In Springfield, the president-elect awoke early on November 7, having spent a sleepless night prickled by worries about his new responsibilities and punctuated by window-rattling blasts from the incessant cannon fire in the courthouse square. Even in the first blush of victory, Lincoln had no illusions about the difficulties facing him and the nation in the days to come. He did not question the legitimacy of his election. Still, his 39.9 percent share of the popular vote was the lowest since John Quincy Adams had won his tarnished victory in 1824, and only Stephen Douglas had managed—however meagerly—to win votes both above and below the Mason-Dixon Line. If Lincoln was not exactly a minority president, he was a sectional one, and no one before him had ever been elected without at least some support in all sections of the country. Electorally speaking, the Deep South had walled itself off from the rest of the country. It remained to be seen how strong that wall would be.
Unable to sleep, Lincoln took out a blank note card and jotted down the last names of seven potential cabinet members: Seward, Bates, Dayton, Judd, Chase, Blair, and Welles. Counting Lincoln himself, the preliminary cabinet was equally composed of old-line Whigs and free-soil Democrats—the strength-bearing walls of the new Republican Party. Seward would be asked to be secretary of state; Lincoln would divide the other cabinet chairs as he saw fit. By inviting his principal rivals for the nomination to join him in the government, he was exhibiting either deep-seated self-confidence or uneasy self-doubt in his ability to govern—perhaps a little of both. He would run the list by his running mate, Hannibal Hamlin, when they met in Chicago in a couple weeks. For the time being, the list seemed nicely “balanced and ballasted” to Lincoln. The next morning, as he entered his office in the state capitol, he greeted the assembled newsmen with a jaunty but revealing quip. “Well, boys,” he said, “your troubles are over now, mine have just begun.”1
To handle the expected crush of office seekers, Lincoln decided to hold two receptions each day, one in the morning, the other in the late afternoon. His personal secretary, John Nicolay, signed up an old prep school friend, John Hay, to assist him with the bushels of correspondence piling up in the office. Visitors were treated to the novel sight of Lincoln sporting facial whiskers. During the campaign, he had received a letter from eleven-year-old Grace Bedell of Westfield, New York, who promised to get her brothers to vote for Lincoln if he would grow a beard. Miss Bedell, an unusually self-possessed preteen, assured the candidate: “You would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be president.” By the end of November, Lincoln was sporting a closely cropped beard—actually, more a chin-topping goatee—and regaling visitors with an almost manic cascade of jokes, puns, and tall tales. When former Kentucky governor Charles S. Morehead called on the president-elect to urge him to make concessions to southern moderates, Lincoln favored him with a retelling of Aesop’s fable about the lion who agrees to trim his fangs and claws before marrying a beautiful young woman, only to be knocked on the head by his prospective in-laws once he is defenseless. “That was an exceedingly interesting anecdote, and very apropos,” said the unimpressed Morehead, “but not altogether a satisfactory answer.”2
Another close observer of the South, Cincinnati journalist Donn Piatt, endured a similarly unsatisfactory session with the incoming president. After vividly warning Lincoln that the countryside would be “white with army tents” within three months’ time if events continued in the direction they were headed, Piatt said Lincoln brushed him off with an airy “Well, we won’t jump that ditch until we come to it.” An indication that he was not always so unconcerned might be inferred from an eerie experience Lincoln had one afternoon while taking a break from office seekers. According to Ward Hill Lamon, who got the account straight from Lincoln, the president-elect was lying on his sofa in his study when he saw his reflection in a bureau mirror. His body was intact, but there were two faces in the mirror—one normal and ruddy, the other deathly pale. Inconsiderately, perhaps, Lincoln told Mary of the vision. It scared her to death. She interpreted the strange encounter as a sign that her husband would die during his second term in the White House. Lincoln was unusually sensitive to dreams and portents, and although he tried to put it out of his mind, “the thing would come up once in a while and give me a little pang, as though something uncomfortable had happened.” Adding to his discomfort, he was regularly receiving hate mail from disgruntled southerners, some of it decorated with ghoulish drawings of guns, daggers, and hangmen’s nooses. One showed Lincoln being tossed into hell by the devil’s three-pronged pitchfork.3
Despite all warnings, portents, and threats, Lincoln refused to be pressured into making untimely, if not indeed unseemly, concessions to the South, particularly since he had not yet taken office. The hot breath of secession, he told Nicolay, was “just the trick by which the South breaks down every Northern man.” He did go as far as inserting a couple of conciliatory paragraphs into a speech Lyman Trumbull gave in Springfield on November 20. In the appended passage, Lincoln pledged that “each and all of the States will be left in…complete control of their own affairs respectively.” At the same time, a reporter for the New York Tribune observed Lincoln reading an account of Andrew Jackson’s heavy-handed treatment of the nullification crisis in South Carolina three decades earlier, when Jackson had threatened to hang John C. Calhoun and send in the army to enforce federal laws. Lincoln’s assurance that the states would be treated “as they have been under any administration,” was received, perhaps understandably, with less-than-complete magnanimity by the “political fiends” he now saw at work in the South.4
Fresh from his own encounters with the clamorous fiends, Stephen Douglas returned to the nation’s capital on the morning of December 1, a beaten but by no means broken man. Mainly, he was a worried one. The election had justified his eleventh-hour campaigning in the South, even if it had proven a crushing failure at the ballot box. Now all his efforts would be directed at holding the Union together, at least until the new administration was in place and the next Congress took its seats in loyal opposition, with Douglas at its head. Time, however, was running out. In Charleston, at the same Institute Hall where the fire-eaters had blocked his nomination eight months earlier, delegates were meeting to debate an ordinance of secession. Other cotton states were making similar noises. Douglas called for southern legislators to “sink their bickerings” and return to Washington for the short winter session. “Let all asperities drop, all ill feelings be buried, and all real patriots strive to save the Union,” he urged. With the exceptions of South Carolina senators James Chesnut and James H. Hammond, all southern lawmakers did return to their seats when Congress reopened for business on December 3. How long they would remain there was an open question.5
Buchanan, as usual, was no help. In his annual message to Congress, the lame-duck president went out of his way to blame Republicans for “the incessant and violent agitation of the slavery question,” which he said had “produced its malign influence on the slaves and inspired them with vague notions of freedom,” causing “many a matron throughout the South [to] retire at night in dread of what may befall herself and her children before morning.” He called on northerners to stop criticizing slavery, obey the Fugitive Slave Law, and adopt a constitutional amendment protecting slavery in the territories. The South, he said, was responsible for its own domestic institutions, and “the people of the North are not more responsible and have no more right to interfere than with similar institutions in Russia or in Brazil.” If abolitionist agitation did not cease, Buchanan warned, the South would “be justified in revolutionary resistance to the government.” Such resistance was illegal, the president maintained, but there was nothing he could do about it. “The fact is,” said Buchanan, “that our Union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war. If it cannot live in the affections of the people, it must one day perish.”6
William Seward, who had no such scruples, sneered openly at the president, scoffing that what Buchanan really was saying was that “no state has the right to secede unless it wishes to, and that it is the President’s duty to enforce the laws, unless somebody opposes him.” The message, added Massachusetts abolitionist Charles Francis Adams, was “in all respects like the author, timid and vacillating in the face of slave-holding rebellion, bold and insulting towards his countrymen whom he does not hear.” Buchanan, said one northern newspaper, was a “Pharasaical old hypocrite.”7
Two days later, the appropriately named Senator Lazarus Powell of Kentucky sought to revive the Senate’s waning influence by calling for the appointment of a special committee to consider ways to preserve the Union. Douglas was one of thirteen senators named to the committee—his bête noire, Jefferson Davis, was another—and the panel immediately began debating how best to meet the newest southern threat. Kentucky senator John J. Crittenden, in the spirit of his late home-state hero, Henry Clay, proposed a series of constitutional amendments designed to preserve and protect slavery by restoring the Missouri Compromise and extending the dividing line all the way to the Pacific. Douglas, who had sponsored similar legislation six years earlier, did what he could to help, supporting the Crittenden amendments in the committee and offering his own suggestion—which Lincoln had favored for years—that freed blacks be colonized to Africa or South America.
Douglas was hopeful the Crittenden plan would win widespread Republican support, since it “would not add a foot of slave territory to the Union, except where climate and soil render it more profitable than free labor.” Once again, he failed to take into account the moral objections to what he persisted in seeing as a purely economic matter. Lincoln, back in Illinois, was unyielding on the issue. He signaled Republicans in Washington to oppose any compromise measure, writing to Trumbull: “Entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery. The tug has to come & better now than later. Republicans have only to stand firm acting firmly, but in a kind spirit & all will yet be well. Concession on our part…would be fatal.” To a New York Herald reporter, the president-elect insisted, “I will suffer death before I consent or will advise my friends to consent to any concession or compromise which looks like buying the privilege to take possession of this government to which we have a constitutional right.” Ultimately, the compromise was defeated in committee, seven to six, with Jefferson Davis and fellow southerner Robert Toombs joining the five Republicans in voting no.8
Douglas was disappointed by Lincoln’s resistance to the compromise, but he was not surprised. He still considered his old rival a hopeless provincial in the game of national politics, telling an acquaintance that Lincoln was “eminently a man of the atmosphere which surrounds him. He has not yet got out of Springfield. He does not know that he is president-elect of the United States. He does not see that the shadow he casts is any bigger than it was last year. It will not take him long when he has got established in the White House. But he has not found it out yet.”9
Meanwhile, as Douglas understood better than Lincoln, time was not on their side. After ever-troublesome South Carolina—“too small to be a republic, too large to be a lunatic asylum,” went the joke—voted on December 20 to secede, he tried unsuccessfully to get Congress to stay in session over the holidays. “I know we do not feel like going abroad and enjoying a holiday,” Douglas said. “I trust there may be something done to restore peace to the country. This is a good time to do it, and I hope we shall remain in session.” Congress dutifully continued to meet, but nothing was done. Meanwhile, on December 26, Major Robert Anderson moved his small garrison of soldiers from Fort Moultrie, on the South Carolina mainland, to Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor. By the second week in January, five other southern states had “gone out” of the Union: Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Texas was teetering on the brink. Douglas considered secession “wrong, unlawful, unconstitutional, criminal,” but he opposed armed resistance to the act. “Surely you do not expect to exterminate or subjugate ten million people, the entire population of one section, as means of preserving amiable relations between the two sections?” he wondered aloud.10
There were signs, subtle but unmistakable, that Lincoln was considering doing just that. The Illinois State Journal, his longtime mouthpiece, editorialized: “Disunion by armed force is treason, and treason must and will be put down at all hazards…. The laws of the United States must be executed—the President has no discretionary power on the subject—his duty is emphatically pronounced in the Constitution. Mr. Lincoln will perform that duty.” To young Nicolay, Lincoln maintained, “The right of a state to secede is not an open or debatable question.” And to Thurlow Weed, Lincoln reiterated: “No state can, in any way lawfully, get out of the Union, without the consent of the others.” Lincoln did not intend to give such consent, and nothing was likely to sway him. As his wife observed, Lincoln “was a terribly firm man when he set his foot down. No man or woman could rule him after he had made up his mind.” When Nicolay reported rumors that Buchanan was preparing to surrender Fort Sumter, Lincoln snapped uncharacteristically, “If that is true, they ought to hang him.” He would simply retake the fort once he entered office.11
By late January, Lincoln was making the final preparations for a twelve-day train trip to Washington. He resisted Seward’s pleas to come to Washington early, but he agreed to his suggestion to make a highly publicized journey east to rally support for the Union. Faced with leaving the town where he had made his home for the past twenty-four years, Lincoln was in a somber mood. He paid an emotional visit to his beloved stepmother, Sarah, who was still living with her daughter in rural isolation in Farmington, Illinois. Sarah, who had loved Abe like her own son after his mother died and had encouraged his reading in the face of his father’s resistance, worried tearfully that something would happen to the president-elect. “No, no, Mama,” Lincoln assured her. “Trust in the Lord and all will be well. We will see each other again.” He also visited his father’s grave, promising to have a better gravestone erected on the site, but as with most dealings between Lincoln and his father, alive or dead, it was a promise he did not keep.12
A few days later, Lincoln and Mary held a huge reception for their friends, standing side by side for five hours in the parlor to personally greet the 700 well-wishers who turned out for the festivities. The day before he was scheduled to leave, Lincoln climbed the stairs to his law office on the town square and bade his old partner Billy Herndon a wistful farewell. Taking a last look at the sign hanging outside their office, he assured the damp-eyed younger man, “If I live, I’m coming back some time, and then we’ll go right on practicing law as if nothing had ever happened.” For the time being, Lincoln added fatalistically, “I am decided; my course is fixed.”13
More than 1,000 people turned out at the Springfield railroad depot on the morning of February 11 to see him off. Mary and the two younger boys were traveling separately and would meet him in Indianapolis. In the waiting room at the station, a visibly moved Lincoln shook hands ceremonially with each of his friends. “His face was pale, and quivered with emotion so deep as to render him almost unable to utter a single word,” reported the correspondent for the New York Herald. Stepping onto the platform at the rear of the train, Lincoln removed his hat and asked for silence. He had not intended to make a formal farewell, but the solemnity of the moment seemed to call for a few heartfelt words. “My friends,” he began, “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 every thing. 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, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To his care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.”14
A special four-car train carried Lincoln on the roundabout journey to Washington. Accompanying him were his oldest son, Robert, immediately dubbed by the press “the Prince of Rails”; private secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay; personal physician William S. Wallace; political backers David Davis and Norman Judd; and burly, pistol-packing Ward Hill Lamon, who had appointed himself Lincoln’s bodyguard. Somewhat surprisingly, the government had not supplied a military escort for the president-elect, but three army officers, their eyes clearly on their own careers, volunteered to protect him. (As proof of their self-interested acuity, all three—Colonel Edwin Sumner, Major David Hunter, and Captain John Pope—would be promoted to major general by Lincoln within a year.) A chesty young militia captain, Elmer Ellsworth, was also along for the ride, having traded his law books for the manual of arms. Local politicians jumped on and off the train every few miles, seeking to share the luster of the moment. At Indianapolis, Lincoln was reunited with his family at the Bates House, where he delivered a preplanned speech from the hotel balcony. “By what principle of original right is it that one-fiftieth or one-ninetieth of a great nation, by calling themselves a state, have the right to break up and ruin that nation as a matter of original principle?” he wondered aloud. “Now, I ask the question—I am not deciding anything. Where is the mysterious right for a certain district of country with inhabitants to play tyrant over all its own citizens, and deny the authority of everything greater than itself?”15
The trip quickly took on the trappings of a vacation jaunt for Lincoln and his family. Robert lost his usual Todd-like reserve, flirting with girls along the way, throttling the locomotive beside the engineer, and, on one occasion at least, drinking too much Catawba wine. His abstemious father was not amused, particularly when Robert nearly lost the satchel containing the only copies of the inaugural address that Lincoln had entrusted to his care. Willie and Tad tickled themselves by asking other train passengers if they wanted to see “Old Abe,” then pointing out someone other than their father. Even tightly wound Mary allowed herself to join her husband on the rear platform of the train when it pulled away from the various whistle stops. As for Lincoln, he relaxed more into the role of president-elect with each passing mile. He was determined not to say anything concrete on the national crisis, for fear of committing himself to a specific course of action, but he perfected the rhetorical trick of saying very little, satisfyingly. He devised a joke at his own expense—a proven crowd-pleaser—telling the people who turned out to see him that he wanted to see them as well, and “in that arrangement I have the best of the bargain.” In Westfield, New York, he stopped the train long enough to single out little Grace Bedell and give her a newly bewhiskered kiss.16
Not everyone was pleased with Lincoln’s performance. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., son of the Massachusetts congressman, complained that Lincoln was “perambulating the country, kissing little girls and growing whiskers.” And his patrician father worried in his diary that Lincoln’s folksy appearances “are rapidly reducing the estimate put upon him. I am much afraid that in this lottery we may have drawn a blank.” The northern public seemed not to agree, turning out in massive numbers in Cincinnati, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Buffalo, Albany, New York City, Trenton, Camden, and Philadelphia. At tiny Dunkirk, in upstate New York, some 12,000 people gathered for a glimpse of the president-elect. Saying that he had no time to speak, Lincoln placed his hand on the flagstaff and intoned portentously: “I stand by the flag of the Union, and all I ask of you is that you stand by me as long as I stand by it.”17
It was well enough to make such promises in the North—enforcing them in the South would be a different matter. While Lincoln was still en route to Washington for his inauguration, the Confederate States of America held its own inauguration ceremony in Montgomery, Alabama. Jefferson Davis, at last gaining the ascendancy he had been seeking for the past decade over his turbulent fellow southerners, assumed the presidency. More surprisingly, Lincoln’s and Douglas’s old friend, Alexander Stephens, agreed to serve as Davis’s vice president. Still, Lincoln maintained a stubborn serenity in the face of the news. “There is nothing going wrong,” he assured a crowd at Pittsburgh. “We entertain different views on political questions, but nobody is suffering anything.” He continued to assert his belief that the current crisis was an artificial one, gotten up by “designing politicians” in the South. “Why are southerners so incensed?” he asked in Cleveland. “Have they not all their rights now as they ever had? What then is the matter with them? Why all this excitement? Why all these complaints?”18
When Lincoln’s train arrived in Philadelphia on February 21, a hitherto unknown railroad detective named Allan Pinkerton, who was working for the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore line, warned the president-elect that a plot was in the works to assassinate him as he changed trains in Baltimore. Pinkerton even had the name of the plot’s leader—local barber Cypriano Ferrandini. The detective advised Lincoln to alter his schedule and leave for Washington immediately, passing through Baltimore under cover of darkness. Lincoln refused—he had symbolically important speaking engagements at Independence Hall and the Pennsylvania state capital in Harrisburg. He kept his appointments, alluding cryptically to the threats in the building where the Declaration of Independence was signed. “If [the government] can’t be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful,” Lincoln warned. “I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.” Pinkerton continued to urge Lincoln to take a night train from Philadelphia, and after additional warnings arrived from William Seward and General Winfield Scott, Lincoln reluctantly agreed.19
Leaving the official party, Lincoln boarded a different train to Baltimore, accompanied only by Pinkerton and Lamon—“a brainless egotistical fool,” in the detective’s professional judgment—and wearing a faintly ridiculous “Kossuth” hat that drooped over his ears and a long overcoat thrown, invalid-like, across his shoulders. The sleeping berth Pinkerton had reserved for Lincoln was too short for him to stretch out, and the president-elect rode, knees up, all the way to Baltimore, where he secretly changed trains for the final leg of his unheralded entry into the nation’s capital. Alighting at dawn, Lincoln and his bodyguards were startled by a loud voice echoing down the platform: “Abe, you can’t play that on me!” Guns drawn, Pinkerton and Lamon whirled around and were about to fire on the approaching stranger when Lincoln recognized him at the last moment as Illinois congressman Elihu Washburne, who had appointed himself a one-man welcoming committee. Badly rattled, Lincoln was driven to Willard’s Hotel at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. Waiting for him at the desk was an unsigned letter warning, somewhat baroquely, “If you do not resign we are going to put a spider in your dumpling and play the Devil with you,” and closing with the less subtle salutation “You are nothing but a goddamn black nigger.”20
The press had a field day at Lincoln’s expense. New York Times reporter Joseph Howard wrote inaccurately that Lincoln had made his getaway from Harrisburg wearing a Scottish plaid cap and a long military coat. Cartoonists immediately elaborated on the disguise, changing it into a tam-o’-shanter and kilts and depicting a scarecrowlike Lincoln doing “the Mac Lincoln Harrisburg Highland Fling.” The final leg of the trip was termed “the flight of Abraham,” and even the pro-Lincoln New York Tribune demanded some proof of the “imminent and great danger” that had caused the president-elect to make such a seriocomic arrival. Diarist George Templeton Strong worried that “this surreptitious nocturnal dodging or sneaking of the President-elect into the capital city will be used to damage his moral position and throw ridicule on his Administration.” Mainly, it damaged Lincoln’s self-respect. Days later, he was still explaining, a little huffily, that he had never believed he would be assassinated, “but I thought it wise to run no risk where no risk was necessary.” Whatever the case, it was an inauspicious beginning to his presidency.21
Stephen Douglas was among to first to meet with Lincoln after his arrival in the capital. Hurrying over to Willard’s that afternoon, the Little Giant reunited with the man who had bested him for the presidency. It was their first face-to-face meeting since the senatorial debates in Illinois two and a half years earlier. By all accounts, the reunion went surprisingly well—Douglas pronounced it “peculiarly pleasant.” He took the opportunity to urge Lincoln to support an eleventh-hour national peace conference chaired by former president John Tyler and attended by a number of Lincoln’s old Whig associates, including David Wilmot, Stephen Logan, Thomas Ewing, and Caleb Smith. “In God’s name,” said Douglas, “act the patriot and save our children a country to live in.” Lincoln listened “respectfully and kindly,” Douglas reported, but would not throw his support behind a conference that was being boycotted by thirteen of the thirty-four states, including all the southern states and the free states of Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, California, and Oregon. In the end, the peace conference got no further than a Senate committee, where it was tabled without comment. Douglas took his leave after assuring Lincoln of his personal support. Later, Lincoln told another visitor, a little wistfully, “What a noble man Douglas is.”22
The next ten days were spent in a dizzying whirl of courtesy calls—on the president, Congress, the Supreme Court, even the mayor of Washington, D.C. At night, Lincoln and Mary entertained visitors in the hotel parlor. President Buchanan’s supercilious niece, Harriet Lane, the reigning doyenne of Washington society, compared Lincoln to her “tall, awkward” Irish doorman, and sniffed disapprovingly that Mary was “awfully western, loud & unrestrained.” The Dutch ambassador complained that Lincoln’s “conversation consists of vulgar anecdotes at which he himself laughs uproariously,” and a Virginia aristocrat compared the president-elect to “a cross between a sandhill crane and an Andalusian jackass.” Understandably weary of his official duties, and smarting a little from his cool reception, Lincoln’s temper grew short. When New York financier William E. Dodge, whose suite the Lincolns were using before the inauguration, fretted that the nation was headed for bankruptcy, with “grass growing in the streets of our commercial cities,” Lincoln snapped: “Let the grass grow where it may.”23
Inauguration Day dawned cloudy and cool, more late winter than early spring, and a sharp northwesterly wind blew through the bare-branched elm trees on Capitol Hill. Beneath the temporary wooden speaker’s stand on the east portico of the Capitol, a sleepy group of volunteer soldiers shivered and stretched in the lightening air. They were part of the rapidly expanding federal militia now taking shape in Washington. Their commanding officer, Colonel Charles P. Stone, had been dragooned back into the army by his old Mexican War commander, General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, a few weeks earlier. The men had been there all night, dispatched by Stone to guard the platform after an anonymous warning that someone was planning to blow it up. Posted in the shadows beneath the stand, the soldiers had watched and waited for something to happen, fingering their muskets and jingling their canteens, but they had seen nothing more menacing in the blue-black night than the spectral waving of the elms in the wind or the disembodied statue of Armed Freedom standing watch on the Capitol lawn, clutching her bronze sword and wreath of flowers and staring up forlornly at the unfinished dome.
A few blocks away, at Willard’s Hotel, the president-elect was dressing himself with unaccustomed care: new black suit, polished boots, stovepipe hat, and gold-headed cane. Abraham Lincoln was no one’s idea of a clotheshorse—least of all his own—but he had a politician’s innate respect for public ceremony and a historian’s awareness of the timeless moment. Both were coming. Lincoln had just enough time to finish dressing and read his much-worked-over inaugural address to his family and friends. Unlike most of his speeches, this one had been vetted by a number of hands, most especially those of his newly designated secretary of state, William Seward. The conclusion, in particular, had been Seward’s idea, although Lincoln had improved upon it with his surprisingly delicate gift for language. “Guardian angel of the nation” had been changed to “the better angels of our nature,” and “ancient music” had been transformed into the infinitely more evocative “mystic chords of memory.” It was the difference between a statesman and a poet. Today, of all days, Lincoln would need to be both.
Outside, the crowd was beginning to gather on Pennsylvania Avenue, the main Washington thoroughfare down which Lincoln and outgoing President Buchanan were scheduled to lead a rather truncated parade to the Capitol. Above the crowd, on the sloping rooftops of finely appointed mansions, army sharpshooters were moving into position, while below in the dusty street, squads of cavalrymen cantered into place to seal off intersections along the parade route. General Scott himself commanded a section of flying artillery on the far slope of Capitol Hill. The whole city was on edge, and with good reason. With seven southern states now out of the Union, no one was really sure who, exactly, Lincoln would be addressing, beyond the crowds now jockeying for position below the speaker’s stand. Were there still thirty-four states in the Union, or only twenty-seven? Was Lincoln the president-elect of a transcontinental nation, or merely a transnorthern one? Lincoln intended to address these questions.
Precisely at noon, the carriage bearing Buchanan, Maryland senator James A. Pearce, and Lincoln’s closest friend, Oregon senator Edward Baker, pulled up to the front door of Willard’s Hotel. Buchanan went inside alone and emerged a few minutes later, arm in arm with Lincoln. The two presented a dramatic contrast. Buchanan was “pale, sad, preoc-cupied,” while Lincoln was “grave and impassive as an Indian martyr.” The sky had cleared to a bleached-out blue, but it was still unpleasantly cool. The weather inside the carriage was scarcely warmer. Buchanan and Lincoln said little as the procession moved down Pennsylvania Avenue. The two senators took their cues from the president and president-elect and said nothing. Along the avenue, people strained to catch a glimpse inside the carriage, but the cavalry escort blocked their view. There was a smattering of cheers, and an equal amount of boos. One onlooker called out, “Three cheers for the southern Confederacy!” Lincoln typically kept his feelings to himself.24
In contrast to Buchanan’s gala inaugural four years earlier, the festivities surrounding Lincoln’s advent were decidedly low-key. Five hundred Republican stalwarts, including representatives from the Wide Awakes, led the way, followed by a company of West Point cadets and a float carrying thirty-four pretty girls, one for each state in (or out of) the Union. Alongside the presidential carriage, Stone and his horsemen purposely reared and swerved, the better to block an assassin’s aim. Bringing up the rear was a contingent of Washington-based militia, their rifles topped with bayonets. It looked, one observer said, less like a parade than a military march.
Entering the Capitol through a door guarded by marines and shielded from the public by a high board fence, Lincoln and his escort walked directly to the Senate, where they witnessed the unadorned swearing-in of Vice President Hannibal Hamlin. Then, as marksmen crouched in every window overlooking the Capitol, the official party walked out onto the speaker’s platform in the wan sunlight. Overhead, an American flag dangled limply from a broken halyard on the derrick atop the sheared-off dome—a bad omen, some thought. Silver-haired Senator Baker, more handsome and mellifluous than either the outgoing or incoming president, strode to the front of the podium and said, with little fanfare, “Fellow citizens, I introduce to you Abraham Lincoln, president-elect of the United States of America.” There was the slightest ripple of applause.25
Standing behind a small table placed at the front of the podium, Lincoln fumbled momentarily with his top hat and cane. Stephen Douglas, seated nearby, stepped forward graciously and took the hat, saying, “Permit me, sir.” Those were the only words they exchanged all morning. As Douglas returned to his seat, Lincoln laid the cane underneath the table, then fiddled with a pair of reading glasses. The crowd waited silently, surprised by both the glasses and the new beard the president-elect had sprouted in the sixteen weeks since the election. He looked both unfamiliar and uncomfortable, like a man who had wandered into the wrong wedding party. In the background, leaning against a column in the Capitol doorway, Texas senator Louis Wigfall, a leading spokesman for southern secession, folded his arms and glared contemptuously at Lincoln’s back.26
With long experience acquired from outdoor meetings in Illinois, Lincoln’s naturally high-pitched voice carried easily to the back row of the crowd. “Fellow citizens of the United States,” he began, and was greeted with his first big cheer. “Good, good,” his old opponent Douglas murmured, holding Lincoln’s top hat in his lap. “Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the southern states, that by the accession of a Republican administration, their property, and their peace, and personal security, are to be endangered,” Lincoln continued, downplaying intentionally the current state of affairs. “There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension.” At this, Wigfall smirked in the background. Lincoln quoted from an earlier speech in which he had declared, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” Unmentioned was his less-ambiguous statement of intent to “place slavery in the course of its ultimate extinction,” or his personal opinion that it was “a moral, social, and political evil.”27
It was not Lincoln’s intention to reopen that particular can of worms. Most people knew his views on the matter, and nothing he could say would be likely to change anyone’s mind. Instead, he devoted the majority of his speech to the legal question of secession, which he argued was both unconstitutional and illegal. “I therefore consider that, in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is unbroken,” Lincoln said, “and, to the extent of my ability, I shall take care that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the states.” Such execution of laws need not be accompanied by force, he argued, “and there shall be none, unless it be forced upon the national authority.” Federal officers would be protected and the mails would be delivered, he promised, but “my best discretion will be exercised with a view and a hope of a peaceful solution of the national troubles, and the restoration of fraternal sympathies and affections.”28
The crowd listened quietly and respectfully, although at one point in Lincoln’s speech he was badly startled by a sudden commotion directly down front. A little man with a red beard who had been sitting in the crook of a tree and regaling those close to him with a sort of counter inaugural address, somehow contrived to fall out of the tree. Soldiers immediately rushed over and hustled him away, but Louisville Journal correspondent Henry Watterson thought that “Mr. Lincoln was thrown completely off his balance for a moment.”29
With order restored in the crowd below, Lincoln turned to the question of restoring order in the nation as a whole. Secession, “the essence of anarchy,” would not be tolerated. “The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible,” he said. “Anarchy, or despotism in some form, is all that is left.” With a backhanded slap at the much-derided Dred Scott decision and the author of that decision, Supreme Court chief justice Roger Taney, who was sitting on the platform behind him, Lincoln noted punctiliously that the court’s rulings were binding, even when “it is obviously possible that such a decision may be erroneous,” but there was always “the chance that it may be overruled.” It was also possible, Lincoln continued, that the Constitution itself could be amended. For his part, Lincoln pledged that he would “make no recommendation of amendments,” but he left the door open for the individual states to recommend their own future changes to the Constitution. Few listeners were in doubt as to what part of the document Lincoln wanted to see changed. He had made it obvious a few paragraphs earlier: “One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute.”30
In the speech’s original form, Lincoln had planned to tell rebellious southerners, “With you, and not with me, is the solemn question of ‘Shall it be peace, or a sword?’” But Seward, who had contributed as much as any single person to the present difficulties between the regions with his talk of an “irrepressible conflict” and “a higher law,” had advised Lincoln to end on a more conciliatory note. “Some words of affection, of calm and cheerful confidence” were needed, Seward urged. These Lincoln provided. “I am loth to close,” he told the crowd. “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, 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.”31
That was all. The crowd applauded politely, if not enthusiastically. Senator Wigfall melted back into the shadows. Chief Justice Taney, looking, someone said, “like a galvanized corpse,” tottered forward on his eighty-three-year-old legs to formally administer the oath of office. Placing his hand on a gilt-edged, cinnamon-colored, velvet-trimmed Bible, Lincoln swore the time-honored pledge to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Cannons boomed a twenty-onegun salute. Standing alongside the guns on Capitol Hill, Winfield Scott threw up his hands and cried: “God be praised! We have a government!” But of whom, and for how long, no one could say.32
Douglas’s first reaction to Lincoln’s address was positive. During the speech, he had audibly murmured, “Good,” “That’s so,” and “Good again.” Afterward, he praised Lincoln to a New York Times reporter, observing: “He does not mean coercion; he says nothing about retaking the forts or federal property—he’s all right.” That night, Douglas personally escorted his old Springfield dance partner, Mary Lincoln, into the inaugural ball. Mary, resplendent in a blue silk gown, pearls, diamonds, and gold bracelets, shared a reminiscent quadrille with the Little Giant. Two days after the inauguration, Douglas gave a gloss of the president’s speech in the Senate. Lincoln, he repeated, did not intend to use forcible coercion on the South. His inaugural address had been “a peace offering rather than a war message,” and “on this one question, that of preserving the Union by peaceful solution of our present difficulties…I am with him.” The New York Times, among others, was a little skeptical of Douglas’s apparent change of heart. “What means this evident weakness of Mr. Douglas for Mr. Lincoln?” it wondered.33
Douglas’s newfound amiability did not extend to his abolitionist colleagues in the Senate. During a sharp exchange with Daniel Clark of New Hampshire and Timothy Howe of Wisconsin over his demand to know the War Department’s plans for protecting federal property in the South, Douglas lost his temper. Referring to his recent defeat for the presidency—the only direct reference he ever made to the election—he observed: “Seven states are out of the Union, civil war is impending…commerce is interrupted, confidence destroyed, the country going to pieces, just because I was unable to defeat you. You can boast that you have defeated me, but you have defeated your country with me. You…have triumphed over the unity of these States. Your triumph has brought disunion; and God only knows what consequences may grow out of it.”34
The answer to that question was not long in coming. On the night of April 12–13, Confederate cannons fired on Fort Sumter. The war of words was over; the shooting war had begun. The next afternoon, Douglas met privately with Lincoln for two hours at the White House. Lincoln showed him the draft of a presidential order asking for 75,000 three-month volunteers to put down the insurrection; Douglas recommended raising the total to 200,0000 and strengthening other federal installations at Fortress Monroe, Washington, Harpers Ferry, and Cairo, Illinois. “You do not know the dishonest purposes of those men as well as I do,” he warned. The meeting, Douglas told the press afterward, was marked by “a cordial feeling of a united, friendly, and patriotic purpose.” While he remained “unalterably opposed” to the administration on political issues, he was prepared to sustain the president in all his attempts to preserve the Union. “I’ve known Mr. Lincoln a longer time than you have, or than the country has,” Douglas assured a doubtful friend. “He’ll come out all right, and we will all stand by him.”35
Lincoln’s call for volunteers had the unwelcome consequence of driving the border states into the southern camp. At the urging of Illinois Democrats, Douglas set out for Springfield with Adele on April 21 to pump up support for the Union cause. What he saw back home was not encouraging. “I found the state of feeling here and in some parts of our State much less satisfactory than I could have desired or expected when I arrived,” he reported to Lincoln. But, he assured his old Prairie State rival, “There will be no outbreak however and in a few days I hope for entire unanimity in the support of the government and the Union.” Some whispered that Lincoln had sent Douglas on a secret mission to raise an army in the Northwest, with him serving at its head. Given the fact that Douglas had even less active military experience than Lincoln, the image of the Little Giant galloping boldly at the forefront of an army was comical. Asked about the rumor by the Chicago Tribune, Lincoln said diplomatically that he had not considered appointing Douglas to a military position, but that if he did, “there were many who would be inferior” to the senator. Considering the quality of Lincoln’s initial appointments as commander in chief, it would prove in retrospect to be faint praise indeed.36
Riding through Confederate Virginia, Douglas’s train was stopped and searched by southern militia, some of whom wanted to throw the apostate Democrat into jail. Douglas was defiant. If he were arrested, he warned, a huge northern army would invade Virginia immediately and release him. Allowed to proceed, Douglas rode into the border town of Bellaire, Ohio, where he delivered a saber-rattling speech to listeners on both sides of the Ohio River. Denouncing “the new system of resistance by the sword and bayonet to the results of the ballot box,” Douglas called on “the people in this great valley” to stand by the Union. “I have almost exhausted strength, and voice, and life, in the last two years, in my efforts to point out the dangers upon which we were rushing,” he said. “Unite as a band of brothers and rescue your government and your country from the enemy who have been the authors of your calamity.” Continuing to Springfield, he spoke for two hours before a full house at a special session of the legislature on April 25. In the same hall where he had fought so many battles with Lincoln in the past, Douglas now openly acknowledged that he had made a mistake “by leaning too far to the southern section of the Union against my own.” He urged his listeners to stand with him against “the piratical flag” of the secessionists and “protect this government from every assailant.”37
Douglas followed that defiant speech with another combative appearance in Chicago six days later. Speaking inside the Wigwam, where Lincoln had won the Republican presidential nomination almost exactly twelve months earlier, Douglas pointed out that he had struggled for years to find a peaceful solution to the sectional controversies. “I have gone to the very extreme of magnanimity,” he said, only to be thwarted by “an enormous conspiracy” on the part of southern militants to overthrow the government. “The slavery question is a mere excuse,” Douglas charged. “The election of Lincoln is a mere pretext.” After conjuring up the horrors of the French Revolution, he ended with another ringing call to arms: “There are only two sides to the question. Every man must be for the United States or against it. There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots—or traitors.”38
Douglas was treated like a hero by Chicagoans, who greeted his arrival with resounding cheers and an informal parade. The chairman of the Illinois Democratic state committee, Virgil Hickox, was less impressed. Citing Douglas’s public conversion to Unionism, if not Lincolnism, Hickox urged the senator “to make a full explanation” of his views, adding that party members were beginning to “distrust him on account of the great love that the Republicans profess now to have for him.” In an answering letter, Douglas protested, “I am neither the supporter of the partisan policy nor the apologist for the errors of the administration.” But, he added, “If we hope to regain and perpetuate the ascendancy of our party we should never forget that a man cannot be a true Democrat unless he is a loyal patriot.” Hickox, a personal friend of Douglas’s father-in-law, was not entirely persuaded by the Little Giant’s logic. Still, he released the letter to the public—against Douglas’s wishes—in an attempt to reassure restive Democrats.39
Douglas was forced to dictate the letter to Hickox; he had temporarily lost the use of his arms due to “a severe attack of rheumatism.” As had often been the case during his life, personal and political disappointments had been followed closely by a sudden onslaught of illness. Douglas was confined to his bed at the Tremont House, where a steady procession of friends and family trooped in to see him. At first, they expected him to recover quickly, as he had always done in the past. As early as May 17, however, biographer James Sheahan was warning privately that “Douglas is very ill, and I am afraid is past all surgery.” Afflictions mounted. To the persistent rheumatism, apparently brought on by emotional distress, were added typhoid fever, an ulcerated throat, constipation, and “torpor of the liver”—polite language, perhaps, for alcohol-induced cirrhosis. Lapsing in and out of consciousness, Douglas at one point shouted: “Telegraph to the president and let the column move!” Thoroughly alarmed, Adele called in Catholic bishop James Duggan, who asked the feverish senator if he had ever been baptized. “Never,” Douglas replied. When Duggan offered to perform that service for him, the dying man held firm. “No sir,” he said. “When I do I will communicate with you freely.” Shortly after sunrise on June 3, he suddenly raised up from his pillow and cried: “Death! Death! Death!” When Adele leaned closer and asked if he had any last words for his sons, Robbie and Stevie, Douglas replied—so the story went, at any rate—“Tell them to obey the laws and uphold the Constitution.” He died four hours later, at 9:00 a.m.40
Notified immediately of Douglas’s death, Lincoln ordered the White House and other government buildings wrapped in black crepe as a show of mourning. The next day, Secretary of War Simon Cameron sent out a circular to the Union armies in the field announcing “the death of a great statesman…a man who nobly discarded party for his country. A Senator who forgot all prejudices in an earnest desire to serve the republic. A patriot, who defended with equal zeal and ability the constitution as it came to us from our fathers, and whose last mission upon earth was that of rallying the people of his own State of Illinois, as one man, around the glorious flag of our Union.” Cameron, as strong a Republican partisan as there was in the country, directed the various colonels to read the message aloud to their regiments and likewise crape their colors in mourning out of respect for the fallen Democrat.41
As the crowd began gathering in Chicago for Douglas’s funeral—Adele initially had wanted her husband buried in Washington, alongside their daughter, but the state of Illinois claimed pride of place—his old Sangamon County rival remained in seclusion in the White House. Abraham Lincoln had much on his mind. On the same day that Douglas died, Union and Confederate forces had fought the first real battle of the Civil War at Philippi, Virginia. The dispute was no longer an abstract political quarrel—families were beginning to bury their sons and brothers and fathers. No one, least of all Lincoln, knew what direction the war would take, only that it would be a long, hard slog. “The bottom,” he would say, “is out of the tub.” Now, for the first time in nearly three decades, he would have to make the journey alone, without the familiar, short-legged shadow of Stephen Douglas huffing alongside him every step of the way. The long pursuit was over; Lincoln had won the race. But for the time being at least, the victory seemed hollow, the platform of fame a little less crowded, now that the Little Giant had left the stage and passed irrevocably out of the limelight.42