A week after Lincoln’s return from Gettysburg, Hay wrote to Nicolay: “The President is sick in bed. Bilious.” Still later came definite information. The President had varioloid, a mild form of smallpox. Owen Lovejoy sent in his name, waited in the reception room, saw a door open just enough to frame Lincoln in a dressing gown saying, “Lovejoy, are you afraid?” “No, I have had the smallpox.” And walking in, he heard Lincoln: “Lovejoy, there is one good thing about this. I now have something I can give everybody.” Press items told of office seekers suddenly fleeing the White House on hearing what ailed the President.
An epic of action around Chattanooga came to its high point and Lincoln on a sickbed could read a Grant telegram: “Lookout Mountain top, all the rifle- pits in Chattanooga Valley, and Missionary Ridge entire, have been carried and now held by us,” and a dispatch from Thomas: “Missionary Ridge was carried simultaneously at six different points . . . Among the prisoners are many who were paroled at Vicksburg.” And again from Grant on November 27: “I am just in from the front. The rout of the enemy is most complete . . . The pursuit will continue to Red Clay in the morning, for which place I shall start in a few hours.”
For the first time in a large-scale combat, Confederate soldiers had been routed, had run away. They had valor, as they had shown at Chickamauga. What explained their panic? The usual answer was Bragg, upright, moral, irascible, disputatious, censorious, dyspeptic, nervous, so harsh with his corrections and criticisms that the discipline of his army had gone to pieces. Grant had studied Bragg, knew him as Lee knew McClellan, and gauged his plans accordingly. Bragg had cornered Grant, put his army within gunshot range
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overlooking the Union army, making retreat for Grant “almost certain annihilation,” said Grant. Then the rank and file of Grant’s army had thrown orders to the wind and taken mountains away from an army holding the top ridges with cannon and rifle pits.
Anger at Jeff Davis, and mistrust of him, arose among some of his best aides because of his not knowing Bragg was second-rate. And Jeff Davis answered by appointing his friend Bragg Chief of Staff of the Confederate armies, with headquarters in Richmond. Newspapers of the North spread the story before their readers the last Thursday of November, the Day of Thanksgiving proclaimed by the President weeks earlier.
Now Sherman could be released with an army to march on Knoxville and relieve Longstreet’s siege of Burnside there—which Sherman did in a clean, fast operation. Now Grant and Sherman could lay their plans to move farther south—on Atlanta—perhaps drive a wedge and split the Confederacy that lay east of the Mississippi.
The President’s annual message to Congress began with “renewed, and profoundest gratitude to God” for another year “of health, and of sufficiently abundant harvests.” Efforts to stir up foreign wars had failed. The treaty between the United States and Great Britain for suppression of the slave trade was working. The national banking law passed by Congress had proved a valuable support to public credit. The troops were being paid punctually. And the people? The President saluted them. “By no people were the burdens incident to a great war ever more cheerfully borne.”
The report of the Secretary of War, “a document of great interest,” was too valuable to summarize. The Union Navy was tightening its blockade of the enemy. More than 1,000 vessels had been captured; prizes amounted to $13,000,000. New navy yards were wanted. Enlisted seamen in 1861 numbered 7,500, now 34,000. The post office had taken in nearly as much money as it had spent and might soon become self-sustaining. Though a great war was on, 1,456,514 acres of land had been taken up under the new Homestead Law. The President agreed that the law should be modified to favor soldiers and sailors of Federal service.
The hreath of a new and roaring age, intricate with man’s new-found devices, rose at intervals throughout the message. A continuous line of telegraph from Russia to the Pacific Coast was being wrought under arrangements effected with the Russian Emperor. The proposed international telegraph across the Atlantic Ocean, and a telegraph line from Washington to the seaboard forts and the Gulf of Mexico, deserved reasonable outlay from Congress.
The Executive invited a backward look at the war. The “rebel” borders were pressed still farther back, the Mississippi opened, Tennessee and Arkansas cleared
of insurgent control, slaveowners "now declare openly for emancipation,” Maryland and Missouri disputing only as to the best mode of removing slavery within their own limits. Of former slaves 100,000 were in the U.S. military service, half of them bearing arms. “So far as tested, it is difficult to say they are not as good soldiers as any.”
Looking to the present and future, the President had thought fit to issue a Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, a copy of it being transmitted to Congress. To those who wanted it the Union Government would give amnesty, forget what had been. Reconstruction, the bringing together again of the departed brothers into the Union, would begin with amnesty. This was the theory and the hope, not explicitly formulated, that underlay the proclamation and the oath Lincoln discussed for Congress in his message. He cited his constitutional pardoning power: through the rebellion many persons were guilty of treason; the President was authorized to extend pardon and amnesty on conditions he deemed expedient. Full pardon would be granted with restoration of property, except as to slaves and where rights of third parties intervened, and on condition that every such person took an oath:
... in presence of Almighty God, that I will henceforth faithfully support, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and the union of the States thereunder; and that I will, in like manner, abide by and faithfully support all acts of Congress . . . and . . . abide by and faithfully support all proclamations of the President made during the existing rebellion having reference to slaves ... So help me God.
The proclamation had no reference to states that had kept loyal governments, never seceded—meaning Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware. The intention of the proclamation was to give a mode by which national authority and loyal state governments might be re-established. The President’s message reasoned for the amnesty proclamation. “The form of an oath is given, but no man is coerced to take it. The man is only promised a pardon in case he voluntarily takes the oath ...”
The Executive set at rest all talk that the Emancipation Proclamation would be revoked. “While I remain in my present position I shall not attempt to retract or modify the emancipation proclamation; nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the acts of Congress.” Before this sentence the silence in the hall was “profound,” noted Noah Brooks, but with its reading “an irresistible burst of applause” swept the main floor and galleries.
Movements for emancipation in states not included in the Emancipation Proclamation were “matters of profound gratulation.” He still favored gradual emancipation by Federal purchase of slaves. “While I do not repeat in detail
what I have heretofore so earnestly urged upon this subject, my general views and feelings remain unchanged.”
Noah Brooks in his news letter two days later found Senator Sumner “irate because his doctrine of State suicide finds no responsive echo” in the President’s message. As a “vent to this half-concealed anger,” wrote Brooks, “during the delivery of the Message the distinguished Senator from Massachusetts exhibited his petulance to the galleries by eccentric motions in his chair, pitching his documents and books upon the floor in ill-tempered disgust.” Sumner still held that the seceded states had by secession committed suicide and should be governed as territories, conquered provinces on trial and under compulsion.
Lincoln spoke of the newborn fury of some of the Missouri radicals. Hay wrote December 13 of the President “very much displeased” at fresh reports from Missouri. Congressman Washburne had been in Missouri and saw, or thought he saw, that Schofield was overplaying his hand in factional politics; when Washburne spoke of electing Gratz Brown and J. B. Henderson as U.S. Senators, one from each faction, Schofield had replied he would not consent to the election of Brown. Also Brown had told the President that Schofield had refused to consent to a state constitutional convention, even though Brown had promised in that event he would as U.S. Senator vote to confirm Schofield as a major general. “These things,” wrote Hay, “the President says, are obviously transcendent of his instructions to Schofield and must not be permitted. He has sent for Schofield to come to Washington and explain these grave matters.”
Schofield in the White House heard Lincoln and replied the facts were that the desired union of conservatives and radicals in Missouri was impossible; they were more bitterly opposed to each other than either was to the Democrats. According to Schofield, Lincoln promptly dismissed the subject, “I believe you, Schofield; those fellows have been lying to me again.” Later, from Congressman James S. Rollins, Schofield heard that one group of Missouri politicians had called on the President and given a version of Missouri affairs. The President had opened a little right-hand drawer of his desk, taken out a letter from Schofield, read it to them and said, “That is the truth about the matter; you fellows are lying to me.”
To the Secretary of War, Lincoln wrote: “I believe Gen. Schofield must be relieved from command of the Department of Missouri; otherwise a question of veracity, in relation to his declarations as to his interfering, or not, with the Missouri Legislature, will be made with him, which will create an additional amount of trouble, not to be overcome by even a correct decision of the question.’ Lincoln sent to the Senate a nomination of Schofield for
major general. There a majority favored it. But by a small minority, controlling the Military Committee, it was hung up against the President’s wishes for weeks.
Then came word from Grant that General Foster, heading the Department and Army of the Ohio, was leaving on account of ill-health. On being asked whom to appoint in Foster’s place, Grant wired, “Either McPherson or Schofield. Halleck handed Grant’s dispatch to Schofield, who carried it to Lincoln saying he would take all chances on the new job. Lincoln: “Why, Schofield, that cuts the knot, don’t it? Tell Halleck to come over here, and we will fix it right away.” Then Schofield was appointed and transferred, with Rosecrans taking his place in Missouri.
The New York Times was saying that Lincoln’s refusal to identify himself with either side in Missouri exhibited broad-souled patriotism, singleness of purpose. “Mr. Lincoln never forgets he is President of the nation and his prime duty is to save the nation from the rebellion which has threatened to destroy it. He . . . consequently can not be drawn into any petty strife.”
This month of December ’63 seemed to mark the beginning of a period in which. North and South, extremists more often referred to Confederate leaders ending on the gallows. Hanging with rigor, system, ceremonial, lay in the imaginings of the more fiery Republican radicals.
The Richmond Examiner editorial writer, Edward A. Pollard, in December quoted from Lincoln’s Amnesty Proclamation and set down his judgment as a historian: “In proposing these utterly infamous terms, this Yankee monster of inhumanity and falsehood, had the audacity to declare that in some of the Confederate States the elements of reconstruction were ready for action . . . This insulting and brutal proposition of the Yankee Government was the apt response to those few cowardly factions which in North Carolina, and in some parts of Georgia and Alabama, hinted at ‘reconstruction.’”
The New York Metropolitan Record queried: “Ye war Democrats, what do you think of being told that the black soldier is just as good as the white, for this is the amount of the President’s message? What next? Shall we look among the black race for the President’s successor?” The Record had no patience “with the great criminal who now occupies the Presidential chair.”
In the week of the President’s message, and while he yet lay sick, a New York World editorial reprinted in the Detroit Free Press joined in a remarkably human commentary. From those extremist opposition organs came generous wishes:
We believe we but echo the feelings of the whole country, without distinction of party, in sincerely hoping that the President will soon be restored to health and strength . . . His death at this time would tend to prolong the war . . .
Mr. Lincoln has oftentimes acted wrongly, unwisely, arbitrarily; but still he hesitates before he takes an extreme position, and is willing to obey, although not always quick to perceive, the drift of public opinion. Without elevation of character, he has a self-poise, a reticence, an indisposition to commit himself, which in many a trying crisis has saved him from being the utter tool of the madmen whose folly brought on the war . . .
So heaven help Abraham Lincoln, and restore him to his wonted health and strength.
A history rather than a biography would be required for recording the life of Lincoln, wrote James Russell Lowell, of the North American Review, in an article on Lincoln in January ’64. An eminent Bostonian, author of Yankee dialect verse, poet, essayist, critic, Harvard professor in the chair of modern languages and belles-lettres—Lowell sketched Lincoln as . . so gently guiding public sentiment that he seems to follow it, by so yielding doubtful points that he can be firm without seeming obstinate in essential ones.” People come in time to see that such a political leader has shaken himself loose and is free from temper and prejudice. . . perhaps none of our Presidents since Washington has stood so firm in the confidence of the people as he does after three years of stormy administration ... At first he was so slow that he tired out all those who see no evidence of progress but in blowing up the engine; then he was so fast, that he took the breath away from those who think there is no getting on safely while there is a spark of fire under the boilers . . . Mr. Lincoln . . . has always waited . . . till the right moment brought up all his reserves.”
Lowell months before had written in a private letter: “Lincoln may be right, for aught I know, but I guess an ounce of Fremont is worth a pound of long Abraham. Mr. Lincoln seems to have the theory of carrying on the war without hurting the enemy. He is incapable, of understanding that they ought to be hurt.” Lowell now enfigured Lincoln as a logger in a crazy river snatching his way on a shaky raft and trying to hold to the main current through rapids. “He is still in wild water, but we have faith that his skill and sureness of eye will bring him out right at last.” The very homeliness of Lincoln’s genius was its distinction, thought Lowell. “His kingship was conspicuous by its workday homespun. Never was ruler so absolute as he, nor so little conscious of it; for he was the incarnate common-sense of the people.”
The new Congress in December ’63, by the New York Tribune Almanac, had in the House 102 Republicans and unconditional Unionists, 75 Democrats, 9 Border State men; in the Senate 36 Republicans and unconditional Unionists, 9 Democrats and 5 conditional Unionists.
One set of reports about himself that year the President did not bother to answer. Over and again the opposition newspapers large and small said that his salary was to be raised from $25,000 to $100,000 a year, as he wished, thar he was drawing his salary in gold while the soldiers were paid in greenbacks, that his length of time in office was to be fixed by Congress for a life term, as he wished.
Day after day the question of the Negro and his destiny crossed the events of each hour. He was “the inevitable Sambo,” “the everlasting nigger,” the living interrogation point. To one side he incarnated the slavery issue, to the other the race-equality problem. The trend of feeling against slavery went on deepening. Francis George Shaw of Boston wrote to the President, “My only son, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw of the 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteers (colored troops) was killed on the parapet of Fort Wagner in South Carolina, and now lies buried in its ditch among his brave and devoted followers.” To the request of Colonel Shaw’s friends for his corpse came a reply it was “buried under a layer of niggers.” The father urged the President to take immediate measures for protection to colored troops. “If our son’s services and death shall contribute in any degree towards securing to our colored troops that equal justice which is a holy right of every loyal defender of our beloved country, we shall esteem our great loss a blessing.”
Antislavery Roman Catholics declared their convictions in a more positive tone. The Christmas issue of the Catholic Telegraph, December 24, 1863, published: “It seems that there is a Priest in Kentucky who is still holding forth in favor of slavery. He ought to hide in the Mammoth Cave and associate with the fossils ... A Catholic Priest, in the holy times of Christmas, advocating slavery! Handing over women and children into infamous bondage with one hand and offering incense with the other to the infant Saviour— THE REDEEMER OF ALL! What a subject for meditation before the altar on Christmas morning! If slavery must have its advocates let them be found amongst the laity, and not amongst the Priests.” The sermon on the war given by Archbishop John Hughes August 17, 1862, was resented by Southern Catholics, by Northern antiwar groups; he replied to criticisms of his course printed in the Baltimore Catholic Mirror. He broke his connection with the fiercely antiwar and anti- Lincoln Metropolitan Record.
That the year of ’63 was coming to an end with not one Negro slave revolt, not one scene of killing and plunder, as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation, made the going easier for Lincoln.
But for the New Year’s season the Crisis reprinted a lamentation from the Zanesville, Ohio, Aurora-. “The people of the North owe Mr. Lincoln but eternal hatred and scorn. There are 500,000 new made graves; there are
500,000 orphans; there are 200,000 widows . . . thieves in the Treasury, provost marshals in the seats of justice, butchers in the pulpit—and these are the things which we owe Mr. Lincoln. As the Lord liveth, we shall pay him all we owe him some day—him, and all the bloody band of traitors, plunderers and knaves.”
That Christmas Lincoln wrote a letter of thanks for a solid gold watch to James H. Hoes, Esq., a Chicago jeweler. Hoes had donated the watch to the first Sanitary Commission Fair held in Chicago, as a token to be awarded the one person making the largest contribution of funds to the fair. Lincoln donated his original hand-written draft of the Emancipation Proclamation; it sold at auction for $3,000. A Chicago publisher was assigning territory to canvassers selling lithographed copies of “The Emancipation Proclamation, Genuine Facsimile in President Lincoln’s Handwriting."
To Usher F. Linder, Douglas Democrat and storytelling lawyer of the old “orgmathorial” Eighth Circuit, Lincoln sent a Christmas gift. Linder’s boy had joined the Confederate Army, had been taken prisoner, and his father sent letters to Lincoln asking a pardon. Weeks passed and Linder received a note dated December 26, 1863: “Your son Dan. has just left me, with my order to the Sec. of War, to administer to him the oath of allegiance, discharge him & send him to you.”
The year of 1863 saw glimmering of the last hopes of the Richmond Government for European recognition. The despair of Jefferson Davis as to overseas help, as to ships or money from England was set forth in his December message to the Confederate Congress. Davis dwelt at such length and so bitterly on the point that he was rebuked by some of the Southern newspapers for overemphasis of it. Rhett and Yancey among civilians, and the former slave trader General Bedford Forrest, a military leader perhaps as great in his own field as Stonewall Jackson, had said, “If we are not fighting for slavery, then what are we fighting for?” They were told that the outlawing of the African slave trade by the Confederacy in ’61 was a gesture for European good will with a hope of recognition as a World Power among nations. Yet that recognition had not come. All maneuvers and prayers for it had failed.
As early as 61, Archbishop John Hughes had come to Washington, met Lincoln and the Cabinet, indicated that he could not take official appointment. At the President’s request, however, joined to that of his old friend Seward, the Archbishop became one of the President’s personal agents with full powers to set forth the Union cause in Europe. The Archbishop had interviewed the French Emperor, attended a canonization of martyrs in Rome, laid the cornerstone of a new Catholic university in Dublin built partly from moneys
collected in America. In this tour of eight months over Europe the Archbishop spoke the pro-Northern views which he gave in a published letter to the pro-Southern Archbishop of New Orleans.
Meanwhile the war, the Emancipation Proclamation, the messages of Lincoln, the antislavery propaganda, had sharpened the instinct against slavery among masses of people in all countries. In homes and at work millions in Europe had asked, “What is this slavery in America?” the simplest answer being, “It is where a white man owns a black man like he owns a horse, a cow or a dog,” the talk going farther, “What about the black women and children?” “The white man owns them too.” “He can breed them, beat them, sell them?” “Yes.” “Oh! oh!”
Uncle Tom and Simon Legree, Little Eva, and Eliza crossing the ice pursued by bloodhounds, had been presented on stages of world capitals and in hundreds of smaller cities. A thousand folk tales had gone traveling of the mixed bloods of white and Negro races, of fathers selling their children, of lusts and sins and concubines, of fantastic tricks of fate involving those legally proved to have one drop of Negro blood.
A long letter to the Loyal National League of New York came from “friends of America” in France. Among signers were the Count de Gasparin, Protestant, former Minister of Public Instruction; Augustin Cochin, Catholic, author of The Abolition of Slavery, Henri Martin, Catholic, Republican, author of a history of France; Edouard Laboulaye, professor in the College de France, “moderate Catholic, moderate Republican.” They gave Lincoln and his administration complete approval in a propaganda document of 17 pages dated October 31, 1863, and reprinted some weeks later in America.
Italian republican liberals sent to Lincoln a cadenced address lavish with Latin gestures, its first signer the famous fighting patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi. Senor Don Matias Romero, envoy of the Republic of Mexico, presented his credentials at the White House. An army of some 25,000 French soldiers and a fleet were holding a large part of Mexico. But the fugitive President Juarez had in the field perhaps 27,000 troops. Lincoln read a response to Senor Romero: “. . . Thanking you for the liberal sentiments you have expressed for the United States, and congratulating you upon the renewed confidence which your government has reposed in you, it is with unaffected pleasure that I bid you welcome to Washington.”
In Great Britain, with the “mother-tongue,” were crosscurrents as complex and varied as in the United States, as muddled as Missouri. The Emancipation Proclamation, mass meetings of workingmen formulating resolutions and addresses to Lincoln, had roused the active friends of the South, who organized Southern Clubs, gathered in men of influence, and carried on propaganda
favoring the Confederacy. In April, three days’ subscriptions in London to a Confederate loan amounted to 9,000,000 pounds sterling; later it ran to a total of 16,000,000 pounds, subscribers paying 15 per cent down. The last week in June ’63 a motion in the House of Commons for recognition of the Southern Confederacy as a sovereign state was shelved by adjournment and by the speeches and tactics of John Bright and a handful of liberals. When, a little later, news arrived of the victories of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the motion had lost what chance it ever had.
A North British Review writer came to the nub of the matter for many of the British. He quoted from pamphlets and personal letters of Americans showing their almost barbaric faith that “the hand of God” was shaping America. “Citizens of the United States are born with a giant ambition in their brains; and almost the first syllables they lisp have a sort of trumpet twang, as thus, ‘Here I come, ready to grasp a sceptre and to rule the world. ’”
For all the quaffing of toasts to the British Queen and her people, Lincoln and Seward saw that their only dependable well-wisher in Europe, except republican Switzerland, was the land of absolutist monarchy, Russia, the farthest of European extremes from “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Seward arranged secret understandings with Russia so momentous that he must have consulted with Lincoln about them. In America perhaps only Seward and Lincoln knew what conditional assurances were given the Russian government as to the purchase of the peninsula of Alaska. Not to Nicolay nor Hay nor Noah Brooks, nor to others to whom the President sometimes revealed secrets of state, did he give any inklings. And not even to his bosom friend Thurlow Weed did Seward give clues. Estimates ran that it was worth from $1,400,000 to $10,000,000. The United States was to buy it as soon as convenient, the purchase price to include certain naval expenses of the Russian government—some such understanding was worked out between the Washington and St. Petersburg governments.
Early in October ’63 one Russian fleet lay in San Francisco harbor, another at New York with five first-class war vessels. Stalwart Muscovites in gay uniforms, outlandish whiskers, in excellent Russian, indifferent French and worse English, added merriment wherever they went. They sat for Brady photographs. They visited Meade’s headquarters in Virginia, fell from the upper decks of cavalry horses, ate heartily, carried their liquor well.
Special writers filled many newspaper columns with tales of the Russian naval visitors, giving an extra spread to one shipboard reception where U.S. military officers and Mrs. Lincoln drank to the health of the Czar. The Richmond Examiner drew a parallel: “The Czar emancipates the serfs from their bondage of centuries, and puts forth the whole strength of his empire
to enslave the Poles. Lincoln proclaims freedom to the African, and strives at the same time to subjugate free born Americans.”
The essential viewpoint of Seward and Lincoln was probably hit off by Harper’s Weekly. “England and France have recognized the belligerent rights of the rebels . . . Russia has not.”
To Bayard Taylor, author of travel books, who had served as secretary of the American Legation at St. Petersburg under Minister Cameron, Lincoln wrote in December ’63: “I think a good lecture or two on ‘Serfs, Serfdom, and Emancipation in Russia’ would be both interesting and valuable. Could not you get up such a thing?” Not long after, Taylor was addressing lyceum audiences on “Russia and the Russians.” And Elay mentioned in his diary that the President went one evening to hear Taylor’s lecture.
A Southern Union man, James Louis Petigru of Charleston, South Carolina, 74 years old, had gone as worn and infirm oaks fall; even Rhett said he could not find words to tell what a man this had been. At the first gun of the war Petigru had said, “I never believed that slavery would last a hundred years, now I know it won’t last five.” His name for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court to replace Justice McLean or Justice Campbell was seriously laid before Lincoln and by him gravely considered.
Of Lincoln, Petigru had no high opinion, writing in March ’62, “The Mercury has thrown off all reserve and proclaims J. D. [Jefferson Davis] is unfit for his place. I am myself afraid that he is but little better qualified for it than Lincoln is for his.” Now Petigru was beyond the war and his daughter was to write in his epitaph, “In the great Civil War he withstood his People for his Country, but his People did homage to the Man who held his conscience higher than their praise.”
Both sides had laid under earth brigadiers and major generals, the South mourning Stonewall Jackson, Van Dorn, Helm, Paxton, Tracy, Tilghman, Pender, both Garnetts, Barksdale, Preston Smith; the North its Reynolds, Berry, Sill, Lytle, Bayard, Sanders, Buford, Corcoran. The Union commissions had come to Lincoln’s desk and he had signed them; the War Department reports had come to his desk that they were through with commissions. Colleges, societies, lodges, clubs, were treasuring in creped rosters the names of their dead who had not availed themselves of the $300 clause.
When General Michael Corcoran, who had proved his valor often under fire, died from the fall of a horse on him, a comrade of the Fenian Brotherhood in New York intoned a requiem: “Deep in the green sod let him rest under the starry arch of the Republic he so nobly served and within sight of that city where his name will never sound strange.”
Major General John A. Logan, on furlough from Grant’s army, had spoken to rhe people of Du Quoin, Illinois: “How do they know we are all abolitionists, regular straight-outs? Did we tell them so? Did we say so? Why is it? Well, I will tell you. It is because we are in the army and Abraham Lincoln is President. That is the reason. These men don’t know enough or don’t want to know that Abraham Lincoln, because he is President don’t own the Government. This is our Government. This war ain’t fighting for Mr. Lincoln. It is fighting for the Union, for the Government ... I have seen Democrats shot down and buried in the same grave with the Republican and the Abolitionist. They are all fighting for the same country, the same ground . . . You will again see the great railroads running from the North to the South, from the East to the West.”
The human causes operating in America were many and varied and moving, requiring the brush of chaos to do a mural of the crossed interests of climate and geography, of native and foreign blood streams, of bread-and-butter necessity, of cultural environment, of mystic hopes. As they passed before Lincoln in their many guises and dialects, he considered, decided, waited, looked often abstracted, seemed more often to have his mind elsewhere than in Washington.
Lincoln was at the vortex of the revolution to break the power of the Southern planter aristocracy and usher in the dominance of the financial and industrial interests centered in New York City. He may have seen Paris correspondence of the New York Times at the year’s end: “The popularity of Mr. Lincoln has much advanced abroad by his late acts ... I heard a leading French politician say lately: ‘You Americans don’t appreciate Mr. Lincoln at his proper value. No monarch in Europe could carry on such a colossal war in front while harassed by so many factions and fault-finders behind . . . On every side I hear people begin to say that Mr. Lincoln will merit more than a biography—he will merit a history.’”
Newspapers were printing a strangely worded psalm of praise for Lincoln the man, spoken in the 1863 Thanksgiving sermon at the Second Presbyterian Church of Auburn, New York, by its pastor, the Reverend Henry Fowler. The progress of the President kept pace with the progress of the people, Fowler believed, comparing it with the time in Jewish history when the prophet Samuel was the mediator between a passing and a coming epoch. “Such an epoch of perplexity, transition, change, is not often witnessed. In every such passage of a nation there ought to be a character like that of Samuel. Misunderstood and misrepresented at the time; attacked from both sides; charged with not going far enough and with going too far; charged with saying too much and saying too little, he slowly, conscientiously and honestly works
out the mighty problem. He was not a founder of a new state of things like Moses; he was not a champion of the existing order of things like Elijah. He stood between the two; between the living and the dead; between the past and the present; between the old and the new; with that sympathy for each which at such a period is the best hope for any permanent solution of the questions which torment it. He has but little praise from partisans, but is the careful healer binding up the wounds of the age . . .
“His awkward speech and yet more awkward silence, his uncouth manners, his grammar self-taught and partly forgotten . . . doing nothing when he knows not what to do; hesitating at nothing when he sees the right; lacking the recognized qualification of a party leader, and yet leading his party as no other man can; sustaining his political enemies in Missouri to their defeat, sustaining his political friends in Maryland to their victory; conservative in his sympathies and radical in his acts . . . his religion consisting in truthfulness, temperance, asking good people to pray for him and publicly acknowledging in events the hand of God, he stands before you as the type of ‘Brother Jonathan,’ a not perfect man and yet more precious than fine gold.” The President took such outpourings to heart. As prose it had a touch of his own flavor.
New Year’s Day of 1864 came, and Benjamin Perley Poore noted at the morning reception in the White House: “Mr. Lincoln was in excellent spirits, giving each passer-by a cordial greeting and a warm shake of the hand, while for some there was a quiet joke.” Mrs. Lincoln stood at his right hand, wearing purple silk trimmed with black velvet and lace, a lace necktie fastened with a pearl pin, a white plume topping her headdress. At noon the doors were thrown open for the people to pour through in a continuous stream for two hours. “A living tide which swept in, eddied around the President and his wife, and then surged into the East Room which was a maelstrom of humanity, uniforms, black coats, gay female attire, and citizens generally.” Noah Brooks’ eye took in Mrs. Lincoln lacking mourning garb for the first time in the more than twenty months since Willie Lincoln died.
While the President had lain abed with varioloid, an immense crowd had streamed down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol grounds looking skyward toward the Capitol dome. The bronze legs and torso of the massive heroic figure of a helmeted woman representing Armed freedom, after years of lying helpless and forlorn on the ground below, had been lifted to the top of the dome. And on this day, precisely at noon, the last section of this 19/4-foot high bronze statue, consisting of the head and shoulders of the incomplete goddess, left the mass of material at the foot of the dome and moved serenely upward, drawn by a slender wire cable.
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ABRAHAM LINCOLN
From a chaos of timbered scaffolding the head and shoulders emerged and swung lightly and calmly into place joined to her torso. A workman drove a ringing sledge hammer three times. The Union banner ran up a flagstaff. Artillery roared a salute.
To one onlooker, Noah Brooks, the prolonged and loud shout of the crowd seemed to say to the azure that day: “Take her, oh, heavens blue and gay, take her to thy protecting arms, with all her bronze and all her charms.”
John Eaton of Toledo, Ohio, had talked with Lincoln one day about the statue of Armed Freedom to be hoisted over the Capitol dome, new marble pillars to be installed on the Senate wing, a massive and richly embellished bronze door being made for the main central portal. People were saying it was an extravagance during wartime, Eaton remarked. Lincoln answered, “If people see the Capitol going on, it is a sign we intend the Union shall go on.”
CHAPTER XXIV