Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (32 page)

Lincoln was driven to pick a team of rivals by the necessities of a new party in a time of upheaval. To manage them, he had to employ all the arts he had acquired years ago in Illinois, avoiding duels and sharing out congressional nominations—only now he was playing at the highest level, and any mistake could be dire.

In the midst of these personnel decisions, Lincoln exchanged some letters with his past.

Alexander Stephens, the Georgia Whig whose philippic on the Mexican War Lincoln had called the best hour-long speech he had ever heard, had continued serving in the House until 1859. He had become a Democrat after the Whigs collapsed, but had maintained his Whiggish nationalism. Lincoln’s election had not distressed him. Privately he wrote a fellow Georgian that his old colleague was “not a bad man” and might make an even better president than Millard Fillmore. On November 14 Stephens appeared before the Georgia legislature to argue that “the election of no man, constitutionally chosen, is sufficient cause for any state to separate
from the union.”

Lincoln felt the lack of a southerner in his cabinet and considered asking Stephens to be secretary of the navy. Perhaps to break the ice after eleven years, Lincoln wrote him from Springfield asking for a copy of his speech to the legislature. Stephens’s reply evidently mentioned the peril facing the country.

Peril indeed. On November 9 the South Carolina legislature had resolved that the election of “Abram [
sic
] Lincoln” was an act of “open and avowed hostility” to the slaveholding states. Six weeks later, on December 20, a state convention declared that “the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states, under the name of ‘The United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved.”

States had challenged the federal government several times in American history. During the administration of John Adams, Virginia and Kentucky, led by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, had called on the states to interpose their authority against the Alien and Sedition Acts, laws the Republicans considered unconstitutional. During the administration of James Madison, Federalists returned the favor, calling a convention of New England states in Hartford, Connecticut, to condemn the War of 1812. Both episodes had stopped at the stage of posturing, thanks to changes in the political scene: the Republican Party had managed to beat Adams in the election of 1800 and repeal the odious acts; the Federalists collapsed after Madison’s war ended in victory at the Battle of New Orleans.

During the Nullification Crisis of 1832, South Carolina had asserted a right to nullify the tariff, a federal law. In his eulogy for Henry Clay, the man who had resolved that crisis, Lincoln simply assumed that South Carolina was peculiar, calling it a hotbed of “political eccentricities and
heresies.” But never had that state gone so far as secession.

On December 22 Lincoln wrote Stephens, assuring him that the incoming administration had no intention of interfering with the slaves of southerners: “The South would be in no more danger in this respect than it was in the
days of Washington.” But Stephens wanted more. Both North and South were being driven by “passions,” he wrote back on December 30, yet no one was trying to allay them. He gave John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry the year before as an example: it had filled the South with fear, yet it had not been condemned by “any of the leading members” of the Republican Party. Stephens wanted Lincoln as president-elect to do so. He ended with a Bible verse, Proverbs 25:11: “A word fitly spoken by you now would be like ‘apples of gold in
pictures of silver.’”

The problem with Stephens’s plea was that Lincoln had already answered it. He had called John Brown violent, criminal, insane, and a failure. He had assured the South, as recently as Cooper Union, that Republicans intended no interference “
whatever” with their slaves. He had said in the “House Divided” speech that the nation could not endure half slave and half free, but he had explained subsequently that its time of full freedom might take a century to arrive. Asking him to repeat what he had already said was a tic, a nervous ritual. Lincoln had his own Bible verse to characterize such requests, which he had given to another anxious southern correspondent, a minister in Tennessee: “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose
from the dead” (Luke 16:31).

Stephens’s last-minute plea ignored the issue that did separate Lincoln and the South. Slavery was not a good thing protected by the laws, and disallowed only in certain states; it was a bad thing, to be discouraged by the laws and guaranteed only in certain states. Lincoln spelled
it out in his letter of the 22nd: “You think slavery is
right
and ought to be extended, while we think it is
wrong
and ought to be restricted. That I suppose
is the rub.”

Lincoln and Stephens wrote no more, but Stephens would soon have another chance to express himself publicly on the peril facing the country.

The New Year came. South Carolina had accompanied her November 9 resolutions with an appeal for “the cooperation of her sister slaveholding states.” In January 1861 five states answered South Carolina’s call: Mississippi seceded on the 9th, Florida on the 10th, and Alabama on the 11th. Alabama’s ordinance of secession gave as a justification “the election of Abraham Lincoln . . . by a sectional party avowedly hostile to [our] domestic institutions.” Georgia followed on the 19th, and Louisiana on the 26th.

South Carolina was no longer an outlier, but a leader. The South felt a sense of encirclement that few in the North, and almost no one in the Republican Party, understood. The House had had a majority of free-state congressmen for years. With the admission of Kansas as a free state on January 29, in addition to California, Minnesota, and Oregon in the 1850s, the Senate’s balance of free and slave states had vanished forever, unless there was sweeping American expansion in Central America and the Caribbean. Now an antislavery northern party was about to move into the White House, from which position it could begin slowly reshaping the courts. Since the South stood alone in fact, perhaps its only safety was to make a formal break.

On January 31 Lincoln visited his past, going to Coles County, Illinois, to see his stepmother. Sarah Bush Lincoln was then seventy-two years old. Years later, she would say that she had not wanted her stepson to be president. “When he came down to see me after he was elected . . . something told me that something would befall Abe and that I should
see him no more.” She recollected her fears after he had died; very likely his
death altered her recollection. But Lincoln lived in a superstitious world. In the White House his wife would consult mediums who contacted the spirits of the dead; that was rather modern in the mid-nineteenth century, almost scientific. Lincoln, for all his skepticism, bore traces of an older world of folklore. He believed in the efficacy of mad stones (hair-balls from the innards of deer that reputedly cured bites and poisonings);
he examined disturbing dreams for portents. Perhaps his stepmother felt some unease, which events chanced to confirm.

Back in Springfield Lincoln rented his house, wrapped up his law business, and bade farewell to the loyal Herndon. He left town by train on February 11, the day before his fifty-second birthday; it was cloudy and wet. “I go,” he said in brief remarks, “to assume a task more difficult than that which devolved upon General Washington.” No joking about back houses; this was serious—serious enough to invoke God. “Unless the great God who assisted him shall be with me and aid me, I must fail. . . . Let us all pray that the God of our fathers may not
forsake us now.”

Lincoln’s trip to Washington was deliberately indirect. In twelve days he passed through seven states—Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland. There was some relaxation—he saw a new Verdi opera,
Un Ballo in Maschera
in New York—and some alarm—he hurried through Maryland in the dead of night to frustrate a supposed plot to assassinate him in Baltimore. But his primary purposes were dramatic and political. He spoke repeatedly, not saying anything new, or even much at all, but enough to secure his base and to reassure all who needed, and would accept, reassurance.

In the most historic spots he recapitulated his many efforts to connect himself to the founding fathers. On February 21, in Trenton, New Jersey, he recalled what Parson Weems had taught him about Washington’s desperate battle there: “I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that
those men struggled for.” This was his answer to the Washington idolaters, Robert Winthrop and Edward Everett, whose Washington fought merely for unity. Lincoln’s Washington fought for liberty.

On February 22, in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Lincoln recalled a founding document: “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” he said. This was permissible hyperbole; although he had not referred to the Declaration in any serious way before his 1852 eulogy for Henry Clay, he had referred to it repeatedly since then. “What great principle,” he went on, “kept this Confederacy so long together[?] It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land; but something in the Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world
for all future time.” This was his answer to Jefferson Davis and Stephen Douglas. The Declaration was not only an act of separation or a declaration of equality for white people. It was both of those things. But America’s claim to independence, and the white man’s claim to equality, rested on all men’s equal right to liberty.

Lincoln arrived in Washington on February 23. On the same day, Texas voters ratified an ordinance of secession.

Meetings, receptions, discussions, rumors, crowds; all the madness of Springfield repeated and magnified by the normal hubbub of the capital and the abnormal shriek of a country splitting. Lincoln stayed at the Willard Hotel until he could move up the street into the White House.

Inauguration day was March 4, which began under clouds but cleared up in time for the ceremony. Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, still in active service at age seventy-four, had posted sharpshooters on nearby rooftops and watched the proceedings with his staff from a carriage stationed in a side street, ready for any emergency. If any rebels showed their heads, he had assured Lincoln that he would “blow them
to hell.”

Lincoln gave his Inaugural Address on a platform at the East Portico of the Capitol, the preferred location for inaugurations for the previous twenty years. He was introduced by an old political colleague, Edward
Baker, who had moved to Oregon and become a senator. He felt some confusion on rising to speak, in setting aside his top hat and cane, gaudy and unfamiliar appurtenances for him; Stephen Douglas, who sat on the podium, took them from him.