The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (28 page)
Read The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln Online
Authors: Abraham Lincoln
The body was kept in the East Room of the White House until the official funeral was held on Wednesday, April 19. On that day, the procession moved through vast throngs of people to the Capitol, where the body was left to lie in state under the huge dome. All day Thursday thousands of people, white and black, civilians and soldiers, stood patiently in the rain, waiting to pass the flower-decked bier. Then on Friday, the funeral train left Washington bound for Springfield over the same route Lincoln had taken when he had come east as President-elect. An enormous crowd turned out in Baltimore to mourn for the man whose life had once not been safe there. Harrisburg and Philadelphia were visited in turn. The train moved on to New York where an impressive out door ceremony was held. Then it went along the Hudson to Albany, across the state to Buffalo, to Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis and Chicago, taking nearly two weeks to complete its journey. Everywhere people came to see it pass. They stood at country crossroads and lined the tracks on the out skirts of the cities. And everywhere the response was the same. Party feuds and political differences were forgotten as the nation came to mourn. This, and not Appomattox, was Lincoln’s hour of triumph. In death he had won the love of his people.
On the night of May 2 the funeral train left Chicago and headed southward through the small towns of Illinois. It was raining, but people came to stand along the railroad track. They built bonfires to light the scene, and as the train passed slowly through the greening fields of the prairie country, thousands of silent figures were silhouetted against the dull red flames. All night long the train traveled toward Springfield; it passed Bloomington of the famous “Lost Speech” shortly before dawn; it reached the little town of Atlanta as the sun rose to bring fair weather to the day. It moved on through Lincoln, Elkhart and Williamsville in the early morning hours. It approached Springfield about nine o’clock, running
with bell tolling and a long black plume of smoke trailing across the level fields outside the city.
Tens of thousands of people were in Springfield. They had come from prairie villages, from farms and from isolated places scattered far across the state. Among them were men who had known Lincoln on the circuit, people who remembered him from New Salem days, pioneers who could recall the time when an ox-cart had first brought his family to Illinois.
The train steamed slowly along the tracks where country wagons were drawn up to see it pass; it crossed a bridge over the winding brown waters of the Sangamon River; it approached the forest grove in which Springfield had been built; it came to the first houses on the edge of the town; it entered the business center where people were standing on the tops of buildings because the streets were so crowded that it was impossible to get near the railroad station. And then, at ten minutes after nine, it pulled into the Chicago and Alton depot, where regiments of soldiers and the dignitaries of Springfield were waiting to receive it.
Minute guns began their solemn firing. A military band played the slow measures of a funeral dirge. The bells of the city began to toll. But there was a sudden hush of voices around the station as the train came to a stop.
The people of Springfield stood watching in terrible silence as the body of their fellow townsman was taken from the train.
Abraham Lincoln had come home.
1
He was sworn in by Robert Anderson, who was later to be the hero of Fort Sumter. The story that Jefferson Davis mustered him out is probably apocryphal.
2
See the Rutledge correspondence in
The Hidden Lincoln
, edited by Emanuel Hertz, New York, 1938.
3
In their book,
Mary Lincoln, Wife and Widow
, Carl Sandburg and Paul M. Angle put forth the theory that Lincoln’s attempt to break off his engagement took place on January 1, 1841, and that the ensuing period of emotional stress was a result of the still unsettled problem.
4
Sandburg and Angle say that Lincoln never wooed Sarah Rickard at all—that she was Speed’s girl and that the references to her in Lincoln’s letters are for Speed’s benefit. Miss Rickard told Herndon in 1888 that Lincoln had courted her, but they claim that she may then have forgotten the truth, or that she may have wanted to associate herself with Lincoln’s fame.
5
The Lincolns had four children, all sons. Robert Todd was born on August 1, 1843; Edward Baker on March 10, 1846; William Wallace on December 21, 1850; Thomas (“Tad”) on April 4, 1853. Three of the children were dead by 1871. Robert Lincoln lived until 1926.
6
The speech has consequently become known as the Peoria Speech, and is so entitled in this volume.
7
This was the last confidential letter Lincoln wrote to Speed. After this, their correspondence became infrequent and impersonal. The rift between the two men was caused not only by their differences over slavery—Mrs. Lincoln had much to do with it. She seems to have disliked Speed and perhaps was jealous of any intimate friendship formed by her husband. Shortly after he was elected President, Lincoln wrote to Speed, inviting him to come to Chicago. Speed visited the White House during the War. In 1864, Lincoln appointed Speed’s brother, James, Attorney General of the United States.
8
Whitney’s version can be found in full in the appendix to Ida M. Tarbell’s
The Life of Abraham Lincoln
, New York, 1900.
9
Even this is doubtful, as an analysis of the Lincoln electoral votes in 1860 will show.
10
It is for this reason that the material reproduced from the debates reprinted in this volume has been carefully chosen to give Lincoln’s most representative arguments and to avoid repetition as far as possible. The last debate, at Alton, which best summarizes Lincoln’s position, is given nearly in full.
11
In Iowa, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin and Kansas. Many of these speeches are devoted to a discussion of the value and importance of free labor.
12
One of the few men condemned to death whom Lincoln did not pardon during his Presidency was Captain Nathaniel Cordon, convicted slave runner whose ship had been taken with 600 child slaves on board. Lincoln postponed his execution for two weeks in order to give him time to prepare himself for death, but resolutely insisted that the sentence be carried out Cordon was hanged in New York on February 21, 1862.
13
Two remarkable facts emerge from a study of the election figures. Breckinridge, outspoken slavery candidate, failed to carry the solid South. In fourteen slave states (omitting South Carolina which had no popular vote) Douglas, Bell and Lincoln had 124,000 more votes than Breckinridge, indicating that the urge for secession did not have the wide popular support often taken for granted. Lincoln was a minority President in that he obtained only 1,866,000 votes to the 2,815,000 cast for Douglas, Breckinridge and Bell, but he showed remarkable strength in the distribution of his votes among the large, heavily populated states that had many electoral votes—he received no votes in ten slave states. Lincoln received 180 electoral votes; Breckinridge 72; Bell 39; Douglas 12. Nicolay and Hay have remarked: “If all the votes given to all the opposing candidates had been concentrated and cast for a fusion ticket … Lincoln would still have received but 11 less, or 169 electoral votes—a majority of 35 in the entire electoral college.” The split in the Democratic party started by Douglas and then forced wider by sectionalism was not in itself a great enough factor to lose the Democrats the election; the issue was more complex—the Democrats not only divided, they drove voters out of their party by their stand on slavery in the territories, their threats of disunion and their lack of a positive policy on national affairs. All the responsibility for the Democratic party’s failure cannot be placed on Douglas—events were more important than the man, but he did serve as a catalyst to bring it about.
14
The doughty Jackson had met threats with counter-threats and had put the fear of dire punishment into the hearts of those who were ranting about secession. “Tell them,” he said in a personal message to the nullifiers, “if one South Carolina finger be raised in defiance of this government … I shall come down there, and once I am there, I will hang the first man I can lay my hands on, to the first tree I can reach.”
15
For seventy-five years historians and political observers of all shades of opinion have been trying to fasten the cause of the Civil War on anything except slavery. They have advanced theories putting the responsibility for the War on the violation of states rights, on widespread economic differences between the North and the South or on the natural conflict between agrarian and industrial interests. All these causes are correct enough. They did help aggravate the situation. They were involved in many of the events leading up to battle. The American Civil War was, of course, too complicated a movement to have been precipitated by any single cause. But it is undeniable that underneath all the political and economic moves were the four million enslaved blacks, omnipresent and inescapable, whose bondage was the keystone of Southern economy, whose bondage was equally a challenge to the free-labor economy of the North, and an affront to the moral sense of the world. The men who fought the Civil War realized this; they should be given some credit for knowing their own minds. Their rallying cry was “Preserve the Union!” but although they did not fight merely to free the slaves, they knew that there would have been no war if there had been no slaves.
16
Even this was not accomplished without serious bungling on the part of the new and inexperienced administration. A large and well-armed ship, the
Powhatan
, was to accompany the expedition to Sumter. Seward sent through an order assigning the
Powhatan
to go to Fort Pickens instead, and Lincoln inexcusably signed his order without reading it. When Lincoln discovered his own blunder he commanded Seward to send the ship to Sumter. Seward followed his instructions, but signed his own name to the order. The captain of the
Powhatan
refused to accept the new order when he already had one signed by the President. Even if the
Powhatan
had reached Charleston it could not have prevented the outbreak of war. Once Sumter had been fired on, war was inevitable—if, indeed, not before.
17
Had the Confederates been clever enough to follow up their victory, they could probably have taken Washington that day. But their green and untried troops were almost as much surprised at victory as the Northerners were at their own defeat. Some of the Confederate soldiers, taking it for granted that the War was over, laid down their arms and started for home.
18
The members of this group changed somewhat from time to time but the leading spirits were Thaddeus Stevens, Zachariah Chandler, Benjamin F. Wade, Charles Sumner, George W. Julian and two of Lincoln’s friends from Illinois, Lyman Trumbull and Owen Lovejoy. Later in the War they were joined by Henry Winter Davis.
19
McClellan seems to have made almost exclusive use of scouts and spies who could not count. Johnston’s army at Manassas was only one-third the size of his; it was less well equipped and its men were in poorer condition. Yet McClellan spoke constantly about being outnumbered.
20
An incident which took place en route was used against Lincoln to show that he was heartless and unfeeling. His visit occurred sixteen days after the battle, when all the dead and wounded had been removed. While traveling toward McClellan’s camp, Lincoln asked his aide and bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon, to sing one of his sad little songs for him. This story was magnified and distorted by Lincoln’s enemies until it became a wild tale of a callous President driving past heaps of corpses while Lamon roared out obscene ditties. Two years later, on September 12, 1864, Lincoln wrote out an account of the journey for Lamon to use in correcting the absurd story which was still being told.
21
Lincoln did not live to see the slaves freed. The final ratification by the states was not completed until December 18, 1865—eight months after his death.
22
It is interesting to note that just ten days before the ceremony, the President went to the theater in company with Mrs. Lincoln and his secretaries, Nicolay and Hay, to see
The Marble Heart
, the leading actor in which was John Wilkes Booth.
23
This version of the speech is taken from the dispatches of the day in an attempt to reproduce Lincoln’s words as they were actually spoken. The version printed in the Lincoln text differs from it slightly, since Lincoln made some revisions afterward.
24
This, of course, is exactly what happened anyway. After the Radical Republican reconstruction measures had run their first course, the former slaveholders re-established their grip on the government of the South by using violent means to gain control—of which the Ku Klux Klan was only one. The North won its chief objective by becoming the dominant force in the government of the nation; the Southern oligarchy won its secondary objective of keeping itself in power in its own section. The real losers in the War were the poor whites and the Negroes. Sharecropping and the exploitation of cheap labor replaced the slave system, and the democratic methods that Lincoln hoped to see extended to the South were postponed for generations.
25
Mrs. Lincoln’s debts were to cause her endless trouble and disgrace. Her husband’s death left her in control of a considerable sum of money, but it was not large enough to enable her to pay what she owed and still have enough to live on. She threatened to hold a public auction in order to raise funds. Her debts were finally liquidated by payment in part by herself, and in part by secret donations direct to her creditors from her husband’s former political associates. In 1875 she was committed for a short while to an asylum; she was then taken to Springfield, where she died on July 16, 1882, in the house in which she had been married.
26
This generosity later proved embarrassing to Sherman. He accepted Johnston’s surrender a few days after Lincoln’s death and came in for bitter criticism against which he then had no way of defending himself.