Lincoln: A Photobiography (9 page)

Thousands of people gather in front of the unfinished U.S. Capitol to witness Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, 1861. Note the fashionable stovepipe hats scattered through the crowd.

"
If my name ever goes into history, it will be for this act.
"

On Inauguration Day—March 4, 1861—Washington looked like an armed camp. Cavalry and artillery had been clattering through the streets all morning. Troops were everywhere. Rumors of assassination plots, of Southern plans to seize the capital and prevent the inauguration, had put the army on the alert.

Shortly after noon, the carriage bearing President James Buchanan and President-elect Abraham Lincoln bounced over the cobblestones of Pennsylvania Avenue, heading for Capitol Hill. Infantrymen lined the parade route. Army sharpshooters crouched on nearby rooftops. Soldiers surrounded the Capitol building, and plainclothes detectives mingled with the crowds. On a hill overlooking the Capitol, artillerymen manned a line of howitzers and watched for trouble.

A long covered passageway had been built to protect the presidential party on its way to the speaker's platform in front of the Capitol. More than three hundred dignitaries crowded the platform, waiting to witness the swearing-in ceremony. Among them was Stephen Douglas, who had pledged to support the new administration.

Lincoln was visibly nervous. He was wearing a new black suit and sporting a neatly clipped beard. He held his silk stovepipe hat in one hand, a gold-headed cane in the other. He put the cane in a corner, then looked around, trying to find a place for the hat. Stephen Douglas smiled and took the hat from him.

Lincoln unrolled the manuscript of his inaugural address. He put on his steel-rimmed spectacles and faced the sunlit crowd below. Thousands of people jammed the broad square in front of the Capitol, waiting to hear the new president speak.

Four months had passed since Lincoln's election in November. During that time, seven Southern states had left the Union, and four more were about to join them. In February, Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi had been sworn in as president of the Confederate States of America. Now, with the Union collapsing, the defiant South was preparing for war.

Congressional leaders had tried to find a compromise plan that would hold the Union together. But the Southerners would not budge from their demands. They wanted slavery to be guaranteed not only in the South, but wherever else it might spread—to the western territories, and perhaps even to Central America and the Caribbean. By the time Lincoln left Springfield for Washington on the eve of his fifty-second birthday, all attempts at compromise had failed.

He traveled east on a special presidential train, stopping at dozens of cities, towns, and villages along the route. Thousands of Americans had a chance to see and hear their elected leader for
the first time. "Last night I saw the new president/' one man reported. "He is a clever man,
and not so bad looking as they say,
while he is no great beauty. He is tall ... has a commanding figure, bows pretty well, is not stiff, has a pleasant face, is amiable and
determined.
"

The new president

The first lady in the gown she wore to the inauguration ball.

At Philadelphia, the presidential train was met by detectives who had uncovered evidence of an assassination plot, a plan to murder Lincoln as he traveled through Baltimore the next day. He was persuaded to switch trains and travel secretly through the night to Washington, accompanied by armed guards. When his night train passed through Baltimore at 3:30
A.M.,
Lincoln was safely hidden in a sleeping berth. He arrived in Washington at dawn, unnoticed and unannounced.

Word of Lincoln's secret night ride spread fast. Opposition newspapers ridiculed the president-elect, calling his escape from Baltimore "the flight of Abraham." The abuse became nasty. Hostile editors and politicians snickered at "this backwoods President" and his "boorish" wife. They taunted Lincoln as a hick with a high-pitched voice and a Kentucky twang, an ugly "gorilla" and "baboon." Lincoln shrugged off the insults as a hazard of his job, but Mary was mortified.

He was still living under this cloud when he stood in front of the Capitol on Inauguration Day, ready to take his oath of office as the sixteenth president of the United States. In his speech, he appealed to the people of the South, assuring them again that he would not tamper with slavery in their states:

"In
your
hands, my dissatisfied countrymen, and not in
mine,
is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail
you.
You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors.
You
have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to 'preserve, protect and defend' it."

A Baltimore newspaper cartoon ridicules Lincoln's secret arrival in Washington.

Lincoln wanted to believe that the Union could be saved without bloodshed. But that hope was about to vanish. Less than two weeks after his inauguration, he faced his first crisis. Fort Sumter, at the entrance to Charleston harbor in South Carolina, still flew the Union flag. The state's governor was demanding that the fort be given up.

On March 15, Lincoln learned that Sumter was running out of supplies. While the fort was not of great military value, the president had pledged to defend federal property in the South. Sumter had become a symbol of Northern determination, and Lincoln had to make a decision. If he sent supplies, he risked an armed attack and war. If he didn't, the fort could not hold out for long.

He consulted with his military staff and members of his cabinet, but they could not agree on what should be done. Lincoln himself was uncertain. All the troubles and anxieties of his life, he later said, were nothing compared to the weeks that followed.

Finally the president acted. On April 6 he notified the South Carolina governor that a supply fleet was about to sail for Charleston. As the Union ships approached the city on the morning of April 12, rebel cannons ringing the harbor opened fire on Fort Sumter.

The American Civil War had begun.

On April 14, Lincoln heard that the fort had surrendered after a blistering thirty-six-hour bombardment. That day he issued a proclamation calling for 75,000 volunteers for enlistments of ninety days, which seemed long enough. Surely the rebellion would be put down by then.

Stephen Douglas called at the White House and again offered his support. Despite his disagreements with Lincoln, he wanted to preserve the Union. Then Douglas left for Illinois to denounce the rebels and rally Northern Democrats to the Union cause. A month later he was dead of typhoid fever at the age of forty-eight.

The North mobilized. Troops poured into Washington, ready to defend the capital. Across the Potomac River, Virginia had joined the Confederacy. From his office windows, Lincoln could see rebel flags flying over buildings in Alexandria, Virginia.

Everyone in Washington believed that the war would end quickly. The North claimed the loyalty of twenty-three states with a population of 22 million. The eleven states of the Confederacy had about 9 million people, and nearly 4 million of them were slaves. The South was mainly agricultural. The North had factories to produce ammunition and guns, a network of railroads to transport troops, and a powerful navy that could blockade Southern ports.

Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America.

But if the North had most of the industry and population, the South held a monopoly on military talent, Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, was a professional soldier. And Southerners made up a high proportion of the country's skilled military commanders. Lincoln's biggest headache during the early years of the war would be to find competent generals who could lead the Union to victory.

By early summer, both sides were training large armies of volunteers, many of them inexperienced boys who could barely handle a rifle. Northern newspapers were calling for a massive drive against the Confederate capital in Richmond, Virginia. "On to Richmond!" became the popular rallying cry.

In July, Union forces under General Irwin McDowell marched into Virginia. McDowell had been ordered to capture the crucial railroad junction at Manassas, about twenty-five miles southwest of Washington. From there, he would sweep down to Richmond and crush the rebellion.

Word spread through Washington that McDowell would begin his attack on Sunday, July 21. That morning dozens of politicians and their wives, newspapermen, and other spectators drove down from Washington in buggies and carriages to watch their army defeat the rebels. None of these people had ever seen a battle, and they had little idea what to expect. They brought along picnic baskets, champagne, and opera glasses, camped on a hillside, and waited for the action to begin.

Lincoln waited anxiously in the White House. The first reports to reach him were confusing—the two armies had met at a muddy little creek called Bull Run. They were advancing and retreating in turn. Several hours later, Lincoln received word of a disaster. Union troops had broken ranks. McDowell's army had been routed.

The president stayed up all that night, listening to the stories of congressmen and other civilians who had fled in panic before the retreating troops. The Union army had fallen apart. Soldiers
and sightseers alike had stampeded back to Washington. As dawn broke, Lincoln stood at a White House window and watched his mud-splattered troops straggling back into the capital through the fog and rain.