The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (160 page)

“Bless the Lord!” some down front cried up: Negroes mostly, who took their tone from his, and responded as they would have done in church. Lincoln kept on reading from the printed text in a voice one hearer described as “ringing and somewhat shrill.”

“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses 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 offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? 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 bondman’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.’ ”

“Bless the Lord!” came up again through the thunder of applause, but Lincoln passed at once to the peroration. He was beyond the war now, into the peace which he himself would never see.

“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.”

Thus ended, as if on a long-held organ note, the shortest inaugural
any President had delivered since George Washington was sworn in the second time. When the applause subsided, Chase signaled the clerk of the Supreme Court to come forward with the Bible held open-faced before him; Lincoln rested one hand on it while repeating the oath of office. “So help me God,” he said, then bent and kissed the Book. Cheers went up as he rose once more to his full height and guns began thudding their shotless, flat-toned salutes in celebration. He turned to the crowd and bowed in several directions before he reëntered the Capitol and emerged again from a basement entrance, where a two-horse barouche waited to take him and Tad back to the White House in time for him to rest up for the reception scheduled there that evening. Between 8 and 11 o’clock, newsmen reckoned, he shook hands with no less than six thousand people, though these were by no means all who tried to get close enough to touch him. Walt Whitman, caught in the press of callers, was one of those who had to be content with watching from a distance. “I saw Mr Lincoln,” the poet wrote in his notebook that night, “dressed all in black, with white kid gloves and a clawhammer coat, receiving, as in duty bound, shaking hands, looking very disconsolate … as if he would give anything to be somewhere else.”

He was concerned about the reception of his speech that afternoon. “What did you think of it?” he asked friends as they passed down the line. He had heard and seen the cheers and tears of people near the platform, but tonight he was like a neglected author in wistful search of a discerning critic. Later, writing to Thurlow Weed, he said that he expected the address “to wear as well — perhaps better than — anything I have produced; but I believe it is not immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.” Actually, the difficulty lay elsewhere. Some among his hearers and readers found his style as turgid, his syntax as knotty to unravel, as that of the new Vice President in the tirade staged indoors. “While the sentiments are noble,” a disgruntled Pennsylvanian would complain this week in a private letter, “[Lincoln’s inaugural] is one of the most awkwardly expressed documents I ever read — if it be correctly printed. When he knew it would be read by millions all over the world, why under the heavens did he not make it a little more creditable to American scholarship? Jackson was not too proud to get Van Buren to slick up his state papers. Why could not Mr Seward have prepared the Inaugural so as to save it from the ridicule of a sophomore in a British university?”

In point of fact, the British reaction was quite different from the one this Keystone critic apprehended. “It was a noble speech,” the Duke of Argyll wrote his friend Sumner, “just and true, and solemn. I think it has produced a great effect in England.” The London
Spectator
thought so, too, saying: “No statesman ever uttered words stamped at
once with the seal of so deep a wisdom and so true a simplicity.” Even the
Times
, pro-Confederate as it mostly was, had praise for the address. Nor was approval lacking on this side of the Atlantic, even among those with valid claims to membership in the New World aristocracy. “What think you of the inaugural?” C. F. Adams Junior wrote his ambassador father. “That rail-splitting lawyer is one of the wonders of the day. Once at Gettysburg and now again on a greater occasion he has shown a capacity for rising to the demands of the hour which we should not expect from orators or men of the schools. This inaugural strikes me in its grand simplicity and directness as being for all time the keynote of this war; in it a people seemed to speak in the sublimely simple utterance of ruder times. What will Europe think of this utterance of the rude ruler, of whom they have nourished so lofty a contempt? Not a prince or minister in all Europe could have risen to such an equality with the occasion.”

*  *  *

Others besides Adams drew the Gettysburg comparison, being similarly affected, and presently there was still another likeness in what followed. Lincoln fell ill, much as he had done after the earlier address, except then it had been varioloid, a mild form of smallpox, and this was a different kind of ailment — noninfectious, nonspecific, yet if anything rather more debilitating. In fact, that was at the root of his present indisposition. He was exhausted. “Nothing touches the tired spot,” he had begun to say within a year of taking office, and lately he had been referring again to “the tired spot, which can’t be got at,” somewhere deep inside him, trunk and limbs and brain. “I’m a tired man,” he told one caller. “Sometimes I think I’m the tiredest man on earth.”

If so, he had cause. In the past five weeks — hard on the heels of a bitter campaign for reëlection, which only added to the cumulative strain of leadership through four bloody years of fratricidal conflict — he had cajoled and logrolled Congress into passing the Thirteenth Amendment, dealt with the Confederate commissioners aboard the
River Queen
in Hampton Roads, and kept a watchful eye on Grant while raising the troops and money required to fuel the war machine. All this, plus the drafting and delivery of the second inaugural, was in addition to his usual daily tasks as Chief Executive, not the least of which consisted of enduring the diurnal claims of office-seekers and their sponsors, often men of political heft and high position. Two cabinet changes followed within a week, both the result of his acceding to Fessenden’s plea that the time had come for him to leave the Treasury and return to his seat in the Senate. Lincoln replaced him on March 7 with Hugh McCulloch, a Maine-born Hoosier banker, only to have Interior Secretary John P. Usher resign on grounds that he too was from Indiana. Iowa Senator James Harlan was named to take his place,
a felicitous choice, since he was a close family friend and the President’s son Robert was courting the senator’s daughter with the intention of marrying her as soon as he completed his military service.

This too was a problem for Lincoln — or, more specifically, for his wife; which came to the same thing. Just out of college, the young man wanted to enter the army despite strenuous objections by his mother, who grew sick with fear of what might happen to him there. As a result, Lincoln had worked out a compromise, back in January, that might satisfy them both, depending on Grant’s response to a proposal made him at the time: “Please read and answer this letter as though I was not President, but only a friend. My son, now in his twenty-second year, having graduated from Harvard, wishes to see something of the war before it ends. I do not wish to put him in the ranks, nor yet to give him a commission to which those who have already served long are better entitled, and better qualified to hold. Could he, without embarrassment to you or detriment to the service, go into your military family with some nominal rank, I, and not the public, furnishing his necessary means? If no, say so without the least hesitation, because I am as anxious, and as deeply interested that you shall not be encumbered, as you can be yourself.” Grant replied that he would be glad to have the young man on his staff as an assistant adjutant, his rank to be that of captain and his pay to come from the government, not his father. In mid-February the appointment came through. Soon after attending the inaugural ceremonies in the hard-galloping carriage with his mother and his prospective father-in-law, Robert set out down the coast for City Point. Lincoln was glad to have the difficult matter settled, but it came hard for him that he had had to settle it this way, knowing as he did that he had drafted into the shot-torn ranks of the nation’s armies hundreds of thousands of other sons whose mothers loved and feared for them as much as Mary Lincoln did for hers.

As a result of all these pressures and concerns, or rather of his delayed reaction to them, what should have been for him a time of relieved tension — Congress, having adjourned, was not scheduled to reconvene until December, so that he had hope of ending the war in much the same way he had begun it; that is, without a host of frock-coated politicians breathing down his neck — turned out instead to be the one in which he looked and felt his worst. It was as if, like a spent swimmer who collapses only after he has reached the shore, he had had no chance till now, having been occupied with the struggle to keep afloat in a sea of administrative and domestic frets, to realize how close he was to absolute exhaustion. “His face was haggard with care and seamed with thought and trouble,” Horace Greeley noted after a mid-March interview. “It looked care-ploughed, tempest-tossed and weather-beaten.” One reporter diagnosed the ailment as “a severe attack of influenza,” but another remarked more perceptively that the President
was “suffering from the exhausting attentions of office hunters.” In any case, on March 14—ten days after the inauguration — Lincoln was obliged to hold the scheduled Tuesday cabinet meeting in his bedroom, prone beneath the covers but with his head and shoulders propped on pillows stacked against the headboard of his bed.

That day’s rest did some good, and even more came from a new rule setting 3 o’clock as the close of office hours, so far at least as scheduled callers went. By the end of the week he felt well enough to go with his wife and guests to a performance of Mozart’s
Magic Flute
at Grover’s Theatre, enjoying it so much indeed that when Mrs Lincoln suggested leaving before the final curtain reunited the fire-tested lovers, he protested: “Oh, no. I want to see it out. It’s best, when you undertake a job, to finish it.” Much of his fascination was with one of the sopranos, whose feet were not only large but flat. “The beetles wouldn’t have much of a chance there,” he whispered, nodding toward the stage.

Here was at least one sign that he was better, though it was true he often joked in just this way to offset the melancholia that dogged him all his life. He still felt weary — “flabby,” as he called it — and no amount of rest, by night or day, got through to the tired spot down somewhere deep inside him. He considered a trip, perhaps a visit to the army in Virginia, “immediately after the next rain.” Then on March 20 a wire from Grant seemed to indicate that the general either had read his mind or else had spies in the White House. “Can you not visit City Point for a day or two? I would like very much to see you, and I think the rest would do you good.”

Lincoln at once made plans to go. He would leave in the next day or two, aboard the fast, well-armed dispatch steamer
Bat
. “Will notify you of exact time, once it shall be fixed upon,” he replied to Grant. But when he told his wife, she announced that she too would be going; it had been two weeks since Robert left for City Point, and she would see him there. So the expanded party shifted to the more commodious
River Queen
, retaining the
Bat
for escort. Tad would go, along with Mrs Lincoln’s maid, a civilian bodyguard, and a military aide. Lincoln had heard from Grant on Monday, and on Thursday he was off down the Potomac, sailing from the Sixth Street wharf in the early afternoon.

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