Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
“I suppose you refer to something Mr. Blair has said,” Lincoln replied. “Now it is proper to state at the beginning, that whatever he said was of his own accord…. The restoration of the Union is a
sine qua non
with me.” There could be no substantive talk of an armistice or postponement until “the resistance ceased and the National Authority was recognized.” Attempting to circumvent this declaration, Hunter recalled that Charles I of England had entered repeatedly into arrangements with his adversaries despite ongoing hostilities. “I do not profess to be posted in history,” Lincoln answered. “On all such matters I will turn you over to Seward. All I distinctly recollect about the case of Charles I, is, that he lost his head in the end.”
Judge Campbell then turned the conversation to the question of “how restoration was to take place, supposing that the Confederate States were consenting to it.” This opened a discussion of slavery, which Seward addressed by reciting verbatim from Lincoln’s annual address in which he had said that he would not “attempt to retract or modify the Emancipation Proclamation, nor…return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that Proclamation.” Moreover, Seward said, he felt obliged to inform the commissioners that Congress had just passed a constitutional amendment banning slavery throughout the entire United States.
They had clearly reached an impasse, but the conversation continued in an amicable tone. Lincoln let the commissioners know that “he would be willing to be taxed to remunerate the Southern people for their slaves.” He was fairly confident “the people of the North” would sustain him with “an appropriation as high as Four Hundred Millions of Dollars for this purpose.” On the question of some sort of postponement of hostilities prior to the end of the war, Lincoln was immovable. The conference drew to a close without agreement on any issue.
Before any outcome was made public, the radicals had worked themselves into “a fury of rage,” certain that the president “was about to give up the political fruits which had been already gathered from the long and exhausting military struggle.” Fearing Lincoln would turn his back on emancipation, Thaddeus Stevens excoriated him on the floor of the House. In the Senate, “the leading members of the Committee on the Conduct of the War” roundly castigated the very idea of the conference, predicting that “we shall be sold out, and that the Peace we shall obtain, if any we do, will dishonor us.” Both branches passed a resolution calling for a full report on the proceedings. Even Stanton worried that the president’s kindheartedness “might lead him to make some admission which the astute Southerners would wilfully misconstrue and twist to serve their purpose.”
Lincoln’s report on the conference, complete with the telegrams and documents preceding it, was “read amidst a breathless silence in the hall, every member being in his seat. A low gush of satisfaction broke out when the phrase ‘one common country’ was read in the Blair letter, and an involuntary burst followed the annunciation of the three conditions of peace, given to Seward.” Noah Brooks observed that “as the reading of the message and documents went on, the change which took place in the moral atmosphere of the hall of the House was obvious. The appearance of grave intentness passed away, and members smilingly exchanged glances as they began to appreciate Lincoln’s sagacious plan for unmasking the craftiness of the rebel leaders.” When the presentation was done, “there was an instant and irrepressible storm of applause…it was like a burst of refreshing rain after a long and heartbreaking drought.” Representatives vied with one another to praise the president. Even Thaddeus Stevens “paid a high tribute to the sagacity, wisdom, and patriotism of President Lincoln.”
“Indeed,”
Harper’s Weekly
observed, “nothing but the foolish assumption of four years ago, that Mr. Lincoln was unfit for his office,” could explain the fatuous predictions that he would “flinch and falter” before the Southern delegates. “If there is any man in the country who comprehends the scope of the war more fully than the President, who is he?…We venture to say that there is no man in our history who has shown a more felicitous combination of temperament, conviction, and ability to grapple with a complication like that in which this country is involved than Abraham Lincoln.”
Jefferson Davis pragmatically employed the failed conference to incite greater effort on the battlefield, pledging that “he would be willing to yield up everything he had on earth” before acceding to Northern demands. He predicted that before another year had passed, the South would be able to secure peace on its own terms, with separation and slavery intact. “I can have no ‘common country’ with the Yankees,” he announced. “My life is bound up in the Confederacy; and, if any man supposes that, under any circumstances, I can be an agent of reconstruction of the Union, he has mistaken every element of my nature!”
Still, Lincoln did not relinquish hope that he might somehow bring the war to an honorable end before tens of thousands more young men had to die. Following his Hampton Roads suggestion of compensated emancipation, he drafted a proposal that Congress empower him “to pay four hundred millions of dollars” to the Southern states, distributed according to “their respective slave populations.” The first half would be paid if “all resistance to the national authority” came to an end by April 1; the second half would be allocated if the Thirteenth Amendment were ratified by July 1. At that point, with the armed rebellion at an end, the Union restored, and slavery eradicated, “all political offences will be pardoned” and “all property, except slaves, liable to confiscation or forfeiture, will be released.” Furthermore, “liberality will be recommended to congress upon all points not lying within executive control.”
The proposition met with unanimous disapproval from the cabinet, all of whom were present except Seward. “The earnest desire of the President to conciliate and effect peace was manifest,” Welles recorded, “but there may be such a thing as so overdoing as to cause a distrust or adverse feeling.” Usher believed that the radicals in Congress “would make it the occasion of a violent assault on the President.” Stanton had long maintained that it was unnecessary and wasteful to talk about compensation for slaves already freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Fessenden declared “that the only way to effectually end the war was by force of arms, and that until the war was thus ended no proposition to pay money would come from us.”
Lincoln pointed out that the sum he proposed was simply the cost of continuing the war for another one or two hundred days, “to say nothing of the lives lost and property destroyed.” Still, the cabinet was adamant. “You are all against me,” Lincoln said, his voice filled with sadness. “His heart was so fully enlisted in behalf of such a plan that he would have followed it if only a single member of his Cabinet had supported him,” Usher thought. Had Seward been there, Usher mused, “he would probably have approved the measure.” Without a trace of support among his colleagues at the table, Lincoln felt compelled to forsake his proposition, which, in any event, as Jefferson Davis had made clear, was unacceptable to the Confederacy. So the war would continue until the South capitulated.
M
EANWHILE, THE WAR FRONT
continued to generate good news for the Union. After capturing Savannah, Sherman had headed north to Columbia, reaching the state capital of South Carolina on February 17. Columbia’s fall led to the evacuation of Charleston. Stanton ordered “a national salute” fired from “every fort arsenal and army headquarters of the United States, in honor of the restoration of the flag of the Union upon Fort Sumter.” In Washington, the
National Republican
noted, “the flash and smoke were visible from the tops of buildings on the avenue, and the thunder of the guns was heard in all parts of the city.” That evening, Lincoln was in “cheerful” spirits as he relaxed with Seward, Welles, and General Hooker in his office. “General H. thinks it the brightest day in four years,” Welles recorded in his diary.
The following day, however, Browning found Lincoln “more depressed” than he had seen him in the four years of his presidency. His low spirits were probably caused by the pending execution of John Yates Beall, a former Confederate captain who had been tried and found guilty as a spy. In the fall of 1864, when Confederate agents based in Canada were pursuing plots to disrupt the draft and influence the elections, Beall had led a team of raiders in a daring and elaborate scheme to commandeer Union ships in the Great Lakes area, destroy railroad lines, and liberate Confederate prisoners in Ohio. The commander of the army in New York State, General John A. Dix, was unyielding in his belief that Beall must be executed as an example to others.
But Beall came from a prominent Virginia family, and a wide array of supporters petitioned Lincoln for clemency, including Orville Browning, Monty Blair, eight dozen congressmen, and six United States senators. They argued that Beall was acting as a commissioned officer in the Confederate army and should not be treated as “a robber, brigand, and pirate.” The case troubled Lincoln greatly, but he felt compelled to support General Dix. “I had to stand firm,” he told an acquaintance a few weeks later, “and I even had to turn away his poor sister when she came and begged for his life, and let him be executed, and he was executed, and I can’t get the distress out of my mind yet.”
The week before his second inaugural on March 4, Lincoln announced that he would “not receive callers (except members of the Cabinet) for any purpose whatever, between the hours of three and seven o’clock p.m.” He needed solitude to work on his inaugural speech. “The hopeful condition of the Union cause” had brought thousands of visitors to Washington, the
National Republican
reported. They were anxious not only to partake of the inaugural revelries but to share in the general elation that pervaded the capital. The city was so overcrowded that the parlors of all the leading hotels “were occupied by ladies and gentlemen, sitting up all night because no beds could be found for them.”
Frederick Douglass decided to join “in the grand procession of citizens from all parts of the country.” Blacks had been excluded from previous inaugural festivities, but with soldiers of both races “mingling their blood,” it seemed to him that “it was not too great an assumption for a colored man to offer his congratulations to the President with those of other citizens.” The evening before the inauguration, he visited Chase’s Sixth Street home. There, he later recalled, he helped Kate “in placing over her honored father’s shoulders the new robe then being made in which he was to administer the oath to the reelected President.” As he looked at the new Chief Justice, Douglass recollected the “early anti-slavery days” of their first acquaintance. Chase had “welcomed [him] to his home and his table when to do so was a strange thing.”
The steady rain on the morning of March 4 did not dampen the spirits of the estimated fifty thousand citizens gathered at the Capitol to witness the inauguration. Invited guests poured into the Senate chamber for the first part of the ceremony, which included a farewell address by the outgoing vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, and the swearing in of Andrew Johnson. Shortly before noon, a stir in the galleries revealed the arrival of the “notables”—generals, governors, the justices of the Supreme Court, the cabinet members, led by Seward, and finally, the president himself, whose chair was positioned in the middle of the front row. Mary Lincoln was seated in the Diplomatic Gallery, surrounded by members of the foreign ministries. “One ambassador was so stiff with gold lace,” Noah Brooks observed, “that he could not sit down except with great difficulty and had to unbutton before he could get his feet on the floor.”
After Hamlin delivered a graceful farewell address, Andrew Johnson rose to take the oath. His face was “extraordinarily red,” his balance precarious. He appeared to observers to be “in a state of manifest intoxication.” For twenty long minutes, he spoke incoherently, repeatedly declaring his plebeian background and his pride that such a humble man “could rise from the ranks, under the Constitution, to the proud position of the second place in the gift of the people.” Pivoting to face the Supreme Court justices, he reminded them that they also derived their “power from the people.” Then he spoke to the members of the cabinet, insisting they, too, were “creature[s]” of the people. He addressed each secretary by name—Mr. Seward, Mr. Stanton, and down the ranks—until he reached Gideon Welles, whose name he could not remember. Seemingly nonplused, he turned to someone near him and loudly inquired, “What’s the name of the Secretary of the Navy?” Continuing his tirade, he ignored Hamlin’s pointed reminder that “the hour for the inauguration ceremony had passed.”
The crowd stirred uneasily, and the men on the dais tried with varying success to conceal their dismay. “Stanton looked like a petrified man,” Noah Brooks observed. “All this is in wretched bad taste,” Speed whispered to Welles. “The man is certainly deranged.” Welles whispered to Stanton that “Johnson is either drunk or crazy.” Dennison, the new postmaster general, “was red and white by turns,” while Justice Samuel Nelson’s jaw “dropped clean down in blank horror.” Seward and Lincoln alone appeared unruffled. Seward remained as “serene as summer,” charitably suggesting to Welles that Johnson’s performance was a by-product of “emotion on returning and revisiting the Senate.” Lincoln listened in silence, “patiently waiting” for the harangue to end, his eyes shut so that no one could discern his discomfort. “You need not be scared,” he said a few days later; Johnson had “made a bad slip” but was not “a drunkard.”
When Johnson finished at last, the audience proceeded outside to the east front of the Capitol for the inaugural ceremony. As the president appeared on the platform, observed Noah Brooks, “the sun, which had been obscured all day, burst forth in its unclouded meridian splendor and flooded the spectacle with glory and light.” It seemed to many, including the superstitious Lincoln, an auspicious omen, as did the appearance of the newly completed Capitol dome, topped with the statue of Freedom.