SPRINGFIELD

Departure

FEBRUARY 11

AT LAST THE DAY ARRIVED. LINCOLN WAS UP EARLY AND LEFT HIS hotel at seven-thirty. By all counts it was a gloomy morning. Not cold in that savage way that characterizes February in the plains, but rather wetly cold, with lowering clouds and rain. At times snow fell. Lincoln boarded a carriage that took him to the city’s Great Western Railroad depot, a grand-sounding name for a lonesome one-story structure with a flat roof and generous eaves. A crowd had gathered. Though some observers, exercising the reportorial license of the day, put the number of people at one thousand or more, at least two witnesses estimated only one to two hundred people. Another man present, a sculptor named Thomas D. Jones who had spent days working on a bust of Lincoln, recalled later that Lincoln used the depot waiting area as a reception room where friends and neighbors filed past to gravely shake his hand. There was silence and an upwelling of emotion, Jones recalled. Tear-filled eyes. Quiet farewells. “When the crowd had passed him,” Jones wrote, “I stepped up to say good-bye. He gave me both his hands—no words after that.”

At length Lincoln climbed onto the end platform of a train composed just for this first leg of his journey, a small but cheery “Special” with a locomotive and wood-filled tender, baggage car, and a single bright-yellow passenger car. The locomotive was a tried-and-true 4-4-0—four unpowered small wheels on a guide “bogie” up front, four giant fifty-four-inch-diameter drive wheels under the cab and body—built by the Hinkley Locomotive Works of Boston, and, per custom, given a name: “L. M.Wiley.” Whether Lincoln knew it at the time or not, the engine’s namesake, Leroy M. Wiley, sixty-six, a wealthy director of the Great Western Railroad, was a slaveholder from Alabama with plantations in Eufaula and Macon County. He would soon be declared an “alien enemy.”

At about this time Mrs. Lincoln entered the crowd below. She and their youngest sons would not accompany Lincoln on this first day but were scheduled to join him the next morning in Indianapolis. Lincoln would be anything but alone on this leg, however. His eldest son, Robert, joined him, as did two dozen other compatriots, including private secretaries Nicolay and Hay.

Sculptor Jones gave Mrs. Lincoln his arm and drew her as close to the train as possible to better hear Lincoln’s parting remarks. The rain fell faster. Lincoln, sheltered by the overhanging roof of the car’s end platform, removed his hat. Many in the crowd did likewise, but without the benefit of shelter. The train stood poised to depart, with a full head of steam, its conductor standing ready to pull the bell rope that would signal the engineer to engage the drive wheels and get the journey underway. Now, at last, the “Sphinx of Springfield” would speak.

What exactly he said has long been a matter of small controversy, with most authors relying on the one existing copy, partly in Lincoln’s hand, partly in that of Nicolay, and written after Lincoln had spoken, apparently aboard his inaugural train. But there was another version, reported by the Illinois State Journal, that has an extra hundred words and the ring of Lincoln; his own law partner, William Herndon, considered this to be the most authentic.

“Friends,” Lincoln began. “No one who has never been placed in a like position, can understand my feelings at this hour, nor the oppressive sadness I feel at this parting. For more than a quarter of a century I have lived among you, and during all that time I have received nothing but kindness at your hands. Here I have lived from my youth until now I am an old man. Here the most sacred ties of earth were assumed; here all my children were born; and here one of them lies buried.”

Lincoln would turn fifty-two the next day. The death he referred to was that of his second son, Edward, who had died in 1850 just shy of his fourth birthday, the cause thought to have been tuberculosis.

“To you, dear friends, I owe all that I have, all that I am. All the strange, checkered past seems to crowd now upon my mind. To-day I leave you; I go to assume a task more difficult than that which devolved upon General Washington.”

Only with God’s guidance and support, the same that “directed and protected” George Washington, would he succeed, he said. “Let us all pray that the God of our fathers may not forsake us now. To him I commend you all—permit me to ask that with equal security and faith you all will invoke His wisdom and guidance for me.”

By this point, witnesses agree, as rain fell and Lincoln visibly struggled with powerful emotions, a veil of eye-glistening sorrow descended over the crowd.

“With these few words,” he said, “I must leave you—for how long I know not. Friends, one and all, I must now bid you an affectionate farewell.”

THE TRAIN BEGAN TO MOVE. It was eight o’clock. Rain continued to fall, raising a coat of steam from the skin of the hot boiler. Soon the yellow car was just a daub of color against the gray.

This was February 11, 1861; the electoral count was to take place in Washington two days later. If all went well, Lincoln would reach the city ten days after that.