant repeated his Vicksburg triumph by securing Union control over the railroad center at Chattanooga. “Peace does not appear so distant as it did,” Lincoln wrote in August. “I hope it will come soon, and come to stay.”

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Gettysburg The Civil War’s bloodiest battle took place at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, from July 1 to 3, 1863, with some 51,000 Union and Confederate soldiers killed, wounded, captured or missing. Although both sides lost about the same number of men, the battle was considered a major victory for the Union and a turning point in the war, halting the Confederate invasion of the North and forcing Lee to retreat to Virginia. One of the men who helped win the battle is shown in the photograph above on the horse at left: General George Armstrong Custer. Called the Boy General because he was only 23 years old at the time, Custer was known for his fearlessness, his risk-taking—and his long, blond ringlets, which he reportedly combed and treated with a cinnamon tonic. Indeed, Major General Alfred Pleasanton (on the horse at right) was so impressed with Custer’s ability and dash that he jumped him in rank from captain to brigadier general.

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Gettysburg Address The carnage at Gettysburg, combined with the heavy rains and humidity that followed, created a problem: what to do with the rotting bodies lying exposed in their shallow graves. Four months later—after a commission raised the money for 17 acres of land at the battle site and the U.S. government provided coffins—a proper burial ground was ready. The plan was not for Lincoln to speak at the dedication of Soldiers’ National Cemetery or even attend. Edward Everett, a noted orator from Massachusetts, was to give the remarks, and Lincoln was invited as an afterthought. When he accepted, the event took on greater importance, and crowds began arriving in Gettysburg the night before. By the morning of November 19, more than 15,000 people had gathered to hear him speak. First came Everett, whose oration lasted two hours, followed by Lincoln, who spoke for about two minutes. He could hardly have been more wrong when he said, during his speech, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.” On the contrary, Senator Charles Sumner said later: “The world at once noted what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech.”

He certainly craved it for himself. He had lost old friends to the war, such as General Edward Baker (for whom “little Eddie” had been named), and young protégés, like Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, who should have had full lives before them. In February 1862, 11-year-old “Willie” Lincoln, who reminded people more of his father than any of his siblings, contracted typhoid from the tainted Washington water system and died. Mary Lincoln went into a steep spiral of depression from which she never fully recovered; Lincoln himself dreamt that Willie came at night to his bedside, and was still talking about “the loss of our darling Willie” at the end of his own life. Even his Cabinet proved unruly. Although William Seward had turned from being a rival to a valuable ally, Salmon Chase never ceased conspiring behind Lincoln’s back, plotting to have the Republican party dump Lincoln for himself on the 1864 presidential ticket. After battling both friends and enemies, Lincoln admitted to journalist Noah Brooks that he was left with a “tired spot within” that “nothing could touch.”

As it had in an earlier crisis, Lincoln’s thinking began to take on a religious coloring. The contrary course of the war puzzled Lincoln, who had once imagined that it would be short and mostly painless, and nothing during the war’s first year had turned out as people thought. One thing, at least, he could take as beyond dispute: “The will of God prevails.” The problem was that in this war, as in most, both sides claimed “to act in accordance with the will of God.” God could not be on both sides, Lincoln reasoned, and had thus far favored neither side with victory, despite the fact that he could have done so “by his mere quiet power, on the minds of the now contestants.” So it must be that God had willed the beginning of the war, as well as willing that it should “proceed in a direction that neither side had anticipated.” That unplanned-for result must surely be the emancipation of the slaves, and to the amazement of his Cabinet, this was part of the rationale Lincoln presented for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. The Proclamation was the product of a “promise” he had “made to myself, and”—hesitating a little—“to my Maker,” who “decided this question in favor of the slaves.”

But, like the biblical Abraham, Lincoln only bargained with God; he did not presume to read God’s mind. “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me,” he wrote. “Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation’s condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it.” What was certain, though, was that if the war was lost, not only the slaves but the entire idea of democracy itself would be jeopardized. In November 1863, Lincoln was invited to deliver “a few appropriate remarks” at the dedication of a soldiers’ cemetery on the Gettysburg battlefield. The “remarks,” he explained to Noah Brooks, were intended to be “short, short, short,” but they also struck straight to the heart of the Civil War’s meaning.

“Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” he said. The Confederates denied this proposition, not only by keeping slaves but by trying to walk out on their government the moment it seemed matters were not pleasing to them. To do so was a living contradiction of democracy and made the Civil War a test of whether democratic government “can long endure.” But at Gettysburg, Lincoln was satisfied that “the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here” had answered that test. Their dedication to democracy had consecrated that ground “far above our poor power” to dedicate. Indeed, their example must inspire the living to dedicate themselves “to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion” and ensure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

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MATHEW BRADY & COMPANY/KEYA MORGAN COLLECTION, LINCOLNIMAGES.COM

272 Words On the opposite page, at top, appears the famous photograph of Lincoln taken on the day he gave his Gettysburg Address. The larger view of the image shows a group of boys in the foreground and men wearing sashes in the distance behind them. In the close-up view, Lincoln can be seen at center, seated on the podium. Before and after he spoke, he wrote out the address by hand—five times, each with slightly different words. The version above, called the Bliss copy because it was given to Colonel Alexander Bliss, is the one most often quoted, including on the wall of the Lincoln Memorial. The only copy signed and dated by the President, it hangs in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House.

THE MUSEUM OF THE CONFEDERACY

The Living and the Dead During the war’s four years, the nation became one of suffering, mourning and loss—more pervasive than could have been imagined beforehand. The Union’s wounded were cared for in hospitals on and off the battlefield, more than 50 (including Carver Barracks Hospital, below) in Washington, D.C., alone. Some captured soldiers were, unfortunately, taken to Andersonville Prison , (below) officially known as Camp Sumter, a Confederate institution in Georgia that became notorious for its mistreatment of prisoners. Some 45,000 Union soldiers were confined within its 26½ acres during the war; nearly 13,000 died. Final letters home from dying soldiers were common—and heartbreaking, as the bloodstained missive above demonstrates. “I am very weak but I write to you because I know you would be delighted to read a word from your dying son,” Private James Robert Montgomery, a Confederate soldier who took a shell fragment to his right shoulder at Spotsylvania, writes to his father on May 10, 1864. “I would like to rest in the grave yard with my dear mother and brothers but it’s a matter of minor importance . . . May we meet in heaven.”

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

CORBIS

THE “TIRED SPOT” ONLY GREW MORE TIRED as the battles resumed in 1864 and Lincoln’s hope that the end of the war might be at hand disintegrated. Ulysses S. Grant took over command of the Union army operating in Virginia, but after a brutal campaign through that state, he could offer Lincoln no better result than an apparently endless siege of Richmond. Grant’s favorite subordinate, William Tecumseh Sherman, strode southward with another Union army into Georgia, only to be stymied and checked by a wily Confederate general, Joseph Johnston, and clinched into a depressing siege around Atlanta. A Confederate raid, intended to divert Grant’s attention from Richmond, swept up into Maryland and approached so close to Washington that Lincoln was able to stand on the parapet of one of the city’s fortifications and see the rebel skirmishers popping away at him.

Lincoln had little difficulty brushing aside Chase’s minor conspiracy within the Republican Party and obtaining a renomination for the presidency in June 1864. But it was another question entirely whether a war-weary North would vote for him. “You think I don’t know I am going to be beaten, but I do, and unless some great change takes place, badly beaten,” Lincoln rebuked an overoptimistic friend. “The people promised themselves when General Grant started out that he would take Richmond in June. He didn’t take it, and they blame me.”

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Wounded More than 2,500 injured soldiers were above behind in a makeshift field hospital after the battle at Savage’s Station, Virginia (below). Luckier were those cared for by nurses like Anne Bell, shown below with soldiers after the Battle of Nashville. At the start of the Civil War, most nurses were men. But with the need for more soldiers and with increasing numbers of casualties, women started volunteering to help at military hospitals. Thousands served, and a few, including Louisa May Alcott, wrote about their service. The most famous Civil War nurse was Clara Barton, who worked on the battlefield of Antietam and elsewhere and who would subsequently found the Red Cross.

CORBIS

And then, at almost the last minute, the clouds dissolved. On August 5, doughty Admiral David Farragut steamed fearlessly into Mobile Bay and shut down the city’s blockade runners with the rousing order to “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” Sherman captured Atlanta, jubilantly reporting on September 3 that “in the night the enemy retreated south, and we . . . took possession of the place. So Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.” The Confederate raid on Washington stalled, and was eventually chased down and destroyed by the pursuing Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley. And on November 8, Lincoln was resoundingly reelected with over 55 percent of the popular vote. “Long Abraham Lincoln,” wisecracked Harper’s Weekly, had just grown “a Little Longer.”

VALENTINE RICHMOND HISTORY CENTER

The Fall of Richmond Union troops tried to move into the Confederate capital of Richmond for 10 months without success. But early on April 2, 1865, with Lee’s army worn out and his supplies nearly exhausted, Grant’s army finally broke through the line. Later that day, Lee sent a telegram to President Jefferson Davis: “I advise that all preparation be made for leaving Richmond tonight.” Confederate troops, not content to let the Union have their goods and supplies, and most especially their ammunition, tobacco and whiskey, set warehouses on fire, and blazes raged out of control through the night, worsened by looters. For the North, this was victory. But for those who lived in Richmond, it was, as one reporter noted, “too awful to remember, if it were possible to be erased, but that cannot be.” Above: The capitol of the Confederacy stands above a charred city. Below: Ruins of the arsenal in Richmond, the South’s only source of heavy-caliber guns.

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

ABRAHAM LINCOLN PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM

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PICTURE HISTORY

Reelection Through the summer of 1864, the widely held view was that the President could not be elected to a second term. Weary of war, desperate for peace and believing Lincoln wouldn’t broker it without outlawing slavery, citizens leaned toward his Democratic opponent, former Union general George B. McClellan, viewing him as more likely to compromise with the South on slavery to bring an end to the conflict. Even Lincoln thought he might lose, and he drafted a memorandum and asked his cabinet to endorse it without their knowing the contents. After he did win, 212 electoral college votes to 21, having been bolstered by the Union army’s victories in the fall, the contents of the memo were revealed: Lincoln had pledged his cooperation to the new President-elect for the sake of preserving the Union. Scenes from the campaign top to bottom: A Lincoln medal; an anti-Lincoln poster predicting “ruin” if he is reelected; and a wooden shed in Erie, New York, that was the site of weekly meetings in support of Lincoln and his vice presidential running mate, Andrew Johnson.

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William Tecumseh Sherman “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty; and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I will make more sacrifices today than any of you to secure peace.” So wrote General William Sherman to the mayor and councilmen of Atlanta when they argued that they could not obey his order to evacuate the city. “We don’t want your Negroes, or your horses, or your lands, or any thing you have,” Sherman continued. “But we do want and will have a just obedience to the laws of the United States. That we will have, and if it involved the destruction of your improvements, we cannot help it.” Indeed, Sherman’s men destroyed the train station, machine shops and everything else that could aid the Confederates, set the city on fire and continued their march of destruction through Georgia. Above: Sherman (center, right, leaning on the gun breech) and his staff at Federal Fort No. 7 in Atlanta. Below: His telegram to Lincoln on December 22, 1864, announcing the capture of another Georgia city. “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah,” he wrote, “with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition and also about 25,000 bales of cotton.”

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Surrender at Appomattox After such a bitter, brutal war, the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant was striking for its cordiality. “The results of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia in this struggle,” wrote Grant to Lee, asking him to give up. “I reciprocate your desire to avoid useless effusion of blood,” responded Lee. The home of Wilmer and Virginia McLean in the town of Appomattox Court House (above) was selected as the location for a meeting between the two, and on the afternoon of April 9, 1865, first Lee entered, then Grant, 30 minutes later. When discussing the terms of surrender below, Lee asked that his men be able to keep their horses because they would be needed when they returned to farm life. Grant agreed. And when Lee said his troops had been without food for days, Grant ordered that 25,000 rations be sent to the men. With the documents drafted, the two men shook hands and left the home. When Lee had mounted his horse, “General Grant now stepped down from the porch, and, moving toward him, saluted him by raising his hat,” recalled General Horace Porter, a member of Grant’s staff who was there that day. “He was followed in this act of courtesy by all our officers present; Lee raised his hat respectfully, and rode off to break the sad news to the brave fellows whom he had so long commanded.” No wonder the surrender is referred to as The Gentlemen’s Agreement.

FROM “CAMPAIGNING WITH GRANT” BY GENERAL HORACE PORTER/THE CENTURY CO.

Part VII

Requiem

CONFEDERATE RESISTANCE began to collapse at every point after the reelection. Sherman continued southward through Georgia, shouldering his way past feeble Confederate defence, until he had blazed a path all the way to Savannah on December 22; then he bounded northward into the Carolinas. Lee’s army, weakened by the months-long siege around Richmond, struggled to break free as soon as the spring thaws set in, fleeing westward toward Lynchburg. But Grant was after Lee like a tiger, and in a week had cornered the famed Confederate leader and compelled his surrender at Appomattox Court House on April 9. In North Carolina, Sherman was already circling the last sizable Confederate army, and in Charleston harbor, a flag-­raising ceremony was scheduled at Fort Sumter for April 14, the four-year anniversary of the beginning of the war.

GRANGER

March 4, 1865 Though two days of steady rain leading up to Lincoln’s second inauguration left Pennsylvania Avenue a sloppy mess, thousands walked to the now completed Capitol (below) Stood on its muddy grounds to see his swearing-in (above). “I think there were at least twice as many at the [Capitol] as four years ago,” Lincoln secretary John Nicolay later wrote. “Just at the time when the President appeared on the East Portico to be sworn in, the clouds disappeared and the sun shone out beautifully all the rest of the day.”

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KEYA MORGAN COLLECTION, LINCOLNIMAGES.COM

Second Inauguration The highlight of the event was Lincoln’s speech—some 700 words, considered by many to be better than the Gettysburg Address. Before that, though, there was an incident in the Senate chamber. Andrew Johnson, recovering from typhoid fever, drank three glasses of whiskey before being sworn in—and managed to not only slur his words, make an embarrassing speech, kiss the Bible and wave it overhead but also insult Frederick Douglass. After giving a firm but quiet instruction to the inauguration marshal (“Do not let Johnson speak outside”), Lincoln took his place on the portico, surrounded by the Supreme Court justices and members of his cabinet (Johnson has his hat over his face, above, front row). Some in the audience cried as Lincoln spoke his words of compassion and reconciliation—“with malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in”—and The New York Times praised the speech afterward for “its calmness, its modesty, its reserve,” declaring, “We have a President who will be faithful to the end.” The end, of course, was much nearer than anyone knew—and in fact could have come that day. John Wilkes Booth was standing in the balcony above Lincoln (below: Booth is slightly right of center, top row, with a mustache and high hat) and later said, “What an excellent chance I had to kill the President if I had wished, on inauguration day.”

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That evening, Lincoln went to the theater. As a trial lawyer, he had always been a public performer before audiences, and he felt an unspoken kinship to actors. He adored Shakespeare—“especially Macbeth,” he wrote, “I think nothing equals Macbeth. It is wonderful”—and rarely lost an opportunity to see anything that played on the Washington stage, from French opera to minstrel shows. On the bill for April 14 was a British comedy of manners, Our American Cousin, at Ford’s Theatre, where many hundreds packed the galleries as much for a glimpse of Lincoln as for the play.

But for this performance, there would be an unscripted entr’acte. Just after 10 o’clock, a well-known Maryland-born actor and sometime Confederate agent named John Wilkes Booth slipped into the presidential box. Booth was fanatically unreconciled to the Confederate surrender, and he and a small band of conspirators planned to undo the Union’s victories by assassinating not only Lincoln but the Vice President, the secretary of state and General Grant. In the end, Booth was the only one of the gang who succeeded in his mission. He placed a Deringer behind Lincoln’s head, shot him, and then, in the confusion, leapt to the stage and disappeared into the Washington night. Although two doctors were at Lincoln’s side almost at once, it was clear that the wound was mortal. Soldiers carried the unconscious President across the street to a boardinghouse, where he was laid out on a bed in a back room. The next morning, at 7:22, the last labored breathing ceased, and Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes pronounced Lincoln dead.

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Ford’s Theatre There were about 1,700 people in attendance at Ford’s Theatre the night Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln came to see Our American Cousin. Sitting on a bench in the balcony cost 25 cents; an orchestra seat (a ticket from that evening is shown at above) went for one dollar. An upper box cost $10 and a lower box $6, but no one sat in the boxes that night except for the Lincolns and their guests, Major Rathbone and his fiancée, Clara Harris, in the State Box (below), also known by history as the presidential box. That special enclave had never been decorated before, but on April 14 a portrait of George Washington was placed there—where it still hangs today. The terrible crime that was committed there would change the course of history—for the nation as well as the witnesses. Mary Lincoln never recovered. Rathbone and Harris would marry and have three children, but in 1883 he shot and killed her as she was reportedly protecting her children from him. He was then committed to an insane asylum, where he lived until his own death in 1911.

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“I THINK MR. LINCOLN WAS THE BEST MAN, the kindest, tenderest, noblest, loveliest, since Christ,” wrote William Henry Herndon, after Lincoln’s death. “He . . . is now the great central figure of American History.” Herndon could be pardoned for a measure of affectionate exaggeration, but his estimate of Lincoln’s place is not far from the mark. He is certainly the principal figure in the preservation of the American Union as a single nation. To understand what an achievement this was, we have only to consider what the course of world history during two world wars and the cold war might have been if he had allowed that nation to fall apart. He was also the Great Emancipator—not because he single-handedly freed every slave but because he found the key, through the Emancipation Proclamation, that made emancipation legal and deployed the armies of the Union to enforce it. It would actually take the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution to blot out the legal standing of slavery entirely, but Lincoln would play a vital role in that struggle, too.

What Lincoln himself would probably point to as his principal badge of honor was the way the Civil War vindicated the idea of democracy. “The central idea pervading this struggle,” he told his assistant ­secretary John Hay, “is the necessity that is upon us of proving . . . whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail, it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.” The American democracy was, as he told Congress in 1861, an “experiment.” It assumed that ordinary people were perfectly equal to the task of governing themselves, without needing to be managed, driven or ridden by an elite with greater knowledge or greater power. “Two points” in this experiment “have already settled—the successful establishing, and the successful administering of it.” But “one still remains—its successful maintenance against a formidable attempt to overthrow it.” Because if the overthrowing succeeded, it would serve as proof that democracies are inherently unstable and self-destructive.

This was the message Lincoln had particularly wanted the spectators at the Gettysburg cemetery dedication to hear in 1863. At the same time, though, he did not want democracy’s vindication to become a source of boasting as the war drew near its end. In his second inaugural address, just six weeks before his death, Lincoln warned the Union against too much self-congratulation. Both sides in the war, he said, “looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.” God had passed judgment on “both North and South” through “this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came.” His old faith had, in a measure, come back to him. All had sinned, and all must submit to the divine decree, and must demonstrate that submission by showing “malice toward none” and “charity for all,” and “to bind up the nation’s wounds” and “achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

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Deathbed Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles (seated, with white beard) is one of the men surrounding a dying Lincoln in the engraving above. In his diary he described what he saw: “The giant sufferer lay extended diagonally across the bed, which was not long enough for him. He had been stripped of his clothes. His large arms, which were occasionally exposed, were of a size which one would scarce have expected from his spare appearance. His slow, full respiration lifted the clothes with each breath that he took. His features were calm and striking. I had never seen them appear to better advantage than for the first hour, perhaps, that I was there.” Early the next morning Welles went for a walk but came back in time to see Lincoln die—and to see Lincoln’s wife and son Robert struggle with their sadness. “Robert, his son, stood with several others at the head of the bed,” Welles wrote. (He appears there in the engraving, bending toward his father.) “He bore himself well, but on two occasions gave way to overpowering grief and sobbed aloud, turning his head and leaning on the shoulder of Senator Sumner. The respiration of the President became suspended at intervals, and at last entirely ceased at twenty-two minutes past seven.”

But alongside the message of his words, there remains also the message of Lincoln’s life. The openness and mobility of a free society were, in Lincoln’s mind, the best arguments for that society, and the most essential meaning of liberty was the freedom to transform oneself, unbounded by the irrational restraints of title, race or language. “Nowhere in the world is presented a government of so much liberty and equality,” he said in 1864. “To the humblest and poorest amongst us are held out the highest privileges and positions.” That turned the Civil War into “essentially a People’s contest . . . a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” It fell to Lincoln not only to model this life but to defend it, and to make it worthy of being defended. The American “experiment” will doubtless produce greater generals, more suave diplomats, elegant writers, lofty idealists and eloquent speakers. But it will not likely produce another Abraham Lincoln—or one greater than him.

ALLEN C. GUELZO is the Henry R. Luce III Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, where he directs the Civil War Era Studies program. As mentioned earlier, he is the author of several acclaimed histories of Lincoln and the war between the states.