That evening at the executive mansion, another episode indicated the deep contradiction that would persist. When Douglass tried to attend the reception there, to give Lincoln his congratulations, policemen at the door, from long racist practices, rudely stopped him and tried to usher him away. It took Lincoln’s own intervention to secure his admission.
These episodes suggest why Douglass would not want the “charity” that the Second Inaugural’s last paragraph recommends to be separated from the stark picture of injustice that the penultimate paragraph recognizes. The monstrous injustice of slavery both fed upon and reinforced the further injustice of racial caste, which the abolition of slavery would not end. “Charity” should lead to justice but, if misapplied, can reinforce injustice. Charity to whom? Does nonvindictiveness mean a return to power of the slave state leaders who would subordinate freed black citizens? Does healing the nation’s wounds mean reconciling the white North and the white South, leaving black citizens excluded? The United States at the end of the Civil War faced yet another perplexing moral-political conundrum: how to secure the equal place of the freed black citizens while without vindictiveness bringing the fractured nation back together. It was an exacting test that for a lost hundred years the nation would fail. Frederick Douglass would say in a memorial lecture six weeks after Lincoln’s death: “Whosoever else have cause to mourn the loss of Abraham Lincoln, to the colored people of the country his death is an unspeakable calamity.” It turned out to be an unspeakable calamity for the entire nation.
Douglass did manage, by sending an appeal to Lincoln himself, to break the racial barrier and to be admitted to the reception on the evening of the second inauguration. He would write this about what happened:
Recognizing me, even before I reached him, [the President] exclaimed, so that all around could hear him, “Here comes my friend Douglass.” Taking me by the hand, he said, “I am glad to see you. I saw you in the crowd to-day, listening to my inaugural address; how did you like it?”
I said, “Mr. Lincoln, I must not detain you with my poor opinion, when there are thousands waiting to shake hands with you.”
“No, no,” he said, “you must stop a little, Douglass; there is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours. I want to know what you think of it?”
I replied, “Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort.”
A CONCLUSION
Abraham Lincoln Among the Immortals
ON APRIL 11, 1865, speaking about a proposed Louisiana constitution, the president hoped that the “elective franchise” would be conferred on “the very intelligent [Negroes]…and those who serve our cause as soldiers.” The actor John Wilkes Booth had already been shocked by the sight in Richmond, a week earlier, of newly freed slaves ecstatically welcoming the visiting president. Now Booth, hearing this presidential speech, said, “That means nigger citizenship…That is the last speech he will ever make.”
On Friday, April 14, 1865, the president was sitting with his wife in a box in the dress circle in Ford’s Theater in Washington, watching a play called Our American Cousin. At 10:13 p.m., when Booth the actor knew audience laughter would muffle the sound, he opened the door of the state box, drew his derringer, and shot Lincoln behind the left ear. Major Henry Rathbone, who had accompanied the Lincolns, struggled with Booth; Booth stabbed Rathbone, leaped from the box the eleven feet to the stage, caught his foot in the drape, broke a bone in his leg, perhaps shouted “Sic semper tyrannis,” and fled out the back door of the theater to his waiting horse. Lincoln, unconscious, paralyzed, and barely breathing, was carried across the street to a private home and died the next morning, April 15, at 7:22 a.m.
The kings and queens and emperors and empresses, the counts and countesses, the highnesses and the majesties and the excellencies, the viceroy, the sultan, and the tycoon, who had just four short years earlier suddenly become, officially, his great good friends, now suddenly found it necessary to become, officially, his grief-stricken mourners.
If the world’s rulers did not yet know quite what to make of this unlikely American leader, they did know what to say about the shooting of a head of state: this act was execrable, horrid, vile, cowardly, abhorrent, brutal, deplorable, despicable, atrocious, criminal, and odious.
As was said in the English House of Lords, so it would be said in ruling circles everywhere: “I think that your lordships will agree with me that in modern times there has hardly been a crime committed so abhorrent to the feelings of every civilized person. [Hear, hear.]”
Lincoln’s great and good friend Queen Victoria wrote a personal, private letter of condolence, in her own hand, as Parliament was informed, to Mrs. Lincoln, as one sorrowing widow to another. (Prince Albert had died in December 1861, not long after the Trent affair.)
But there was a bit of awkwardness, if truth be told, for the British aristocracy, which had never quite got over a first snobbish response to the uncouth provincial who had somehow come to be head of this runaway colony. The aristocracy had harbored a surprising sympathy for the Confederacy and a surprising disinclination to support emancipation. Some of the world’s worst editorials against the Emancipation Proclamation had appeared in the London Times.
In the House of Commons Sir Gordon Grey began his address by saying that although English people held different opinions, “still I believe that the sympathies of the majority of the people of this country have been with the North.” He was greeted with loud denials. (Cries of “No, no,” “Hear, hear,” and “Question, question.”)
English aristocrats were caught abruptly in a double embarrassment by their own past disdain for Lincoln and their mixed attitude to the cause for which he was now suddenly a martyr, on the one side, and by the overwhelming grief of the English people, on the other.
It fell to the British foreign secretary Lord John Russell to speak in the House of Lords. First he referred to the Queen’s letter:
[H]er Majesty…has instructed me already to express to the government of the United States the shock which she felt at the intelligence of the great crime which has been committed. [Hear, hear.] Her majesty has also been pleased to write a private letter to Mrs. Lincoln [cheers] expressive of sympathy with that lady in her misfortune. [Cheers.]
But Lord Russell also had to say something about the victim, and as with many, what he had said in the past about Lincoln made it awkward. He had written back in early 1861 that “President Lincoln looming in the distance is a still greater peril than President Buchanan” and later that year that Lincoln was capable of “getting up war cries to help his declining popularity.” But perhaps he had learned something in four years’ experience. He said:
President LINCOLN was a man who, though not conspicuous before his election, had since displayed a character of so much integrity, so much sincerity and straightforwardness, and at the same time of so much kindness, that if any one was able to alleviate the pain and animosities which prevailed during the period of civil war, I believe that ABRAHAM LINCOLN was that person. It was remarked of President LINCOLN that he always felt disinclined to adopt harsh measures, and I am told that the commanders of his armies often complained that when they had passed a sentence which they thought no more than just, the President was always disposed to temper its severity. Such a man this particular epoch requires. The conduct of the armies of the United States was intrusted to other hands, and on the commanders fell the responsibility of leading the armies in the field to victory. They had been successful against those they had to contend with, and the moment had come when, undoubtedly, the responsibilities of President LINCOLN were greatly increased by their success.
Lord Russell apparently never did get Lincoln right: he thought it was the commanders who had won the war; now in the aftermath of their victory Lincoln would have become useful because he was such a meek and lenient fellow.
But, though it was not for him to lead the armies, it would have been his to temper the pride of victory, to assuage the misfortunes which
his adversaries had experienced, and especially to show, as he was well qualified to show, that high respect for valor on the opposite side which has been so conspicuously displayed.
One might say to the British foreign secretary that a good deal of valor had been displayed also on the side of the legitimate government of the United States, which the British government should have supported unequivocally.
The English humor magazine Punch was another organ of the upper reaches of British society that had to do a quick repair of attitude. It had mocked Lincoln for years (his “length of shambling limb…his unkempt, bristling hair…his garb uncouth”). After the assassination, Punch published a poem by its editor that a later British biographer of Lincoln, Lord Charnwood, would describe as having “embodied in verse of rare felicity the manly contrition of its editor for ignorant derision in past years.”
Yes, he had lived to shame me for my sneer
To lame my pencil, and confute my pen—
To make me own this kind of prince’s peer,
The rail-splitter a true-born king of men.
An American less willing to forget the ignorant derision would write a little poem responding to Punch:
What need hath he now of a tardy crown,
His name from mocking jest and sneer to save
When every ploughman turns his furrow down
As soft as though it fell upon his grave.
And that was the worldwide story: What need had he for the labored and qualified approbation of the excellencies when every plowman gave his heart?
Years later Nicolay and Hay would see it clearly:
In fact it was among the common people of the entire civilized world that the most genuine and spontaneous manifestations of sorrow and appreciation were produced, and to this fact we attribute the sudden and solid foundation of Lincoln’s fame…[T]he progress of opinion from the few to the many is slow…But in the case of Lincoln the many imposed their opinion all at once; he was canonized as he lay on his bier, by the irresistible decree of countless millions. The greater part of the aristocracy of England thought little of him but the burst of grief from the English people silenced in an instant every discordant voice.
“The irresistible decree of countless millions” came not only from the English people but from all the world.
“The burst of grief” was universal.
Argentina declared three days of mourning.
John Bigelow, the U.S. ambassador to France, reported that forty thousand French citizens subscribed to a memorial medal for presentation to Mrs. Lincoln, asking that she be told “that in this little box is the heart of France.”
An American foreign service officer reported from Chile: “Strong men wandered about the streets weeping like children, and foreigners, unable even to speak our language, manifested a grief almost as deep as our own.”
The governments of the world were required by their position to say some word of official condolence and graveside commendation, but there was no such requirement for the Working Class Improvement Association of Lisbon or the Students in the Faculty of Theology in Strasbourg or the Teachers of the Ragged School in Bristol or the Vestry of the Parish of Chelsea or the Cotton Brokers’ Association of Liverpool.
Messages of sympathy and condolence poured into Washington and American embassies and consulates everywhere. Municipal governments by the hundreds tried to express their sympathy and grief, and sent the written result to an American representative. Lesser bodies did the same; several local boards of health around the world took time out from their work to have their say about the death of an American president.
Hundreds of worthy nongovernmental bodies did the same: antislavery societies to be sure, and church groups—many Wesleyan groups, vestries, evangelical alliances, and many other entities that would seem to have no connection to the great world of nations and governments. A surprising number of singing societies would add their voice to the worldwide lament.
One might not have thought that the Men’s Gymnastic Union (Männer Turnverein) of the city of Berne, Switzerland, would pause before gymnastics one evening and join—all forty-four members—in an expression of sympathy and condolence to the United States of America on account of the assassination of President Lincoln. But they did.
And an immense number of unorganized citizens gathered together for the sole purpose of making a statement or individually composed letters at their desks. Grace W. Gray of Northampton, England, expressed her grief and her tribute by composing an acrostic with Lincoln’s name, the “Abraham” part of which goes like this:
A nation—nor one only—mourns thy loss,
Brave LINCOLN, and with voice unanimous
Raise to thy deathless memory
A dirge-like song of all thy noble deeds.
High let it rise; and I, too, fain would add
A loving tribute to thy priceless worth,
More widely known since banished from the earth.
The executive of the United Kingdom Alliance for the Legislative Suppression of the Liquor Traffic felt particularly keenly Lincoln’s death “by the hand of a murderer moved by drink.” (Booth had gone into a nearby saloon and had a brandy just before he mounted the theater’s stairs to the president’s box.) There were a large number of statements from temperance groups.
The State Department would eventually gather together an immense collection of these messages under the main title Appendix to the Diplomatic Correspondence of 1865 but with a subtitle that told what it was really about: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln…Expressions of Condolence and Sympathy, an enormous collection of statements sent to Washington or to an embassy from every imaginable sort of gathering, the first 837 pages of which came from outside the United States.
It would be called “one of the most interesting and deeply affecting books in the English language.”
“It forms a large quarto of a thousand pages, and embraces the utterances of grief and regret from every country under the sun, in almost every language spoken by man.”
Would one have thought that condolences for the death of an American president would come from the Grand Trunk R.R. Company at its semiannual meeting at a London tavern?
Something about this head of state evoked grief, mourning, and condolence from an unusually broad spectrum of humanity.
Would the company of free hunters of the city of St. Gall have taken the trouble to compose a message of condolence if the assassinated president had been James Buchanan?
Would the Polish refugees in Zurich have put their feelings on paper if the president killed across the Atlantic had been Franklin Pierce?
Would the local board of health in Luton, England, have paused in its business to compose and send a message of condolence to the American ambassador if the assassinated statesman had been Millard Fillmore?
Lincoln had captured the world’s heart because of what he was, what he stood for, and what he did.
Those apparent disqualifications as he took office—his humble origins, and meager education, and limited experience in great affairs—turned around and became sterling qualifications to the ordinary folk of the world.
As a public meeting of the trading and working classes of Brighton, in Sussex, England, put it: “This meeting of working men sympathize the more deeply with the untimely death of Abraham Lincoln, as he was the first President elected from the working classes to the high position of ruler of one of the mightiest nations of the globe.”
The members of the Fraternal Association of Artisans of Leghorn, Italy, sending sincere condolence and brotherly grief, said they were “aware that the valorous champion of the American Union was born an artisan, and that liberty made him great and powerful, not to oppress but to strengthen and ennoble an entire nation; for this they have loved him as though they had been his sons or brothers.”
As the citizens of Acireale, Sicily, put it: “Abraham Lincoln was not yours only—he was also ours…a brother whose great mind and fearl
ess conscience guided a people to union, and courageously uprooted slavery.”
All the world knew that he had fought slavery.
Moving messages arrived from Haiti and Liberia, which had first been recognized by the Lincoln administration, and from the Gold Coast. The chargé d’affaires in Monrovia would say: “Much of that great flood of tears shed over this great sorrow will flow from the children of Africa.” The president of Liberia would write that Lincoln’s “virtues can never cease to be told so long as the republic of Liberia shall endure; so long as there survives a member of the negro race to tell of the chains that have been broken; of the griefs that have been allayed; of the broken hearts that have been bound up by him who, as it were a new creation, breathed life into four millions of that race whom he found oppressed and degraded.”
An American in the legation in Vienna, after trying to describe “the consternation which the event has caused throughout the civilized world,” especially in Europe, asked, “And if the inhabitants of foreign and distant lands are giving expressions to such deep and unaffected sentiments, what must be the emotions now sweeping over our own country?”
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 53
