Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (48 page)

If George Washington was the standard by which Lincoln’s presidency was to be measured—and Lincoln had invited the comparison himself—then Lincoln’s task, even after four years of war, was only half done.

Washington’s war, the Revolution, was still, as of 1865, the longest war in American history to date (1775–1783—twice as long as Lincoln’s). But soon after the victorious general returned to Mount Vernon it had become clear to him that a new government needed to be made. Washington spent four months at the Constitutional Convention (1787) and a year of discreet politicking to help ratify the document it produced, then two terms as first president (1789–1797), putting the new system into effect. Only after this double exertion did he become, in Henry Lee’s phrase, first in peace as well as first in war.

Lincoln had suppressed a rebellion. Now he had to repair the country. During his first term he had shown great skill in keeping the disparate factions of the Republican Party, from ideologues like Salmon P. Chase and Charles Sumner to moderates like William Seward and the Blairs, in harness. His hold on non-Republican unionists was less firm; they contested both his policies and his runs for the presidency. Yet he had managed to be elected and reelected, and to see his party keep its majorities in Congress.

Now Lincoln had to embrace the South, which he had never visited, apart from his youthful trips to New Orleans and his recent trip
to Richmond; where he had never won an electoral vote nor, south of Kentucky and Virginia, ever won a single vote of any kind.

In this strange third of the country he would have to embrace newly liberated blacks. If slavery was crippled by the war and in the process of being abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment (twenty states had ratified it by the time of the surrender at Appomattox), what then would be the status of freemen?

Lincoln’s early thoughts on the future of blacks in America had been rather thoughtless. Following Henry Clay, he had considered encouraging them to move away, first to Liberia, then to the Chiriqui coast of Panama; he had also toyed with the idea of a black American colony on Île-à-Vache (Cow Island) off the southern coast of Haiti. None of these plans had come to anything. Blacks hardly figured in his Second Inaugural Address, where he depicted them as faceless characters in a morality play—victims of injustice, or occasions for divine wrath. White Americans in Lincoln’s address had at least risen to the dignity of sinning; blacks had simply been sinned against.

But these blinkered views did not, by 1865, express Lincoln’s full view of the place of blacks in American life. The utility and the conduct of black enlisted men during the war had shown him that they might deserve, and be capable of exercising, the privileges of citizenship. In February 1865, Martin Delany, a black abolitionist, was commissioned as a major, the first black officer in the history of the army. Lincoln sent him to Stanton with a note: “Do not fail to have an interview with this most extraordinary and
intelligent black man.”

In reconstituting the South, Lincoln would also have to embrace former rebels: men who had killed many Union soldiers, and their families and friends, who had kept up the home front for four bitter years. Lost-cause nostalgia has made the Confederacy seem more united than it was: Andrew Johnson was but one of many highlanders in western Virginia and eastern Tennessee who hated the planter oligarchs who ran their states. Yet Lincoln had somehow to deal with those who had accepted disunion, and even labored for it.

He had not accurately judged the pride and desperation of southern bitter-enders before Fort Sumter; afterward, he had vainly expected unionist sentiment in the South to revive. Lincoln’s tone-deafness to the force of secessionist feeling had, however, an upside: he did not demonize the enemy. Demagogues, he assumed, had led secessionists astray in their views about the proper position of slavery in the republic; growing up in a slave society had led them astray in their views about human equality (“they are just what we would be in
their situation,” he had said in his Peoria speech). So why punish them afterward? Some southerners noticed his lack of rancor. At the Hampton Roads Conference, Robert Hunter, another of the three Confederate peace commissioners, asked a potentially awkward question: Did Lincoln consider the Confederacy’s leaders to be traitors? Lincoln said that was “about the size of it.” “Well, Mr. Lincoln,” Hunter replied, “we have about concluded that we shall not be hanged
as long as you are president.” The man would temper the verdict. Lincoln tried to show his sentiments, making a point of shaking hands with wounded Confederate soldiers when he visited field hospitals in occupied Virginia.

In his first term, Lincoln had been abused as both pro-black (and therefore black himself) and pro-southern (“
white trash,” in Benjamin Wade’s phrase, and an in-law of rebels). In his second term, he would have to find ways of reaching at least some of his symbolic alter egos.

Lincoln laid out his thoughts on the postwar South in a speech to a celebrating crowd on the White House lawn on the evening of April 11, two days after Lee’s surrender. Despite the informal circumstances, this was not an impromptu talk but a prepared statement.

Lincoln focused on Louisiana, which had been trying to rejoin the Union since shortly after the fall of New Orleans. In December 1863 he had issued
a proclamation offering to recognize any government in a formerly Confederate state where at least 10 percent of the voters in the last prewar election (1860) would take an oath to uphold the Constitution and the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln could not guarantee that the representatives of such state governments would be seated in
Congress; that, he pointed out, was up to each house of Congress itself. His plan also excluded voting by free black men, since the necessary 10 percent of voters was to be calculated from presecession voting rolls (which were all white). Louisiana took up Lincoln’s offer and elected a new government in February 1864. (Lincoln sent Michael Hahn, the new governor, a private note asking whether “colored people” who were veterans or “
very intelligent” might not be allowed to vote, too.) But the same lame-duck session of Congress that passed the Thirteenth Amendment would not recognize the new government of Louisiana. Some of Congress’s reluctance was political—Congress wanted to take the lead in readmitting seceded states. Some of it was principled—Radical Republicans felt that Louisiana had not done nearly enough for its black population.

In his speech at the White House, Lincoln compared the Louisiana government to an egg, and asked whether the nation would “sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg” or “by smashing it.”

One of his arguments for the Louisiana government was directed at southern whites and their role in the endgame of abolition. If the new Louisiana state government were recognized, it would provide one more vote for ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment (the state had already approved it on February 17). After an amendment received a two-thirds vote in each house of Congress, it then had to be approved by three-quarters of the states before it became part of the Constitution. If the only states that counted in ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment were the twenty-five that had not seceded, the necessary three-quarters (nineteen states) would be more quickly reached. But such a ratification, Lincoln argued, “would be questionable, and sure to be persistently questioned.” If, on the other hand, the amendment were ratified by three-quarters “of all the states”—twenty-seven out of thirty-six—it would be safe from doubt or challenge.

As long ago as his days in the Illinois legislature, Lincoln had held that slave owners ought to approve abolition themselves. They were free men, albeit engaged in a wrong; they should not be relieved from their
wrongdoing by force or external power. The war had trampled many scruples. Slavery had been shattered by conflict and by Lincoln’s proclamations as commander in chief. But requiring all the states, including formerly Confederate ones, to count toward the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment would restore consent and agency to ex-rebels. Freedom would come, but it should come with their participation.

Another of Lincoln’s arguments in favor of the new Louisiana government was directed to blacks. He repeated in public the suggestion he had made privately to Governor Hahn: “I would myself prefer” that colored veterans and “very intelligent” colored men could vote. But how was that goal best reached? By “saving the already advanced steps toward it” (by which he meant a functioning state government that had abolished slavery and approved the Thirteenth Amendment)? Or “by running backward over them”? If the new Louisiana government were recognized, Lincoln argued, “the colored man” would be “inspired with vigilance, and
energy, and daring” to win his rights. This figure of Lincoln’s imagination was more alive than the inert slaves of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address; he sounded in fact like the self-made man of old Whig polemics—only he was now to be a self-made man of color.

One of Lincoln’s auditors in the crowd on the White House lawn understood the import of these remarks very well. “That means nigger citizenship,” said John Wilkes Booth to a friend. “That is the last speech
he will ever make.”

John Wilkes Booth, a month shy of his twenty-seventh birthday, belonged to a famous family of actors. He played dashing heroes, and he looked the part: he had the pale skin and dark curls of Lord Byron (still the nineteenth-century ideal of masculine beauty), with a slim cavalry mustache. The great actor in the family was his older brother Edwin, whose Shakespeare performances were natural, intimate, and profound. John Wilkes Booth was not a great actor, but rather an athletic ranter,
good for swordfights and tirades. He was destined to win fame not in drama, but in politics.

The Booth brothers had grown up in Maryland, and their divided sympathies reflected those of the state: Edwin was a unionist, John Wilkes a partisan of slavery and the South. In December 1859 the younger Booth had joined a Richmond militia company so he could travel to Harpers Ferry to witness the execution of John Brown. He hated Brown for both his principles and his deeds, though he admired his aplomb.

As the war progressed, Booth made contact with the lower levels of the Confederate secret service; the eastern shore of Maryland, only a boat ride across the Potomac from Virginia, was sown with agents. In 1864 Booth hatched a plot to kidnap Abraham Lincoln, spirit him to Virginia, and ransom him for the release of Confederate prisoners of war. In November he left a sealed letter to be opened if he should come to grief, justifying his plans.

“I have ever held the South were right,” Booth began. It was right because it correctly understood the difference between the races. “The country was formed for the white, not for the black man.” Slavery was a blessing for both whites and blacks—“Witness heretofore our wealth and power; witness their elevation and enlightenment above their race elsewhere.” The South was doubly right, Booth went on, because it was being bullied and oppressed, and because the founding fathers had given an example of resistance as the remedy in such cases. “To hate tyranny, to love liberty and justice, to strike at wrong and oppression, was the teaching of our fathers.”

The villain of the struggle was Lincoln. “The very nomination of Abraham Lincoln four years ago spoke very plainly of war, war, upon Southern rights and institutions. His election proved it.” So Booth believed he would be right to make Lincoln “a prisoner.” He signed his testament, “A Confederate doing his duty on his
own responsibility.” Booth meanwhile assembled a team of conspirators to help with his scheme.

The idea of kidnapping Lincoln was harebrained; Jefferson Davis
himself had nixed another such plot because it would have likely resulted in killing rather than capturing its object. But Booth’s justifications, far from being mad, were the typical reasonings of Confederates and northern peace Democrats: blacks were inferior, the South was a victim, and Lincoln was her oppressor. Booth’s disgusted remark on the White House lawn about “nigger citizenship” was in keeping with these views.

The collapse of the Confederacy in April 1865 rendered the kidnapping plot impossible even in theory—To whom would Booth deliver his prisoner, and for what might he be ransomed? It was then that Booth rose (setting morality aside) to greatness.

Assassination was an old tool of statesmanship. It had been used spectacularly in the French wars of religion of the late sixteenth century, in which numerous leaders, including two kings, Henri III and Henri IV, were assassinated by rivals or by zealots. The emergence of modern nation-states and the decline of crusading fervor in the seventeenth century signaled a turn away from assassination. Thereafter wars would be between countries, whose rulers were not to be held personally punishable for their policies. There were no assassinations during the American Revolution; George Washington approved a plot to kidnap Benedict Arnold after his treason, and even managed to insert an agent, a supposed defector, into British-occupied New York to do it, but he wanted Arnold captured, returned, and tried, not murdered (a last-minute change in Arnold’s plans put him beyond his would-be captor’s reach).