Chapter 11
The Journey to Washington
With all the menacing rumors coming from the South, the timing of Lincoln’s arrival in Washington was sensitive. Tradition had it that the incoming President should appear in the capital in mid-February, a couple of weeks before the inauguration. There had been so many threats of assassination, however, that the journey to Washington for the swearing-in had taken on an air of suspense. Lincoln’s friend Ward Hill Lamon, who accompanied him as a bodyguard, wrote, “Some thought the cars might be thrown from the track; some thought he would be surrounded and stabbed in some great crowd; others thought he might be shot from a house-top as he rode up Pennsylvania Avenue on inauguration day; while others still were sure he would be quietly poisoned long before the 4th of March.” Many of his friends had advised the President-elect to come as swiftly and as quietly as possible, avoiding all publicity. Medill of the Chicago Tribune wrote to Lincoln, as a “volunteer sentinel on the walls,” that enemies planned to seize Washington with an army and that Lincoln should grab his “carpet sack” and hurry down. The cautious Lincoln, however, favored delay: “Our adversaries have us now clearly at disadvantage. On the second Wednesday of February, when the [electoral] votes should be officially counted, if the two Houses refuse to meet at all, or meet without a quorum of each, where shall we be? … In view of this, I think it best for me not to attempt appearing in Washington till the result of that ceremony is known.”
With his approach to Washington thus closely gauged, Abraham Lincoln on February 11 gave a short address to the gathered townspeople of Springfield in a cold rain, disappeared into a train car, and headed east on his journey to Washington. So many towns and cities had invited him to visit that Lincoln felt obliged to schedule a long, slow, winding itinerary of 1,600 miles on eighteen different railroads. The train would travel at a sustained thirty miles an hour, guarded by flagmen stationed at every crossing and every half-mile along the track. There were some public objections to this “royal procession.” The Crisis of Columbus, Ohio, objected to the holiday atmosphere of the procession, and chided, “So we shall have an ‘ovation’ before he reaches the capital of the nation. How little he seems to estimate the troubled times, the importance of his position, or the true theory of our system.”
As he had said repeatedly for months, Lincoln was determined not to say anything that would anticipate his upcoming inaugural address. He thus plunged himself into a difficult situation. He was handicapped by the need to remain extremely guarded lest some careless utterance be taken as future government policy and ignite combustible public opinion in the slave states. He had nevertheless consented to speak at official welcomes in numerous major cities, as well as dozens of minor stops where he would show himself on the rear platform, bow, and deliver a few pleasant remarks along the route.
It would have been better if he had not spoken at all. Lincoln was not good at impromptu speeches. He tended to fumble with lame clichés when he had not prepared his thoughts and written them down beforehand. He had never been comfortable with appearing before crowds and saying high-sounding nothings. He was the opposite of the great orators of the day. When he had nothing to say, he could not cover the lack with pretty phrases. Without a vision, his gifts deserted him. His speeches on the twelve-day train journey were unfortunate. They were most often trite, and where they were not trite they were evasive, and where they were not evasive they were harmful. He left his listeners with off-the-cuff remarks that all too often gave the impression that a pitiably unfit man was about to take office.
On one of his very first stops, in Tolono, Illinois, he stepped onto the rear platform and delivered to the crowd only a maddeningly inadequate platitude: “Let us believe, as some poet has expressed it, ‘Behind the cloud, the sun is still shining.’” He then disappeared into his car. Later that day, in Indianapolis, he made the homely observation that according to the secessionists’ view, the Union “as a family relation, would not be anything like a regular marriage at all, but only … a sort of free-love arrangement to be maintained on what that sect calls passionate attraction.” The Hoosiers on hand roared with laughter. But seeing the words in print, readers nationwide were appalled by what they considered his vulgar remarks. “Who would have supposed,” clucked the New Orleans Daily Crescent, “that a man elevated to the Presidency of a nation would indulge in comparisons of this sort? Imagine George Washington or James Madison, on their way to the capital, making public speeches, destined to be read by the whole world, in which illustrations were drawn from such sources as these! … No wonder Seward … should hesitate to accept a position in the Cabinet of one who has so poor an opinion of the popular intelligence, and so small an appreciation of the dignity of his office, as Mr. Lincoln displayed in his speech at Indianapolis.”
In Indianapolis also, Lincoln broke his rule against saying anything of substance, and learned a bruising lesson. When he stepped off the train, Governor Oliver P. Morton had set the tone with a speech that was not an official welcome but rather a declaration of policy, exhorting Lincoln to stand firm for the Union. Lincoln, following Morton’s lead, spoke that evening on the sensitive subject of whether asserting Federal authority could be fairly construed as “coercing” the Southern states. What if the government simply held or recaptured its own forts, or enforced the laws by collecting duties, or stopped the mails where they were being violated? “Would any or all of these things be coercion?” he asked rhetorically. For the next few days, newspapers all over the South twisted the speech to mean that Lincoln promised invasion and bloodshed, and was only waiting until he was in office to begin the war. The Louisville Courier cried, “It is a war proposition couched in language intended to conceal the enormity of the crime beneath pretexts too absurd to require exposure and fallacies too flimsy to deceive the most stupid.” The Nashville Patriot attacked not the proposition but the man: “Whatever may have been the motive which suggested the Indianapolis harangues,” it declared, “there can be no mistake as to one thing, and that is they prove him to be a narrow-minded Republican partisan incapable apparently of rising to the attitude of statesmanship necessary to a thorough comprehension of the national crisis, and the remedies demanded by patriotism to preserve the government he has been selected to administer.”
In an attempt to avoid repeating his mistake, Lincoln performed even worse the next day, and the next. The age was not one in which humility was valued in its public men, especially just then, when Northern citizens were tense with the news that the Southern Confederacy was swearing in its own president, the venerable Jefferson Davis, in Montgomery, Alabama. Yet Lincoln confessed, “should my administration prove to be a very wicked one, or what is more probable, a very foolish one, if you, the people, are but true to yourselves and to the Constitution, there is little harm I can do, thank God!” He was self-conscious—almost apologetic—about the improbable fact of his election, calling himself “the humblest of all individuals that have ever been elected to the Presidency,” a man “without a name, perhaps without a reason why … I should have a name.” At Steubenville, Ohio, he confessed, “I fear that the great confidence placed in my ability is unfounded. Indeed, I am sure it is.” Going on, he declared, “If anything goes wrong … and you find you have made a mistake, elect a better man next time. There are plenty of them.” He told one crowd he had been elected President “by a mere accident, and not through any merit of mine”; he was “a mere instrument, an accidental instrument, perhaps I should say.” Many, dismayed by such hand-wringing, were alarmed that the President-elect should have so much to be humble about.
In Columbus, Ohio, Lincoln took an even more unfortunate tack, dismissing the secession crisis with the canard, “there is nothing going wrong. It is a consoling circumstance that when we look out there is nothing that really hurts anybody. We entertain different views upon political questions, but nobody is suffering anything.” Lincoln undoubtedly intended to calm his listeners, but he produced instead the alarming effect of a man who did not understand that the nation was in crisis. Here he revealed his dangerous underestimation of the intensity and depth of Southern feeling, and he struck this same note again and again as he approached Washington, at Pittsburgh—“In plain words, there is really no crisis except an artificial one”—and again at Cleveland: “I think that there is no occasion for excitement. The crisis, as it is called, is altogether an artificial crisis…. It has no foundation in facts.” Such remarks baffled anybody who could read a newspaper, such as New York congressman Edwin Reynolds, who wondered aloud, “Have not our forts and vessels been seized, our arsenals invaded, our mints robbed, by men and States in arms? Has not our flag been fired into, our mails rifled and intercepted, our commerce on the Mississippi obstructed? Is not the public mind today, North and South, convulsed as never before?” The Saint Louis Daily Missouri Republican protested:
At Columbus, Ohio, the President improvised a little—and certainly it is the most remarkable speech on record. The burden of it is that “nobody is hurt”—“nobody is suffering” from the present condition of affairs, pecuniary and political. Was the like of that ever heard? What could he have meant? With a perfect knowledge that the Union has been virtually dissolved—that six of the States have renounced this confederacy and formed a new government … he proceeds to tell us, that “nobody is hurt,” and “nobody is suffering,” from the present condition of the country.
“Nobody hurt—nobody suffering”—what does this mean? We ask the people of St. Louis to respond to this inquiry. How has it happened that commerce is checked in every department; that our merchants are forced to curtail, and even to close their business; that hundreds and thousands of worthy men are thrown out of employment, and left with their families to starve—now is this the case if, according to Mr. Lincoln, there is “no suffering?”
Politically and socially, did the United States ever present such an aspect of complete wreck and abandonment, and yet Mr. Lincoln tells us “nobody is hurt” and “nobody is suffering”!
The New York Herald accused Lincoln of “ignorance” of the danger to the Union. He showed “no capacity to grapple manfully with the dangers of this crisis,” it said; “If Mr. Lincoln has nothing better to offer upon this fearful crisis than the foolish consolations of his speech in Columbus, let him say nothing at all.” Serious people everywhere wondered if the new President was so deluded as to be incompetent to lead the nation through such a time of decision.
Nor was Lincoln’s longest treatment of a policy question to his credit. This was the Pittsburgh speech in which he tackled the tariff, which in Pennsylvania had been a more potent vote-getting issue than slavery. Here Lincoln was out of his league. According to his law partner William Herndon, Lincoln had never had a mind for figures. In Pittsburgh he admitted that he had no “thoroughly matured judgment” on the subject and was “not posted” on the bill then under consideration. He referred to the tariff in frontier style, calling it “housekeeping” and “replenishing the mealtub.” He stumbled on, expressing the hope that every congressman would “post himself thoroughly” “so as to contribute his part” in order to “be just and equal to all sections … and classes of people,” which, of course, was the opposite of what a tariff was intended to do. Henry Villard rightly called the speech “crude, ignorant twaddle, without point or meaning.”
At other stops, Lincoln’s homespun, Western-style attempts to provide a light touch seemed to sensitive citizens to be inappropriate to the emergency of the moment, as at Westfield, New York, where he hauled up the little girl who had written him suggesting he grow a beard, and kissed her; and at Freedom, Pennsylvania, where he invited a huge coal-heaver to clamber up onto the platform with him and compare heights back-to-back. Such antics struck the nation as undignified, certainly unpresidential. To Charles Francis Adams, Jr., it was unseemly that the “absolutely unknown” Lincoln was “saying whatever comes into his head,” and “perambulating the country, kissing little girls and growing whiskers!”
Many sober-minded citizens, especially those reading accounts in newspapers, reacted to their first experience of the Washington-bound President-elect with similar dismay. The editor of the influential Springfield (Mass.) Republican, Samuel Bowles, despaired in a letter to a friend, “Lincoln is a ‘Simple Susan.’”The most esteemed orator in America, Edward Everett, wrote in his diary: “These speeches thus far have been of the most ordinary kind, destitute of everything, not merely of felicity and grace, but of common pertinence. He is evidently a person of very inferior cast of character, wholly unequal to the crisis.” From Washington, Congressman Charles Francis Adams wrote, “His speeches have fallen like a wet blanket here. They put to flight all notions of greatness.” Vanity Fair joked slyly about Lincoln’s poor performance, observing, “Abe is becoming more grave. He don’t construct as many jokes as he did. He fears that he will get things mixed up if he don’t look out.” Even in Illinois, there were bitter public voices savaging his utterances during the journey:
The illustrious Honest Old Abe has continued during the last week to make a fool of himself and to mortify and shame the intelligent people of this great nation. His speeches have demonstrated the fact that although originally a Herculean rail splitter and more lately a whimsical story teller and side splitter, he is no more capable of becoming a statesman, nay, even a moderate one, than the braying ass can become a noble lion. People now marvel how it came to pass that Mr. Lincoln should have been selected as the representative man of any party. His weak, wishy-washy, namby-pamby efforts, imbecile in matter, disgusting in manner, have made us the laughing stock of the whole world. The European powers will despise us because we have no better material out of which to make a President. The truth is, Lincoln is only a moderate lawyer and in the larger cities of the Union could pass for no more than a facetious pettifogger. Take him from his vocation and he loses even these small characteristics and indulges in simple twaddle which would disgrace a well bred school boy.
The Harrisburg Daily Patriot and Union published its dim view from the Pennsylvania capital:
The lack of good taste and proper dignity of deportment that has marked Mr. Lincoln’s course since he left Springfield, Illinois, … is the subject of universal remark, as well as universal regret.
… Had he been the dignified statesman he ought to be, … it seems to us he would have proceeded from his home in Illinois to the Federal Capital by the most direct route, in a quiet way, avoiding all parade and ostentation, and thus save his friends and the nation at large the mortification of seeing the elected President of the country making the most puerile and disgusting displays of mountebankism that were ever given by any harlequin who ever strutted upon a stage or gamboled in a circus ring, to delight a gaping crowd, at twenty-five cents a head.…
We confess that we shudder as we contemplate the future in the person of this weak and ignorant man.
The Baltimore Sun affected hilarity: “There is that about his speechification which, if it were not for the gravity of the occasion, would be ludicrous to the destruction of buttons. Indeed we heard his Columbus speech read yesterday amidst irresistible bursts of laughter…. We begin to realize his qualifications as a barroom‘Phunny Phellow.’”
Further south, the reactions to Lincoln’s speeches were improvisations on the theme of disgust. The Staunton (Virginia) Vindicator, wrote:
His speeches on his tour … have been a display of the most vulgar and ill-bred tastes, more alike to buffoonery of the clown than the logic of the statesman. Instead of rising to the dignity of his exalted position, he indulges in the disgusting and silly electioneering harangues, and exposes his ignorance both of the science of letters as well as the rules of rhetoric.
The Richmond Examiner called Lincoln “a beastly figure,” and asserted, “No American of any section has read the oratory with which he has strewn his devious road to Washington, condensed lumps of imbecility, buffoonery, and vulgar malignity, without a blush of shame.” The Charleston Mercury dismissed Lincoln’s speeches as “fiddle-faddle,” and Lincoln as a “weak compound of blockhead and blackguard.” The New Orleans Daily Crescent told its readers, “If any one can read the speeches which Mr. Lincoln has made on his recent trip to Washington City without a feeling of intense disgust, we envy him not his disposition.” The Crescent, however, was outdone by the crosstown New Orleans Daily Delta:
His silly speeches, his ill-timed jocularity, his pusillanimous evasion of responsibility, and vulgar pettyfoggery [sic], have no parallel in history…. We have repeatedly averred that the secession of the South was instigated by higher motives than a mere hostility to Lincoln; that the simple fact of his election was not the moving cause of that great movement. But his recent conduct will compel us to confess that the debasement of being ruled over by such a President—the disgust of having to look up to such a Chief Magistrate as the head of the Republic—is quite as powerful a justification for secession as could be presented. It is evident that the South has been quite as much deceived in its estimate of Lincoln as the North and his own party have been. His bearing in the debate with Douglas produced a general impression that he was a man of some ability, as a politician and a polemic…. But he is no sooner compelled to break [his] silence, and to exhibit himself in public, than this delusion vanishes, and the Hoosier lawyer dwindles into far smaller proportions than his bitterest enemies have ever assigned to him…. [H]e never opens his mouth but he puts his foot into it. In supreme silliness—in profound ignorance of the institutions of the Republic of which he has been chosen chief—in dishonest and cowardly efforts to dodge responsibility and play a double part—in disgusting levity on the most serious subjects, the speeches of Lincoln, on his way to the capital, have no equals in the history of any people, civilized or semi-civilized.
The newsprint blows that rained down on Lincoln transformed his jubilee procession into a painful run of the gauntlet on a continental scale. But he was only now approaching the most hazardous stretch in what had become, for the press at least, a hazing ritual. As he descended the Hudson River valley, one wag noted sarcastically, “Mr. Lincoln, having … brought his brilliant intellectual powers to bear upon the cultivation of luxuriant whiskers … has now … concentrated his mental energies upon the question—what hotel he shall stop at in New York.”