Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (57 page)

From his knowledge of the stage Lincoln would have known that in classic tragedy the victims are imprisoned by circumstances of their own creating, which render morally impossible their own escape. Innumerable historians have implicitly adopted just that fatalistic mode in telling and retelling the events of Lincoln’s last Good Friday, alert to the president’s chronic and incorrigible laxness over his personal safety; to his desire not to be cut off from the public by an imperial guard; to his deafness to the pleas of Stanton and Hill Lamon (his usual bodyguard, but absent that day) not to go out that night—an occasion made all the more dangerous by its being generally known that he and Grant would share the state box.
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That a theater-loving president bent on nonpunitive peace should have been slain by a notable Shakespearean actor casting himself as the guardian of the Old South layered the tragedy of assassination with heavy dramatic irony. John Wilkes Booth and his fellow conspirators had earlier aimed to kidnap Lincoln in exchange for Confederate prisoners of war, but with the war virtually at an end, with his band of accomplices dwindling, and driven by racial venom to preempt Lincoln’s reconstruction policies, Booth turned in desperation to a theatrical act of self-styled tyrannicide. His cruel bullet into the back of the president’s head released Lincoln from the burdens of office, sent Mary spiraling into inconsolable grief, aroused white-hot feelings of vengeance across the Union, and plunged the Confederate South into paroxysms of fear over the price it might have to pay.
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In too small a bed in a cramped room across the street from the theater, Lincoln lingered for a further nine hours after the shooting, never regaining consciousness. The doctors who clustered around the bed to which he had been carried were surprised by his resilience in extremis, but eventually—at 7:22 a.m. on Saturday, April 15, 1865—he passed from life into history and memory.

When a distraught Edwin Stanton, present at Lincoln’s death, remarked, “Now he belongs to the ages,” it is unlikely that he realized just how swiftly and thoroughly his all-too-human friend and ally would be transformed into an iconic, mythic figure. Lincoln’s unique achievements—as president and commander-in-chief of the victorious Union in a fratricidal war, as the preserver of American nationhood, and as the author of the emancipation edict—would themselves have guaranteed his historical celebration and acclamation. But the manner and suddenness of his death opened the door to his apotheosis, or deification.

John Wilkes Booth

LINCOLN’S ASSASSINATION AND FUNERAL

News of Booth’s assassination of the president spread swiftly by printed proclamation and the daily press. After the White House funeral, Lincoln’s coffin was borne to the Capitol and, two days later, to the Washington depot to be carried by circuitous route to Springfield for interment. In Philadelphia alone a million people jammed the city; a three-mile line of mourners waited to view the martyr’s body lying in state at Independence Hall.

A million or more grieving people turned out to pay their respects as Lincoln’s body, after a military funeral, was taken to lie in state in the Capitol and was then slowly carried on a special funeral train back to Springfield, along the 1,600-mile route that the president-elect had taken to Washington in 1861. Stunned at the loss of a man they had come to think of as a friend or a brother or a father, millions more looked to their religious and civic leaders to put a profound collective sorrow into words. In their myriad black-edged editorials and sermons, the clergy sought to articulate the mixture of misery, anger, and bewilderment felt across the North. They extolled Lincoln’s personal traits and accomplishments with a degree of unanimity unknown during his lifetime. Some earlier critics remained silent, and a very few even risked life and limb to utter a discordant note, but mostly those who had once hurled brickbats now fashioned eulogies. In celebrating Lincoln, the kind, the gentle, the honest, the witty, the sagacious, the unselfish, and the representative man, they drove from view the shrewd and guileful politician, and the man of flesh and blood and human foibles. Lincoln’s greatness—even “grandeur,” as the Congregationalist minister Joseph P. Thompson saw it—raised him to an equality with, and even superiority to, George Washington himself. He was, in Bishop Matthew Simpson’s words, “no ordinary man”: the nation had come to see that God had prepared him through life for the ordeal that lay ahead and that “by the hand of God” he had been “especially singled out to guide our government in these troublesome times.”
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A dramatic version of Stanton’s telegraphed announcement to John A. Dix, the U.S. military commander of the Department of the East.

Lincoln’s funeral car
makes its slow journey through the choked streets of Philadelphia.

A contemporary journalist immediately understood the significance of what was at work: “It has made it impossible to speak the truth of Abraham Lincoln hereafter.” The iconic figure who took a place in American memory would become a constant impediment to historians trying to catch the essence of the man beyond. Moreover, there have been multiple American
memories.
The historian David Blight has shone a brilliant light on the competing folk narratives of the Civil War in the half-century after Appomattox. Lincoln, naturally, was incorporated (alongside Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and others) into the heroic African-American script of emancipation. But implicitly the president who had intended “malice toward none” could be slowly incorporated, too, into a script of national “reconciliation” which marginalized and downgraded the black race: gradually in the South “the Black Republican” Lincoln became, for some at least, the charitable Lincoln whose death had deprived the Confederacy of a southern-born ally.
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The Lincoln delineated in the present study is a man who, politically gifted though he was, earns the label “exceptional” chiefly because of the office he held and the singular circumstances in which he held it. Lincoln is best understood not as the extraordinary figure of the iconographers, but as a man of his times, politically wise but capable of misjudgments, too, and powerful largely because he was representative and, as such, deeply familiar with his people and his context. This gave him a real feel for the direction of events. Thus, he came to see that a party committed to quarantining slavery was capable of securing the highest office in the land; he realized that he had the qualities—and good fortune—to fit that party’s prescription of its ideal candidate; he rightly sensed that his own outrage at southern secession was widely enough shared to make defense of the Union politically practicable; and he understood that his power as a war president depended above all on his harnessing the potent force of popular nationalism.

Problematic as his deification may be for the historian, Lincoln’s instant elevation to the pantheon had its own public significance and demonstrated that—thanks to his martyrdom—he continued to exercise remarkable political power even in death. Desperate to understand their cruel bereavement, most Union loyalists were convinced that the assassination had a meaning, however opaque, and that “the permissive hand of God” had allowed a temporary evil “for His own wise and holy ends.” The Almighty had deemed his agent’s work on earth completed: having guided the nation safely through its era of crisis, Lincoln would have been too lenient and merciful for the next stage, the era of reconstruction.
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Lincoln’s martyrdom derived particular potency from its Christian, vicarious character. A chorus of voices claimed the murdered president for the church. It was, they agreed, a shame that he had made no public profession of faith, but it would have come, in time. Some clutched at the implausible report of a tearful Lincoln telling how, when he visited the heroes’ graves at Gettysburg, “I gave myself to God, and now I can say that I do love Jesus.” Speaking at the Springfield interment, Matthew Simpson reassured his mass audience that at least Lincoln “believed in Christ the Saviour of sinners; and I think he was sincere in trying to bring his life into harmony with the principles of revealed religion.”
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Lincoln’s religious credentials and role as liberator of an enslaved people cast him as a latter-day Moses (though one who had freed even more slaves than the Old Testament leader, “and those not of his kindred or his race”); he had taken “this Israel of ours” over “the blood-red sea of rebellion” and, like Moses, had been allowed to see, but not to enter, the Promised Land. More compelling still were the Christ-like characteristics of the murdered president. Vicarious sacrifice for his people on Good Friday succeeded a Palm Sunday on which Lincoln had in humble triumph entered the Confederate capital of Richmond: “As Christ entered Jerusalem, the city that above all others hated, rejected, and would soon slay Him . . . so did this, His servant, enter the city that above all others hated and rejected him, and would soon be the real if not the intentional cause of his death.” A theater may have been “a poor place to die in,” but the president had gone out of a sense of duty, “not to see a comedy, but to gratify the people.” God had taken Lincoln, “the Saviour of his country,” from the American people, just as he had taken Moses and Jesus when their tasks were done. In the future, urged Gilbert Haven, his death should be commemorated not on the calendar date, but on every Good Friday, as “a movable fast” to be kept “beside the cross and the grave of our blessed Lord, in whose service and for whose gospel he became a victim and a martyr.”
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The profoundest historical consequences of Lincoln’s assassination, then, had less to do with his removal from the fraught politics of reconstruction (we may reasonably wonder, if there had been no murder, whether the exhausted Lincoln would naturally have lived out his second term) than with the sanctification of American nationalism.
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As they mourned, Americans were encouraged to discover in Lincoln’s death a millennial promise that fused the secular and the sacred. Through “Black Easter” the Almighty was unfolding a plan that would secure the Kingdom of God and a purified nation. A Brooklyn Presbyterian rejoiced, “A martyr’s blood has sealed the covenant we are making with posterity,” guaranteeing “the rights of men, the truth of the Gospel, the principles of humanity, the integrity of the Union, the power of Christian people to govern themselves, the indefeasible equality of all creatures of God . . . , no matter what may be the color of their skin.” Likewise, George Dana Boardman, a Philadelphia Baptist, read in Lincoln’s death a glorious promise of the nation’s future greatness. Had Lincoln lived into old age, “no nation would have been born of him.” But an inscrutable Providence had allowed “the glorious seed” to die “that it might . . . bring forth much fruit. . . . I see springing from the tear-wet bier of Abraham Lincoln the green and tender blades which foretell the birth of an emancipated, united, triumphant, transfigured, immortal Republic.”
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