Lincoln in the World (44 page)

Lincoln’s tragic sensibility seemed to pervade even his public pronouncements. On the cool, cloudy morning of March 4, Lincoln delivered his second inaugural in the shadow of the newly completed Capitol dome. The president, appearing “gaunt” and “skeleton-like” to one observer, perched his steel-rim glasses on his nose and gathered
together the oversize sheets of foolscap on which he had written the 703 words of the speech. Lincoln’s audience included Washington’s diplomatic corps—one of whom, a journalist reported, “was so stiff with gold lace” that he could barely sit down. (In his own address, before Lincoln’s, a drunken Vice President Andrew Johnson had insulted the gathered diplomats, mocking the “fine feathers and gewgaws” of their ornate uniforms.) Now, as Lincoln began his own address, a ray of sun emerged from the clouds.
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Lincoln’s second inaugural should be considered one of America’s seminal foreign-policy documents. The only explicit reference to global affairs comes in the last line, with its appeal for a just and lasting peace “with all nations.” Yet the president’s words can be read as a profound meditation on America’s place in the world. Both North and South, Lincoln told the crowd, “read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”
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France, England, Spain, Mexico, and Russia, of course, also read the same Bible and prayed to the same god. Understood one way, then, the address trenchantly sets forth a worldview in which Lincoln’s Union is portrayed as one nation among others—not as God’s chosen people on earth. If morality were to be found in international relations, it would emerge from a just balance of competing national interests—not romantic crusades. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, a shrewd thinker about the place of love and justice in global affairs, later observed that Lincoln’s second inaugural proclaimed the “partiality of all historic commitments.” The president’s address, Niebuhr concluded, “put the enemy into the same category of ambiguity as the nation to which his life was committed.”
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Europeans appreciated the appeal to international justice. From tense Paris, the
Chicago Tribune
correspondent reported that
Lincoln’s speech “has been received here with unmitigated satisfaction.” Frenchmen praised the address for “its moderation of tone, its wise reticence with respect to the war, the absence of all boasting either as regards the glorious past or the hopeful future.” Bigelow wrote home from the French capital to say that the address “has enjoyed a rare distinction for an American state paper of being correctly translated and almost universally copied here. This, I think, is less due to its brevity than to its almost inspired simplicity and Christian dignity.”
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America’s penny press, on the other hand, did not universally laud the oration. The
New York Herald
scolded Lincoln for saying nothing about the French presence in Mexico. Lincoln later dismissed the gripes. “Men are not flattered,” the president explained, “by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.”
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And yet even as Lincoln proclaimed his government’s humility, the president celebrated the occasion in high style. One fashion magazine reported on the “august assemblage” of “foreign ministers with their wives” that paraded through the inaugural ball. Mary wore a white satin dress with a matching lace flounce. Heavy silk cords and tassels swung from the garment, and white-and-purple flowers adorned her hair. The scene, the correspondent continued, “impressed us as being fully equal to the … pageants of the Old World.” As March progressed, even the president began to loosen up a little, occasionally taking Mary out to the opera. “Mr L.,” the First Lady told a friend, “when he throws off his heavy manner, as he often does, can make himself very, very agreeable.”
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Not all Europeans were comfortable with the rejoicing across the Atlantic. The American president now commanded the world’s largest army and a navy shimmering with ironclads. Any cold analysis of the new balance of power could not fail to take note of the colossus of North America. From Mexico, Charlotte wrote to Eugénie pleading that Napoleon’s regime not be “too optimistic” about their prospects in Mexico. Maximilian’s government was like “ivy,”
Charlotte told the empress—“we shall grow into a tree, but for the moment we still need a trunk to cling to.” Austria’s minister in Washington, Baron Wydenbruck, also cautioned against taking American power lightly. “It is certain that the inexhaustible resources at the disposal of the American people have developed in an eminent degree its sense of its own power and of the part reserved for it in the events of the world,” he warned. “The naval powers of Europe will in future have to reckon more and more with this proud and sensitive people.”
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As the spring unfolded, the news only improved for Lincoln. In the first days of April, Grant’s Army of the Potomac finally penetrated the Confederate defenses around Richmond. Lincoln had traveled from Washington to the front lines with his son Tad to witness the fall of the Confederate capital. From City Point, Virginia, the president watched as Grant’s men made their final assault on a rainy, moonless night. Lincoln could hear the pounding of the cannon and see their flickering light reflected against the clouds. On the warm, sunny Sunday morning of April 3, Grant’s men finally broke the Confederate lines and barreled into Richmond. “Thank God that I have lived to see this,” Lincoln exulted. “It seems to me that I have been dreaming a horrid dream for four years, and now the nightmare is gone. I want to see Richmond.” The president and his son walked the shattered streets of the Confederate capital, surrounded by cheering crowds.
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On April 6, Mary Lincoln joined her husband at City Point. She was accompanied by the Marquis de Chambrun—a young grandson of Lafayette’s who was visiting the United States. Mary, long a Francophile,
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had renewed her French studies once again in the last days of the war. She peppered Chambrun with flowers and invitations. Now Mary and the Marquis joined Lincoln in the saloon of the
River Queen
—the same space in which Stephens had pressed his case for an invasion of Mexico earlier that year. Lincoln showed Chambrun around the room, pointing out where each of the delegates to the conference had sat.

Chambrun thought the sunburned Lincoln’s eyes looked sunken and full of “deep sadness.” He marveled at the way Lincoln would shift, in the course of a single evening, from mirth to melancholy—one moment regaling his company with jokes, and the next closing his eyes to “retire within himself.” One night the Frenchman counted more than twenty “of these alternations and contrasts.” The president’s demeanor left Chambrun with an odd, slightly unsettling feeling. “Every time I have endeavored to describe this impression,” he later recalled, “words, nay, the very ideas, have failed me.”

The Frenchman quizzed the president about his intentions with regard to Mexico. Would he invade? “There has been war enough,” Lincoln replied. “I know what the American people want, but, thank God, I count for something, and during my second term there will be no more fighting.” Still, the president could not resist a subtle jab at his imperial antagonist in the Tuileries. With Chambrun looking on, Lincoln told the band to strike up the “Marseillaise”—the French revolutionary standard that Napoleon III had prohibited. When the band had finished, Lincoln told them to play it again.
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With Richmond finally secure, relief broke over Washington. Seward, for once, was pleased with the outlook for American foreign relations. On the sunny afternoon of April 5, he closed up shop at the State Department and went for his usual afternoon carriage ride, taking along his son Frederick, his daughter Fanny, and one of Fanny’s friends. But as their carriage rattled up Vermont Avenue, the door kept flapping open, and the driver suddenly lost control of his horses. The secretary of state lurched for the reins—but then caught a heel and tumbled into the street.

The fall knocked Seward unconscious, dislocating his shoulder and breaking his jaw on both sides. Blood poured from his nose as he lay in the street with his heavy overcoat thrown over his head. Frederick, along with a clutch of bystanders, carried the secretary of state’s limp body up the stairs to his bed. Fanny sat by her father’s side as he muttered incoherently in his sleep. When he woke up, the secretary of state was in excruciating pain. Seward’s wife, when she
arrived at his bedside, found his face “so marred and swollen and discolored that one can hardly persuade themselves of his identity; his voice so changed; utterance almost entirely prevented by the broken jaw and the swollen tongue. It makes my heart ache to look at him.” The secretary of state remained incapacitated for days.
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After Lincoln heard the news, he returned to Washington. Inside the secretary of state’s Lafayette Square home, the president found the gaslights turned down to a dim flame. The house was filled with whispers. As Lincoln entered Seward’s sickroom, he found his secretary of state completely wrapped in bandages. He sat down on the edge of Seward’s bed. The New Yorker could hardly speak. “You are back from Richmond?” Seward whispered to the president. “Yes,” Lincoln said, “and I think we are near the end, at last.” The president then told stories from the front until Seward drifted off to sleep.
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Lincoln, despite his early tension with Seward, had grown fond of his secretary of state. He had come to rely on the New Yorker’s foreign-affairs counsel.
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Fortunately, the threat of a foreign war now seemed distant. Euphoric Washingtonians paraded through the streets waving flags and exploding fireworks over Lafayette Square. Lincoln even allowed himself to daydream about traveling abroad. He fantasized about taking his family on a vacation to Europe. The president, who came into office with virtually no experience with the world outside America’s borders, explained that he had a strong desire to spend time “moving and traveling.” He also wanted to visit the Middle East. Mary later recalled her husband telling her that “there was no city on earth he so much desired to see as Jerusalem.”
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In the meantime, Lincoln satisfied his escapism by going to the theater.
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The president was particularly captivated by the tales of jealousy, murder, and guilt in Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies. Lincoln was attending the theater so often in the spring of 1865 that aides worried he would make an easy target for an assassin. His security was so light, one friend lamented, that “any able-bodied woman
in this city” would be able to make an attempt. An Iowan had once written to Lincoln’s personal secretary offering to construct a special shirt made of gold-plated chain mail to protect the president. “I am told that Napoleon III is constantly protected in this way,” he explained, “and that his life was thus saved from small pieces of the Orsini shells, which killed his horses and several persons. I shall be very happy to get this done for Mr. Lincoln if he will accept of it.” Lincoln declined the eccentric offer.
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On the night of April 14—Good Friday—the president attended the performance of
Our American Cousin
at Ford’s Theatre with Mary, along with a young Army major and his fiancée. It was a comedy, and loud and frequent peals of laughter filled the theater. Few patrons paid much attention to the twenty-six-year-old actor who crept upstairs toward the president’s box. As the audience tittered and guffawed, the young man peered at the president through a small peephole that had been cut into the door of the box.
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Then he pushed through the entrance and lifted his snub-nosed pistol.
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John Hay was in his bedroom in the residence of the Executive Mansion that evening, when an anxious, hurried crowd came pouring through the compound’s east gate. Lincoln’s twenty-six-year-old secretary, the White House doorkeeper later recalled, was “a handsome young man with a bloom on his cheeks just like that of a beautiful young lady.” When the doorkeeper told him that Lincoln had been shot, Hay “turned deathly pale, the color entirely leaving his cheeks.” Now the stricken young man hurried down the White House stairs alongside the president’s son Robert, with whom he had been studying Spanish earlier that night. They hustled into a carriage and sped off toward the boardinghouse across from Ford’s Theatre where Lincoln was being treated for his gunshot wound.
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Hay had once dismissed the threat of Lincoln’s assassination. It would be impossible to prevent, the young man told his diary, and so was not worth worrying about. Now, however, the nightmare scenario was unfolding before his eyes. When Lincoln’s secretary
arrived at the boardinghouse, he found his mentor lying diagonally on the bed, his hair caked with blood. Robert wept uncontrollably. Mary, also wailing, was finally taken from the crowded room. As the sun rose, Lincoln’s breathing grew shallower. Hay was at Lincoln’s bedside when the doctor pronounced the president dead at 7:22 a.m. “Now he belongs to the ages,” said the secretary of war, Edwin Stanton.
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The assassination, as it turned out, was part of a coordinated plot to strike at key figures in the Lincoln administration. Late on the same evening that the president had gone to Ford’s Theatre a tall, dapper figure showed up at the front door of Seward’s home on Lafayette Square, claiming that he brought a message from the secretary of state’s doctor. Despite the late hour, the man was brought upstairs through the dim, gas-lit corridors. Most of the family had already gone to bed. Seward’s son Frederick explained that his father was off limits for the night. At first the messenger seemed ready to depart. “Very well, sir, I will go,” he muttered, and turned back toward the stairs.