by Larry Tagg
Sumner rose to publicly challenge Lincoln’s analogy of the eggs and the fowls. “The eggs of crocodiles can produce only crocodiles,” he contended, “and it is not easy to see how eggs laid by military power can be hatched into an American State.” He was encouraged in his opposition by baskets full of letters condemning the President’s charity. “Magnanimity is the great word with the disloyal who think to tickle the president’s ear with it,” wrote one New Yorker. “Magnanimity is one thing and weakness is another. I know you are near the throne and you must guard its honor… . The Blacks are entitled to all the rights that white men are bound to Respect… . A universal amnesty must not be granted. Never were men more guilty. The honor of the country requires a sacrifice and it cannot be dispensed with.” R.F. Fuller of Boston wrote to Sumner that Lincoln’s Louisiana plan was “wicked and blasphemous,” betraying blacks with easy compromises. “No power but God ever has or could have forced him up to the work he has been instrumental of; and now we see the dregs of his backwardness.”
Neither did the Democrats applaud Lincoln’s gentle, conservative plans. The New York World printed its view that he was rudderless: “Mr. Lincoln gropes, in his speech, like a traveler in an unknown country without a map,” it said, calling attention to “the vagueness, indecision, and emptiness of the speech,” and charging that he had “said nothing, or what comes so near to nothing that he might as well have not broken silence at all.” The World did rejoice, however, in the heat Lincoln was receiving from Radicals over the speech, informing its readers, “The Washington telegrams to the Tribune foam over with rage.” The New York Herald, too, reported “the more radical of the Republicans much chagrined at the indications of a disposition to heal up existing difficulties.” Noah Brooks’ dispatch to the Sacramento Union said, “The radicals … are as virulent and bitter as ever, and they have gladly seized upon this occasion to attempt to reorganize the faction which fought against Lincoln’s nomination. These men were the bitter opponents of new Louisiana in the last Congress, and they are enraged that the President should dare to utter his sentiments as antagonistic to theirs.”
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While the Radicals anguished over Lincoln’s leniency toward the rebels and regretted that he had not gone far enough in demanding black suffrage, there were others listening to Lincoln’s Reconstruction speech who were outraged that he had gone so far. When he uttered the words, “I would myself prefer that [voting rights] were now conferred on the very intelligent [blacks], and on those who serve our cause as soldiers,” it was the first time any President had publicly advocated giving blacks the vote.
“That means nigger citizenship,” muttered an angry man in the crowd that evening. He turned to one of his companions and urged him to shoot Lincoln on the spot. When his friend refused, the man turned to his other companion and growled, “Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.” The man was John Wilkes Booth.
Threats of assassination had blighted Lincoln’s presidency since before he took office—the Baltimore threat on his approach to Washington had been a spectacular example. In his desk he kept an envelope labeled “Assassination” which bulged with more than eighty death threats, from all sides. His secretary estimated that he received about one a day, observing that, “Not all of these letters, by any means, came from professed rebels; there was no want of variety in the avowed causes for hatred.” The times were so violent that assassination was threatened not only in the private mails, but also in the public print. During the previous election campaign, Wisconsin’s LaCrosse Democrat told its readers, “If Abraham Lincoln should be reelected for another term of four years of such wretched administration, we hope that a bold hand will be found to plunge the dagger into the tyrant’s heart for the public welfare.”
With so much danger, when so much was at risk, what was most remarkable about Lincoln’s security was that it was so lax. Political assassinations were alien to America. In the Old World, it was thought, such extreme measures were necessary to remove tyrants, but never in a republic whose leaders could be removed at the next election day. Lincoln’s closest advisor, William Seward, had said, “Assassination is not an American practice or habit, and one so vicious and so desperate cannot be engrafted into our political system. This conviction of mine has steadily gained strength since the Civil War began. Every day’s experience confirms it.” Lincoln was of the same opinion. When one evening General Butler rode with him four miles to the Soldiers’ Home, Butler was appalled that there was no guard, and protested, “I think you peril too much. We have passed a half dozen places where a well-directed bullet might have taken you off.” Lincoln reassured him, “Oh, assassination of public officers is not an American crime.”
Besides, being accessible was part of Lincoln’s job. The White House belonged to the public, and it was part of the republican tradition that anybody could meet with his President face to face. Lincoln, in fact, was irritated by arrangements for his personal safety. John Nicolay wrote that the President “had himself so sane a mind, and a heart so kindly, even to his enemies, that it was hard for him to believe in political hatred so deadly as to lead to murder.” William Crook, Lincoln’s guard, testified, “He hated being on his guard, and the fact that it was necessary to distrust his fellow-Americans saddened him… . Both from his own feelings and as a matter of policy, he did not want it blazoned over the country that it had been found necessary to guard the life of the President of the United States from assassination. It was not wise—especially at this critical time—to admit so great a lack of confidence in the people. He was sensitive about it, too. It hurt him to admit it.” As Lincoln told Stanton, “It is important that the people know I come among them without fear.”
Lincoln, in fact, had developed a curious indifference to his own safety. His lack of concern sprang from a profound fatalism. He had come to see a grand design in his election as President at a time of such grave danger to the Union, and was convinced that his fate was not in his own hands. Noah Brooks reported that one night, after walking with Lincoln, “I could not help saying that I thought his going to and fro in the darkness of the night, as it was usually his custom, often alone and unattended, was dangerous recklessness. That night, in deference to his wife’s anxious appeal, he had provided himself with a thick oaken stick. He laughed as he showed me this slight weapon, and said, but with some seriousness: ‘I long ago made up my mind that if anybody wants to kill me, he will do it. If I wore a shirt of mail, and kept myself surrounded by a body-guard, it would be all the same. There are a thousand ways of getting at a man if it is desired that he should be killed.’”
For much of the war, Lincoln was alone in his room in the evenings with no guards at the entrances to the White House. His secretaries stayed up late, remembered one, working “with a sharp eye and ear open for the footstep in the hall,” feeling that “in some vague and unaccountable way we were ‘on guard.’” A horrified visitor remarked on “the utterly unprotected condition of the president’s person, and the fact that any assassin or maniac, seeking his life, could enter his presence without the interference of a single armed man to hold him back. The entrance-doors, and all doors on the official side of the building, were open at all hours of the day, and very late into the evening; and I many times entered the mansion, and walked up to the rooms of the two private secretaries, as late as nine or ten o’clock at night, without seeing or being challenged by a single soul.” Lincoln explained to him, “It would never do for a President to have drawn sabres at his door, as if he were an emperor.”
Stanton placed a cavalry guard at the gates of the White House for a while, but, as Lincoln chuckled privately to a friend, he “worried until he got rid of it.” When Stanton provided a cavalry detachment to accompany him to and from the Soldiers’ Home, Lincoln complained that they were too noisy—“he and Mrs. Lincoln couldn’t hear themselves talk for the clatter of their sabres and spurs,” he told a guard, and, “as many
of them appeared new hands and very awkward, he was more afraid of being shot by the accidental discharge of one of their carbines or revolvers, than of any attempt on his life.” Furthermore, he thought it futile: “He said it seemed to him like putting up the gap in only one place when the fence was down all along.” When he could, he escaped his protectors, with chilling results. One evening in August of 1864, when Lincoln was riding to the Soldiers’ Home alone on horseback, someone fired a shot at him, sending a bullet through the crown of his stovepipe hat.
To those most vexed about his safety, he was a constant worry, walking at night through the streets of Washington alone or with a single companion, or strolling unguarded through the wooded White House grounds to the War Department to read the day’s dispatches. His habit of attending the theater accompanied only by Mary and one or two friends was particularly exasperating to U.S. Marshal Ward Lamon, who offered to resign after one such episode in late 1864, writing:
Tonight, as you have done on several previous occasions, you went unattended to the theatre. When I say unattended, I mean that you went alone with Charles Sumner and a foreign minister, neither of whom could defend himself against an assault from any able-bodied woman in this city. And you know, or ought to know, that your life is sought after, and will be taken unless you and your friends are cautious; for you have many enemies within our lines.
Lamon’s last sentence alluded to the sharp spike of malice toward Lincoln in the months after his reelection, as dissenting Northerners and ground-under-heel Southerners woke to the awful dawn of four more years of Lincoln’s “abuses.” Now that his enemies saw there would be no quick end to his term, a new swell of hostility threatened. There was an ugly temper in Washington as soldiers in blue began to be outnumbered by men in tattered gray. Knots of aimless, hard-looking men, the deserters of Lee’s army, drifted steadily into the capital in the last months of the war—more than a thousand in February, almost three thousand more in March. Nervous citizens were constantly on the alert for the ragged bands roaming the streets.
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All caution was forgotten, however, in the euphoria after the capture of Richmond and Lee’s surrender. And in the days around Lincoln’s Reconstruction speech, “Washington was a little delirious. Everybody was celebrating,” according to William Crook:
The city became disorderly with the men who were celebrating too hilariously. Those about the President lost somewhat of the feeling, usually present, that his life was not safe. It did not seem possible that, now that the war was over and the government … had been so magnanimous in its treatment of General Lee, after President Lincoln had offered himself a target for Southern bullets in the streets of Richmond and had come out unscathed, there could be danger. For my part, I had drawn a full breath of relief after we got out of Richmond, and had forgotten to be anxious since.
On April 14, Good Friday, Lincoln was himself buoyant, breathing deeply of Washington’s ongoing jubilee. The war was all but won. Sherman was expected hourly to telegraph an announcement of the surrender of the last large rebel army. It was the fourth anniversary of Sumter, and that day in Charleston, the festivities called for a speech by the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and a raising of the Stars and Stripes over the fort to the roar of massed cannon.
At the Cabinet meeting that morning, newly appointed Attorney General James Speed thought he had never seen Lincoln in better spirits. Frederick Seward, sitting in for his injured father, wrote that “visible relief and content” showed on Lincoln’s face. Stanton described him as “grander, graver, more thoroughly up to the occasion than he had ever seen him.” As his busy, pleasant day wound down, Noah Brooks and two old Illinois friends met with Lincoln for some light reminiscences. “He was unusually cheerful that evening, and never was more hopeful and buoyant,” remembered Brooks. “His conversation was full of fun and anecdotes, feeling especially jubilant at the prospect before us.”
A few minutes later, he stepped into the carriage with Mary for his short journey to Ford’s Theater.
Epilogue
The Sudden Saint
“The murderer’s bullet opens to him immortality.”
No living man was ever charged with political crimes of such multiplicity and such enormity as Abraham Lincoln. He has been denounced without end as a perjurer, a usurper, a tyrant, a subverter of the Constitution, a destroyer of the liberties of his country, a reckless desperado, a heartless trifler over the last agonies of an expiring nation. Had that which has been said of him been true there is no circle in Dante’s Inferno full enough of torment to expiate his iniquities.
So editorialized the New York Times the previous May. Now, in April of 1865, the war was won and Lincoln was murdered. Elation at the war’s end gave way to shock over the assassination, and so closely did one follow on the other that the red, white, and blue bunting of victory had to be torn down to put up the black crepe of mourning.
Lincoln had been shot on Good Friday, and the next day, April 15, the slow toll of church bells went on hour after hour, knelling not just a death, but a martyrdom. Pastors across America rewrote their Easter sermons to include a new, exalted view of Lincoln as an American Moses, a leader out of slavery, a national savior who was not allowed to cross over into the Promised Land. The sermons were read the next day to overflow congregations dressed in black. The people in the pews were the first to hear the mournful reappraisal of Lincoln after his murder. In the next few weeks, almost every prominent man in America would take up the new gospel. Suddenly, it had become to every man’s advantage to hallow the memory of the slain Lincoln.
Although many Northern pastors had criticized Lincoln’s policies while he was alive, they sang only praises on “Black Easter,” as people called it. The President had been dead only twenty-four hours, and even the breath of a rebuke of Lincoln in the Easter sermon would have caused a furor. Ministers weighed their words carefully in front of crowded, overwrought congregations. One who was not careful declared, “If Johnson pursues the same course as Lincoln, he will meet the same fate!” and was arrested for it. On this day, preachers could accuse Father Abraham of only one sin: of being too gentle, too lenient with Southern traitors who deserved a harsh justice. Some preached that this was why God had taken him just now. Out of the human instinct that demands that great events must have great causes, it seemed clear to everyone that the South must have been involved in the assassination, and that slavery was somehow responsible for Lincoln’s murder. Many proclaimed, like the Reverend Albert G. Palmer, “It was treason, it was the Rebellion, it was the internal wickedness of slavery that sped the ball … for the life of Abraham Lincoln.”
Even men who loathed Lincoln knew they must yield to his sudden sainthood. “This murder, this oozing blood, almost sanctify Lincoln,” wrote Count Gurowski on the day he died. “His end atones for all the short-comings for which he was blamed and condemned by earnest and unyielding patriots… . [W]hatever sacrifices his vacillations may have cost the people, those vacillations will now be forgiven… . The murderer’s bullet opens to him immortality.” Radical Senator James W. Grimes of Iowa, who had regarded Lincoln as “a disgrace,” glumly predicted on the day after the assassination, “Mr. Lincoln is to be hereafter regarded as a saint. All his foibles, and faults, and shortcomings, will be forgotten, and he will be looked upon as the Moses who led the nation through a four years’ bloody war, and died in sight of peace.” A journalist lamented, “It has made it impossible to speak the truth of Abraham Lincoln hereafter.”
Radical Lincoln-haters wasted no time in convening. On the afternoon of April 15, as shock mixed with grief in the North, they gathered in Washington only hours after Lincoln’s death. There, they rejoiced. “While everybody was shocked at his murder, the feeling was universal that [it] would prove a godsend to the country,” wrote George Julian, who was there. “I … have not in a long time heard so much profanity,” he wrote. “It became intolerably disgusting. Their hostility towards Lincoln’s polic
y of conciliation and contempt for his weakness were undisguised.”
Zachary Chandler, who was also there, wrote to his wife, “I believe that the Almighty continued Mr. Lincoln in office as long as he was useful and then substituted a better man [Andrew Johnson] to finish the work.” Ben Wade, Henry Winter Davis, and the others present agreed, of course, as did Radicals everywhere. Oliver Wendell Holmes, when he heard the news in Boston, judged that “more than likely Lincoln was not the best man for the work of reconstruction.” Wendell Phillips assured his listeners in a memorial speech at Tremont Temple the next week, “God has graciously withheld from him any fatal misstep in the great advance, and withdrawn him at the moment when his star touched its zenith, and the nation needed a sterner hand for the work God gives it to do.”
Even in the first few days after Lincoln’s murder, however, Lincoln’s Radical enemies saw that his death was a propaganda windfall—Lincoln could be made to stand for the North, for freedom, and his murderer for the South, for slavery.
* * *
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was the first to use the assassination as a weapon. When Mary Lincoln asked that her husband’s funeral be in Springfield, Stanton made it the business of his own War Department, and made the martyr’s corpse a traveling exhibit of Southern wickedness. He announced a funeral procession for Lincoln’s body that would traverse the North by slow train, retracing the same 1,600-mile route Lincoln had used when he came to Washington. The sight of Lincoln visible in his casket, surrounded by mute soldiers in blue, would fuse the sacrifice of Lincoln and the Union soldiers in the memories of millions who would witness the spectacle first-hand, and help cement Republican dominance for two generations.
