The Silence Breaks

FEBRUARY 11–12

LINCOLN’S FIRST MORNING ON THE RAILS TOOK HIM THROUGH twenty towns in Illinois before he reached the Illinois-Indiana state line, according to a special “Time Card” produced for the journey by the Great Western Railroad. Here were Illiopolis at 8:49 A.M.; Niantic at 8:58; Cerro Gordo, 9:54; Sadorus, 10:40; Philo, 11:07; Homer, 11:30; and Catlin, twenty-nine minutes later. Often Lincoln stood on the rear platform as the train passed through town, fulfilling his goal of letting the people see him; to enable them to put a face and a body to this man they had heard so much about and who had struck such fear into the South. “Every station along the road had its crowd,” one newspaper reported, “all anxious to see the man whose election to the first office in the gift of a free people has been the cause (whether with reason or not) of the distracted state of the country.”

Three times that morning—at Decatur, Tolono, and Danville—the train stopped long enough to allow Lincoln to speak so that the public could also hear him and marvel at how such an immense man could produce that reedy, high-pitched voice. He kept it brief, as at Tolono, where the train stopped for wood and water:

“I am leaving you on an errand of national importance, attended, as you are aware, with considerable difficulties,” Lincoln said. “Let us believe, as some poet has expressed it:—

“‘Behind the cloud the sun is still shining.’”

The train reached the state line at 12:38, eight minutes behind schedule; here Lincoln disembarked to have his midday dinner while his train received a new locomotive and shifted to the tracks of the Toledo and Wabash line. The food was not only “miserable,” according to journalist Henry Villard, a member of Lincoln’s party, but overpriced, with Lincoln and his companions “charged one dollar per head, twice the amount charged to common travelers.”

ON THAT AFTERNOON OF February 11, Lincoln’s Special stopped at Thorntown, Indiana, to once again take on fuel. As had occurred at every prior stop, a crowd gathered and demanded a speech. Lincoln parried this by offering to tell one of the folksy stories of which he seemed to have an inexhaustible supply. He cautioned, however, that he probably shouldn’t be telling stories, given that he was on his way to assume the highest office in the land, but he would tell it, “if you promise not to let it out.”

He began: A man running for a county office had a favorite horse that was sure-footed but slow. The man knew he was likely to win the nomination for the office. On the day of the convention he set out on his horse for the county seat, but the animal insisted on nibbling every comely bush along the way, despite the would-be candidate’s use of a whip and spurs to prod it along.

Lincoln was midway through a sentence when the train began to move.

Lincoln laughed; the crowd laughed. Someone shouted that he need not worry about this particular story getting out. Lincoln waved; the train gained speed.

At the next stop—Lebanon, Indiana—ten miles farther on, Lincoln stepped out onto the end platform of his car just as a group of people came running up along the tracks. These were local citizens, but a joke circulated that they were actually residents of Thorntown, the previous stop, who had run all the way and were “panting outside to hear the conclusion of the story.”

Lincoln found this hilarious and retold the story, this time to completion—how the horse moved so slowly that the candidate arrived at the county seat after the convention had ended.

If he gave a speech at every stop, Lincoln said, the same would happen to him; he would not reach Washington until the inauguration was over.

Again he laughed—he always did like his own jokes. And again his audience laughed too.

“I bid you an affectionate farewell,” he said. “I cannot miss the inauguration.”

THE DAY’S JOURNEY ENDED in Indianapolis at the Bates Hotel, where he was to spend the night. First, however, he delivered a speech from the hotel balcony to a throng estimated to number forty-five thousand.

All that grueling day he had strived to avoid saying anything even remotely incendiary, fully aware that thanks to the miracle of telegraphy his remarks would be transmitted far and wide, north and south, immediately, and then subjected to whatever interpretation editors chose to apply. He was especially mindful of the fact that among the items he had brought with him from Springfield were copies of his inaugural address tucked into a black satchel that he had given to Robert for safekeeping. Before his departure, Lincoln had arranged to have twenty copies secretly printed on the presses of the Illinois State Journal by a friend, William H. Bailhache, an owner of the journal. Lincoln’s great fear was that somehow the address would make its way into the hands of a reporter. Robert was seventeen years old and had quickly become a celebrity in his own right, with the nickname “Prince of Rails” in recognition both of his father’s nickname, “Railsplitter,” and of the Prince of Wales’s North American tour. (The prince traveled as far south as Richmond, where a big slave auction scheduled for the same time had to be cancelled owing to his known antipathy to slavery.) Robert, weary of carrying the satchel, left it with the hotel clerk and set off for an evening with a group of Young Republicans.

Immediately upon arrival in the city Lincoln had given a brief, cautious, carefully written speech, but now, on the hotel balcony, he abandoned that caution.

ON THIS PROMONTORY IN front of the Bates Hotel, dressed in black, Lincoln looked like a very tall undertaker. After greeting the thousands gathered below and thanking them for the city’s warm welcome, he ventured directly into the fray. “The words ‘coercion’ and ‘invasion’ are in great use about these days,” he said. “Suppose we were simply to try if we can, and ascertain what, is the meaning of these words. Let us get, if we can, the exact definitions of these words—not from dictionaries, but from the men who constantly repeat them—what things they mean to express by the words. What, then, is ‘coercion’? What is ‘invasion’?”

Given that the first microphone would not be invented for another fifteen years, most in this vast audience could not hear a word, but those in the first ranks knew that Lincoln was about to enter territory he thus far had avoided. The great silence was being broken.

“Would the marching of an army into South Carolina, for instance, without the consent of her people, and in hostility against them, be coercion or invasion?” he asked. “I very frankly say, I think it would be invasion, and it would be coercion too, if the people of that country were forced to submit. But if the Government, for instance, but simply insists upon holding its own forts, or retaking those forts which belong to it”—

A great cheer rose from the crowd.

—“or the enforcement of the laws of the United States in the collection of duties upon foreign importations—

Another round of cheering.

—“or even the withdrawal of the mails from those portions of the country where the mails themselves are habitually violated; would any or all of these things be coercion?”

He chided those who contended that the federal government had no right to take such steps. If indeed states considered those acts to be coercion or invasion, he said, “then it occurs to me that the means for the preservation of the Union they so greatly love, in their own estimation, is of a very thin and airy character.”

Lincoln knew he had his audience now; its energy flowed upward in an electric embrace and caused him to cast aside his last reticence. He summoned an earthy analogy certain to please his listeners.

“In their view, the Union, as a family relation, would not be anything like a regular marriage at all, but only as a sort of free-love arrangement”—laughter convulsed the crowd—“to be maintained on what that sect calls passionate attraction.”

The laughter continued.

He asked what power gave a state the right to seize federal property within its boundaries when such property was placed there solely because of the state’s affiliation with the Union; what “principle of original right” allowed it “to play tyrant over all its own citizens, and deny the authority of everything greater than itself?”

Which drew still more laughter.

“I say I am deciding nothing, but simply giving something for you to reflect upon.”

At which point, reminding his listeners that he had foresworn long speeches, he said goodbye.

The street below swelled with cheers. “The applause was deafening,” wrote John Hay, “and there were loud exclamations from the crowd, of ‘That’s the talk,’ ‘We’ve got a President now,’ &c.”

Still the speech begged the question: Why had he been so careful thus far, only to launch this fiery ember into the firmament two days before the electoral count and three weeks before his inauguration?

NEITHER LINCOLN’S BREVITY NOR humor altered the fact that he had clearly posited the government’s right to retake forts, arsenals, and other federal property, and to collect duties and enforce laws in the seceded states. A Virginia congressman called the speech a declaration of war. And Lincoln could not take back that free-love allusion, which, along with the rest of the speech, was telegraphed to newspapers around the country and caused some critics to wonder if Lincoln had the dignity to hold the highest office in the land. At Fort Sumter, Asst. Surgeon Crawford expressed dismay. “If Mr. Lincoln fancies he can carry out the policy indicated by the speech at Indianapolis he will find himself very much mistaken,” Crawford told his brother after finally being able to read the speech. “Civil War with all its horrors will ensue and no human foresight can tell what the end will be. I should think his vulgar exhibitions, and his so-called speeches since his pilgrimage to Washington began would greatly disgust his supporters and friends.” Crawford revealed a deeper fear, one shared by many Northerners, as to the threat Lincoln might pose to the racial status quo. Crawford feared that the Republican Party had become populated with abolitionist zealots. “I abhor fanaticism and despise cant,” he wrote. “The party is full of both, and any proposition to lift the negro to the social level of the white man is to me monstrous and insane.”

The speech, however, pleased Northern Republicans, who had grown weary of the endless effort to appease the South. The Chicago Tribune said it “electrified the true Republicans and has given the fishy ones ‘fever and ague.’”

NOW A GOOD PORTION of Indianapolis surged into the Bates Hotel for a closer look at the president-elect, exhibiting, according to secretary Hay, “too many elbows, too much curiosity, and a perfectly gushing desire to shake hands with somebody—the president, if possible; if not, with somebody who had shaken hands with him.” After freeing himself and struggling to secure a dinner in the hotel dining room, Lincoln turned his attention to his inaugural speech. He wanted to give a copy to a friend, Orville Browning, for his comments. Browning, soon to become a U.S. senator from Illinois, had accompanied him on the day’s journey but planned to return home the next morning.

Lincoln’s son Robert, guardian of the speech, was still out with the Young Republicans. On his return, possibly a bit drunk, Robert found his father in an atypical state of distress, demanding to know the whereabouts of the satchel. One witness recalled, “I had never seen Mr. Lincoln so much annoyed, so much perplexed, and for the time so angry.”

With studied insouciance, and exhibiting a “bored and injured virtue,” as another account put it, Robert told his father that he had left the satchel at the front desk.

“And what did the clerk do with it?” Lincoln asked.

“It is on the floor behind the counter,” Robert answered.

Stunned, as “visions of his inaugural in all the morning’s newspapers floated before the president-elect,” Lincoln, according to this account, leapt into action. Without another word, he rushed from the room and descended the stairs, plowing through a cloud of onlookers who had jammed the hotel halls to get a glimpse of him. “One single stride of his long legs swung him across the clerk’s desk, and he fell upon the small mountain of luggage accumulated behind it.” This was not the sort of thing one expected from a newly elected president. “Bystanders craned their necks, and the horrified clerk stood open-mouthed.” At one point Lincoln, disgusted with himself, bowed his head and quietly said, “I guess I have lost my certificate of moral character, written by myself.”

Lincoln drew a small key from his pocket. There were many black bags behind the desk, and they all looked the same. Given the imprecise nature of luggage locks, the key was likely to fit a number of them. Lincoln opened one bag and found nothing. Then another. One bag yielded shirt collars, playing cards, and a bottle of whiskey. This so amused onlookers that even Lincoln had to laugh. After six tries, he found the correct bag. Robert was freed of all his luggage-watching responsibilities for the rest of the trip.

Lincoln gave a copy of his inaugural to Browning, who after just one day on the rails was more than happy to leave this particular adventure behind. “Had to sleep two in a bed, and accommodations were very poor,” he wrote in his diary. “It is just about as much of that sort of thing as I want.”

Happily, Browning and the others awoke to a day so lovely that it could have been spring. This was also Lincoln’s birthday. At fifty-two he was not exactly “old,” as he had described himself to his audience in Springfield, but certainly at a point where men understood that they had entered the far side of their lives.

The train wore festive attire. Thirty-four stars circled the engine’s smokestack, representing every state, including those that had seceded, and one for newly admitted Kansas, which had joined the Union two weeks earlier as a free state. Portraits of past presidents hung from the locomotive’s forward end, prominent among them George Washington. Along the train’s length were decorations of all kinds, including evergreens splayed along the boiler and tender.

Lincoln’s Special departed midmorning, now with his wife and two youngest sons, Willie, ten, and Tad, eight, aboard as well.