On February 1, Lincoln signed the amendment, although, by law, the president’s signature was unnecessary. He wanted to sign. As the jubilant Elizabeth Lee put it, the amendment “has laid nearest to his & somebody elses heart.” The somebody else was herself.
The amendment was on its way to the states for the requisite three-fourths ratification, which it could achieve since most of the slave states were not in the Union. Ten months later, the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution became law: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Then, on March 3, the day before the inauguration, Congress also passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1865, which established for one year a government agency, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, to assist in the placement of freedmen and refugees and to oversee abandoned or confiscated land. Perhaps the war was really ending; one could almost taste the future.
By the next day, the city was ready for a celebration. The hotels were jammed, and travelers who couldn’t find a room slept in one of the capital’s firehouses. But there were also rumors that the president would be kidnapped, maybe killed. Violence would not really surprise anyone. Stanton ordered sharpshooters to be stationed on top of the buildings near the Capitol, where the second inauguration of Lincoln would take place.
On March 4, the weather was uncooperative. That morning, a torrential downpour rendered impassable streets more treacherous than ever, with thick wads of ankle-deep mud clinging to the wheels of the slow-moving omnibuses. There was a parade, of course, though the day was also cold and terribly windy, yet, even with that relentless rain, as many as 30,000 spectators showed up. At least “half the multitude” reported the London Times, “were colored people.” Never before. The mile-long procession, which included floats and all kinds of marching bands, also flexed military muscle with two regiments of the Invalid Corps, a squadron of cavalry, a battery of artillery—and four companies of troops from the 45th Regiment U.S. Colored Troops. Never before had that happened.
The inauguration ceremony took place outdoors on the eastern portico of the Capitol, where a temporary platform had been built. Above and behind it loomed the Capitol’s iron dome, completed at last, and on top of that was a nineteen-foot statue known as Armed Liberty: a militant Minerva, cast in bronze, holding a sword in one hand and an olive branch and shield in the other. Jefferson Davis might have been somewhat pleased. Years earlier, as Pierce’s secretary of war, Davis had protested the sculptor Thomas Crawford’s first design, in which Minerva wore atop her head the liberty cap that symbolized the emancipation of the Roman slave. Davis wanted her to wear a helmet, signifying war, which she now did. But Davis likely would also know that when the martial Minerva was finally installed in 1863, just after the Emancipation Proclamation had been announced, it faced the South.
The swearing-in ceremony of Vice President Johnson had taken place inside the Senate chamber. Johnson, who had been ill, had evidently taken more than a medicinal draft of whiskey to help him get through the event, and he delivered a long-winded, incoherent speech while gesturing lavishly with the Bible and then planting a wet kiss on it. Edwin Stanton whispered to the embarrassed Gideon Welles, “Johnson is either drunk or crazy,” and when he saw him later, in the crowd outdoors, Frederick Douglass also thought him inebriated. Lincoln had already told a marshal not to let Johnson speak to the crowd.
The rain had finally subsided when the presidential party appeared at about one o’clock on the platform, and just as the tired president stepped forward from the shelter of the Capitol building, the sun began to shine, as if on cue. A man in the crowd could see that Lincoln’s beard was trimmed, his head uncovered and slightly bowed; but it was the man’s silent strength and the eloquence of that silence that were dazzling—as well as the scriptural beauty of the speech he read in that high-pitched voice of his.
Lincoln’s brief address, all 700 or so words of it, began with a backward look to his first inaugural, when the nation had stood, or so it seemed, on the brink of a war that was then waged, more and more brutally, throughout his entire administration. “While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war,” he reminisced, “insurgent agents were in the city, seeking to destroy it with war—seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide the effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war,” he continued, “but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish; and the war came.” Both parties, in other words, embraced war without comprehending, it seemed, its contradictory and irreversible pain.
“And the war came”: the monosyllables were flat and—because understated—ominous. One side would make war, one side would accept war, and so the war came, as if no one could have prevented it. (“I claim not to have controlled events,” as he’d said the previous spring, “but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”) And the war came: the spectators stood quiet; their eyes brimmed with tears. Lincoln continued, his rhythms perfect, his comparisons apt and heart-rending. “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes.” Such purposes—the purpose of all that slaughter, all that suffering—are beyond the reach or knowledge of humankind, and seen, if seen at all, through a glass darkly. Or so Lincoln seemed to be saying. The self-righteousness, the commitment to higher laws, the pride, the scruples, and the suspicions: all those had brought on the war, and he would not deign to pass final judgment on either the South or the North for the slaughter.
Yet he knew what lay underneath, what had caused the war: slavery. Slavery, slavery as scourge, slavery as an American institution, not just a Southern one; and so Lincoln invoked both the New and Old Testaments, for he too could harden his charitable heart, much as Sherman had fixed his own moral compass. Grant, Sherman, Sheridan: they were hired hands, employed by the government of the United States and its president, the man who now cried, “Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh! If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of these offences, 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 offence came, shall we discern there is any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him?”
Not at all. God is vengeful and merciful, both at the same time. And this terrible war must be fought; it was being fought. “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away,” Lincoln resumed. “Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman’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 by 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.”
We will fight until the finish, he was saying. Yet as he looked beyond the present war, he asked, If the Union wins, what then? To finish the work that we began, Lincoln said. He spoke less, now, of vengeance than of mercy: such would be the peace. But how could mercy supersede vengeance, supplanting it, and could the moral guilt of slavery be washed away while the nation’s wounds were being bound up? To do that, to start to do that, he offered a generous homecoming to those who had fought and all of those who had, as he said, borne the battle. And so the most famous and fre
quently quoted part of his speech was its conclusion: “With malice towards 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 wound; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and orphans; to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
The new chief justice, Salmon Chase, administered the oath of office to the eloquent but weary president, who then began his second term.
REACTION TO THE speech was predictably partisan. The New York World dismissed it as a prose parody of John Brown’s hymn. And The Liberator gently chided the president for not adding “a few words of friendly encouragement and assurance in a direct address to the freedmen, or even the incidental mention, in the Inaugural Address, of a duty due to them from the nation, and of the President’s desire that this duty be discharged.” Lydia Maria Child admired the speech, mainly; though it represented Lincoln’s moral growth and basic kindheartedness, she also warned “that the newly-emancipated will need vigilant watchmen on the towers for one generation more, at least.” As she put it, the “pro-slavery devil, after he has come out, with such terrible rending and tearing, will assume all manner of Protean shapes for mischief.”
Lincoln thought he had done pretty well. The speech would “wear as well as—perhaps better than—any thing I have produced,” he said. Still, he could guess why it wasn’t “immediately popular”: “Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be told.”
Temporarily barred from the White House reception—because he was black and had been, momentarily, unrecognized—Frederick Douglass did manage to attend and to talk to Lincoln, who asked for his opinion of the speech. Douglass told the gratified president that it had been a “sacred effort.”
Lincoln did not know, though, of the tired Confederate war clerk in Richmond who in the privacy of his diary summarized the speech with resigned perspicacity. “It is filled with texts from the Bible. He says both sides pray to the same God for aid—one upholding and the other destroying African slavery,” he observed. “In short, he ‘quotes Scripture for the deed’ quite as fluently as our President; and since both presidents resort to religious justification, it may be feared the war is about to assume a more sanguinary aspect and a more cruel nature than ever before. God help us! The history of man, even in the Bible, is but a series of bloody wars.”
(15)
AND THIS IS RICHMOND
If the war would soon be over, the sorrows of it might disarm, in every sense of the word, all animosity, or so Herman Melville hoped. So too Abraham Lincoln fervently prayed.
The Confederate States of America was exhausted; its people and its army were starving, its currency was nearly worthless. In Baton Rouge, flour was not to be had at any price; neither were soap, candles, matches, coffee. Coal sold for $90 a load (circa the equivalent of $1,267 in 2013). In Richmond, wood cost $50 per cord (circa the equivalent of $704) before the price doubled; two chickens cost $30 ($422 in 2013). President Davis and his wife ate mainly rice and cornmeal. Many men, knowing their families were in dire straits, deserted from the army to return to their homes and farms. Those who stayed in the army were hungry. “Our rations have been shorter than ever; no meat at all, a small quantity of sour meal and one roll per day,” wrote a soldier in Georgia in January 1865. “It appears as if we are to be starved to death.” And in Richmond, a staff officer remarked, “The wolf is at the door here. We dread starvation far more than we do Grant or Sherman. Famine—that is the word now.”
A woman in Winnsboro, South Carolina, reflected, “The Confederacy seemed suddenly to have changed, a glory had passed from it, and, without acknowledging it, we felt the end was near.”
In January the Federals had pounded Fort Fisher in North Carolina with the full force of the fleet and with 8,000 troops. Wilmington, North Carolina, the last major Confederate seaport, fell into Union hands. Later that month, Confederate secretary of war James A. Seddon resigned. The Confederate Congress promoted Robert E. Lee to general in chief, which was a vote of no confidence in Jefferson Davis. “He has not the broad intellect requisite for the gigantic measures needed in such a crisis, nor the health and physique for the labors devolving on him,” a war clerk close to the administration grumbled. “Disaffection is intense and wide-spread,” said General Josiah Gorgas, a Confederate ordnance officer. “Lee is about all we have.”
Though Judah Benjamin denounced as traitors and cowards anyone who wanted to end the war, there were rumors, half welcome, about peace negotiations. The venerable newspaperman and family patriarch Francis Preston Blair, Sr., undertook his own harebrained plan: unite the South with the North by waging war against Mexico. He secured a pass from Lincoln to travel to Richmond and talk to his old friend Jefferson Davis; Lincoln knew that the plan was misguided—and violated the Monroe Doctrine—but he permitted Blair to go ahead and arrange a meeting of Federal and Confederate peace commissioners. Neither Lincoln nor Davis wished to appear unwilling to discuss terms.
On January 29, 1865, the commissioners descended on Petersburg, Virginia. A white flag flapped in the winter breeze. Diminutive and pale, the vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens, had arrived, flanked by the Confederacy’s former secretary of state, R. M. T. Hunter, and Assistant Secretary of War James A. Campbell. Although Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles thought it a bad idea for Lincoln to attend, Lincoln wanted to go, and he did, along with Secretary of State Seward. For four hours on February 3, 1865, they met with the Southerners on General Grant’s flagship, the River Queen, at anchor near Fortress Monroe, in what became known as the Hampton Roads Conference.
The meeting predictably concluded without any treaty, and since no reporters or stenographers were allowed aboard, what we know about the conference are oft-told anecdotes (the men had also agreed that no one should take notes). Lincoln had presumably declared that he wouldn’t parley with “rebels”—that is, he refused to recognize the Confederacy as an independent entity. Robert Hunter replied that during the English Civil War even Charles I had negotiated with the rebels. “I do not profess to be posted in history,” Lincoln dryly retorted. “All I distinctly recollect about the case of Charles I, is, that he lost his head.”
As unwavering as Lincoln, Jefferson Davis used the conference’s failure as propaganda. The intransigent North, he told his Congress, refused “to give to our people any other terms or guarantees than those which the conqueror may grant, or to permit us to have on any other basis than our unconditional submission to their rule.” Then a large band played as some 10,000 men and women trudged on a snowy day to the African Church near Capitol Square, the only building large enough to accommodate the huge white population jostling inside to hear Davis, though feeble, roundly spurn Lincoln as His Majesty Abraham the First and passionately declare that he, Davis, would live and die with the Confederacy, which would survive, victorious and grand.
Old-time revivalism and a cheering band could not get Richmond very far. People were hungry and frightened, and they teetered on the edge of hopelessness. Yet it was not a revival meeting; Secretary of State Judah Benjamin was also going to speak—with a particular purpose in mind, one that had been on Davis’s mind too, but that Benjamin would voice aloud. “War is a game that cannot be played without men!” the pudgy secretary shouted. By men, Benjamin meant soldiers, and since soldiers were scarce, the time had come to enlist able-bodied slaves. “Is it not a shame that men who have sacrificed all in our defense should not be reinforced by all the means in our power?” he asked. “Is it any time now for antiquated patriotism to argue a refusal to send them aid, be it white or black?”
The audience caught his drift, and someone yelled out, “Put in the niggers.”
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nbsp; The secretary ventured a step further. The Negro, he said, would not fight without being emancipated. “If we impress them,” he warned, “they will go against us.”
Benjamin had gone too far. “There is much excitement among the slaveowners, caused by Mr. B’s speech,” recorded a spectator. “They must either fight themselves or let the slaves fight.” Benjamin was willing to give up slavery in order to win; it was a pragmatic position at odds with those who believed in unqualified, unalloyed sacrifice to the cause, all the way to the bitter end.
Already disliked by several cabinet members and censured by the Senate, Benjamin offered to resign from the cabinet, so unpopular was his position, but Davis kept him on, hoping against hope that at this eleventh hour he could pull a different rabbit out of the hat: Europe. “Intervention on the part of European powers is the only hope of many,” groaned a despondent war clerk. “Failing that, no doubt a negro army will be organized—and it might be too late!”
Davis had already sent Duncan F. Kenner to France and Britain on a diplomatic mission geared to snagging their aid at last. A wealthy sugar planter who in 1860 owned 473 slaves, the suave Kenner had been a member of the Confederate Congress and chair of its Ways and Means Committee. A protégé of Louisiana’s John Slidell (the Confederate envoy arrested on the Trent), a breeder of racehorses, and a close personal friend of Benjamin, who had shared a house with him when the two Louisianans had first come to Richmond, Kenner had for a long time favored a policy of gradual emancipation. And now Kenner agreed with Benjamin that the Confederacy’s independence as a sovereign nation was far more important than the preservation of slavery. They had brought the idea to President Davis. Kenner argued that his family owned more slaves than all the members of the Confederate Congress put together and he was therefore not asking anyone to give up more than he was.
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