Lincoln (115 page)

With soaring eloquence Lincoln concluded his address: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the
nation’s wounds;... to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

After immense applause, Lincoln turned to Chief Justice Chase, and, laying his right hand on an open page of the Bible, repeated after him the oath of office, ending with an emphatic “So help me God!” He then kissed the Bible and, as a salvo of artillery boomed and the crowd cheered, he began his second term.

Except for Copperhead journals like the
Chicago Times,
which denounced the speech as “so slip shod, so loose-joined, so puerile” that “by the side of it, mediocrity is superb,” most newspapers gave Lincoln’s second inaugural address a respectful if somewhat puzzled reception. In general, English editors praised it more highly than did the Americans. But the Washington
National Intelligencer
felt the President’s final words, “equally distinguished for patriotism, statesmanship, and benevolence,” deserved “to be printed in gold.”

Lincoln was not troubled that his address was not immediately popular. He recognized that “men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.” But he was pleased when it received praise. He positively beamed when Frederick Douglass, who was in the throng at the White House reception after the inauguration, pronounced it “a sacred effort.” As Lincoln told Thurlow Weed, he expected it “to wear as well as—perhaps better than—any thing I have produced.” “Lots of wisdom in that document, I suspect,” he said as he filed away his manuscript.

Lincoln was so exhausted after the inauguration ceremonies that he took to his bed for a few days. There was nothing organically wrong. Despite his sedentary work, he continued to be a physically powerful man, but he often felt terribly tired. For some time he had been losing weight, and strangers now noted his thinness rather than his height. Though he was only fifty-six, observers at the second inauguration thought he looked very old. His photographs showed a face heavily lined, with sunken cheeks. Joshua Speed, who had not seen the President for some time, was shocked to find him looking so “jaded and weary.” “Speed,” said Lincoln, “I am a little alarmed about myself; just feel my hand.” It was, remembered Speed, “cold and clammy,” and his feet were obviously cold, too, for he put them so near the fire that they steamed.

Mary worried about his health. “Poor Mr. Lincoln is looking so brokenhearted, so completely worn out,” she told Elizabeth Keckley, her dressmaker, “I fear he will not get through the next four years.” For months she had been urging her husband to keep a lighter schedule, and in order to get him away from his desk she encouraged him to go to the theater frequently. He attended both Grover’s Theatre on E Street between Thirteenth
and Fourteenth streets, and Ford’s Theatre on Tenth Street, between E and F streets. Usually Mary accompanied him, but occasionally he went with Tad or with one or both of his secretaries, and occasionally the Lincolns made up a small party of friends to occupy the presidential box. He enjoyed all sorts of theatrical entertainment, including Barney Williams, the blackface minstrel and Irish comedian, and he attended numerous plays that were little noted nor long remembered, like
Leah,
starring Avonia Jones, and
The Marble Heart,
featuring the brilliant young actor John Wilkes Booth.

Shakespeare’s plays appealed to him most. As a boy, he had memorized the soliloquies contained in William Scott’s
Lessons in Elocution,
and in Springfield he owned and frequently read his own copy of Shakespeare’s works, but he had never seen Shakespeare performed on the stage until he became President. After that he rarely missed an opportunity. In February and March 1864, at one of the most dangerous periods of the war, he took time off from his duties to see the great tragedian Edwin Booth perform in
Richard III, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice,
and
Hamlet.

He enjoyed them all. Shakespeare’s wit delighted him, and he was enchanted by the magic of his language. The great tragedies, with their stories of linked ambition and guilt, especially appealed to him. As an often lonely leader, he found it easy to identify with Shakespeare’s heroes; he could sympathize with their fears and understand their anxieties. “It matters not to me whether Shakespeare be well or ill acted,” he remarked; “with him the thought suffices.” Still, he had decided ideas about how the plays should be performed. He insisted, for instance, that the choicest part of
Hamlet
was not the familiar “To be or not to be” soliloquy but King Claudius’s meditation “O my offence is rank, it smells to heaven.”

Once his fondness for Shakespeare led to an embarrassment. In August 1863, after seeing James H. Hackett as Falstaff in
Henry IV,
he wrote the actor commending his performance and expressing the hope that he would have a chance to make his personal acquaintance when he next performed in Washington. The President went on to say that he had never read some of Shakespeare’s plays but that he had gone over others—mentioning
King Lear, Richard III, Henry VIII, Hamlet,
and
Macbeth
—“perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader.” “I think nothing equals Macbeth,” he added. “It is wonderful.” Though the letter was intended to be personal, Hackett printed and distributed it, and newspapers had a field day, criticizing the President as would-be dramatic critic. To Hackett’s apology Lincoln replied that the hostile comments “constitute a fair specimen of what has occurred to me through life.” He added, in one of his most perfectly balanced sentences: “I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it.”

Mary Lincoln also tried to divert her husband by going with him to concerts and the opera. The President was so impressed by the singing of Felicita Vestvali—“Magnificent Vestvali,” as the newspapers called her—that
he attended her long-forgotten musical play called
Gamea, or the Jewish Mother
not once but twice, and within a week returned to hear her in two other musical dramas. After 1863, when New York opera companies began offering a special Washington season, the Lincolns were regular patrons. They attended performances of Gounod’s
Faust,
Weber’s
Der Freischütz,
and Flotow’s
Martha,
among others. Few of the President’s comments on the music were recorded, but in March when he heard
The Magic Flute,
he remarked to Colonel James Grant Wilson that the exceptionally large, flat feet of one of the leading female singers meant “the beetles wouldn’t have much of a chance there!” During most of the opera, Wilson recalled, the President “sat in the rear of the box leaning his head against the partition, paying no attention to the play and looking... worn and weary.” When Wilson asked if he was enjoying the opera, Lincoln replied: “Oh, no, Colonel; I have not come for the play, but for the rest. I am being hounded to death by office-seekers, who pursue me early and late, and it is simply to get two or three hours’ relief that I am here.” But when Mary asked if he would like to leave before the ending, he said: “Oh, no, I want to see it out. It’s best when you undertake a job, to finish it.”

When he was too tired to be diverted by either drama or opera, the President was able to forget his work and his worries only during the carriage rides Mary arranged to take with him several afternoons a week. These were times for quiet conversation, when Lincoln remembered the past and planned for the future. Though he was only into the first weeks of his second term, he looked forward to the end of his administration, when, he told Mary, he wanted to take the whole family to Europe. After that “he intended to return and go to California over the Rocky Mountains and see the prospects of the soldiers etc. etc. digging gold to pay the National debt.” He was not sure where they would ultimately make their home. Earlier he had always talked of returning to Springfield and practicing law, but now he thought less about settling than of “roving and travelling.”

Lincoln could afford to think in rosy terms of the future. Unaware of the very considerable debts Mary had accumulated, he was confident that he and his wife were comfortably provided for. His estate had been worth about $15,000 in 1861, but it had grown rapidly during the war years. Most of his expenses while living in the White House were covered by congressional appropriations, so that he was able to save the bulk of his $25,000 annual salary and invest it in Treasury notes or certificates of deposit. Interest and premiums on this paper, which amounted to nearly $10,000 over four years, he promptly reinvested. Because he did not have time properly to manage his funds—indeed, at the time of his death there were four uncashed salary warrants in his desk—he turned to Chase for advice, and in June 1864 brought over to the Secretary’s desk “a confused mass of Treasury notes, Demand notes, Seven-thirty notes, and other representatives of value” and asked for help in reinvesting his funds in government bonds. By April 1865 he owned, in addition to his house in Springfield, two hundred acres of
land in Iowa, a town lot in Lincoln, Illinois, and nearly $60,000 in government securities—not an inconsiderable sum, and one certain to double in the next four years.

During these few quiet weeks after the second inauguration, the Lincolns had a chance to talk about Robert, who was now in the army. After graduating from Harvard in 1864, the President’s oldest son wanted to enlist. Indeed, he had been under considerable pressure to do so for some time, because critics did not hesitate to brand him a “shirker,” who was “old enough and strong enough to serve his country.” But his mother was afraid; she had already lost two sons, and she grew hysterical at the possibility of losing another. When her husband tried to intercede for the boy, she replied, “Of course, Mr. Lincoln, I know that Robert’s plan to go into the Army is manly and noble and I want him to go, but oh! I am frightened he may never come back to us.” Unwilling to do anything to upset his wife’s precarious emotional balance, Lincoln encouraged Robert to go to Harvard Law School, but when he came home for the Christmas vacation in 1864, he was determined to “see something of the war before it ends.” In January, finally overcoming Mary’s resistance, Lincoln, writing “as though I was not President, but only a friend,” asked whether Grant could give Robert “some nominal rank” and allow him to join his military family. Promptly Grant welcomed the young man and commissioned him a captain. Grant made sure that Robert was not exposed to danger, and his principal duty was to escort visitors to the Army of the Potomac from one place to another.

On March 20, at Mrs. Grant’s prompting, General Grant invited the President to come down to army headquarters at City Point for a few days, suggesting that the rest would do him good. Lincoln accepted immediately, adding that Mrs. Lincoln “and a few others” would come with him. Despite a furious gale, the Lincolns, accompanied by Tad, Mary Lincoln’s maid, White House guard William H. Crook, and Captain Charles Penrose, assigned by Stanton to protect the President, boarded the
River Queen
and sailed down the Potomac on March 23.

They were eager to get away from Washington, which Mary thought was a place filled with their enemies and which Lincoln knew was a city filled with office-seekers. They wanted to learn how Robert was faring in the army. And, most of all, they needed rest.

They did not get much of it at City Point, where they were welcomed with a round of lunches, dinners, receptions, parties, and dances. Tad probably had the best time. Aboard the
River Queen
his “investigating mind led him everywhere,” and, Crook reported, he “studied every screw of the engine and knew and counted among his friends every man of the crew.” Once on land, he was a special pet of the soldiers, and he was allowed to accompany his father everywhere.

Though Lincoln was unwell aboard the
River Queen,
he began to feel better once he was away from Washington and from the press of office-seekers. On his first day at City Point he rode out on a special train to General Meade’s headquarters, where he saw evidence of recent fighting, heard a terrific Union bombardment of the Confederate lines at Petersburg, and witnessed an attack by the Sixth Corps on the enemy picket line. The next morning he had a chance to greet General Sheridan’s troops, which had cleaned the Confederates out of the Shenandoah Valley and had come to assist Grant in the final campaign against Richmond. That afternoon he reviewed part of General Edward O. C. Ord’s Army of the James at Malvern Hill. On another day Lincoln visited the army field hospital at City Point, where for more than five hours he moved from tent to tent, greeting each patient, pausing at the bedside of the seriously ill or wounded, and making a point of shaking hands with the hospitalized Confederates.

He had very little time for relaxation, and his “very care-worn and fatigued appearance” reappeared whenever he let his guard down. In particular, Mary reported, he found that the visit to the hospital, “although a labor of love, to him, fatigued him very much.” But the cheers of the troops that he reviewed and the demonstrations of the sailors on the vessels he passed in the James River were exhilarating, and he gained strength from the scent of coming victory.