The Last Weeks of Abraham Lincoln

by David Alan Johnson

  “If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?” Slavery was one of the offences committed by the country, and God punished the entire country, North and South, for this offence. The Civil War was nothing less than a scourge from God. “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’” This quote was also from the Bible, from Psalm 19, which produced a long and enthusiastic round of applause, along with another chorus of “Bless the Lord.”

  The crux of the speech, Lincoln's main point, did not come until the end: “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 a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.” This is the best remembered section of the address, as well as the most eloquent.

  This was not just political rhetoric—Lincoln meant what he was saying. He really did hope that the United States would be united for the first time in its history, with no more hostility or resentment between North and South when the fighting ended. “Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained.” But if the peace turned out to be generous and magnanimous, maybe the four terrible years that just passed would produce a “just and lasting peace,” along with a unified country and an end to slavery.

  Photographer Alexander Gardner had set himself and his camera in the audience, in a position to the left of the rostrum, where he could record the event on film. His photo shows Lincoln with an intense expression on his face as he reads his address, which he holds with both hands. It is anything but a technical marvel, even for its time, but it is the only photo taken of Lincoln while he is speaking. Also in the audience, above and behind the president, standing to his left, John Wilkes Booth listened to the speech from a part of the building overlooking the rostrum. Booth would later claim that he could have shot the president from where he was standing. He was certainly within the range of a pistol shot while the president was giving his speech.

  “After the delivery of the address, a national salute was fired by a battery stationed east of the Capitol,” according to a reporter who covered the event.11 People in the audience were as startled by the artillery salute as they were by the brevity of the president's speech—it was only 703 words long, and only lasted six or seven minutes. Everyone expected it to go on for some time, like most political speeches, especially most inaugural speeches. One of Lincoln's biographers reflected, “Seldom had a President been so short-spoken about the issues of so grave an hour.”12

  When the crowd realized that the speech actually had ended, and after the artillery had fired its salute, everyone burst into cheers and applause. The noise from the crowd drifted away after a minute or so, along with the smoke from the saluting batteries, and Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase stepped forward to administer the oath of office. President Lincoln had appointed Chase as chief justice only three months earlier, after the death of eighty-seven-year-old chief justice Roger B. Taney. In 1861, Chase had been one of Lincoln's opponents for the Republican Party's presidential nomination. Now, Chief Justice Chase turned toward the Supreme Court clerk, who handed him a Bible.

  Lincoln placed his right hand on the book, which had been opened to the book of Isaiah, chapter five. The president repeated the oath after Chief Justice Chase and ended with a ringing “So help me God!” Lincoln then stooped slightly to kiss the Bible. Chase presented it to Mrs. Lincoln. With that, the inauguration ceremony was over—at 12:17 p.m.13 The president's part in the proceedings, including delivering his speech, lasted less than fifteen minutes—one of the most memorable quarter hours in the country's history.

  The president left the Capitol by way of the basement. Outside the basement exit, he shifted his lanky six-foot, four-inch frame into a waiting carriage and was driven back to the White House with his son Tad. All along the way, onlookers cheered and shouted and waved at Lincoln as he passed by. The president waved right back. Now that the inauguration ceremony was over, and he had been sworn in as president, he could afford to relax—at least for a while. But he would not be able to relax for very long. The day might have been over, but the night, and the public reception that was to be held at the White House in a few hours, was still ahead of him.

  A crowd had been gathering outside the White House since late afternoon—several thousand people, according to most accounts. The gates were finally opened at 8:00 p.m., and the public began filing into the White House grounds. According to observers who were on hand for the event, the events that took place during the next three hours sound like a cross between a cattle stampede, a mob scene, and a madhouse.

  President Lincoln spent most of his time during the reception in the East Room, shaking hands with guests—reporters estimate that he shook hands with more than six thousand visitors. One of the guests was Frederick Douglass, the outspoken black abolitionist. The president caught sight of Douglass as soon as he walked into the East Room. Since he was the only black person in the room, he was very easy to spot.

  “Here comes my friend Douglass,” Lincoln announced in a loud voice, loud enough so that everyone in the vicinity could hear him. He walked up to Douglass, shook his hand, and said, “I am glad to see you. I saw you in the crowd today, listening to my inaugural address. How did you like it?”

  This was a risky question. Douglass had been present at Lincoln's first inaugural address, as well, and did not think very much of it. His main objection was that the president had been much too lenient regarding the South and, especially, regarding slavery.

  Encouraging leniency for the South was the entire purpose of Lincoln's first inaugural address. He wanted to placate the Southern states, not to threaten or alienate them. Mentioning slavery would have been certain to do both. “We are not enemies, but friends,” he said. “We must not be enemies.” He urged the Southern people not to secede, and instead to be touched by the mystic chords of memory and the better angels of their nature and to return to the Union.14 But Douglass only saw that the president had not taken Southerners to task over the question of slavery.

  But slavery, “a peculiar and powerful interest,” occupied a major part of the second inaugural address. President Lincoln was anxious to hear what Frederick Douglass had to say about it. Lincoln had a high regard for both Douglass and his opinion, and was disappointed that Douglass considered Lincoln's position on abolition lacking in dedication and forcefulness.

  Douglass tried to evade the question. He told the president that he did not want to detain the president “with my poor opinion,” when there were thousands of visitors waiting to shake hands with him. But Lincoln persisted—“I want to know what you think of it.”

  “Mr. Lincoln,” Douglass replied, “it was a sacred effort.”15 The president was more than satisfied with his opinion. According to one writer's account, Lincoln “positively beamed” when he heard Douglass's verdict.16

  By midnight, the reception had finally come to an end and the crowd had disappeared into the Washington night. Some visitors took souvenirs with them, unauthorized souvenirs—pieces of curtains from the East Room, flowers from the floral designs.
One of the guards remarked that it looked as though a regiment from the Confederate army, with permission to forage, had taken up residence. President Lincoln was upset by the vandalism and could not understand how anyone could have caused such willful damage.

  But the big day was finally over, and he had other things to worry about. He had just begun his second term of office as president, and the most pressing thing in his mind was the war—more specifically, with winning the war. Spring had arrived, and the fighting in Virginia would begin as soon as the roads dried out from the winter rains. After the Confederacy surrendered, and the fighting had stopped, he would be able to concentrate on other things. This included rebuilding the war-ravaged Southern states, dealing with Jefferson Davis and other Confederate political leaders, and ending slavery.

  After all the pomp and ceremony of Inauguration Day, and its accompanying activity and busyness, the inactivity of Sunday, March 5, came as a welcome relief. The president desperately needed some time off, time to recover and to collect himself. He had clearly been overworking—everyone close to him, including his wife, could see that. The war may have been winding down, but nobody could say how many battles still had to be fought before the Confederates decided to give up. The coming weeks would be wearing, and Lincoln needed to conserve his strength. Taking Sunday off, especially after the pressure of the previous day, would not only be welcome but necessary.

  The president and Mrs. Lincoln attended religious services that Sunday morning at the Methodist Episcopal Church. Bishop Matthew Simpson delivered the sermon—“a masterly effort and very touching.”1 Bishop Simpson made a point of mentioning the sudden burst of sunshine that occurred just as Lincoln stepped forward to begin his inauguration address on the previous day. Just as the sun had broken through the overcast, Bishop Simpson told the “large and attentive” congregation, peace would burst upon the divided country and dispel the clouds of war. It was a very nice allusion, but Lincoln was well aware that peace was not going to come that quickly or easily.

  Abraham Lincoln was not a religious man. He never gave any indication that he ever belonged to any particular church or denomination, although he attended the local Baptist church when he lived with his parents in Pigeon Creek, Indiana. But young Abe never actually joined the church, in spite of his father's urging—“nagging” is probably a more accurate word—and he acquired a reputation as a rebel and a religious dissenter. One account said that he was considered “a village atheist” by his neighbors.2

  Being an atheist, or a dissenter, or anything resembling a freethinker was a liability to anyone with any political ambitions in the orthodox Midwest, as Abraham Lincoln found out the hard way. In 1846, he ran for a seat in Congress against a Methodist preacher named Peter Cartwright. Cartwright accused Lincoln of ridiculing and looking down at Christianity, a charge that Lincoln considered serious enough to answer with a formal denial. “That I am not a member of any Christian church is true,” he said, “but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any denomination of Christianity in particular.”3 Lincoln's defense must have been effective enough to satisfy the voters—he was elected to Congress by a considerable margin.

  Even though Lincoln did not belong to any church and did not seem to have very much interest in organized religion in general, he did have an in-depth knowledge of the Bible. Along with most other families in that part of the country, the Bible would have been one of the few books the Lincolns had in their household, and it was read thoroughly and avidly by young Abraham. He seems to have compensated for his lack of interest in religion with an intense interest in the Bible. “In regard to the Great Book, I have but to say. It is the best gift God has given to man,” he would write. “All things desirable for man's welfare, here and hereafter, are to be found portrayed in it.”4

  Over the years, Lincoln read and re-read the Bible many times over. This gave him the depth of knowledge and the ability to quote from scripture whenever he wanted to emphasize a subject or a remark, either in a debate or in one of his speeches—he made a point of using Bible quotes in his second inaugural address. He could also use a biblical quotation as a joke when the situation presented itself.

  The British ambassador, Lord Lyons, once made an official visit to the White House to deliver a handwritten message from Queen Victoria. The queen sent the note to inform the president that her son, the Prince of Wales, was betrothed to the Princess Alexandra of Denmark. Lord Lyons was a stuffy and pompous old bachelor who tended to take himself too seriously. He made a formal speech “appropriate to the occasion;” Lincoln replied in the “usual conventional manner.”5 When the requisite formalities were safely out of the way, and the impending marriage had been announced, Lincoln took the ambassador by the hand and said, “And now, Lord Lyons, go thou and do likewise.”

  Lyons did not have a very high opinion of Lincoln to begin with—in 1860, he reported to London that Lincoln was a rough farmer of low origins, which was probably putting his thoughts politely. The joke did not improve his opinion, especially since it had been made at his expense. But Lincoln would have had a good laugh over the incident, and from sticking a pin in the ambassador's overdeveloped sense of self-importance.

  After church services were over, the president and Mrs. Lincoln were driven back to the White House. Lincoln had several administrative chores to attend to, including inviting Congressman Schuyler Colfax to accompany his family to the Inauguration Ball, which would be held on the following evening. Lincoln was on the verge of exhaustion, but he still had to attend to his official duties and responsibilities. Sunday was another working day, just as Inauguration Day had been. And he still had to get ready for the Inauguration Ball, which was another chore for him to deal with.

  The day's main activity, for both the president and Mrs. Lincoln, was the Inauguration Ball, which would be held that evening at the Patent Office. But there was a great deal to be done before the president could leave for the party. He met with the diplomatic corps around noon, posed for a photographer later in the afternoon, received members of the Perseverance Fire Company of Philadelphia in East Room at 4:00 p.m., and tended to several other official functions while his wife was preparing for the evening's events.

  But the most important event of the day took place several hundred miles from Washington, DC, and had nothing to do with the president's activities. About 60,000 men commanded by General William Tecumseh Sherman crossed from South Carolina into North Carolina, moving north to join forces with General Ulysses S. Grant's army, just south of Petersburg, Virginia. Even though the roads in Virginia were still far too muddy to allow an army to move out of its winter camp, let alone mobilize for the coming spring campaign—the mud was more than a foot deep in some places—the campaign was already beginning.

  President Lincoln both dreaded and anticipated the fighting that would soon occupy so much of his time. He hoped that the coming operations between the Army of the Potomac and Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia would be the final campaign of the war, and that General Grant would be able to bring about the surrender of General Lee and his army. He wanted to end the war quickly and, if at all possible, without another major battle between the two armies. There had already been too much killing.

  But the main focus of Monday morning's headlines was not General Sherman and his march through the Carolinas. The newspapers of March 6 were mostly occupied with editorial opinions of the president's Inauguration Address. Papers from all across the country gave their views of the address, both pro and con. The New York Times thought that Lincoln had written a flop and a disappointment of a speech. “All that he does is simply to advert to the cause of the war,” the Times complained, “and to drop an earnest exhortation that all will now stand by the right and strive for a peace that shall be just and lasting.”1 Another New York paper, the World, hated the speech—which was understandable, since the World was anti-Lincoln as well
as outspoken in its support of Confederate independence. “The pity of it, that a divided nation should neither be sustained in this crisis of agony by words of wisdom nor cheered with words of hope.”2 Philadelphia's Inquirer had nothing but praise for the address, as well as for the president himself: “The address is characteristic of Mr. Lincoln. It exhibits afresh the kindness of heart, and the large charity which has ever marked his actions toward those who are his personal enemies as well as enemies of his country.”3

  The newspaper that came closest to grasping exactly what Lincoln had in mind with his speech was not from New York or Philadelphia or anywhere else in the United States. London's Spectator praised the Inauguration Address not only because of its content, but also because it showed how far Abraham Lincoln had matured and evolved as president during his four years in the White House. “Mr. Lincoln has persevered through all,” the editor wrote, “visibly growing in force of character, in self-possession, and in magnanimity during his first term as president.” In his address, “We can detect no longer the rude and illiterate mould of a village lawyer's thought, but find it replaced by a grasp of principle, the dignity of manner, and solemnity of purpose.”4

  President Lincoln certainly had been changed by the war since 1861. He seemed a lot older and more dignified, as well as a lot sadder and more reflective, than he had been four years earlier. “Poor Mr. Lincoln is looking so brokenhearted, so completely worn out,” Mary Lincoln confided to her dressmaker. “I fear he will not get through the next four years.”5 And he was fully aware that the fighting was far from over. There would be more battles to come, with more slaughter and dying, before the war finally came to an end. For the president, the war could not end soon enough.

  The Inauguration Ball had already been in progress for some time before the president and Mrs. Lincoln arrived at around 10:30 p.m. The Patent Office was filled “with many of the most distinguished men and women of the country.” It was “a glorious spectacle, such has not been seen in Washington for years.”6