Coming Fury, Volume 1 (36 page)

The man and the hour had been approaching each other by unlikely channels. The hour grew out of everything that a proud, self-centered, insecure society had been striving for in its attempt to ward off unwelcome change. The long argument over slavery in the territories, the resentment aroused by abolitionist taunts and by Northern aid for fugitive slaves, the fear and fury stirred by John Brown’s raid and by the realization that many folk in the free states looked on Brown as a saintly martyr, the desperate attempt to preserve a pastoral society intact in a land being transformed by the Industrial Revolution—all of these had led to this hour in Montgomery, with banners waving and words of brave defiance shouted into the winter air. And the man who was meeting the hour, tense and erect, lonely and dedicated, looking without fear into a clouded future, was perhaps greater than the cause he embraced. He came from the Ohio Valley, cradle of a leveling democracy, born within a few months and a few miles of another Kentuckian, Abraham Lincoln, coming to manhood by a different course. He was a Mississippi planter at a time when the Mississippi planter was a hard man on the make rather than the exemplar of a cultivated pillared aristocracy, and yet somehow he transcended the limitations of his background and represented, once and for all, the nobility of the dream that his fellows believed themselves to be living by. Of all the men the Confederacy might have summoned, he was the man for this hour and for the hours that would follow.

Jefferson Davis was leaving Brierfield, saying good-by to his rose garden, his slaves, and his dream of military glory, traveling to Montgomery to begin a great hour on a hotel balcony amid cheers and torchlight. Similarly touched by destiny, Abraham Lincoln was beginning the same sort of journey at just about the same time, going from Springfield to whatever might await him in Washington. Like Davis, Lincoln had to say farewell to much; he was moving away from his own personal existence, he would belong from now on in every word and thought and deed to something larger than himself, and everything that had happened to him until now was no more than preparation for the years that lay ahead. He would meet, as he traveled eastward, flags and music and crowds of people eager to look and to cheer, just as Davis had met them; and although he and Davis would never come face to face, they would confront one another now through tumult and wind-driven smoke, the rival leaders of two nations in a land that could hold only one.

Early in February Lincoln closed his home, selling or storing his household furnishings, moving to Springfield’s Chenery House for his last days in Illinois. Shortly after daybreak on February 11 he drove to the Great Western railroad station through a cold drizzle, and in the waiting room there he spent half an hour bidding farewell to friends. There was a crush of people all about, and Lincoln was pale, apparently gripped by deep emotion. He said little as men and women pumped his hand, and when he spoke, his voice seemed almost ready to break. After half an hour of it the train was ready, and the President-elect and his party went out to go aboard.

There were three cars—baggage car, smoker, and coach, with “a powerful Rogers locomotive” in front; the railroad time card warned that “it is very important that this train should pass over the road in safety.” With Lincoln there was his son Robert, already dubbed “the Prince of Rails” by newspaper correspondents; his youthful secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John Hay; and Elmer Ellsworth, the slightly unreal amateur soldier who had drilled gaily
dressed militia units and who had somehow won a place in the older man’s heart; he would be killed in three months, and his body would lie in state in the White House. Also present were four professional soldiers, detailed by the War Department to be an escort and to look out for the safety of the President-elect. One of these was Colonel Edwin Vose Sumner, gruff and white-haired, who became an army officer before Lincoln entered his teens, an old-timer who would not survive the war. Others were Major David Hunter, Captain George Hazard, and energetic Captain John Pope, who would live to meet responsibilities too heavy for him. There were reporters, and political characters, and the New York
Herald
man noted that the cars were well stocked with “refreshments for the thirsty.” Mrs. Lincoln, with the younger sons, Willie and Tad, would board the train at Indianapolis.

The crowd surged out of the waiting room as the party got on the train. Lincoln went to the rear platform, his tall hat in his fingers, and his fellow townsmen fell silent. He faced them, a somber, brooding figure, seemingly as reluctant as Davis had been to meet the incomprehensible burdens of the presidency. He spoke, finally, the last words he would ever speak in Springfield, not so much making a speech as thinking out loud.

“No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting,” he said. “To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trusting in Him, Who can go with me and remain with you and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all yet will be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.”
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In this simple impromptu speech Lincoln was at his best. He would be at his worst in the speeches he would give between Springfield and Washington, and a thoughtful American who troubled to listen could have been excused for believing that a woefully
unfit man was about to become President. As the special train moved eastward, it began to seem that all of the North was watching it, and whenever the train stopped, Lincoln had to show himself—precisely as Davis had to show himself on another train, far to the southward. Showing himself, he had to say something, and the art of saying nothing in an impressive way was one that he had not yet learned. Not having learned it, he fumbled badly, giving the impression at times of a man who simply did not understand the crisis or know what his own part in it ought to be. Few chapters in Lincoln’s whole career are as melancholy to read about as the one that tells how he went from Illinois to Washington.

There were trackside crowds all along the route, but most of these expected little more than a bow and a waved hand from the train’s rear platform. The first real test came at Indianapolis, where Lincoln had to leave the train and attend a reception at the Bates House. There was a dense, uncontrolled crowd here, and the New York
Herald
reporter noted disapprovingly that Lincoln had to force his way through the crush unaided: “no precautions had been taken to protect him from insolent and rough curiosity,” and when he reached the supper room he had to wait half an hour for a sketchy meal. Having eaten, at last, Lincoln had to make a speech. For the first time since the election, he was addressing his fellow countrymen, and a carefully considered policy pronouncement might have been expected. What actually came out was nothing much better than the rambling spur-of-the-moment remarks of a politician who, finding himself in the presence of an enthusiastic crowd, feels obliged to “say a few words” without much regard to what the words mean or the echoes they may strike—one trouble, perhaps, being that he simply did not yet realize how far his lightest words now must echo.

The people of the South, Lincoln now said, seemed to be worried about coercion. But what was coercion? “Would the marching of an army into South Carolina, for instance, without the consent of her people, and in hostility against them, be coercion or invasion? I very frankly say, I think it would be invasion, and it would be coercion too, if the people of that country were forced to submit. But if the Government, for instance, simply insists on holding its own forts, or retaking those forts which belong to it”
—just here he was interrupted by cheers—“or the enforcement of the laws of the United States in the collection of duties upon foreign importations, or even the withdrawal of the mails from those portions of the country where the mails themselves are habitually violated; would any or all of these things be coercion? Do the lovers of the Union contend that they will resist coercion or invasion of any state, understanding that any or all of these would be coercing or invading a state? If they do, then it occurs to me that the means for the preservation of the Union they so greatly love, in their own estimation, is of a very thin and airy character.”

Interrupted again by applause, Lincoln went on to develop this off-hand study of the value of a secessionist’s love for the Union; a study that would have benefited greatly by deeper thought and more careful phrasing. “… In their view, the Union, as a family relation, would not be anything like a regular marriage at all, but only a sort of free-love arrangement to be maintained on what that sect calls passionate attraction.” This was greeted by laughter, and Lincoln presently continued: “Can a change of name change the right? By what principle of original right is it that one-fiftieth or one-ninetieth of a great nation, by calling themselves a State, have the right to break up and ruin that nation as a matter of original principle?… Where is the mysterious, original right, from principle, for a certain district of the country, with inhabitants, by merely being called a State, to play tyrant over all its own citizens and deny the authority of everything greater than itself?”
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The best that can be said for the Indianapolis interlude is that at last it ended and the journey was resumed. That Lincoln or any other man should be asking himself questions of that sort, in the baffling February of 1861, is not surprising, but that these questions, unedited and unanswered, should find their way into a serious speech is staggering. (It was on this day that the Southern Confederacy served formal notice of its existence by inaugurating its Vice-President.) On succeeding days there were other crowds to be addressed, and the result was not always more fortunate.

At Lawrenceburg, Indiana, on February 12, Lincoln was on a different tack: “I have been selected to fill an important office for a brief period, and am now, in your eyes, invested with an influence which will soon pass away; but should my administration prove to
be a very wicked one, or what is more probable, a very foolish one, if you, the PEOPLE, are but true to yourselves and to the Constitution, there is little harm I can do,
thank God!
” The next day he had more cheerful words for the Ohio legislature, at Columbus: “I have not maintained silence from any want of real anxiety. It is a good thing that there is no more than anxiety, for there is nothing going wrong. It is a consoling circumstance that when we look out there is nothing that really hurts anybody. We entertain different views upon political questions, but nobody is suffering anything.”

He developed this notion further, as his train continued in its oddly zigzag course across the Middle West. At Rochester, Pennsylvania, someone called out to ask what he would do about the secessionists when he reached Washington and became President, and he replied: “My friend, that is a matter which I have under very great consideration.” But the next day, at Pittsburgh, he told an audience: “Notwithstanding the troubles across the river, there is really no crisis springing from anything in the government itself. In plain words, there is really no crisis except an
artificial
one.… If the great American people will only keep their temper, on both sides of the line, the troubles will come to an end.” His itinerary doubled back to Cleveland, where there was a long parade through slush and snow, leading to a speech in which this Pittsburgh theme was carried further:

“I think that there is no occasion for any excitement. The crisis, as it is called, is altogether an artificial crisis.… It has no foundation in facts. It was not argued up, as the saying is, and cannot, therefore, be argued down. Let it alone and it will go down of itself.”
³

 … It was not going down very fast. On February 18 Jefferson Davis took the oath of office as President of the Southern Confederacy, and Lincoln told the New York State legislature: “It is true that while I hold myself without mock modesty the humblest of all individuals that have ever been elected to the Presidency, I have a more difficult task to perform than any one of them.” In New York City on February 20 he paid his respects, obliquely, to Mayor Fernando Wood’s suggestion that the metropolis set itself up as a free city, declaring that “there is nothing that can ever bring me willingly to consent to the destruction of this Union, under
which not only the commercial city of New York but the whole country has acquired its greatness”; and a day later, in Philadelphia, he returned to the notion that there was something artificial about the national crisis. He qualified this, however, by adding: “I do not mean to say that this artificial panic has not done harm. That it has done much harm I do not deny.”

At least partial redemption from all of this came on Washington’s Birthday when Lincoln spoke at Independence Hall, and reached above the say-a-few-words routine to touch the edges of genuine eloquence.

“I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” he said. “I have often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the motherland; but something in the Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that
all
men should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I would consider myself one of the happiest men in the world if I can help to save it.… If this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle—I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.”
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