The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (16 page)

The superstitions of the forest folk rose up out of the past, out of the far-off days when Sarah Bush Lincoln had lived with her stepson in the great wilderness of Indiana where the phases of the moon, the call of an owl in the night and the spirits that dwelled in the darkness had been a real part of their lives. The old stepmother was not alone in her premonitions. Her foster child had received the dark warning; he, too, had had a presentiment of his destiny and his end. In Springfield, a few days after his election, he had risen from
a couch one day to look at himself in a mirror. He had seen a double image in the glass, one clear and real, the other vague and shadowy, lurking behind the clear reflection. The incident made a great impression on him. He told it to his wife who said that she felt it was a sign that he would serve two terms as President but that he would not live to finish his second term of office.

There was good reason for his mind—and the minds of his stepmother and his wife—to turn toward thoughts of an untimely death for him. The bitterness of feeling raging in the country had concentrated itself upon the person of this one man who was about to take office as President. Threats of personal violence and of actual assassination had begun even before election; they were to continue all through his administration. The Lincoln family mail was never free from them. Mrs. Lincoln finally had to have someone open their letters to remove the abusive and sometimes obscene messages addressed to them both.

Before the month of February was out, Lincoln was to have his first experience with threatened assassination. Long familiarity with its ever-present possibility finally made him oblivious of danger. “I long ago made up my mind that if anybody wants to kill me, he will do it,” he said. “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.”

The time was now fast approaching when it would be necessary to leave Springfield for Washington. On February 6, a farewell party was given by the Lincolns in the house that had been their home for sixteen years. As soon as the party was over the furniture was sold and dispersed forever. Trunks and bags were packed for the long stay in Washington. The family went to a hotel on February 8. There Lincoln made
out the baggage labels with his own hand and addressed them: “A. Lincoln, Executive Mansion, Washington.” On the afternoon of his last day in Springfield (Sunday, February 10), he walked over to his law office to talk with Herndon.

After disposing of business matters, Lincoln lay down on the old sofa which had been his favorite resting place. He spoke for several hours, recalling scenes from the past and joking about some of the ridiculous incidents that had taken place during their practice together. Finally the time came for him to go. He mentioned the weatherbeaten signboard that carried the firm name. “Let it hang there undisturbed,” he said to Herndon. “Give our clients to understand that the election of a President makes no change in the firm of Lincoln and Herndon. If I live, I’m coming back some time, and then we’ll go right on practicing law as if nothing had ever happened.”

The next morning dawned rainy and cheerless. The Presidential train was to leave early, and Mrs. Lincoln and the children were to be on it. Something went amiss. According to the story told by a New York newspaper correspondent, Mary Lincoln quarreled with her husband that morning over a political appointment she wanted him to make. When the time for departure came, she was lying on the floor of her hotel room, screaming with hysterical rage that she would not leave for Washington unless her husband granted her wishes.

The President-elect entered his carriage without his family. He was driven through the muddy streets to a railroad station that was only a few blocks away from his old home. This was supposed to be his day of triumph, the auspicious beginning of a progress toward fame and success. The rain poured down as he rode through the familiar streets of Springfield; it drummed on the roof of his carriage and streaked down the window glass, obscuring the faces of people who had gathered along the sidewalks to see him pass.

Many of his old friends were at the railroad station. Some
of them doubtless inquired about Mrs. Lincoln, and the man whose heart was breaking at this miserable farewell to his own past had to parry off their questions and explain elaborately that she had changed her plans. He went through the waiting room to the platform, where he was greeted with cheers. Soldiers lined his passageway; friends stopped him to shake hands for the last time.

Heavily, tiredly, he mounted the steps to the observation platform at the end of the train. He stood for a moment at the rail, looking in silence at the people he had known so well—people whose lives had been so long intertwined with his. Then he spoke to them out of the fullness of his heart:

No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. 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 will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.

The rain fell fast upon him, glistening on his cheeks as he spoke. The engine whistle blew. He turned and went into the car, and the train moved off toward Washington, toward civil war and death.

The people of Springfield waited, standing bareheaded in the rain, watching the train recede into the distance. They were never to see their fellow-townsman alive again.

The train bearing the President-elect and his party headed east, stopping on the way at Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Buffalo, Albany and New York.
Mrs. Lincoln and the children joined the train at Indianapolis. Mary Todd was not to be done out of the glory of social receptions and kowtowing. The route had been carefully planned, and Lincoln had to speak at all the scheduled stops—and at some of the unscheduled ones, for huge crowds came to see the train even when it halted at some wayside station to take on fuel and water. The speeches he made on this journey are among the worst of his career. He was determined not to say anything that might be construed as a declaration of policy, so he spoke only a few banal words. The situation in the South was becoming more dangerous every day; he wanted to see what would happen; and he felt that he had to wait until he took office before he could express himself on any stand.

On February 18, when Lincoln was on his way through New York State, he received word that Jefferson Davis had been inaugurated President of the Confederate States of America. Lincoln made no comment, but rode on grimly, knowing that on March 4, he would be faced with a problem of a rival government already in power on United States territory. The slaveholders, whose reckless course of action he had observed all his life, had struck the long-threatened blow at the Union, and they had struck at a moment when the whole defense of the Union would be thrust upon him. He had already composed his inaugural address and was carrying it with him on the train. “Physically speaking, we cannot separate,” he had written in Springfield. “We cannot remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them.… Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws can among friends? Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides, and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions as to terms of intercourse are again upon you.” And he had written, at the end of his address, a
question addressed to the people of the South which he had couched in forthright and uncompromising terms:

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect and defend it.” You can forbear the assault upon it, I cannot shrink from the defense of it. With you, and not with me, is the solemn question of “Shall it be peace or a sword?”

New York City was a Democratic stronghold; the reception awaiting him there was a purely formal one, lacking in enthusiasm or spontaneous warmth. One man who saw him said: “As the carriage in which he sat passed slowly by on the Fifth avenue, he was looking weary, sad, feeble and faint. My disappointment was excessive; so great, indeed, as to be almost overwhelming. He did not look to me to be the man for the hour.”

New Jersey, too, was hostile territory; it was the one free state that had voted against him. Yet, when he addressed the State Assembly in Trenton, he spoke more frankly than he had at any time on his journey. Events in the South were becoming more and more ominous, and he was evidently making up his mind as to what course he must take, for he said that he, a man devoted to peace and with no malice toward any section, might find it “necessary to put the foot down firmly.” And he was cheered when he said this.

When he arrived in Philadelphia he received word of the first of the many plots that were to be made against his life. Allan Pinkerton, the famous detective, was waiting for him. Pinkerton’s agents had found out that the President-elect was to be attacked as he passed through Baltimore. Their information did not sound unreasonable; Baltimore was a city known for its Southern sympathies and its gangs of “plug-uglies”
who could be hired for any purpose from illegal voting to actual murder. Pinkerton wanted Lincoln to proceed at once to Washington in secrecy. This Lincoln was unwilling to do, since he had speaking engagements the next day in Philadelphia and Harrisburg. It was agreed that he should leave Harrisburg the next evening and go on to Washington from there in order to arrive ahead of his scheduled time. Later in the evening, Frederick Seward arrived from Washington carrying messages from his father and from General Scott, commander of the Army, warning Lincoln of the Baltimore plot which they had heard about from other sources.

The President-elect attended a flag-raising ceremony at Independence Hall in the morning, and the words he spoke on that occasion indicate the threats of death that were hanging over him. He went on to Harrisburg, and there, as he had arranged, he left the Governor’s dinner, took a carriage and was rapidly driven outside the town, where a special train was awaiting him. Telegraph wires were cut so no one could signal ahead that he was on board. As soon as he arrived in Philadelphia, he was put into a closed carriage and driven around the city until it was time for the Washington train to leave.

He entered the sleeping-berth and went to bed immediately. The train proceeded on to Baltimore, where it arrived at three-thirty in the morning. Baltimore, at that time, had a curious railroad situation which made it an ideal place in which to attempt an assassination. Trains coming from the north had to stop at a terminal on one side of the city; their cars were detached and drawn through the streets by horses to the southern terminal, making it easy for armed men to attack the cars while they were in slow transit through the roughest part of the city. (Less than two months later trains were held up at this spot, and men of the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment were killed as they tried to reach the southern terminal.)

No one knew that Lincoln was on the train this night, so the passage across Baltimore was made without trouble. The train pulled into Washington at six o’clock in the morning, and the man who was about to be inaugurated President of the United States entered the city unknown and unheralded. He was driven to Willard’s Hotel where he was to stay until he went to the White House.

Mrs. Lincoln and the rest of the party came through Baltimore later in the day without molestation. The conspirators—if they did exist—had evidently found out that the President-elect was already in Washington. Just how real the Baltimore plot was we shall never know. Certainly there were men in the South who had openly discussed the possibility of preventing the inauguration, and in December, the Richmond
Examiner
had printed the query: “Can there not be found men bold and brave enough in Maryland to unite with Virginians in seizing the Capital in Washington?” All this may have been mere gasconade, but irrefutable and tragic stands the evidence of April 14, 1865, in denial of all theories that Abraham Lincoln had nothing to fear while he was President.

On the evening of Lincoln’s arrival in Washington, Stephen A. Douglas called upon the President-elect to talk with him about the impending crisis. Just before he left, he took Lincoln’s hand and said: “You and I have been for many years politically opposed to each other, but in our devotion and attachment to the Constitution and the Union we have never differed—in this we are one—this must and shall not be destroyed!”

Lincoln spent the ten days between his arrival in Washington and his inauguration conferring with members of his prospective Cabinet, calling on President Buchanan, and visiting the Supreme Court, the House of Representatives and the Senate. Some of the Southern Senators refused to be presented to him, but in general there was little unpleasantness,
for the issues involved were too grave to be expressed in such petty ways.

He consulted with Douglas and with Seward on the wording of his inaugural address, and changed several parts of it in order to make it more palatable to the South. N
tably he changed the ending, taking a suggested paragraph of Seward’s and transmuting its dull language into poetry. The “peace or a sword” ending now became: