by Larry Tagg
His body shook all over with gleeful emotion, and when he felt particularly good over his performance, he followed his habit of drawing up his knees, with his arms around them, up to his very face. I am sorry to state that he often allowed himself altogether too much license in the concoction of the stories. He seemed to be bent upon making his hit by fair means or foul.
In other words, he never hesitated to tell a coarse or even outright nasty story, if it served his purpose. All his personal friends could bear testimony on this point. It was a notorious fact that this fondness for low talk clung to him even in the White House. More than once I heard him “with malice aforethought” get off purposely some repulsive fiction in order to rid himself of an uncomfortable caller. Again and again I felt disgust and humiliation that such a person should have been called upon to direct the destinies of a great nation in the direst period of its history… . At the time of which I speak, I could not have persuaded myself that the man might possibly possess true greatness of mind and nobility of heart.
Henry E. Dummer, a lawyer who spent time with the future President in Illinois, said that he was a man of “purity” but had an “insane love” for dirty stories. He remembered an occasion in 1859 when someone asked Lincoln why he did not assemble his stories into a book. Lincoln laughed, “Such a book would stink like a thousand privies.” Lincoln’s secretary, John Hay, played on words in calling him “the riskiest of story tellers.” As late as 1864, George Templeton Strong protested, “I do wish Abraham would tell fewer dirty stories.” Close friend Ward Lamon explained it this way:
Although Mr. Lincoln’s walk among men was remarkably pure, the same cannot be said of his conversation. He was endowed by nature with a keen sense of humor, and he found great delight in indulging it. But his humor was not of a delicate quality; it was chiefly exercised in hearing and telling stories of the grosser sort. In this tendency he was restrained by no presence and no occasion. It was his opinion that the finest wit and humor, the best jokes and anecdotes, emanated from the lower orders of the country people. It was from this source that he had acquired his peculiar tastes and his store of materials.
An example of Lincoln’s low-brow bent was the story his law partner, William Herndon, said he heard the future President tell “often and often.” Herndon explained that Lincoln was a diffident man, rather shy in society, especially in a crowd of ladies and gentlemen at a party. For that reason, he admired audacious men, quick-witted, cheeky, and self-possessed. Lincoln loved to tell this story to illustrate the power of audacity:
Well, there was a party once, not far from here, which was composed of ladies and gentlemen. A fine table was set and the people were greatly enjoying themselves. Among the crowd was one of those men who had audacity—was quick-witted—cheeky and self possessed—never off his guard on any occasion. After the men & women had enjoyed themselves by dancing, promenading, flirting, and so on, they were told that the supper was set. The man of audacity—quick-witted—self-possessed and equal to all occasions—was put at the head of the table to carve the turkeys, chickens, and pigs. The men and women surrounded the table and the audacious man, being chosen carver, whetted his great carving knife with the steel and got down to business, and commenced carving the turkey, but he expended too much force and let a fart—a loud fart so that all the people heard it distinctly. Of course it shocked all terribly. A deep silence reigned. However, the audacious man was cool and entirely self-possessed; he was curiously and keenly watched by those who knew him well, they suspecting that he would recover in the end and acquit himself with glory. The man, with a kind of sublime audacity, pulled off his coat—rolled up his sleeves—put his coat deliberately on a chair—spat on his hands—took his position at the head of the table—picked up the carving knife and whetted it again, never cracking a smile nor moving a muscle of his face. It now became a wonder in the minds of all the men and women how the fellow was to get out of his dilemma. He squared himself and said loudly and distinctly—“Now, by God, I’ll see if I can’t cut up this turkey without farting.”
Then, according to Herndon, Lincoln would add, “I worshipped the fellow.”
Many of Lincoln’s first Eastern auditors were left open-mouthed by such stories, lacking the insight of journalist Donn Piatt, who, perhaps because he was a Westerner, could see through to the purpose in their telling. He described after-dinner conversations back in Springfield:
We had gatherings at which men only formed the company, and before those good honest citizens … Mr. Lincoln gave way to his natural bent for fun, and told very amusing stories, always in quaint illustration of the subject under discussion, no one of which will bear printing. They were coarse, and were saved from vulgarity only by being so strangely in point, and told not for the sake of the telling as if he enjoyed the stories themselves, but that they were, as I have said, so quaintly illustrative.
Carl Schurz was another one of the few who discerned the point of Lincoln’s tales. “He interspersed our conversation with all sorts of quaint stories,” he wrote, “each of which had a witty point applicable to the subject in hand, and not seldom concluding an argument in such a manner that nothing more was to be said.” Throughout his presidency, Lincoln would call on this ability to apply a frontier story to clinch an argument. Countless opponents found themselves laughing, not only at a story but in wonder at the brand of genius that could effortlessly produce something so homely yet so apropos; whereupon Lincoln could gracefully turn away, leaving his adversary with the sudden realization that the last word had been said and the point won by the uneducated, disheveled man from the prairie.
Men with delicate aristocratic sensibilities, though, were horror-struck, such as the Georgia poet and musician Sidney Lanier, who, after meeting Lincoln in the days before the inauguration, wrote to his father, “What a disgusting Scene was the Lincoln hand-Shaking affair! I think the disgrace of the United States had its fit culmination therein: the scene ought to go into History under the title of ‘The Great Apotheosis of the Great Hog.’” Lanier’s view was jaundiced by his love for the South, but Missouri’s Colonel Alexander Doniphan and West Virginia’s Sherrard Clemens, both of whom met Lincoln in the days before the inauguration, were Unionists, and neither was as kind as Lanier. Doniphan wrote home that Lincoln was “a man of no intelligence, no enlargement of views, as ridiculously vain and fantastic as a country boy with his first red morocco hat.” Clemens was even more disappointed, describing the Illinoisan as “a cross between a sandhill crane and an Andalusian jackass. He is, by all odds, the weakest man who has ever been elected … vain, weak, puerile, hypocritical, without manners, without social grace, and as he talks to you, punches his fists under your ribs. He swears equal to Uncle Toby, and in every particular, morally and mentally, I have lost all respect for him. He is surrounded by a set of toad eaters and bottle holders.”
“Our Presidential Merryman.” Lincoln tells jokes while a hearse bearing the Constitution passes outside.
There was another provocation to those proud men in the East for whom Lincoln’s greatest crime was his self-esteem. These men despised Lincoln for being an uneducated Westerner with the presumption to dictate to his betters. The high-bred George Templeton Strong called him “superficially vulgar and a snob.” Don Piatt noted that a “sense of superiority possessed President Lincoln at all times.” As his secretary John Hay observed, “Lincoln’s intellectual self-confidence was galling to vastly better educated men, learned men, like Sumner and Chase. It would be absurd to call him a modest man. No great man is ever modest. It was his intellectual arrogance and unconscious assumption of superiority that men like Chase and Sumner could never forgive.” An example of the breathtaking way in which Lincoln was capable of dismissing the great and powerful was provided when Lincoln had the only meeting he was ever destined to have with Charles Francis Adams—American royalty, son and grandson of Presidents, Boston Brahmin, status-conscious, cool and aloof. Lincoln had just appointed Adams amba
ssador to Great Britain. As Adams’ son told the story:
[Charles Francis Adams] had been summoned to Washington by the secretary of state [Seward] to receive his verbal instructions. The country was in the midst of the most dangerous crisis in its history; a crisis in which the action of foreign governments, especially of England, might well be decisive of results. The policy to be pursued was under consideration. It was a grave topic, worthy of thoughtful consideration. Deeply impressed with the responsibility devolved upon him Mr. Adams went with the new secretary to the State Department, whence, at the suggestion of the latter, they presently walked over to the White House, and were ushered into the room which more than thirty years before Mr. Adams associated most closely with his father [John Quincy Adams], and his father’s trained bearing and methodical habits. Presently a door opened, and a tall, large-featured, shabbily dressed man, of uncouth appearance, slouched into the room. His much-kneed, ill-fitting trousers, coarse stockings, and worn slippers at once caught the eye. He seemed generally ill at ease,—in manner, constrained and shy. [Seward] introduced [Adams] to the President, and [Adams] proceeded to make the usual conventional remarks, expressive of obligation, and his hope that the confidence implied in the appointment he had received might not prove to have been misplaced. They had all by this time taken chairs; and the tall man listened in silent abstraction. When Mr. Adams had finished, — and he did not take long,—the tall man remarked in an indifferent careless way that the appointment in question had not been his, but was due to the secretary of state, and that it was to “Governor Seward” rather than to himself that Mr. Adams should express any sense of obligation he might feel; then, stretching out his legs before him he said, with an air of great relief as he swung his long arms to his head: — “Well, governor [Lincoln’s way of addressing Seward], I’ve this morning decided that Chicago post-office appointment.” Mr. Adams and the nation’s foreign policy were dismissed together! Not another reference was made to them. Mr. Lincoln seemed to think that the occasion called for nothing further; as to Mr. Adams, it was a good while before he recovered from his dismay; — he never recovered from his astonishment, nor did the impression then made ever wholly fade from his mind.
Most prominent men thought Lincoln merely simple. After all, they only knew him by his campaign image as “The Railsplitter,” the humble embodiment of rustic simplicity. Men thought him well-intentioned, honest, and entertaining—but, especially so soon after his sneaking entry into Washington, they could see no sign of power. Alexander McClure later wrote:
Few, very few, of the Republican leaders of national fame had faith in Lincoln’s ability for the trust assigned to him. I could name a dozen men, now idols of the nation, whose open distrust of Lincoln not only seriously embarrassed, but grievously pained and humiliated, him. They felt that the wrong man had been elected to the Presidency, and only their modesty prevented them, in each case, from naming the man who should have been chosen in his stead.
One without regard for the new President was British diplomat Lord Lyons, who, on the eve of the inaugural, said, “Mr. Lincoln has not hitherto given proof of his possessing any natural talents to compensate for his ignorance of everything but Illinois village politics. He seems to be well meaning and conscientious, … but not much more.” Another was vice-president-elect Hannibal Hamlin, who visited Lincoln on his very first day in Washington and left filled with uneasiness about Lincoln’s “honest simplicity and want of necessary knowledge of men.” The Public Man wrote in his diary what many suspected: “He is not a great man, certainly, and, but for something almost woman-like in the look of his eyes, I should say the most ill-favored son of Adam that I ever saw. … Half an hour with Mr. Lincoln confirmed my worst fears.” Henry Villard, after months of experience shadowing the President-elect, wrote, “I doubt Mr. Lincoln’s capacity for the task of bringing light and peace out of the chaos that will surround him. A man of good heart and good intention, he is not firm. The times demand a Jackson.”
The Public Man assumed what most intellectuals who met Lincoln assumed: that he could not direct his own administration, that he would delegate the task of directing the nation to other, abler hands. The Washington correspondent of the New York Herald, for instance, had written on Lincoln’s approach, “He is unequal to the crisis, and will feel it so sensibly when he arrives here that it is inferred he will rush for safety into the arms of some man of strong will, who will keep his conscience and manage the government.” Chicago Tribune editor C. H. Ray thought that getting Salmon Chase into the Cabinet was necessary, since that man’s “great ability in affairs will give the force to Mr. Lincoln which nature has denied him.” In the week before the inauguration, Horace Greeley confessed his worries: “Old Abe is honest as the sun, and means to be true and faithful; but he is in the web of very cunning spiders and cannot work out if he would.” The Louisville Daily Courier put into print similar fears of many in the South who saw in Lincoln low ability, no education, and no experience—“simply, we believe, an honest man, he will be the tool of a fanaticism which he represents, and the instrument of the able, unscrupulous, and daring men whom he will call around him.” Many among the elite in the North simply threw up their hands, such as Henry Adams, who wrote after seeing him at the Inaugural Ball that Lincoln looked as though “no man living needed so much education as the new President but all the education he could get would not be enough.”
* * *
Lincoln would never completely shed this image—the uneducated, wellintentioned bumbler, the weak, pliable, vacillating tool of those around him— during his lifetime. It prejudiced those in the South, who were already tilted against him; it prejudiced people in the Border States, who were hanging in the balance in the crucial first days of his presidency; it prejudiced people in the Democratic Party in the North, who were already skeptical of his administration; and it prejudiced the men of every faction in his own party, who could never get over the conviction that Lincoln was being used by their enemies to thwart them. Because Lincoln was so easy to approach, yet so naturally reticent and so innately secretive, and because he always sought the ideas of others while delaying his own decisions until the last possible moment before they must be rendered, he seemed indecisive, and remained easy to underestimate during the course of the coming war and the presidential term that would end with his death. This gave him an advantage—he could remain opaque while those around him became transparent—but at a great cost: in the most divisive period in the nation’s history, powerful men on all sides—the Cabinet, the generals, the opinion-makers, the Congress, the editors—would discount his sagacity, even when he was most wise; they would sneer at his weakness, even when he was most resilient. The image of the homely ditherer, at the mercy of events, would persist until his assassination forced a mournful reappraisal four years later.
Chapter 14
The First Inaugural
“It is the knell and requiem of the Union, and the death of hope.”
Four years earlier, President Buchanan in his inaugural had paraded gaily between two elaborate floats, the Goddess of Liberty on her pedestal and a full-rigged ship, manned by smiling and waving sailors from the Navy Yard. On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln took office at the center of a tense military maneuver. For weeks, General in Chief Winfield Scott had been building a small army in Washington—653 professional soldiers, along with 925 nervous, unready District of Columbia militiamen—for the test of Inauguration Day. He had been meeting daily with his officers, planning and drafting orders for a ceremony many secessionists were oath-bound to prevent. Dozens of threats lent urgency to his arrangements, including this, sent to Lincoln:
Dear Sir,
Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell. And the President may profit by their example. From one of a sworn band of 10, who have resolved to shoot you in the inaugural procession on the 4th of March, 1861.
Vindex
The state of uncertainty in the days approaching
the ceremony was underlined on its eve, when Scott’s own secretary, after he wrote out the general’s instructions for the troops, resigned his commission and crossed the Potomac to join the Confederate army.
Crowds assembling along Pennsylvania Avenue on the raw, wind-whipped morning of Inauguration Monday looked up and down a broad street adorned with few decorations. Many of the residents of the houses along the parade route had shuttered their windows in scorn for the proceedings. On commanding housetops, spectators were elbowed aside by squads of riflemen who dipped their barrels over the roof edges and kept eagle eyes on the windows opposite. At street level, platoons of soldiers were stationed every hundred yards. Secret police mingled with the crowds.
About noon, as the wind blew the clouds away and a bright sun dried the muddy streets, President Buchanan arrived in his barouche at Willard’s Hotel to call upon the President-elect. A few minutes later a band struck up “Hail to the Chief” as the pair emerged, and the loaded coach started toward the Capitol building between double files of District of Columbia cavalry. Their colonel, Charles Stone, rode alongside the carriage, occasionally digging his horse with his spurs to keep the cavalry horses uneasy, making it harder for anyone to get a good shot at Lincoln between the prancing, skittish mounts. In front of Lincoln’s carriage marched the elite Sappers and Miners company, brought in for the occasion from West Point. Stone’s newly organized militia infantry, marching behind, completed the armed phalanx around the carriage. On the side streets rode flanking squadrons of regular cavalry, synchronizing their progress with the presidential party to intercept any assassins who might hurtle down the intersecting streets toward the President-elect.
