Lincoln: A Photobiography

by Russell Freedman

  In late afternoon, Lincoln would go for a carriage ride with Mary, taking in the fresh air as they drove through the countryside, accompanied by a cavalry escort. Sometimes they stopped to chat with soldiers at an army mess or a military hospital before returning to the White House. If there was no official function that evening, the Lincolns might attend the opera or theatre, which Mary loved. Or Lincoln might relax with a small group of close friends, becoming his old self again, "the cheeriest of talkers, the riskiest of storytellers," as one friend said.

  On most evenings, Lincoln returned to his office after dinner and worked late into the night by lamplight. His last chore before going to bed was to stop at the War Department telegraph room and read the latest dispatches from the front.

  Wounded Union soldiers in a Washington hospital ward. Lincoln also visited Confederate wounded when he toured a hospital. According to Dr. Jerome Walker, "...He was just as kind, his handshakings just as hearty, his interest just as real for the welfare of the men, as when he was among our own soldiers."

  On the Western front, Union armies had been winning a string of victories. On July 4, 1863—the day after the battle at Gettysburg—the fortified city of Vicksburg, the last important Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi, had surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant. By the time of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Grant's armies were fighting their way through Tennessee, heading for Georgia and the heart of the Confederacy. Grant had emerged as the one commander the president could count on. Early in 1864, Lincoln called the whiskered, cigar-smoking general to Washington and appointed him as the new general in chief of all Union armies.

  Ulysses S. ("Unconditional Surrender") Grant, Lincoln's favorite commander. He became general in chief in 1864.

  Together, Grant and Lincoln worked out a plan to smash the Confederacy. They would launch coordinated offensives on all fronts, pounding at the rebels from every direction. In the East, Grant would personally direct a new drive against Lee's troops in Virginia, pushing toward the rebel capital at Richmond. In the West, Union forces under General William Tecumseh Sherman would advance from Tennessee into Georgia to strike at the crucial railway center of Atlanta. Then Sherman would drive north toward Virginia, squeezing the Confederacy in a pincer. Lincoln was hopeful. "Grant is the first general I have had," he said. "You know how it has been with all the rest. They wanted me to be the general. I am glad to find a man who can go ahead without me."

  In May 1864, the mightiest offensive of the war began. Grant marched into Virginia, but he met stubborn resistance from Lee's newly rebuilt army in a densely wooded area called the Wilderness. "I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer," Grant declared. Unfortunately, that's what happened. After fighting three major battles near Richmond, Grant was unable to take the city. And his losses were staggering. About fifty-four thousand Union soldiers were killed or wounded during the Wilderness campaign. "Those poor fellows," Lincoln grieved, "this suffering, this loss of life."

  Throughout the North, people were shocked by the death toll. Once again a cry went up to end the slaughter and bring the boys home. With all his other troubles, Lincoln now had to worry about the presidential election scheduled for 1864. Northern Democrats were determined to turn the president out of office. And there were some Republicans, members of Lincoln's own party, who talked of dumping him in favor of another candidate. They felt that Lincoln wasn't pushing the war vigorously enough, that he would be too easy on the South once the war was over, that in any case, he was too unpopular to win reelection.

  Lincoln wanted to stay in office. Reelection alone would show that the people approved of his emancipation policy. He felt that he was "not entirely unworthy to be entrusted with the place" he had occupied since 1861. Most Republicans still supported the president, and now he exerted all his presidential powers of patronage and persuasion to rally the party and whip reluctant Republicans into line. In June, he was nominated for a second term by a National Union convention representing both Republicans and "war Democrats."

  Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

  Then the Democrats nominated their candidate—General George B. McClellan, the very same McClellan that Lincoln had dismissed as commander of the Union armies. McClellan ran against Lincoln on a peace platform, promising to stop the fighting right away and restore both the Union and slavery.

  A political cartoon from the campaign of 1864 shows Lincoln, General McClellan, and Jefferson Davis fighting over the Union.

  The summer of 1864 was the most dismal period of Lincoln's presidential career. People in the North were weary of the constant calls for more men, the growing casualty lists, the lack of progress. Friends and foes alike felt certain that Lincoln could not win the election. Some Republicans appealed to the president to step down in favor of a stronger candidate, and Lincoln himself believed that he might lose. In a secret memorandum, he outlined his plans to hand over power in an orderly manner should the election go against him. "It seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be reelected," he wrote.

  As the election approached, there was good news—sensational news! Down in Georgia, General Sherman had finally pushed his way to Atlanta, and after a long siege, the city had surrendered. "Atlanta is ours," Sherman reported. The general ordered an evacuation of the city and had his troops destroy everything of military value—warehouses, factories, and army depots.

  William Tecumseh Sherman led the Union advance into Georgia. An advocate of total war, Sherman declared: " We are not only fighting hostile armies, hut a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war."

  With Atlanta in flames, Sherman set out on a devastating march across Georgia, destroying fields and driving off livestock, bringing fire and ruin to everything in his path. Up in Virginia, cavalry troops under General Philip Sheridan were battering rebel forces in the Shenandoah Valley. Grant, meanwhile, was tightening his stranglehold on Richmond.

  Union victories had come at last. By Election Day on November 8, it was clear that the end of the war was in sight. Lincoln's policies had been vindicated after all, and the president's Republican critics rallied around him. He won reelection by nearly half a million votes out of some four million cast.

  Lincoln regarded the election as a mandate to push forward with his emancipation program. For months he had been urging Congress to pass a constitutional amendment that would outlaw slavery everywhere in America, not just in the rebel South, but in the loyal border states as well. Lincoln knew that his Emancipation Proclamation, a wartime measure, could be overturned at any time by the courts, by Congress itself, or by a future president. A constitutional amendment would get rid of slavery permanently.

  As the winter of 1864 began, Lincoln put tremendous pressure on congressmen who opposed the amendment. The final vote came on January 31, 1865, when a cheering House of Representatives approved the Thirteenth Amendment, prohibiting slavery in the United States. Lincoln hailed the vote as a "great moral victory" William Lloyd Garrison, the Boston abolitionist who had often criticized Lincoln, now called him "presidential chainbreaker for millions of the oppressed."

  A month later, on March 4, Lincoln stood before the Capitol and took his oath of office a second time. The pressures of the war showed clearly in the president's face. His features, a friend noted, were "haggard with care, tempest tossed and weatherbeaten."

  Lincoln had thought long and deeply about the horrors of the war, trying to understand why the nation had been swept up into such violence, destruction, and death. At first the issue had seemed the salvation of the Union, but in the end, slavery had become the issue. The war had demonstrated that the Union could survive only if it were all free.

  In his second Inaugural Address, Lincoln called slavery a hateful and evil practice—a sin in the sight of God. North and South alike shared the guilt of slavery, he declared. "This mighty scourge of war" was a terrible retribution, a punishment for allowing human bondage to
flourish on the nation's soil. Now slavery was abolished, and the time had come for healing. Lincoln felt no malice, no hatred of the Southern people who had taken up arms against the United States:

  "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations."

  Even as Lincoln spoke, the Union war machine was sweeping toward a final victory. Sherman had marched from Atlanta to the sea, capturing the coastal city of Savannah, then slashing his way northward through the Southern heartland. Charleston, South Carolina, where the war had started, surrendered to Union forces in February. By March, Sherman had invaded North Carolina and was driving toward a rendezvous with Grant's armies in Virginia.

  Richmond was still under siege. On April 2, Robert E. Lee notified Confederate President Jefferson Davis that he could no longer hold his lines. Richmond would have to be evacuated. That night, Davis and his government fled to Danville, Virginia, burning bridges and warehouses behind them. The flames swept through Richmond, setting hundreds of buildings ablaze. When Union troops marched into the city on April 3, their first job was to put out the fire.

  The ruins of Charleston, South Carolina, at war's end.

  The next day, Lincoln sailed up the lames River with his son Tad and a small military escort, so he could see for himself the capital that had been the seat of rebellion for four years. A pall of smoke hung over the city as he stepped ashore, and fires were still burning. The only people in the streets were liberated slaves and black Union troops. They recognized Lincoln's tall, stovepipehatted form instantly.

  Joyous black people flocked around the president, cheering and laughing, yelling his name, reaching for his hand. The growing crowd followed Lincoln and Tad as they stepped through the smouldering rubble and made their way to Jefferson Davis's headquarters, the executive mansion of the Confederacy Lincoln entered the abandoned building. He went to Davis's office. He stood before the desk that had belonged to the Confederate president. Then he sat down in Davis's chair, and the Union soldiers around him broke into cheers.

  Fighting was still going on outside Richmond, but in a few days, it was all but over. On April 9, Generals Lee and Grant met face-to-face at a place called Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. The two men exchanged pleasantries. Then Grant accepted Lee's surrender. Lee's soldiers were to lay down their arms, but they could keep their horses so they could take them home for the spring planting. Grant sent a telegram to the president: "General Lee surrendered this morning on terms proposed by myself."

  Jefferson Davis would refuse to admit defeat until his capture by Union troops in May. But for all practical purposes, the war was over.

  The American Civil War had lasted almost exactly four years and cost the nation more than six-hundred thousand lives—about equal to the death toll in all other U.S. wars combined, before and since. Neither side had expected the war to last so long. And neither side had expected it to end slavery

  The strain of war. A sampling of photographs taken during Lincoln's four years in office shows how the pressures and anxieties of the war became etched in his face.

  April 10, 1865. A careworn president faces the camera for the last time in Alexander Gardner's Washington studio. As Gardner was taking the photograph, the glass-plate negative cracked across the top. After a single print was made, the negative broke completely.

  Six days after this reward poster was issued, Lincoln's assassin was cornered in a Virginia barn and shot by pursuing army troops.

  SEVEN

  Who Is Dead in the White House?

  "I know I'm in danger, but I'm not going to worry about it."

  The president's friends were worried about his safety. They feared that rebel sympathizers would try to kidnap or kill him in a desperate attempt to save the Confederacy

  Lincoln had been living with rumors of abduction and assassination ever since he was first elected. Threatening letters arrived in the mail almost every day. He filed them away in a bulging envelope marked ASSASSINATION.

  "I long ago made up my mind that if anyone wants to kill me, he will do it," he told a newspaper reporter. "If I wore a shirt of mail, and kept myself surrounded by a bodyguard, 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."

  Even so, his advisors insisted on taking precautions. Soldiers camped on the White House lawn, cavalry troops escorted Lincoln on his afternoon carriage rides, and plainclothes detectives served as his personal bodyguards. He complained about the protection, but he accepted it. Thoughts of death were certainly on his mind. More than once, he had been troubled by haunting dreams.

  He told some friends about a dream he had early in April, just before the fall of Richmond. In the dream, he was wandering through the halls of the White House. He could hear people sobbing, but as he went from room to room, he saw no one.

  He kept on until he reached the East Room of the White House: "There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a ... corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. 'Who is dead in the White House?' I demanded of one of the soldiers. 'The President,' was his answer; 'he was killed by an assassin.' Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which awoke me from my dream. I slept no more that night."

  April 14, 1865, was Good Friday. Lee had surrendered just five days earlier, and Washington was in a festive mood. Lincoln arose early as usual, so he could work at his desk before breakfast. He was looking forward to the day's schedule. That afternoon he would tell his wife, "I never felt so happy in my life."

  At eleven, he met with his cabinet. He had invited General Grant to attend the meeting as guest of honor. Most of the talk centered on the difficult problems of reconstruction in the conquered South. Lincoln emphasized again that he wanted no persecutions, "no bloody work." Enough blood had been shed. "There are men in Congress/' he said, "who possess feelings of hate and vindictiveness in which I do not sympathize and can not participate."

  After lunch he returned to his office to review court-martial sentences. He revoked the death sentence of a Confederate spy And he pardoned a deserter, signing his name with the comment, "Well, I think this boy can do us more good above ground than under ground."

  Late in the afternoon he went for a carriage ride with Mary That evening they would attend the theatre with another couple, but for the moment, they wanted some time to themselves. The war had been hard on both of them. Since Willie's death, Mary had been plagued by depression and imaginary fears, and at times, Lincoln had feared for his wife's sanity. As their carriage rolled through the countryside, they talked hopefully of the years ahead. "We must both be more cheerful in the future," Lincoln said. "Between the war and the loss of our darling Willie, we have been very miserable."

  After dinner, Lincoln and Mary left for Ford's Theatre in the company of a young army major, Henry R. Rathbone, and his fiancee, Clara Harris. Arriving late, they were escorted up a winding stairway to the flag-draped presidential box overlooking the stage. The play had already started, but as Lincoln's party appeared in the box, the orchestra struck up "Hail to the Chief" and the audience rose for a standing ovation. Lincoln smiled and bowed. He took his place in a rocking chair provided for him by the management and put on a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses he had mended with a string. Mary sat beside him, with Major Rathbone and Miss Harris to their right.

  The play was Our American Cousin, a popular comedy starring Laura Keene, who had already given a thousand performances in the leading role. Lincoln settled back and relaxed. He laughed heartily, turning now and then to whisper to his wife. Halfway
through the play, he felt a chill and got up to drape his black overcoat across his shoulders.

  Ford's Theatre, Washington, D.C.

  During the third act, Mary reached over to take Lincoln's hand. She pressed closer to him. Behind them, the door to the presidential box was closed but not locked. Lincoln's bodyguard that evening, John Parker, had slipped away from his post outside the door to go downstairs and watch the play.

  The audience had just burst into laughter when the door swung open. A shadowy figure stepped into the box, stretched out his arm, aimed a small derringer pistol at the back of Lincoln's head, and pulled the trigger. Lincoln's arm jerked up. He slumped forward in his chair as Mary reached out to catch him. Then she screamed.

  Actor John Wilkes Booth fires the fatal shot. Drawing from Harper's Weekly.

  Major Rathbone looked up to see a man standing with a smoking pistol in one hand and a hunting knife in the other. Rathbone lunged at the gunman, who yelled something and slashed Rathbone's arm to the bone. Then the assailant leaped from the box to the stage, twelve feet below. One of his boot spurs caught on the regimental flag draped over the box. As he crashed onto the stage, he broke the shinbone of his left leg.

  The assailant struggled to his feet, faced the audience, and shouted the motto of the commonwealth of Virginia: "Sic semper tyrannis"—(Thus always to tyrants). The stunned and disbelieving audience recognized him as John Wilkes Booth, the well-known actor. What was going on? Was this part of the play?