by Larry Tagg
In an attempt to avoid repeating his mistake, Lincoln performed even worse the next day, and the next. The age was not one in which humility was valued in its public men, especially just then, when Northern citizens were tense with the news that the Southern Confederacy was swearing in its own president, the venerable Jefferson Davis, in Montgomery, Alabama. Yet Lincoln confessed, “should my administration prove to be a very wicked one, or what is more probable, a very foolish one, if you, the people, are but true to yourselves and to the Constitution, there is little harm I can do, thank God!” He was self-conscious—almost apologetic—about the improbable fact of his election, calling himself “the humblest of all individuals that have ever been elected to the Presidency,” a man “without a name, perhaps without a reason why … I should have a name.” At Steubenville, Ohio, he confessed, “I fear that the great confidence placed in my ability is unfounded. Indeed, I am sure it is.” Going on, he declared, “If anything goes wrong … and you find you have made a mistake, elect a better man next time. There are plenty of them.” He told one crowd he had been elected President “by a mere accident, and not through any merit of mine”; he was “a mere instrument, an accidental instrument, perhaps I should say.” Many, dismayed by such hand-wringing, were alarmed that the President-elect should have so much to be humble about.
In Columbus, Ohio, Lincoln took an even more unfortunate tack, dismissing the secession crisis with the canard, “there is nothing going wrong. It is a consoling circumstance that when we look out there is nothing that really hurts anybody. We entertain different views upon political questions, but nobody is suffering anything.” Lincoln undoubtedly intended to calm his listeners, but he produced instead the alarming effect of a man who did not understand that the nation was in crisis. Here he revealed his dangerous underestimation of the intensity and depth of Southern feeling, and he struck this same note again and again as he approached Washington, at Pittsburgh—“In plain words, there is really no crisis except an artificial one”—and again at Cleveland: “I think that there is no occasion for excitement. The crisis, as it is called, is altogether an artificial crisis … . It has no foundation in facts.” Such remarks baffled anybody who could read a newspaper, such as New York congressman Edwin Reynolds, who wondered aloud, “Have not our forts and vessels been seized, our arsenals invaded, our mints robbed, by men and States in arms? Has not our flag been fired into, our mails rifled and intercepted, our commerce on the Mississippi obstructed? Is not the public mind today, North and South, convulsed as never before?” The Saint Louis Daily Missouri Republican protested:
At Columbus, Ohio, the President improvised a little—and certainly it is the most remarkable speech on record. The burden of it is that “nobody is hurt”—“nobody is suffering” from the present condition of affairs, pecuniary and political. Was the like of that ever heard? What could he have meant? With a perfect knowledge that the Union has been virtually dissolved—that six of the States have renounced this confederacy and formed a new government … he proceeds to tell us, that “nobody is hurt,” and “nobody is suffering,” from the present condition of the country.
“Nobody hurt—nobody suffering”—what does this mean? We ask the people of St. Louis to respond to this inquiry. How has it happened that commerce is checked in every department; that our merchants are forced to curtail, and even to close their business; that hundreds and thousands of worthy men are thrown out of employment, and left with their families to starve—now is this the case if, according to Mr. Lincoln, there is “no suffering?”
Politically and socially, did the United States ever present such an aspect of complete wreck and abandonment, and yet Mr. Lincoln tells us “nobody is hurt” and “nobody is suffering”!
The New York Herald accused Lincoln of “ignorance” of the danger to the Union. He showed “no capacity to grapple manfully with the dangers of this crisis,” it said; “If Mr. Lincoln has nothing better to offer upon this fearful crisis than the foolish consolations of his speech in Columbus, let him say nothing at all.” Serious people everywhere wondered if the new President was so deluded as to be incompetent to lead the nation through such a time of decision.
Nor was Lincoln’s longest treatment of a policy question to his credit. This was the Pittsburgh speech in which he tackled the tariff, which in Pennsylvania had been a more potent vote-getting issue than slavery. Here Lincoln was out of his league. According to his law partner William Herndon, Lincoln had never had a mind for figures. In Pittsburgh he admitted that he had no “thoroughly matured judgment” on the subject and was “not posted” on the bill then under consideration. He referred to the tariff in frontier style, calling it “housekeeping” and “replenishing the mealtub.” He stumbled on, expressing the hope that every congressman would “post himself thoroughly” “so as to contribute his part” in order to “be just and equal to all sections … and classes of people,” which, of course, was the opposite of what a tariff was intended to do. Henry Villard rightly called the speech “crude, ignorant twaddle, without point or meaning.”
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At other stops, Lincoln’s homespun, Western-style attempts to provide a light touch seemed to sensitive citizens to be inappropriate to the emergency of the moment, as at Westfield, New York, where he hauled up the little girl who had written him suggesting he grow a beard, and kissed her; and at Freedom, Pennsylvania, where he invited a huge coal-heaver to clamber up onto the platform with him and compare heights back-to-back. Such antics struck the nation as undignified, certainly unpresidential. To Charles Francis Adams, Jr., it was unseemly that the “absolutely unknown” Lincoln was “saying whatever comes into his head,” and “perambulating the country, kissing little girls and growing whiskers!”
Many sober-minded citizens, especially those reading accounts in newspapers, reacted to their first experience of the Washington-bound President-elect with similar dismay. The editor of the influential Springfield (Mass.) Republican, Samuel Bowles, despaired in a letter to a friend, “Lincoln is a ‘Simple Susan.’” The most esteemed orator in America, Edward Everett, wrote in his diary: “These speeches thus far have been of the most ordinary kind, destitute of everything, not merely of felicity and grace, but of common pertinence. He is evidently a person of very inferior cast of character, wholly unequal to the crisis.” From Washington, Congressman Charles Francis Adams wrote, “His speeches have fallen like a wet blanket here. They put to flight all notions of greatness.” Vanity Fair joked slyly about Lincoln’s poor performance, observing, “Abe is becoming more grave. He don’t construct as many jokes as he did. He fears that he will get things mixed up if he don’t look out.” Even in Illinois, there were bitter public voices savaging his utterances during the journey:
The illustrious Honest Old Abe has continued during the last week to make a fool of himself and to mortify and shame the intelligent people of this great nation. His speeches have demonstrated the fact that although originally a Herculean rail splitter and more lately a whimsical story teller and side splitter, he is no more capable of becoming a statesman, nay, even a moderate one, than the braying ass can become a noble lion. People now marvel how it came to pass that Mr. Lincoln should have been selected as the representative man of any party. His weak, wishy-washy, nambypamby efforts, imbecile in matter, disgusting in manner, have made us the laughing stock of the whole world. The European powers will despise us because we have no better material out of which to make a President. The truth is, Lincoln is only a moderate lawyer and in the larger cities of the Union could pass for no more than a facetious pettifogger. Take him from his vocation and he loses even these small characteristics and indulges in simple twaddle which would disgrace a well bred school boy.
The Harrisburg Daily Patriot and Union published its dim view from the Pennsylvania capital:
The lack of good taste and proper dignity of deportment that has marked Mr. Lincoln’s course since he left Springfield, Illinois, … is the subject of universal
remark, as well as universal regret.
… Had he been the dignified statesman he ought to be, … it seems to us he would have proceeded from his home in Illinois to the Federal Capital by the most direct route, in a quiet way, avoiding all parade and ostentation, and thus save his friends and the nation at large the mortification of seeing the elected President of the country making the most puerile and disgusting displays of mountebankism that were ever given by any harlequin who ever strutted upon a stage or gamboled in a circus ring, to delight a gaping crowd, at twenty-five cents a head. …
We confess that we shudder as we contemplate the future in the person of this weak and ignorant man.
The Baltimore Sun affected hilarity: “There is that about his speechification which, if it were not for the gravity of the occasion, would be ludicrous to the destruction of buttons. Indeed we heard his Columbus speech read yesterday amidst irresistible bursts of laughter. … We begin to realize his qualifications as a barroom ‘Phunny Phellow.’”
Further south, the reactions to Lincoln’s speeches were improvisations on the theme of disgust. The Staunton (Virginia) Vindicator, wrote:
His speeches on his tour … have been a display of the most vulgar and ill-bred tastes, more alike to buffoonery of the clown than the logic of the statesman. Instead of rising to the dignity of his exalted position, he indulges in the disgusting and silly electioneering harangues, and exposes his ignorance both of the science of letters as well as the rules of rhetoric.
The Richmond Examiner called Lincoln “a beastly figure,” and asserted, “No American of any section has read the oratory with which he has strewn his devious road to Washington, condensed lumps of imbecility, buffoonery, and vulgar malignity, without a blush of shame.” The Charleston Mercury dismissed Lincoln’s speeches as “fiddle-faddle,” and Lincoln as a “weak compound of blockhead and blackguard.” The New Orleans Daily Crescent told its readers, “If any one can read the speeches which Mr. Lincoln has made on his recent trip to Washington City without a feeling of intense disgust, we envy him not his disposition.” The Crescent, however, was outdone by the crosstown New Orleans Daily Delta:
His silly speeches, his ill-timed jocularity, his pusillanimous evasion of responsibility, and vulgar pettyfoggery [sic], have no parallel in history … . We have repeatedly averred that the secession of the South was instigated by higher motives than a mere hostility to Lincoln; that the simple fact of his election was not the moving cause of that great movement. But his recent conduct will compel us to confess that the debasement of being ruled over by such a President—the disgust of having to look up to such a Chief Magistrate as the head of the Republic—is quite as powerful a justification for secession as could be presented. It is evident that the South has been quite as much deceived in its estimate of Lincoln as the North and his own party have been. His bearing in the debate with Douglas produced a general impression that he was a man of some ability, as a politician and a polemic. … But he is no sooner compelled to break [his] silence, and to exhibit himself in public, than this delusion vanishes, and the Hoosier lawyer dwindles into far smaller proportions than his bitterest enemies have ever assigned to him. … [H]e never opens his mouth but he puts his foot into it. In supreme silliness—in profound ignorance of the institutions of the Republic of which he has been chosen chief—in dishonest and cowardly efforts to dodge responsibility and play a double part—in disgusting levity on the most serious subjects, the speeches of Lincoln, on his way to the capital, have no equals in the history of any people, civilized or semi-civilized.
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The newsprint blows that rained down on Lincoln transformed his jubilee procession into a painful run of the gauntlet on a continental scale. But he was only now approaching the most hazardous stretch in what had become, for the press at least, a hazing ritual. As he descended the Hudson River valley, one wag noted sarcastically, “Mr. Lincoln, having … brought his brilliant intellectual powers to bear upon the cultivation of luxuriant whiskers … has now … concentrated his mental energies upon the question—what hotel he shall stop at in New York.”
Chapter 12
Lincoln and the Merchants
“The Undertaker of the Union.”
For the first eight days of Lincoln’s procession across the North, Lincoln’s speeches drew jeers from the pens of distant partisans who scoured the text of Lincoln’s remarks in cold print. Those on hand, however—the crowds who mobbed Lincoln at every stop, even in pouring rain and blowing snow—were not there to hear the final word on the nation’s troubles, but merely to look at the Westerner who had come out of nowhere to lead the nation through the crisis, to hear the bands play and the cannon boom, and to show themselves for the Union.
The impression Lincoln made on the crowds on his eight-day progression from the Illinois prairie to the Hudson Valley was mixed. Villard discerned a letdown in the throng at seeing him in the flesh: “While he thus satisfied the public curiosity, he disappointed, by his appearance, most of those who saw him for the first time. I could see that impression clearly written on the faces of his rustic audiences. Nor was this surprising, for they saw the most unprepossessing features, the gawkiest figure, and the most awkward manners. Lincoln always had an embarrassed air, too, like a country clodhopper appearing in fashionable society, and was nearly always stiff and unhappy in his off-hand remarks.”
One who agreed was a young Lexington, Kentucky, man who came to Cincinnati to see Lincoln. He wrote to his brother soon afterward, “Old Abe Lincoln was here this week. He looks, talks, & acts just as you may have seen some long, slab sided flat boat ‘Capting,’ who had sold his ‘prodooce’ at Memphis&invested l2$ at a slop shop tailor’s in rigging himself out for Sunday. He is a disgrace as the headboss of any civilized nation.” A friend who wrote to diarist Mary Chesnut in Charleston described Lincoln as “Awfully ugly, even grotesque in appearance, the kind who are always at the corner stores … whittling sticks, and telling stories as funny as they are vulgar.”
Many in the small towns and farm communities, however, probably took away a more generous impression, like the Ohio lawyer and future president, James A. Garfield, who, after seeing him for the first time, wrote, “He is distressingly homely. But through all his awkward homeliness, there is a look of transparent, genuine goodness which at once reaches your heart and makes you trust and love him.” The Northern farmland through which Lincoln traveled was his base, the heart of his political strength. His friend Judge Davis thought it was not Lincoln himself, but the peril of the country that brought out the tumultuous crowds, but still, he marveled, “The whole trip … has been an Ovation such as never before been witnessed … It is simply astonishing.”
Then, in the mid-afternoon of February 19, the Presidential train arrived in New York City, and the holiday mood changed.
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New York City was a hostile pro-Southern enclave in the Republican North. In the November election, it had cast 62% of its votes for Lincoln’s opponents. Here, his audience did not even approach the size of the crowd that had strained to see the visiting Prince of Wales three months before. The New York Herald observed, “the masses of people did not turn out.” It reported a “crowd which cheered, and scoffed, and scowled him a doubtful welcome. He passed through almost unknown, and the crowd which followed his coach with cheers were actuated by curiosity as much as admiration.” Walt Whitman, who was there, wrote that Lincoln
possessed no personal popularity at all in New York City and not much political. But it was evidently tacitly agreed that if [his] few political supporters … present would entirely abstain from any demonstration on their side, the immense majority—who were anything but supporters—would abstain on their side also. The result was a sulky, unbroken silence, such as certainly never before characterized a New York crowd. … The crowd that hemmed around consisted … of thirty to forty thousand men, not a single one his personal friend, while, I have no doubt (so frenzied were the ferments of t
he time) many an assassin’s knife and pistol lurked in hip- or breast-pocket there—ready, soon as break and riot came.
The sulky mood in New York City took its tone from the large Democratic immigrant population, which had a wait-and-see attitude toward the new man, but it also partook of the distrust of the big-time capitalists. The New York captains of commerce had a monetary stake in stability, in tranquility, in “business as usual.” The present crisis threatened their empire. The merchants sanctified property rights, and they sympathized even with those whose property was black people. To them, it was the abolitionists who were the revolutionary troublemakers, the Republican platform that was the hostile program. The city’s merchants owed a large share of their prosperity to shipping Southern cotton, an estimated two hundred million dollars a year. Surely, they thought, this was something Lincoln had to respect. One observer spoke of New York, with its financial dependence on the cotton trade, as “a prolongation of the South.” The mayor, Democrat Fernando Wood, had in November floated the idea of New York itself seceding from the Union and becoming a “free city,” the better to maintain its business with the departing Cotton States.
