Lincoln: A Photobiography (14 page)

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.
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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.

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