Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  At City Point, a Confederate prisoner of war, General Rufus Barringer, asked to see Lincoln, who expressed keen interest in meeting him. “I have never seen a live rebel general in full uniform,” he remarked. When the captive identified himself as a brother of Daniel Barringer, whom the president had befriended when they both served in Congress, Lincoln relaxed and joyfully reminisced about his days as a U.S. Representative. After a long conversation, he innocently asked Barringer: “Do you think I can be of any service to you?” Everyone in earshot laughed heartily at such a quaint question. Realizing how naïve he sounded, Lincoln quickly began writing a note to Stanton. As he did so, he told Barringer: “I suppose they will send you to Washington, and there I have no doubt they will put you in the old Capitol prison. I am told it isn’t a nice sort of a place, and I am afraid you won’t find it a very comfortable tavern; but I have a powerful friend in Washington—he’s the biggest man in the country,—and I believe I have some influence with him when I don’t ask too much. Now I want you to send this card of introduction to him, and if he takes the notion he may put you on your parole, or let up on you that way or some other way. Anyhow, it’s worth trying.” The note asked Stanton to make Barringer’s “detention in Washington as comfortable as possible.” Speechless at this display of presidential magnanimity, Barringer left the tent and burst into tears. He was paroled three months later.313

  On April 6, Mary Lincoln returned to City Point and once again engaged in hysterics. She came with an entourage consisting of her confidante-cum-dressmaker Elizabeth Keckly, Senator Charles Sumner and his young French friend Charles Adolphe Pineton (the Marquis de Chambrun), James Speed, Assistant Secretary of the Interior William T. Otto, and Iowa Senator James Harlan with his wife and daughter Mary, who was the object of Robert Lincoln’s affections. The First Lady, sorely disappointed that she had been unable to accompany her husband on his entry into Richmond two days earlier, was eager to tour that city. So while Lincoln attended to business, she and her friends headed up the James for the Confederate capital.

  Upon her return the following day, she expressed a desire to visit Petersburg. Lincoln reluctantly agreed to join her. She put a damper on the event by behaving much as she had done two weeks earlier. Just as she had then snapped at Mrs. Grant for daring to sit next to her, she now scolded Mrs. Harlan for a similar breach of etiquette. Making matters worse, she exploded in anger at Admiral Porter for inviting his wife as well as Mrs. Harlan and other ladies to join the excursion. According to Porter, she threw herself on the ground and tore her hair. Later she upbraided him in a “very sharp letter.” Porter laconically noted that Mrs. Lincoln had “an extremely jealous disposition.”314

  Some black servants aboard the River Queen wished to accompany the presidential party. Chambrun reported that Lincoln, who “was blinded by no prejudices against race or color” and who “had not what can be termed false dignity,” invited them to sit with him and his companions.315 In Petersburg, he got off one of his better puns. At a house which George L. Hartsuff had commandeered as his headquarters, the general explained that its owner was demanding rent. Pointing to a hole in the wall created by a Union artillery shell, Lincoln quipped, “I think our batteries have given him rents enough without asking for more.”316 That morning he also sent Grant a telegram which succinctly expressed the iron determination that characterized his leadership throughout the war: “Gen. Sheridan says ‘If the thing is pressed I think that Lee will surrender.’ Let the thing be pressed.”317

  As the visitors toured the town, where most houses were closed and most shops either abandoned or vandalized, blacks crowded the streets to cheer their liberator while whites hastily sought refuge to avoid having to look upon him. After consulting with General Hartsuff, Lincoln reported to his companions that “[a]nimosity in the town is abating, the inhabitants now accept accomplished facts, the final downfall of the Confederacy, and the abolition of slavery. There still remains much for us to do, but every day brings new reason for confidence in the future.”318 On the way back to City Point, he ordered the carriage to halt before a tall tree, whose beauty he analyzed. Like a botany teacher lecturing students, he pointed out its strong trunk and elaborate branches, comparing it to an oak and striving to make his fellow passengers appreciate the distinctive character of different types of trees.

  Farewell to City Point: Hospital Visits

  The next night Lincoln returned to Washington, where Seward had recently been injured in a carriage accident. Before departing, the president spent five hours visiting the hospitals of each corps, despite the doctors’ warning that greeting thousands of men would be more than he could endure. When the physicians spoke proudly of the hospital facilities, he replied: “Gentlemen, you know better than I how to conduct these hospitals, but I came here to take by the hand the men who have achieved our glorious victories.”319 And so he began shaking hands with the wounded. Private Wilbur Fisk noted that Lincoln “appeared to take delight in it. I believe he had almost as much pleasure in honoring the boys, as the boys did in receiving the honor from him. It was an unexpected honor, coming from the man upon whom the world is looking with so much interest, and the boys were pleased with it beyond measure. Everything passed off in a very quiet manner; there was no crowding or disorder of any kind.” The patients who were not bedridden formed a line along which Lincoln passed, speaking to every one as he shook hands:

  “Are you well, sir?”

  “How do you do to-day?”

  “How are you, sir?”

  Then he entered the stockades and tents to greet those too weak to join the line. Fisk commented that “Mr. Lincoln presides over millions of people, and each individual share of his attention must necessarily be very small, and yet he wouldn’t slight the humblest of them all. … The men not only reverence and admire Mr. Lincoln, but they love him.”320

  After shaking the hands of all the Union soldiers, he turned to enter tents housing Confederate wounded.

  “Mr. President, you do not want to go in there!” exclaimed a doctor.

  “Why not, my boy?” he asked.

  “Why, sir, they are sick rebel prisoners.”

  “That is just where I do want to go,” he said and shook the hands of many surprised Confederates.321

  Nearly every soldier asked the president about the military and political situation and smiled with happiness when Lincoln said: “Success all along the line.” He assured them that the war would end within six weeks.322

  Lincoln’s mood in his final days at the front oscillated between hearty bonhomie and sad introspection. Chambrun recalled that “it was rare to converse with him a while without feeling something poignant. … Mr. Lincoln was quite humorous, although one could always detect a bit of irony in his humor. He would relate anecdotes, seeking always to bring the point out clearly. He willingly laughed either at what was being said to him, or at what he said himself. But all of a sudden he would retire within himself; then he would close his eyes, and all his features would at once bespeak a kind of sadness as indescribable as it was deep. After a while, as though it were by an effort of his will, he would shake off this mysterious weight under which he seemed bowed; his generous and open disposition would again reappear. In one evening I happened to count over twenty of these alternations and contrasts.”

  In discussing peace plans, Lincoln emphasized the need to show mercy to the defeated foe. When it was suggested that Jefferson Davis be hanged, he calmly replied: “Let us judge not, that we be not judged.” Told that the suffering of Union soldiers in Libby Prison should trump the claims of mercy, he repeated that biblical injunction twice. When Chambrun alluded to the possibility of war between France and the United States over Napoleon III’s intervention in Mexico, Lincoln remarked: “There has been war enough. I know what the American people want, but, thank God, I count for something, and during my second term there will be no more fighting.”

  In the afternoon, Lincoln asked a military band to play “La M
arseillaise,” saying “he had a great liking for that tune.” To Chambrun he noted the irony of the situation: “You must come over to America to hear it.” (Napoleon III had banned that revolutionary anthem from France.) Upon learning that Chambrun was unfamiliar with the song “Dixie,” he requested the band to strike it up, much to the musicians’ surprise. “That tune is now Federal property; it belongs to us, and, at any rate, it is good to show the rebels that with us they will be free to hear it again.”323

  At 10 P.M., the River Queen weighed anchor and headed for Washington. As it pulled away, Lincoln, lost in thought, stood at the rail gazing at the distant hills. He continued to meditate long after they disappeared from view. It is hard to imagine the profound feelings that ran through his mind that night. He probably reviewed the entire course of the war, from the shelling of Fort Sumter through the capture of Richmond. He may have thought of all the blood shed by the 620,000 men killed over the past four years, including friends like Elmer Ellsworth, Ben Hardin Helm, and Edward D. Baker; all the wounded, many of whom he had spoken to that day; all the mourning widows and orphans; all the vast destruction of property, so vividly apparent amid the ruins of Petersburg and Richmond. Counterbalancing those grim reflections, he probably derived immense satisfaction recalling the joy of the liberated slaves who thronged about him in those two cities. How could justice for those people be secured while simultaneously granting mercy to their former masters?

  Lincoln and Congress had both addressed the problem of Reconstruction and had reached an impasse. He had stuck by his Ten Percent plan and the Radicals had countered with the Wade–Davis bill. He had stymied them with his veto; they had thwarted him by refusing to recognize the Louisiana government and seat its congressmen and senators. His principal motive in framing Reconstruction policy had been to induce the Confederates to surrender. Now that the war was virtually over, should he move to compromise with the Radicals? If so, how far?

  36

  “I Feel a Presentiment That I Shall Not

  Outlast the Rebellion. When It Is Over, My

  Work Will Be Done.”

  The Final Days

  (April 9–15, 1865)

  Lincoln had no doubt that the Union would ultimately triumph, but, he said in July 1864, “I may not live to see it. I feel a presentiment that I shall not outlast the rebellion. When it is over, my work will be done.”1 To Harriet Beecher Stowe he made a similar prediction: “Whichever way it [the war] ends, I have the impression that I shan’t last long after it’s over.”2 He told his friend Owen Lovejoy that he might die even before peace came: “This war is eating my life out; I have a strong impression that I shall not live to see the end.”3

  Return to Washington

  On April 9, as Lee was surrendering to Grant at Appomattox, the River Queen sailed up Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River. Thomas Stackpole, a White House steward, reported that en route, the First Lady struck her husband in the face, damned him, and cursed him. At a dinner party aboard ship, Mrs. Keckly observed a young captain try to make pleasant conversation: “Mrs. Lincoln, you should have seen the President the other day, on his triumphal entry into Richmond. He was the cynosure of all eyes. The ladies kissed their hands to him, and greeted him with the waving of handkerchiefs. He is quite a hero when surrounded by pretty young ladies.” The officer “suddenly paused with a look of embarrassment. Mrs. Lincoln turned to him with flashing eyes, with the remark that his familiarity was offensive to her. Quite a scene followed.”4 Mary Harlan similarly recalled how a young officer aboard the River Queen described an episode of the president’s visit to Richmond: all doors were closed to Lincoln save one, which “was opened furtively and a fair hand extended a bunch of flowers, which he took.” Mrs. Lincoln “made manifest her dislike of the story, much to the narrator’s chagrin.”5

  To his shipboard companions Lincoln read for hours, mostly from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. After reciting the thane’s guilty soliloquy following the murder of his cousin, King Duncan, the president remarked “how true a description of the murderer that one was; when, the dark deed achieved, its tortured perpetrator came to envy the sleep of his victim.” He read that scene several times. While passing Mount Vernon, Adolphe de Chambrun predicted to Lincoln that Americans would one day revere his house in Springfield as much as they did George Washington’s estate. “Springfield! How happy, four years hence, will I be to return there in peace and tranquility!” the president exclaimed.6 A few days earlier, when John Todd Stuart had asked him if he intended to return to the Illinois capital after his presidency, Lincoln replied: “Mary does not expect ever to go back there, and don’t want to go—but I do—I expect to go back and make my home in Springfield for the rest of my life.”7

  During the voyage, Lincoln did not discuss his Reconstruction policy with Charles Sumner, its chief opponent. Instead, he reminisced, observing that he could not understand why people thought Seward had been his chief advisor. “I have counseled with you twice as much as I ever did with him,” he told the Massachusetts senator.8 As they approached Washington, the First Lady said: “That city is full of our enemies.” Lincoln impatiently exclaimed: “Enemies! We must never speak of that!”9

  Last Public Speech

  Lincoln rejoiced greatly at Lee’s surrender. “The very day after his return from Richmond,” Stanton recalled, “I passed with him some of the happiest moments of my life; our hearts beat with exultation at the victories.”10 But the president did not long indulge in celebrating, for he had to deal with the thorny issues of Reconstruction. On April 10, when Virginia Governor Francis H. Pierpont congratulated him on the fall of Richmond, he replied: “I want it distinctly understood that I claim no part nor lot in the honor of the military movements in front of Richmond[.] All the honor belongs to the military. After I went to the front, I made two or three suggestions to Gen. Grant about military movements, and he knocked the sand from under me so quickly that I concluded I knew nothing about it and offered no more advice.” From Pierpont, Lincoln wanted information rather than congratulations. What should be done in Virginia now that Lee had surrendered? Elements of the disloyal state legislature had reassembled in Richmond but had overstepped their mandate. Should Pierpont, as governor of loyal Virginia (based in Alexandria) proceed to the state capital? How would people there receive him? “Will they rush forward and try to seize all the offices?” he asked. “Will they sulk and do nothing? … Is there any Union sentiment among the Southern people strong enough to develop itself? If so, what measures should be adopted to foster this sentiment?” Lincoln enjoined Pierpont to be “industrious, and ascertain what Union sentiment there is in Virginia, and keep me advised.”11

  Virginia was a special case, since it had a Unionist government (under Pierpont) already in place. What about the other states lately in rebellion? Of them, Louisiana was furthest along the road to restoration. Lincoln wanted to continue nurturing the Hahn government there and win congressional recognition for it. But to do so he had to overcome the resistance of Radicals in Congress, many of whom shared Andrew Johnson’s view that “treason must be made odious” and “traitors must be impoverished, their social power broken.” Wealthy Confederates should be arrested, tried, convicted, and hanged, the vice-president said: “We have put down these traitors in arms; let us put them down in law, in public judgment, and in the morals of the world.”12 When an abolitionist suggested disfranchisement rather than execution would be the best punishment for Rebel leaders, Johnson replied: “a very good way to disfranchise them is to break their necks!”13

  Less punitive Radicals, concerned more about protecting former slaves than punishing their erstwhile masters, championed black suffrage. Salmon P. Chase wrote Lincoln predicting that “it will be, hereafter, counted equally a crime & a folly if the colored loyalists of the rebel states shall be left to the control of restored rebels.”14 On April 11, Lincoln moved dramatically closer to those Radicals in a carefully prepared address delivered from the White House, in
which he indirectly responded to Chase.

  On April 10, the president was twice serenaded by thousands of cheering Washingtonians, who clamored for a speech. To their disappointment, he replied that he would not deliver one then but would do so the next day. As a gesture to placate them, he instructed the Marine band to play “Dixie.” In justifying that selection, he jocularly explained: “I have always thought ‘Dixie’ one of the best tunes I have ever heard. Our adversaries over the way attempted to appropriate it, but I insisted yesterday that we fairly captured it. [Applause.] I presented the question to the Attorney General, and he gave it as his legal opinion that it is our lawful prize. [Laughter and applause.] I now request the band to favor me with its performance.”15 The way for this magnanimous gesture had been paved by young Tad, who preceded his father at the window, waving a Confederate flag (the one that Elmer Ellsworth had torn down in May 1861) until a servant yanked him away, much to the amusement of the assembled multitude.

  The night of April 11, Lincoln, as promised, delivered a formal speech to a crowd whose response to his appearance was unusually intense. Standing near him, Noah Brooks found “something terrible about the enthusiasm with which the beloved Chief Magistrate was received—cheers upon cheers, wave after wave of applause rolled up, the President modestly standing quiet until it was over.”16 Elizabeth Keckly wrote that she “never saw such a mass of heads before. It was like a black, gently swelling sea. The swaying motion of the crowd, in the dim uncertain light, was like the rising and falling of billows—like the ebb and flow of the tide upon the stranded shore of the ocean. Close to the house the faces were plainly discernible, but they faded into mere ghostly outlines on the outskirts of the assembly; and what added to the weird, spectral beauty of the scene, was the confused hum of voices that rose above the sea of forms, sounding like the subdued, sullen roar of an ocean storm, or the wind soughing through the dark lonely forest. It was a grand and imposing scene.”17