LINCOLN

The Time Will Come

FEBRUARY 17–21

ON SUNDAY, LINCOLN’S FRIEND ORVILLE BROWNING WROTE TO HIM with an appraisal of his proposed inaugural address. “When I read your inaugural at Indianapolis, I did so in very great haste, and my attention was more attracted to the clear, bold and forcible statement of principles which are just and true than to considerations of policy and expediency,” he wrote. But now after reading it again more carefully, one passage troubled him—a sentence that struck him as unduly aggressive: “All the power at my disposal will be used to reclaim the public property and places which have fallen; to hold, occupy, and possess these, and all other property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties on imports, but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion of any state.”

Browning urged Lincoln to drop the part about reclaiming public property. Lincoln had already asserted the right to do so in his Indianapolis speech, but this was the inaugural address, a speech for the nation as a whole, in which every word would be dissected for clues as to how Lincoln’s administration would address the North-South divide. A vow to reclaim property would be “construed into a threat, or menace, and will be irritating even in the border states,” Browning wrote. He told Lincoln that in whatever conflict might lie ahead, it was “very important” that the secessionists be made to appear as the aggressors. “The first attempt that is made to furnish supplies or reinforcements to Sumter,” he wrote, “will induce aggression by South Carolina, and then the government will stand justified, before the entire country, in repelling that aggression.”

Browning later would offer Lincoln another telling observation: “The time is not yet, but it will come when it will be necessary for you to march an army into the South and proclaim freedom to the slaves.”

Lincoln adopted Browning’s suggestion. He also made a note on the back of the letter’s last page, a whisper of a sentiment Lincoln would later incorporate in his address: “Americans, all, we are not enemies, but friends—We have sacred ties of affection which, though strained by passions, let us hope can never be broken.”

LINCOLN FOUND LARGE CROWDS at every stop, no matter what the weather. In one city, a man gave him an apple, which prompted a small but savvy boy to shout, “Mr. Lincoln! That man is running for postmaster!” Everyone laughed, including Lincoln. Even this boy understood that Lincoln was now being dogged at every stop by swarms of people seeking patronage jobs in the new administration. The character and size of his retinue changed dramatically from city to city. His cars took on office seekers the way his locomotive took on water. At Girard, Ohio, Horace Greeley himself climbed aboard bearing his familiar red-and-blue traveling blanket, and accompanied Lincoln for a short leg of his journey. As testimony to the fast-changing character of the age, at least one of Lincoln’s trains reached sixty miles an hour.

Lincoln veered east to Albany, where a certain well-respected actor was onstage performing in a play called The Apostate. The actor, John Wilkes Booth, threw himself so energetically into his role that at one point he fell on his character’s dagger and carved open a three-inch wound. So well known was Booth as a “tragedian” that the incident made news as far away as Montgomery, Alabama.

The entourage reached New York City the next day, Tuesday, February 19. The streets outside the Astor House were unusually quiet because all buses and carriages had been shunted to other streets. Among the many who witnessed Lincoln’s arrival was poet Walt Whitman.

“Presently two or three shabby black barouches”—carriages with two large rear wheels, two smaller in front, and two rows of seats facing each other—“made their way with some difficulty through the crowd, and drew up at the Astor House entrance,” Whitman wrote. “A tall figure stepp’d out of the center of the barouches, paused leisurely on the sidewalk, look’d up at the dark granite walls and looming architecture of the grand old hotel—then, after a relieving stretch of arms and legs, turn’d round for over a minute to slowly and good-humoredly scan the appearance of the vast and silent crowds.”

Whitman’s perch afforded him “a capital view of it all and especially of Mr. Lincoln: his looks and gait; his perfect composure and coolness; his unusual and uncouth height; his dress of complete black, stovepipe hat pushed back on his head; dark-brown complexion; seamed and wrinkled yet canny-looking face; black, bushy head of hair; disproportionately long neck; and his hands held behind, as he stood observing the people.”

AS LINCOLN MADE HIS way toward the hotel, Kate Warne, Pinkerton’s chief female detective, also got a first look at the president-elect and registered a different impression. In her report she described him as looking “very pale and fatigued.” That evening, she sent a note to Lincoln aide Norman Judd by way of a hotel messenger, urging him to meet her in her room.

Judd complied. “I followed the servant to one of the upper rooms of the hotel,” he wrote, “where, upon entering, I found a lady seated at a table with some papers before her.”

He read Pinkerton’s letter. Inexplicably, Judd also kept this one to himself, possibly out of the conviction that it was just one more false threat, like so many others Lincoln had received since his election.

DURING ONE OF THE many receptions arranged for Lincoln in New York, he met P. T. Barnum, the famed showman, who repeatedly invited him to visit his American Museum. Never one to miss a marketing opportunity, Barnum placed an advertisement on the front page of the New York World inviting New Yorkers to come to the museum and use its windows and balconies to observe Lincoln’s departure from the city. “Remember, this is the last chance in New York,” the ad bellowed. “Come early and get a good place.” While there, visitors “at no extra charge” could take in the museum’s exhibits, including “The Great Lincoln Turkey,” a forty-pounder allegedly to be presented to Lincoln on Inauguration Day; a giant two-thousand-pound bear named Samson; two “living Aztec children”; an albino family from Madagascar; a “man monkey”; thirty living “monster snakes”; a $150 speckled brook trout; and perhaps that most novel of phenomena, “The Living Happy Family.” Lincoln didn’t go, but his wife and sons did, with the exception of Tad, who demurred on grounds that he had no need to see any more bears; there were “plenty of bears” back home. That night Lincoln took in a popular opera, Un Ballo in Maschera, A Masked Ball, by Giuseppe Verdi, set improbably in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, and featuring the assassination of the “governor of Boston.” Lincoln did not stay for the climactic murder.

He left for Philadelphia at nine o’clock Thursday morning, February 21, the day before George Washington’s birthday. Along the way he stopped in Trenton, the first of a number of moments scheduled to create an allusive link between the nation’s first president and its next. Here he addressed the secession crisis head-on. “I fear we shall have to put the foot down firmly,” he told his spellbound audience of state legislators; he then raised and lowered his own foot. It was a “quick, but not violent gesture,” according to John Hay. The audience roared approval and kept on roaring. “It was some minutes before Mr. Lincoln was able to proceed,” Hay wrote.

When Lincoln arrived in Philadelphia that afternoon, he was met by a crowd estimated by the Philadelphia Daily News at “not less than a quarter of a million people” watched over by 550 city police officers, everyone chilled by a brisk westerly wind. Now and then snow fell. He did not expect to give a formal address but found himself compelled to speak anyway, and delivered the most important speech of his journey, one that whispered a theme soon to be clarified in blood.

First, however, he received disturbing news.