Curtis’s colleague Henry L. Dawes recalled that Howard’s story touched off “a sudden and painful revulsion of feeling” toward Lincoln, “which waited for neither reason nor explanation.” The “outcry came near being ‘away with him, crucify him.’ ‘He had sneaked into Washington,’ ‘he was a coward,’ ‘the man afraid to come through Baltimore was unfit to be president,’ ‘Frightened at his own shadow.’ ” Those “and worse epithets” greeted the president-elect.212 “These are not times for a high public officer to play the woman,” sneered some Philadelphians, who predicted that his “flight was a disgrace from which he can never recover.”213 Caricaturists ridiculed Lincoln mercilessly. George Templeton Strong rightly feared that “this surreptitious nocturnal dodging or sneaking of the President-elect into his capital city, under cloud of night, will be used to damage his moral position and throw ridicule on his Administration.”214 One journalist claimed that the night journey had ruined “the reputation Mr. Lincoln enjoyed for Jackson-like firmness and boldness that the people were anxious once again to see in an occupant of the Presidency.”215 An Indiana Republican leader opined that Lincoln “was in the hands of cowardly men” and that “the Republican cause has thereby been greatly damaged.” The president-elect “had better died in the transit” than ignominiously sneaking through Baltimore.216 The New York World expressed disbelief that “a man of his bold and open bearing, who has hewn his way with strength of arm, and will, and force of character to his present high position, would blench at the first show of danger, and of his own choice, travel by night into the capitol.”217
Republican newsmen who had been accompanying Lincoln called his change in plans “cowardly” and unfavorably compared his action to that of the South Carolinians: “They say nothing can excuse or justify such conduct. … Ill-advised, injudicious, indeed every epithet is showered upon the movement.” Worthington G. Snethen, a leading Baltimore Republican and a member of the disappointed welcoming committee, complained that “this was a shameful way to treat men who had risked their lives to vote for Lincoln, and that it would have been perfectly safe for Lincoln to have walked through the city.”218 In Michigan, the Republican governor expressed indignation: “I am ashamed when I think of what derision it will be received in the South. If Lincoln don’t take the reins vigorously in his own hands smite these villains ‘hip & thigh’ then the concern is not worth running any longer.”219 The Illinois State Register scolded Lincoln: “the dignity of his station, and regard for the character of the country, should have forbidden that he should sneak to the nation’s capital incog., like a refugee from justice.”220 Elsewhere in Illinois people had “a deep feeling of shame, mortification, sorrow & indignation.”221 Southern papers denounced Lincoln “as a coward, a more than coward, because of his sending his wife and family over a railroad and in a train in which he was afraid to travel himself.”222
Some Republicans defended Lincoln’s action. The Cincinnati Gazette speculated that if he had been killed, “civil war would have broken out immediately, for an enraged North would have blamed the South for the crime and taken swift revenge.” If Seward, Scott, Pinkerton, Judd, and the others had entertained any doubts about Lincoln’s safety, “it was their imperative duty to urge upon him to forego the Baltimore reception.”223 An Indiana Republican thought Lincoln had shown “true courage,” for if he had ignored the warnings and been attacked, “he would have been, in some degree, responsible for any acts of violence, outrage, or bloodshed” in Baltimore.224 “Who does not remember,” asked editor John W. Forney in the course of justifying Lincoln’s action, “only a few years ago, when, in broad daylight, some of these fiends in human shape murdered or wounded, or struck down, in the streets, a number of the most respected and influential citizens?”225 The Baltimore American called Lincoln’s action “a simple and practical avoidance of what might have been an occasion of disorder and of mortification to all interested in the preservation of the good name of our city.”226
Lincoln may have overreacted to a threat that was perhaps exaggerated, but given the bloody history of Baltimore mobs and the fatal attack they were to make on Union troops passing through that city on April 19, his decision seems to have been a reasonable precaution, especially since the warnings came from independent sources. Yet Lincoln came to rue that decision, telling friends that he considered it one of the worst mistakes he ever made. His embarrassment at appearing weak and fearful may have disposed him in the momentous coming weeks to avoid steps that might deepen that unfortunate impression.
20
“I Am Now Going to Be Master”
Inauguration
(February 23–March 4, 1861)
The nation’s capital, with its 75,000 inhabitants, was little more impressive in 1861 than it had been when Lincoln first set foot there thirteen years earlier. “As in 1800 and 1850, so in 1860, the same rude colony was camped in the same forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for workrooms, and sloughs for roads,” according to Henry Adams.1 It was traversed by a noisome canal, which was little more than a malarial open sewer. Henry Villard described the town as “a great straggling encampment of brick and mortar, spread over an infinite deal of space, and diversified with half a dozen government palaces, all in a highly aggravating and inconvenient state of incompleteness.” Society was “shifting, unreliable, and vagabondish to the last degree,” and it was “always full of cormorants, speculators, and adventurers.” Its hotels were “vast caravansaries of noise and rush,” its markets extremely expensive, its newspapers insubstantial, and its hot, humid climate “among the worst in the world.”2
Lincoln’s arrival cheered up the town, which had been in despair as the South girded for war and the Buchanan administration dithered. The influential journalist John W. Forney noticed “more joyous faces this Sabbath morning than I have met in years. The friends of the Union, on the streets and in the hotels, are full of buoyant hope, and the enemies of the Union are correspondingly cast down.” The president-elect’s appearance among them, “like the return of Napoleon to Paris from Elba, has effected a magical change in the opinions of politicians, and the anticipations of the local population.”3 Yet people were unsure what the president-elect’s policy would be, for his speeches en route to the capital had oscillated between hard-line and conciliatory approaches to secession.
Dealing with the Washington Peace Conference
Fatigued from the long trip, Lincoln relaxed before breakfasting with Seward, who at 11 A.M. escorted him to the White House. His visit surprised President Buchanan. After a brief chat with the lame-duck chief executive, Lincoln was introduced to the members of his cabinet. On the way back to Willard’s, he called on General Scott briefly. That afternoon, the president-elect was, as Iowa Senator James Harlan recalled, “overwhelmed with callers. The room in which he stood, the corridors and halls and stairs leading to it, were crowded full of people, each one, apparently, intent on obtaining an opportunity to say a few words to him privately.”4 On March 2, John Hay reported that his boss “sits all day in his parlor at Willard’s, receiving moist delegations of bores. That he is not before this torn in pieces, like Actaeon, is due to the vigor of his constitution, and the imperturbability of his temperament.”5
On the evening of February 23, Mary Lincoln and the rest of the presidential entourage reached Washington. In Baltimore, an unruly mob had greeted them with three loud cheers for Jefferson Davis and three groans for Lincoln. As the party detrained in the Monumental City, the crowd surged back and forth with such force that it drove people off the platform and trampled them. Roughneck boys and men, not content merely to knock the hats off of leading Republicans, surrounded Mrs. Lincoln’s car, insulting her rudely. Captain John Pope overheard many ugly expressions and observed several menacing faces amid the crowd, which he thought “consisted precisely of the people capable of [committing an] outrage.”6
Nonetheless, at lunch Mrs. Lincoln told her hosts “that she felt at home in Baltimore, an
d being a Kentuckian, was sometimes too conservative for some of Mr. Lincoln’s friends.”7 She added that “her husband was determined to pursue a conservative course.”8 With “much indignation” she denounced Lincoln’s advisors and said that she had recommended that he “not depart from the route which he had first intended to take.”9 In Washington she continued to proclaim her conservative views.
That night, after dining with Seward, Lincoln held an informal reception for members of the Washington Peace Conference. Lucius E. Chittenden, a delegate from Vermont, admired Lincoln’s great aplomb in dealing with a group that included some political opponents. “The manner in which he adjusted his conversation to representatives of different sections and opinions was striking,” Chittenden recalled. “He could not have appeared more natural or unstudied in his manner if he had been entertaining a company of neighbors in his Western home.”10 Lincoln impressed them with his uncanny memory. As he was introduced to the delegates by their last names, he recalled most of their first names and middle initials. To several he mentioned their family histories. Betraying no anxiety, he conversed with them warmly, candidly, and with animation. He paid special attention to Southern delegates, particularly the Virginia Unionist William C. Rives, a former senator and minister to France. The diminutive, venerable Rives told his son that when he was presented to Lincoln, the president-elect “took me cordially by the hand—said he had imagined I was at least six foot high, as he always formed an idea of every person he had heard much of. On my remarking to him … that I felt myself to be a small man in his presence—he said aloud, so that all the company heard him, ‘you are any how a giant in intellect.’ I bowed & retired. This piece of Western free & easy compliment passed off among his admirers for first rate Parisian cleverness & tact.” Some Southern delegates took umbrage at Lincoln’s words, calling him a “boor” and a “cross-roads lawyer.” To Rives, Lincoln appeared “to be good natured & well-intentioned, but utterly unimpressed with the gravity of the crisis & the magnitude of his duties.” He “seems to think of nothing but jokes & stories. I fear, therefore, we are to expect but little from his influence with the Convention.”11
When introduced to the unusually tall Alexander W. Doniphan of Missouri, the president-elect asked: “Is this Doniphan, who made that splendid march across the Plains, and swept the swift Camanchee before him?” The general modestly acknowledged that he was that man. “Then you come up to the standard of my expectations,” said Lincoln.12 Recalling their days in Congress together, Lincoln told Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, “I had to bid you good-bye just at the time when our intimacy had ripened to a point for me to tell you my stories.”13
Asked if he backed the plan that the Peace conferees seemed likely to adopt—James Guthrie’s report urging restoration of the Missouri Compromise line, along with half a dozen less controversial measures—Lincoln allegedly “said he had not thoroughly examined it, and was not therefore prepared to give an opinion. If there was no surrender of principle in it[,] it would be acceptable to him.”14 (Unlike the Crittenden Compromise, Gutherie’s proposal stipulated that no new territory could be acquired without the approval of a majority of both the Slave and the Free States.) Although this statement seemed to indicate that Lincoln would support compromise measures, Massachusetts delegate John Z. Goodrich reported after a brief conversation with him that “I cannot doubt he is firm & desires no compromise.”15 Most callers were unable to tell which way the discreet president-elect leaned. “Everybody here seems to look to Lincoln & Lincoln says ‘delighted to see you &c &c’, but no one gets his tongue & everyone has his ear,” reported a fellow guest at Willard’s.16
One who did get Lincoln’s tongue was the New York merchant William E. Dodge, who expressed fears that “the whole nation shall be plunged into bankruptcy” and that “grass shall grow in the streets of our commercial cities.” Lincoln sternly replied that he would carry out his oath of office to defend the Constitution: “It must be so respected, obeyed, enforced, and defended, let the grass grow where it may.” In a more conciliatory tone he added, “If it depends upon me, the grass will not grow anywhere except in the fields and the meadows.”17
The Peace Conference seemed unable to reach a consensus; on February 26, it voted down Guthrie’s report. The following day, however, after the Illinois delegation reversed itself—perhaps at Lincoln’s instigation—that report was approved, cheering up friends of conciliation. “Every one seemed to breathe easier and freer than before,” wrote a former Ohio congressman. Southern Unionists “were especially joyous and reanimated, not because they had obtained all they had desired, but because they believed the recommendations of the convention would effectually arrest the tide of secession in their states if they were favorably received by Congress.”18 Lincoln’s Illinois friend William H. L. Wallace, who had come to the capital to angle for a government job, told his wife that the outcome of the conference “gives great satisfaction to all conservative men of all parties. Indeed the crisis seemed so threatening that most good men forgot party & only regarded the safety of the country.” Governor Thomas Hicks of Maryland informed Wallace “that if the conference adjourned without doing anything, … he should immediately call the Legislature of his state together & the state would at once secede.” Similarly, John Bell confided that Tennessee would probably have pulled out of the Union if the Conference had fizzled.19
Lincoln may have persuaded his fellow Illinoisans serving as delegates at the Peace Conference to change their minds. One member of the Prairie State delegation, John M. Palmer, recalled that the president-elect “advised us to deal as liberally as possible with the subject of slavery.” (Palmer voted for the Guthrie report with some reluctance.)20 Moreover, the motion to reconsider was made by Lincoln’s former law partner, good friend, mentor, and political ally, Stephen T. Logan. On February 25, John W. Forney reported that Palmer and Logan “have been closeted with him [Lincoln] since his arrival here.”21 The “reconsideration was attributed to the interference of Mr. Lincoln or of his recognized friends,” a Massachusetts delegate recalled.22
On February 26, the Conference adjourned earlier than planned, evidently so that its members could meet with the president-elect. Governor Hicks warned Lincoln that if the delegates failed to approve a compromise proposal, Maryland would promptly secede. That night, Stephen A. Douglas begged Lincoln to consult with the Illinois commissioners and thereby save the Union. The senator warned that if the Conference failed to agree on a compromise plan, the Upper South and Border States might well secede. He “reminded Mr. Lincoln that he had children as well as Mr. Douglas, and implored him, ‘in God’s name, to act the patriot, and to save to our children a country to live in.’ ” Lincoln “listened respectfully and kindly, and assured Mr. Douglas that his mind was engrossed with the great theme which they had been discussing, and expressed his gratification at the interview.”23 The president-elect then met with Illinois’s delegates, who the next day voted for Guthrie’s report.
That same night several other commissioners (including Rives and George W. Summers of Virginia, Guthrie and Charles S. Morehead of Kentucky, and Doniphan) also urged the president-elect to support a compromise. Lincoln reminded Rives of Aesop’s fable about a lion who fell in love with a beautiful damsel, “and how the lion who desired to pay his addresses, solicited permission from the bride’s father, and how the father consented, but with the advice that as the lion’s teeth were sharp and the claws long, and not at all handsome, he advised the King of Beasts to pull out the one and cut off the other, which being done, the good father easily knocked the lion in the head. So when we have surrendered Fort Sumter, South Carolina will do this with us.” When Rives and others insisted that Sumter “could not be relieved without the loss of thousands of lives, and to hold it was but a barren honor,” Lincoln replied with a dramatic proposal to solve the Sumter crisis: “You, gentlemen, are members of the Convention. Go to Richmond. Pass a resolution that Virginia will not in any event sece
de, and I may then agree with you in the fact a State any day is worth more than a fort!”24 Morehead recorded that in response to Rives’s comment about Virginia seceding if coercive measures were taken, Lincoln jumped up and exclaimed: “Mr. Rives! Mr. Rives! if Virginia will stay in, I will withdraw the troops from Fort Sumpter.”25 (Months later, the president, referring to this conversation, “talked about Secession Compromise and other such. He spoke of a committee of Southern Pseudo Unionists coming to him before Inauguration for guarantees &c. He promised to evacuate Sumter if they would break up their Convention, without any row or nonsense. They demurred.”)26 This was not the last time Lincoln would make that offer.
The following day, just after the Guthrie scheme won approval with the help of Illinois’s commissioners, Lincoln told Washington city leaders “that though the plan of settlement adopted by the Peace Convention was not the one he would have suggested, he regarded it as very fortunate for the country that its labors had thus eventuated harmoniously.”27 Some stiff-back Republicans who held Lincoln responsible for passage of the Guthrie plan loudly denounced the Conference’s action and threatened “to give their faithless choice for the Presidency the slip.”28 The only senate Republican who endorsed submitting the Peace Conference plan (a constitutional amendment with seven sections) to the states was Lincoln’s close friend Edward D. Baker. No hard evidence suggests that the Oregon senator took that stand at Lincoln’s urging, but he may well have done so. Despite Baker’s support, the Guthrie proposal went nowhere in Congress.
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2 Page 8
