by Larry Tagg
The merchants were for compromise. They had made themselves rich lending credit to Southern planters, and now had outstanding debts to the Southerners totaling $150 million to $200 million. A war would make those millions irrecoverable. Over the winter, they had organized to exert tremendous pressure to soften Republican policy. It was they who had spearheaded the strong demand for compromise in the North. In December, more than two thousand local New York businessmen had gathered to demand the redress of Southern grievances. They had written letters to parties in all sections begging for restraint from any rash action, organized mass meetings, drawn up compromise petitions that drew more than 100,000 signatures in the Eastern cities, and sent delegations to lobby congressmen.
Indeed, some stalwart Republicans were more alarmed about the merchants’ threat to anti-slavery principles than the Southerners’ threat. Radical Republican Zachariah Chandler had written Lyman Trumbull, “The mercantile world is in a ferment, even some good reliable Republicans are alarmed and wish something done. Now I have no fear that the senseless Southern howl will affect Mr. Lincoln in the least, but I do fear that this Republican alarm may extend even to Springfield.” The merchants had certainly bent the ear of Thurlow Weed, who had published the first calls for compromise in the Albany Evening Journal in the weeks after the election. Big Money’s man in Washington was Weed’s partner William Seward.
Big Money’s man would certainly not be Lincoln. In November and December, his election had touched off two panics on the New York Stock Exchange, whose merchants had clamored for concessions to the South to restore prices. Lincoln replied with a Western view of the wicked ways of Wall Street: “I am not insensible to any commercial or financial depression that may exist, but nothing is to be gained by fawning around the ‘respectable scoundrels’ who got it up. Let them go to work to repair the mischief of their own making; and then perhaps they will be less greedy to do the like again.” At work here was his prejudice against the Eastern elite, his frontier resentment at being looked down upon as raw and uncultured, his sense that the businessmen of the East were piling up fortunes from the plush leather chairs of their smoking rooms by manipulating markets and exploiting hard-working laborers of the West. “It annoyed me to hear that gang of men called respectable,” he said.
The “respectable scoundrels,” for their part, returned the feeling. The Eastern men resented the fact that so much political clout had shifted to the West. They were appalled at the boisterous energy of the Westerners, offended by their coarse, vulgar behavior. To them, the West was like a wild child now come of age. Abraham Lincoln—rangy, gawky, and socially awkward; the first president born west of the Appalachians—embodied everything about the frontier that made the merchants shudder.
And there was an even deeper dread at work among the Eastern aristocracy, something that had been noticed by Alexis de Tocqueville in his visit to America some thirty years before. Tocqueville discerned that, hidden beneath an “artificial enthusiasm” for democratic institutions, “it is easy to perceive that the rich have a hearty dislike of the democratic institutions of their country. The people form a power which at once they fear and despise.” The diaries and letters of wealthy observers were rife with dismay at the power of the masses, with their persistent lawlessness and political corruption. British correspondent William Russell observed that among “the upper world of millionaire merchants, … Not a man there but resented the influence given by universal suffrage to the mob of the city, and complained of the intolerable effects of their ascendancy.” The merchants viewed the election of Abraham Lincoln as the coarse culmination of the vulgar tendencies of what they called “the mob,” or “the mobocracy.”
The money men were delighted when, on the first morning of his visit to New York, Lincoln attended a breakfast with a hundred leading businessmen at the home of millionaire Moses H. Grinnell. The stock market rose at the news that the merchant princes finally had the President’s ear. Lincoln disappointed them, however. When one remarked that he “would not meet so many millionaires together at any other table in New York,” he provoked them with his response: “Oh, indeed, is that so? Well, that’s quite right. I’m a millionaire myself. I got a minority of a million votes last November.” Lincoln was reminding the fat cats that their bank accounts had to be balanced against the expressed wishes of millions of voters, but he gained some high-powered enemies by his flippancy. After an uncomfortable interval, the meeting broke up. The merchants emerged grim-faced.
(The intense pressure of the New York businessmen would be brought to bear again a week later, after Lincoln arrived in Washington. There, one of the merchants, William L. Dodge, visited Lincoln at his hotel and reminded him of the worry of the capitalists over the forthcoming inaugural address, insisting, “It is for you, sir, to say whether the whole nation shall be plunged into bankruptcy, whether the grass shall grow in the streets of our commercial cities.”
Lincoln replied in his way—which was often, during this period, rather glib: “Then I shall say not. If it depends upon me, the grass will not grow anywhere except in the fields and the meadows.”
Dodge persisted, “Then you will yield to the just demands of the South. You will leave her to control her own institutions. You will admit slave states into the Union on the same conditions as free states. You will not go to war on account of slavery.”
Lincoln now set his teeth, and he replied slowly and steadily, “I do not know that I understand your meaning, Mr. Dodge, nor do I know what my acts or opinions may be in the future beyond this. I shall take an oath that I will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. It is not the Constitution as I would like to have it, but as it is, that is to be defended. The Constitution will not be preserved and defended until it is enforced and obeyed in every part of every one of the United States. It must be so respected, obeyed, enforced, and defended, let the grass grow where it may.” Dodge withdrew, muttering.)
Immediately after breakfast with the New York millionaires, Lincoln was hurried to City Hall, where he received a chilly reception from Mayor Fernando Wood. Facing Lincoln across George Washington’s writing desk, he warned that New York was “sorely afflicted,” with “all her material interests paralyzed,” and “her commercial greatness endangered.” Wood lectured Lincoln on his duty “to bring it back again to its former harmonious, consolidated and prosperous condition.” In his reply, Lincoln turned the other cheek, graciously acknowledging the advice of the Mayor, and remained at City Hall for two hours to shake hands with citizens.
That evening the Lincolns attended a Verdi opera, Un Ballo in Maschera, at the sumptuous Academy of Music, where he unwittingly ran athwart the prevailing fashion that dictated that white gloves were in style for opera-going. Lincoln wore black gloves, and compounded his faux pas by dangling his huge hands over the railing of the red-velvet box. “I think we ought to send some flowers over the way to the Undertaker of the Union,” laughed a Southerner in a box opposite. Everyone noticed. Newspapers said Lincoln had the manners of a gorilla. The Eastern elite despaired that a man who wore black gloves to the opera, and said “inaugeration,” could ever be capable of statesmanship.
* * *
It must have been to Lincoln’s immense relief when, the next morning, his train re-crossed the Hudson and rolled south across the farmland of New Jersey. He could not know that by that evening the jubilee procession would be over, forgotten amid urgent back-room talk of agents, spies, conspiracies, and assassination. For this was February 21, 1861, when the discovery of the Baltimore plot was revealed to Lincoln in his Philadelphia hotel room, when fate tapped him on the shoulder in the middle of his introduction to the American people and beckoned him into a smoky room full of friends who pleaded with him to make a secret ride through the Maryland capital and on, in the dark, to Washington.
The President-elect would go through the motions the next day, speaking at a flag-raising at Philadelphia’s
Independence Hall in the morning and making two more speeches in Harrisburg that afternoon. By the following day in Washington, in the wake of his secret night ride, after he was rushed to his suite at Willard’s Hotel, all the omissions and failures of the last thirty years would settle onto the shoulders of the man still nine days short of taking office.
The poison pens of a hostile press would wound him.
A warlike new nation of seven states, just now forming in Montgomery, Alabama, would scoff at the imaginary danger he had faced in Baltimore, even while it recruited, trained, and fitted tens of thousands of very real soldiers to destroy his government.
Millions in the South who feared the coming of an American Caesar, and millions more in the North who dreaded the arrival of another inept chief like Pierce or Buchanan, would curse him.
And in Suite 6 at Willard’s he would find on his desk a letter waiting for him. It read:
if you don’t Resign we are going to put a spider in your dumpling and play the Devil with you you god or mighty god dam sundde of a bith go to hell and buss my Ass suck my prick and call my Bolics your uncle Dick god dam a fool and goddam Abe Lincoln who would like you goddam you excuse me for using such hard words with you but you need it you are nothing but a goddam Black nigger.
Part Two
Lincoln’s First Eighteen Months
“No Man Living Needed so Much
Education as the New President.”
Chapter 13
Lincoln’s First Impression
“A cross between a sandhill crane and an Andalusian jackass.”
While the weather in Washington in the last days of February veered from snow to sun to warm rain to choking dust, the nine days between Lincoln’s arrival and his inauguration were a dizzying medley of consultations and receptions. An endless round of introductions occupied him—with the outgoing President and his Cabinet, congressmen, members of the Supreme Court, the mayor of Washington, office seekers, serenaders, and dozens of members of his own party who had come to look at the new man and press him with their views. In his parlor at Willard’s Hotel, the press of humanity was tremendous.
All the men who met Lincoln were aware of the aching need for a great man, someone to do great deeds. The new President was needed to redeem a nation that, by late February, had divided into two nations, with two capitals, one in Washington and one in Montgomery. There was a basic conception of how a great man should look and act, especially among the many who considered themselves great men. They remembered the grand, august Daniel Webster as their model: the dark brow; the piercing, “lightning” eyes; the garments “unsurpassed”; the deep, powerful voice; the majestic oratory, delivered with Napoleonic bearing, with one hand thrust into the vest, the other hanging gracefully. Lincoln, by consensus, was far short of grand.
* * *
To begin with, high society had strict rules that governed who were gentlemen and who were not. A certain voice, manner, dress, style, and a kind of reserve were expected. Lincoln violated these rules completely. It was no great stretch for men bred in high society to conclude that a man so lacking in gentlemanly qualities could not be wise, could not be a statesman. As British journalist William Russell observed, “A person who met Mr. Lincoln in the street would not take him to be what is called a ‘gentleman’; and, indeed, since I came to the United States, I have heard more disparaging allusions made by Americans to him on that account than I could have expected among simple republicans, where all should be equals.” One evening in New York, Russell met several gentlemen, one of whom told him, “the majority of the people of New York, and all the respectable people, were disgusted at the election of such a fellow as Lincoln to be President and would back the Southern States, if it came to a split.” After another two days in such company, Russell wrote further in his diary, “I was astonished to find little sympathy and no respect for the newly installed Government. They were regarded as obscure or undistinguished men. … One of the journals continued to speak of ‘The President’ in the most contemptuous manner and to designate him as the great ‘Rail-Splitter.’”
In the eyes of many, Lincoln’s most immediate problem was the subject of a letter he received two weeks after his election, postmarked Elgin, Illinois:
Deformed Sir,
The Ugly Club, in full meeting, have elected you an Honorary Member of the Hard-Favored Fraternity. –Prince Harry was lean, Falstaff was fat, Thersites was hunchbacked, and Slawkenbergus [sic] was renowned for the eminent miscalculation which nature had made in the length of his nose; but it remained for you to unite all species of deformity, and stand forth the Prince of Ugly Fellows.
In the bonds of Ugliness—Hinchaway Beeswax, President. Eagle-Eyed Carbuncle, Secretary of the Ugly Club.
Journalist Donn Piatt testified that “Mr. Lincoln was the homeliest man I ever saw.” British journalist Edward Dicey insisted that “to say that he is ugly is nothing, to add that his figure is grotesque is to convey no adequate impression.” He was the “homeliest and the awkwardest man in the Sucker State,” according to fellow Illinoisan J. H. Burnham. New York correspondent Henry Villard said simply, “As far as all external conditions were concerned, there was nothing in favor of Lincoln.” “His phiz is truly awful,” agreed another observer. “Slouchy, ungraceful, round shouldered, leans forward (very much in his walk) is lean and ugly in every way,” wrote still another. Carl Schurz confessed that at first, “I was somewhat startled by his appearance. … I had seen, in Washington and in the West, several public men of rough appearance; but none whose looks seemed quite so uncouth, not to say grotesque, as Lincoln’s.” Diarist George Templeton Strong met the President in October of 1861, and even at that late date was not prepared for his first sight of Lincoln, reporting, “He is lank and hard-featured, among the ugliest white men I have seen. Decidedly plebian.” Another friend, Pennsylvania politician Alexander McClure, admitted that, after coming face-to-face with Lincoln, “I doubt whether I wholly concealed my disappointment at meeting him. … I confess that my heart sank within me as I remembered that this was the man chosen by a great nation to become its ruler in the gravest period of its history.”
That Lincoln was extremely odd—“grotesque” was the favorite term—was the universal reaction among men seeing him for the first time. The head itself was arresting, “coconut shaped and somewhat too small for such a stature,” said Dicey, and he described the face that looked out from it as “furrowed, wrinkled, and indented, as though it had been scarred by vitriol.” To William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner, his face was “long, sallow, and cadaverous, shrunk, shriveled, wrinkled, and dry, having here and there a hair on the surface.” “His complexion was very dark, his skin yellow, shriveled, and ‘leathery,’” according to his friend Ward Lamon. Dicey called attention to the “nose and ears, which have been taken by mistake from a head of twice the size.” Russell saw the ears as comical, “flapping and wide-projecting,” and the nose, “a prominent organ—stands out from the face, with an inquiring anxious air, as though it were sniffing for some good thing in the wind.” Lincoln’s “thatch of wild republican hair” was another source of amazement. The morning Lincoln was introduced to Nathaniel Hawthorne (who came away amazed that Lincoln had never heard of him), the novelist noticed his hair “had apparently been acquainted with neither brush nor comb that morning, after the disarrangement of the pillow.” According to Herndon, it was “dark, almost black, and lay floating where his fingers or the winds left it, piled up at random”; “rough, uncombed and uncombable lank dark hair, that stands out in every direction at once,” said Dicey; “bristling and compact like a ruff of mourning pins,” noted Russell.
But it was Lincoln’s “lean, lank, indescribably gawky figure” that inspired the most comment. In an age when men of substance were expected to look substantial—portly and well-upholstered—Lincoln was, according to Herndon, “a thin, tall, wiry, sinewy, grizzly, raw-boned man.” Villard reported that by the time Lincoln reached Wa
shington, “Always cadaverous, his appearance is now almost ghostly.” To get the proper picture, Dicey suggested, “Fancy a man six-foot [actually six feet four inches], and thin out of proportion [he weighed only 180 pounds], with bony arms and legs, which, somehow, seem to be always in the way, with large rugged hands, which grasp you like a vise when shaking yours, with a long scraggy neck, and a chest too narrow for the great arms hanging by its side.” Piatt sketched his impression of Lincoln as “a huge skeleton in clothes. Tall as he was, his hands and feet looked out of proportion, so long and clumsy were they. Every movement was awkward in the extreme.”
McClure was prejudiced early on by Lincoln’s “awkwardness that was uncommon among men of intelligence,” and so were many. Hawthorne called him “loose-jointed”; “There is no describing his lengthy awkwardness, nor the uncouthness of his movement,” he wrote. French journalist Duviergier de Hauranne marveled, “His posture was awkward and like nothing I’ve ever seen before—partly rigid and partly loose-jointed; he doesn’t seem to know how to carry his great height.” In the week before the inauguration, Russell described Lincoln’s comic entrance to a room, “with a shambling, loose, irregular, almost unsteady gait, a tall, lank, lean man, considerably over six feet in height, with stooping shoulders, long pendulous arms, terminating in hands of extraordinary dimensions, which, however, were far exceeded in proportion by his feet.” Herndon pictured him “thin through the breast to the back, and narrow across the shoulders; standing, he leaned forward—was what may be called stoop-shouldered, inclining to the consumptive by build. … The whole man, body and mind, worked slowly, creakingly, as if it needed oiling.” Henry Clay Whitney, a fellow Illinois attorney, testified, “He was very awkward in all the little common-places of life … he was essentially uncouth; so in the company of ladies, or cultivated strangers. In such society—he would not know what to do with his hat, or his arms or legs. I have seen him, in company, put his arms behind his back; then bring them in front again, and then look around sheepishly, as much as to say, ‘What can I do with them?’” One acquaintance swore that, partly because of Lincoln’s stooped shoulders, his arms were longer than those of any man he had ever seen: “When standing Straight, and letting his arms fall down his Sides, the points of his fingers would touch a point lower on his legs by nearly three inches than was usual with other persons.” So, too, with his legs. “The length of his legs [were] out of all proportion to that of his body,” according to Ward Lamon. “When he sat down on a chair, he seemed no taller than an average man, measuring from the chair to the crown of his head; but his knees rose high in front, and a marble placed on the cap of one of them would roll down a steep descent to the hip.” Lincoln’s awkward, shambling walk, which struck everyone, was the result of a crane-like mismanagement of his gangling limbs, combined with his odd, flat-footed, clodhopper gait: according to both William Herndon and Ward Lamon, he was slightly pigeon-toed, and when he walked, he set his whole foot flat on the ground, and then lifted it all at once, so that he lacked any spring or ease of motion. While walking, his long arms and hands hung like a giant’s by his side, which magnified the grotesque effect.
