The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (26 page)

February 5, 1865. Today these papers, which explain themselves, were drawn up and submitted to the Cabinet and unanimously disapproved by them. A. Lincoln.

And then he put the documents away in his files. They were not made public until after his death.

Implicit in this proposal is the trend of purpose that now dominated Lincoln. He was eager to see the War end as quickly as possible, for every day less of fighting meant fewer men killed. He knew, however, that the War could not last very long—the South had been cut in half when the Mississippi was won; it was now being quartered by Sherman’s army. But even more important than bringing to a quick end a War that must inevitably end quickly anyway, was the problem of reconciling the two hostile sections. The South
had gone to war to defend slavery and had declared her independence in order to maintain the “peculiar institution” that was the mainstay of her economy. The War had completely ruined the South; her economy was wrecked; her manpower depleted. The North, however, had become richer and stronger during the War. Huge factories had been erected; railroads and telegraph lines had been extended; grain acreage had increased enormously in the new West; more and more gold and silver were being mined. Hundreds of thousands of Northern youths had died in the War, but millions of people in Europe were eager to come to America to take their places, and it was obvious that they would settle, not in the war ruined South, but in the thriving factory areas of the North and in the new lands of the West.

To Lincoln the United States was still one nation. He had never recognized the independence of the South, never granted that the seceding states were out of the Union. Now he simply wanted to restore peace and prosperity to the whole country. In order to make reconciliation easy, he was willing to take some of the North’s wealth to use for the rehabilitation of the South. More than three billion dollars had been spent by the North to subdue the South—surely the victorious section could afford to give $400,000,000—seven and a half percent of the war expenditure—to the South as a stake with which she could begin a new life. This money was to be an indemnity for the loss of property represented in freeing the slaves. Lincoln’s legal training made him feel that expropriation without proper compensation would be unjust.

There was no malice in his mind, no hatred of the men who had taken up arms against the United States. He was willing to do anything that would make the South an integral part of the nation again. He was a kindly and generous person who wanted to buy peace at any price so long as he could re-establish the Union. Unfortunately he was no economist. He arrived at his conclusion by sheer intuitive judgment. As
a result, he did not see the fallacy in his argument—that by indemnifying the slaveholders for their loss of property he would be strengthening the very men who had brought on the War. He thought that the provision made in his plan requiring emancipation as part of the bargain would eliminate the slavery that was the root of their power, but he did not realize that if he indemnified them, they would still be the dominant group in the new South that he hoped to see established. If they were permitted to hold their power, the same old cycle would begin all over again, and the South would still be ruled by an oligarchy
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instead of by the democratic methods he hoped to establish there. Perhaps the Cabinet sensed this. At any rate they disapproved, and Lincoln’s dream was swept into the dustbin of history.

Yet the spirit that pervaded Lincoln’s proposal of February 5 was the spirit that was to be expressed in developed form in the famous Second Inaugural Address. To Lincoln, slavery was a hateful and offensive thing—a sin in the sight of the Lord. In the second inaugural he speaks of the War as a heaven-sent retribution for this sin. But evil as he thought slavery was in the abstract, he held no malice against the Southern people who had gone to war to defend it. To him North and South equally shared the guilt of slavery; the retribution was visited upon them both for the trespass against righteousness that they had both committed in allowing it to flourish upon the nation’s soil. He wanted them now to forget the years of hatred—the hideous period of fratricidal strife.
His last words—the last words he was ever to speak in an official capacity before a great audience—were an apostrophe to peace and a plea for charity toward all those who erred in inflicting human bondage upon their fellow creatures.

The occasion of the delivery of this celebrated speech marked the differences which four years of battle had made. Outwardly the inauguration ceremonies of 1865 may have seemed much the same as they had been four years before. Again precautions had to be taken to protect the life of the President; again there were riflemen on the housetops; again there was a long covered passage leading to the speaker’s platform. And the actual ceremonial procedure itself, of course, did not vary. But the great dome of the Capitol, which had been under construction in 1861, was now finished, and from its top the huge bronze statue of Freedom looked down at the scene. There were more subtle differences, too. Instead of the ancient Taney with memories of the infamous Dred Scott decision hanging over him, Lincoln’s own appointee, Chief Justice Chase, administered the oath of office. The pathetically small garrison of 1861 was replaced by huge numbers of soldiers whose uniforms were seen everywhere in the city. Among them were the wounded; they were a commonplace sight in Washington. The President, too, had changed. His ordeal had steeled him in dealing with strong men, but it had mellowed him also in dealing with the weak and the defeated. The man who had had to be persuaded in 1861 not to close his inaugural address with a clear-cut offer of peace or a sword was still firm in his belief in the righteousness of his cause:

The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and
that He gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

But his very last words were a plea for peace—peace without malice, peace which would “bind up the nation’s wounds”:

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 care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

As he spoke, the sun which had been behind the clouds all day, came out to shine down on the crowd gathered in front of the long façade of the Capitol. The people, taking this for a good omen, cheered the President heartily. The distant guns thundered a salute to the man who had just entered on his second term of office, and Abraham Lincoln, fifty-six years old, tired, and showing the strain of war, entered his carriage to return to the White House. He then had just six weeks to live.

While he had been pleading for the renunciation of revenge, an almost unnoticed incident had been taking place on the edge of the crowd standing on the platform. A man had tried to force his way nearer to the President. Something about his actions made one of the guards stop him. There was
a brief scuffle, and the man was then ejected from the Capitol. It seems strange that he was not taken into custody for questioning. If he had been, his arrest would have caused a sensation, for he was a well-known person. He was a member of a family whose name was famous in the theater, and he had made a reputation for his own name, John Wilkes Booth.

Booth was the leader of a band of conspirators who had been engaged for months in an effort to strike at Lincoln. They had unsuccessfully tried abduction, thinking that they could spirit the President away to Richmond to be held for ransom. Booth regarded Lincoln personally responsible for having begun the War and for having waged it until the South was on the verge of ruin. He hoped vaguely that Lincoln’s removal would encourage the South to continue fighting, but reason or thought of consequence played little part in his mad scheme; he was the half-insane son of an insane father, Junius Brutus Booth, whose wild idiosyncrasies had been notorious in the theater.

The conspirators were desperately anxious to strike. On March 17, the day before Booth was scheduled to play in Washington at Ford’s Theater in
The Apostate
, a last attempt was made to take the President alive while he was riding out of the city to attend an amateur theatrical performance at one of the soldiers’ camps. This plot, too, was unsuccessful. Booth became frantic; the War was rapidly drawing to a close. Johnston’s army had advanced until it was only 140 miles south of Grant’s. Grant was ready to give the word to his men to begin the assault on Petersburg.

Lincoln’s sudden decision to leave Washington at this time probably gave him a few more weeks of life. On March 23, he, Mrs. Lincoln and Tad left on the River Queen to visit Grant’s headquarters at City Point. A message was sent to Sherman to leave his army in charge of his second in command and join the President and General Grant for a conference before the final campaign was begun.

At City Point, while waiting for Sherman to arrive, Lincoln rode out to inspect armies, fortifications and artillery positions. One of these occasions marked a new point of advance in Mary Lincoln’s rapidly disintegrating control of herself. She and Mrs. Grant were riding to a review in an army wagon, when one of Grant’s aides casually remarked that the troops were evidently getting ready to go into action because all the officer’s wives had been sent to the rear. He then incautiously added that General Griffin’s wife, a handsome Washington society lady, had been given a special permit by the President to remain at the front. Mrs. Lincoln immediately burst out in jealous fury. “Do you mean to say that she saw the President alone?” she demanded. “Do you know that I never allow the President to see any woman alone?” She insisted that the wagon be stopped at once so that she could get out to demand an explanation from her husband. Fortunately, General Meade, the hero of Gettysburg, came up, and he lied gallantly, saying that Mrs. Griffin had received her permit from the Secretary of War.

The next day there was even more trouble of the same kind. Mrs. Lincoln saw General Ord’s wife riding by the side of her husband. She threatened to jump out of the wagon to stop her. Mrs. Grant tried to bring the infuriated woman to her senses but succeeded only in drawing a tirade upon herself. When the wagon came to a halt, Mrs. Lincoln insulted Mrs. Ord to her face, calling her names and reducing her to tears in front of the whole party. At dinner she tried to get the President to remove General Ord from his post. When he refused to do so, she attacked him bitterly in the presence of her embarrassed guests. Lincoln said nothing, but sat unhappy and patiently forbearing while she carried on. Perhaps he suspected that the woman with whom he had lived for twenty-two years was no longer responsible for her actions. He had seen many evidences of her strange behavior, but he was unaware of the one fact that might have given him the
final clue to her mental instability—the fact that her desire for expensive clothes had gone beyond all reasonable bounds. The woman who had sought her husband’s re-election in order to be able to pay her enormous debts had gone right on acquiring more and more finery and trinkets until she now owed the astounding sum of $70,000.
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It was an ironic touch that Mrs. Lincoln’s insane jealousy should have increased at this time until she was driven to make a public display of it, for the husband she was trying to keep away from other women had become an old man whose health was breaking and whose strength was gone. The photographic portraits taken during the War years show with amazing fidelity how his features were aging. Year by year, the War had burned out his life. And the changes being wrought upon him were not only physical ones. The once-ready laughter had almost ceased; the vivid interest in the absurd and ridiculous had dwindled. The Lincoln of 1865 was obviously a man who had met sorrow and been conquered by it. He had seen more than a half million young men from the North and the South march away to their deaths, and the thought of them never left his mind.

It was an old man, dreaming of patching up quarrels between the sons of his family, who went into conference with his generals on the
River Queen
on March 27. Grant and Sherman knew that victory was theirs for the taking; only the terms of surrender had to be considered.

No one realized better than Lincoln that many people in the North were calling out for blood. “Hang the traitors!”
was their cry. Exact the full measure of vengeance from the men whose rebellion had brought suffering and death to the whole country! A younger man than Lincoln would almost surely have been more severe in imposing penalties upon the South. But Lincoln was old and tired, and his heart yearned for the days of his youth when he had seen men of the North and South mingle together to make a continental nation out of a wilderness. He wanted only to place the seal of an understanding peace upon his life’s work. The only thing that mattered to him was the re-establishment of the Union. That and that alone was the major task he had yet to accomplish, and in order to make reconciliation as easy as possible he wanted to be sure that his two chief generals would offer generous terms to the vanquished.