Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (49 page)

By the nineteenth century assassination seemed to have become the province of the unhinged. In 1812 Britain’s prime minister, Spencer Perceval, was shot and killed by a deranged merchant who had once been mistreated while on business in Russia and believed that the British government owed him compensation. Andrew Jackson’s would-be assassin in 1835 was a lunatic who believed he was actually the King of England. In the Cooper Union address, Lincoln compared John Brown to assassins, by way of suggesting Brown’s insanity: “An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by
Heaven to
liberate them.” Brooding enthusiasts belonged on the fringes of reason itself, far beyond the borders of politics.

When Booth transformed his kidnapping plot into an assassination plot, he only returned politics to older methods. He showed thereby an instinct for the crucial point, perhaps related to his lifetime in the theater: Lincoln was the central character, the spring of the action—the inspiration, oracle, and harmonizer of the Union cause. No one had spoken more eloquently, or demonstrated greater political prowess. To strike him even at the end, even after the end, was to strike to the heart.

Booth’s new plot reached beyond Lincoln. He assigned two of his minions the jobs of killing Andrew Johnson and William Seward (Seward just then was bedridden from a carriage accident earlier in the month). Lincoln would be joined in death by his vice president and his secretary of state, the senior member of the cabinet. The date for action was April 15. The Lincolns were to attend a performance at Ford’s Theater, half a dozen blocks from the White House, of
Our American Cousin
, a popular comedy. Booth’s fame as an actor allowed him to scout the theater beforehand, choosing his ingress and his escape route, and to enter it unchallenged during the performance; of course, the famous Mr. Booth could come and go as he liked. In the third act, Booth entered the Lincolns’ box and shot the president in the back of the head.

Booth then jumped to the stage, waved a dagger (his backup weapon), and cried
Sic semper tyrannus
—Thus always to tyrants—the motto of the State of Virginia. When Patrick Henry gave his great 1775 speech on the eve of the Revolution, ending with the cry, “Give me liberty, or give me death!” he had mimed driving a dagger into his breast. Now Booth stood fresh from his deed, brandishing an actual dagger. It was political stagecraft of the highest order. (Except for one detail—in Booth’s downward leap, one of his spurs had caught on the bunting that hung from the Lincolns’ box, causing him to land off balance and break a leg. One eyewitness compared his walk afterward to “the hopping of a
bullfrog.” This was an error: actors on the stage of history should not hop like bullfrogs.) Booth hopped off-stage to an alley, mounted a horse that
he had posted there, and rode off before anyone in the dumbfounded crowd could stop him.

The plot was not a complete success: Johnson’s designated assassin lost heart and spent the night roaming about; Seward’s managed to break into the secretary of state’s house and sickroom and stab him, though not fatally. But Lincoln, who never regained consciousness, died the next morning. Booth eluded pursuit for eleven days, before he was finally hunted down and shot in a barn in Virginia.

On April 17, as Sherman in North Carolina negotiated the surrender of the last major Confederate army, he told Joseph E. Johnston, the Confederate commander, news that he himself had just learned: Lincoln had been assassinated. Johnston, honest soldier, called it
a disgrace to the age.

Johnston was honest, but unimaginative. How much more effective than a dozen Chancellorsvilles was Booth’s blow. If Booth had hoped, by killing Johnson and Seward, to decapitate the Union government and cause it to waver, even in victory, his comrades had failed him. But Booth himself had done the vital thing. He had killed the man who had won the war; more important, he had killed the man who might have been able to win the peace. Slavery was dead, but much might be saved from the old order of things. Booth had shown the most wicked adherents of his cause how to proceed. Not that they needed any example of violence and lawlessness; the human heart is fertile with such impulses. But he gave them an example of success.

With almost no resources—with no armies, and no political authority, armed only with his beliefs and his will—Booth had nevertheless marked the politics of the nation for the next hundred years. John Brown, a capable guerrilla and terrorist, was muddled by his religious visions. Alexander Stephens, a clear-sighted political philosopher, was an ineffectual officeholder. Here at last in John Wilkes Booth was the towering genius Lincoln had foreseen in 1838.

But morality cannot be set aside. Lincoln did not believe so. “Let us have faith that right makes might,” he said at Cooper Union, “and in that faith . . . dare to do our duty as we understand it.” “With firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in,” he prayed at the end of the Second Inaugural Address.

Firmness in the right was never easy to achieve. God never lets us see more than a piece of the picture. Lincoln encountered a lot of people in his life who knew just what should be done right away, and he generally reacted to them with skepticism, if not alarm. Right could be trammeled by old circumstances and arrangements. The founding fathers had found slavery existing among them; they would not name it in their Constitution, but they had secured it there. Right could be limited by countervailing rights. Slave owners were free men and could not simply be ordered to manumit; slaves should not be property, yet they were held as such, which entitled their owners to compensation. So it was necessary to proceed cautiously, legally; to persuade voters and to win elections. The problem of slavery was best solved by the means of politics.

Humor helped, by showing your own and everyone else’s limitations; so, in a different way, did poetry, by describing and ministering to life’s disappointments; so, most remotely, did God, Who presumably knew what He was doing, even if we did not.

Slavery had to end. That was clearly the right thing; besides, a house divided against itself could not stand. But the end of slavery might not come, in Lincoln’s view, until 1893 or 1900, or a hundred years hence. The essential thing until then was to do no new harm, to keep the cancer from spreading.

But the politics of the 1850s, followed by the politics of the war, required the cancer to be cut out. So Lincoln did his duty. There would be charity for all after the bloodletting stopped. And if, thanks to Booth, charity was delayed, it would come one day. The Almighty had His own purposes.

E
PILOGUE
: O
NE
O
LD
M
AN

T
HE PATTERN OF DIFFICULT SECOND TERMS WAS WELL
established by the middle of the nineteenth century, and there is no reason to think that Lincoln, if Booth had failed, would have avoided one.

Second terms were hard because problems sown in first terms came to maturity; because the more talented figures in an administration either retired, burned out, or became locked in intractable feuds; and because other politicians realized that second-term presidents were lame ducks. Though there was no constitutional prohibition then on running for a third term, the precedent of serving no more than two was well established, and the physical and mental toll of eight years was great enough to maintain it.

And yet it is inconceivable that Lincoln would not have done better than his successor. Andrew Johnson’s presidency was what his intemperate interview with Charles Francis Adams Jr. suggested it would be; he turned his wrath from southerners to the Radical Republicans
who controlled Congress, but wrathful he remained, wasting his almost four years in office in political clashes. Ulysses Grant, who served after Johnson for two terms, from 1869 to 1877, did his best. But Lincoln’s great fear at the end of the war—of a neo-Confederate insurgency in the South—became real, and northern voters finally tired of combating it. The election of 1876, like that of 1824, ended with no majority in the Electoral College (or rather, with two, since both parties, Republicans and Democrats, claimed to have won one). The crisis was resolved only by a compromise—giving the White House to the Republicans, and the South to its old masters, rebels no more, but determined to run their section with a firm hand.

Yet slavery had ended (the Thirteenth Amendment received the necessary twenty-seven ratifications by December 1865). Four million bond-men and -women were free. Slavery would not flourish under the American or Confederate flag in Cuba or Central America. And the United States was not two nations but one. Republican government could defend itself against a vast, plausible, but deeply misguided rebellion. America’s republican robe, as Lincoln had put it in the Peoria speech, had been washed—if not white, then cleaner.

On February 12, 1878—what would have been Lincoln’s sixty-ninth birthday—a joint session of Congress met to receive a gift: a painting of Lincoln reading the Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet. The picture had been painted in 1864 by Francis Carpenter, a young artist from upstate New York, who had asked Lincoln and members of his cabinet to pose for him. In 1877 a wealthy benefactor bought it, with the intention of donating it to Congress.

There they sit, ranged around a table, the rivals and the ciphers, in their strange beards and their high collars. Seward looks as if his pants and jacket came out of someone else’s closet. Lincoln, as befits the occasion, is made to be unusually neat. Carpenter included some political symbolism in his group portrait: from the perspective of the viewer, Chase the Radical’s friend stands on the left; Seward and Montgomery Blair are on the right. Lincoln is slightly left of center.
The man who had so admired the founding fathers was now a father of his country, surrounded by the lesser fathers who had helped and hampered him.

By becoming a father, Lincoln risked becoming an icon, as the careless made George Washington and the other founders: a figure in a painting, a face on stamps, money, and monuments, admirable but empty. To understand him, later generations would have to do with him what he had done with the founding fathers—study his actions, study his words. Fortunately, his actions were dramatic and his words meaningful (even though their very beauty is sometimes distracting).

One of the speeches on his birthday in 1878 was given by Rep. James Garfield of Ohio, soon to be president himself (and soon after to be assassinated, not by an ideologue but by a madman).
Another was given by Rep. Alexander Stephens of Georgia.

Stephens had had an active political life after the war. He had been arrested in May 1865 for his part in the rebellion and imprisoned for five months. Shortly after his release, Georgia sent him to the Senate, which refused to seat him (Congress’s policies toward former Confederate states were much tougher than Lincoln’s Louisiana plan). Stephens wrote exculpatory memoirs and histories, and by 1872, Congress having relented, he was elected to the House, where he had last sat in 1859, where he had met Lincoln in 1847.

On February 12, 1878, Stephens had just turned sixty-six—his birthday was the day before Lincoln’s—and his body, never robust, was confined to a wheelchair. His oratorical powers were also weakened, by bad faith more than by time. He praised the southern states for helping to put the Thirteenth Amendment into the Constitution—eight of the twenty-seven states to ratify had formerly been in the Confederacy, their assent the fruit of Lincoln’s wise policy. But Stephens hedged about slavery’s nature and legacy. “It had its faults,” he conceded, “and most grievously has the country, North and South . . . answered them.” It also, he maintained, gave rise to “the noblest virtues. But let its faults and virtues be buried alike forever.” The keen
intelligence that had so appealed to Lincoln was almost blunted by trying to have everything all ways.

His memories of Lincoln were tender, but diffuse. “He was warm-hearted; he was generous; he was magnanimous. . . . Every fountain of his heart was ever overflowing with ‘the milk of human kindness.’”

But in the midst of this lukewarm bath, half self-protection, half sentiment, the old Stephens for one moment stirred, and spoke a sentence that was half right, half wrong, and entirely riveting.

It came in his discussion of the subject of Carpenter’s painting, the Emancipation Proclamation. He made a point similar to one that Lincoln himself had made on various occasions, concerning the power of circumstance. “I claim not to have controlled events,” Lincoln wrote in 1864, “but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” “The Almighty has His own purposes,” he said in 1865. The Emancipation Proclamation, said Stephens, although it grew out of a lifelong principle of Lincoln’s, was a product of circumstance, adopted as a war measure, and confirmed only by the Thirteenth Amendment after Lincoln himself was dead.