Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
In distant St. Louis, where his son Barton had found him a new house with a large garden and a comfortable study, Edward Bates was shaken by “the astounding news” that reached him by telegram. In his diary, he remarked that beyond the “calamity which the nation has sustained, my private feelings are deeply moved by the sudden murder of my chief, with and under whom I have served the country, through many difficult and trying scenes, and always with mutual sentiments of respect and friendship. I mourn his fall, both for the country and for myself.”
News of Lincoln’s death was withheld from Seward. The doctors feared that he could not sustain the shock. On Easter Sunday, however, as he looked out the window toward Lafayette Park, he noticed the War Department flag at half-mast. “He gazed awhile,” Noah Brooks reported, “then, turning to his attendant,” he announced, “The President is dead.” The attendant tried to deny it, but Seward knew with grim certainty. “If he had been alive he would have been the first to call on me,” he said, “but he has not been here, nor has he sent to know how I am, and there’s the flag at halfmast.” He lay back on the bed, “the great tears coursing down his gashed cheeks, and the dreadful truth sinking into his mind.” His good friend, his captain and chief, was dead.
“The history of governments,” John Hay later observed, “affords few instances of an official connection hallowed by a friendship so absolute and sincere as that which existed between these two magnanimous spirits. Lincoln had snatched away from Seward at Chicago the prize of a laborious life-time, when it seemed within his grasp. Yet Seward was the first man named in his Cabinet and the first who acknowledged his personal preeminence…. From the beginning of the Administration to that dark and terrible hour when they were both struck down by the hand of murderous treason, there was no shadow of jealousy or doubt ever disturbed their mutual confidence and regard.”
F
LAGS REMAINED AT HALF-MAST
in the nation’s capital until the last week of May, when citizens from all over the country came to Washington to witness “the farewell march” of nearly two hundred thousand Union soldiers who would soon disband and return to their homes. Stanton had orchestrated the two-day pageant as a final tribute to the brave men who had fought on battlefields from Antietam to Fredericksburg, Gettysburg to Vicksburg, Atlanta to the sea. “Never in the history of Washington,” reported Noah Brooks, “had there been such an enormous influx of visitors as at that time. For weeks there had been so vast a volume of applications for accommodations at the hotels and boarding-houses that every available nook and corner had been taken.”
Schools and government buildings were closed for the occasion. Reviewing stands had been built all along Pennsylvania Avenue, “from the Capitol to the White House.” A covered platform had been erected to seat President Andrew Johnson, General Grant, and an assortment of dignitaries. The weather was beautiful on both days: “The air was bright, clear, and invigorating.”
The first day was dedicated to the Army of the Potomac. Hour after hour the troops filed past in review—the cavalry, the mounted artillery, the infantry, the engineering brigades—each with their distinctive uniforms and badges, accompanied by “the clatter of hoofs, the clank of sabers, and the shrill call of bugles.” It was, Gideon Welles marveled, a “magnificent and imposing spectacle.”
“You see in these armies,” Stanton predicted, “the foundation of our Republic—our future railway managers, congressmen, bank presidents, senators, manufacturers, judges, governors, and diplomats; yes, and not less than half a dozen presidents.” (He was very nearly right, for five of the next seven presidents would be Civil War veterans: Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, and William McKinley.)
Over a quarter of a century earlier, in 1838, young Abraham Lincoln had spoken with fervor of the veterans of the Revolutionary War, who were by then mostly gone, the fabled scenes of their great struggle for American independence growing “more and more dim by the lapse of time.” In that war, “nearly every adult male had been a participant,” he said, “in the form of a husband, a father, a son or a brother,” until “a
living history was
to be found in every family.” Such he had said was no longer true for his generation.
Now a new “living history” had been forged in the families of nearly three million Union soldiers who had fought to create what their matured leader had called “a new birth of freedom” to ensure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The soldiers marching down Pennsylvania Avenue that warm spring day knew they had accomplished something that would change their lives and their nation forever.
The second day belonged to the Army of the West, marching with solemn dignity behind General Sherman. “The streets were filled with people to see the pageant,” Sherman recalled. “When I reached the Treasury-building, and looked back, the sight was simply magnificent. The column was compact, and the glittering muskets looked like a solid mass of steel, moving with the regularity of a pendulum.”
When Sherman came to the corner of Lafayette Square, someone pointed to an upper window of a brick house where Seward, still too feeble to walk on his own, had been carried to witness the parade. “I moved in that direction and took off my hat to Mr. Seward,” Sherman recalled. “He recognized the salute, returned it, and then we rode on steadily past the President, saluting with our swords.”
All of Washington was present, Gideon Welles sadly noted—congressmen, senators, justices, diplomats, governors, military officers, the members of the cabinet, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. “But Abraham Lincoln was not there. All felt this.” None felt that absence more keenly than the members of his cabinet, the remarkable group of rivals whom Lincoln had brought into his official family. They had fiercely opposed one another and often contested their chief on important questions, but, as Seward later remarked, “a Cabinet which should agree at once on every such question would be no better or safer than one counsellor.” By calling these men to his side, Lincoln had afforded them an opportunity to exercise their talents to the fullest and to share in the labor and the glory of the struggle that would reunite and transform their country and secure their own places in posterity.
“I
HAVE NO DOUBT
that Lincoln will be the conspicuous figure of the war,” predicted Ulysses S. Grant. “He was incontestably the greatest man I ever knew.”
The poet Walt Whitman felt much the same. “I have more than once fancied to myself,” Whitman wrote in 1888, “the time when the present century has closed, and a new one open’d, and the men and deeds of that contest have become somewhat vague and mythical.” He fancied that at some commemoration of those earlier days, an “ancient soldier” would sit surrounded by a group of young men whose eyes and “eager questions” would betray their sense of wonder. “What! have you seen Abraham Lincoln—and heard him speak—and touch’d his hand?” Though conceding that the future might decide differently about the prairie president, Whitman had no trouble speaking for his own generation: “Abraham Lincoln seems to me the grandest figure yet, on all the crowded canvas of the Nineteenth Century.”
Even Whitman might have been amazed by the scope of Lincoln’s legacy by the time the new century arrived. In 1908, in a wild and remote area of the North Caucasus, Leo Tolstoy, the greatest writer of the age, was the guest of a tribal chief “living far away from civilized life in the mountains.” Gathering his family and neighbors, the chief asked Tolstoy to tell stories about the famous men of history. Tolstoy told how he entertained the eager crowd for hours with tales of Alexander, Caesar, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. When he was winding to a close, the chief stood and said, “But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock…. His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.”
“I looked at them,” Tolstoy recalled, “and saw their faces all aglow, while their eyes were burning. I saw that those rude barbarians were really interested in a man whose name and deeds had already become a legend.” He told them everything he knew about Lincoln’s “home life and youth…his habits, his influence upon the people and his physical strength.” When he finished, they were so grateful for the story that they presented him with “a wonderful Arabian horse.” The next morning, as Tolstoy prepared to leave, they asked if he could possibly acquire for them a picture of Lincoln. Thinking that he might find one at a friend’s house in the neighboring town, Tolstoy asked one of the riders to accompany him. “I was successful in getting a large photograph from my friend,” recalled Tolstoy. As he handed it to the rider, he noted that the man’s hand trembled as he took it. “He gazed for several minutes silently, like one in a reverent prayer, his eyes filled with tears.”
Tolstoy went on to observe, “This little incident proves how largely the name of Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become. Now, why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all other national heroes? He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skilful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.
“Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country—bigger than all the Presidents together.
“We are still too near to his greatness,” Tolstoy concluded, “but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.”
“E
VERY MAN IS SAID
to have his peculiar ambition,” the twenty-three-year-old Abraham Lincoln had written in his open letter to the people of Sangamon County during his first bid for public office in the Illinois state legislature. “Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other [ambition] so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition, is yet to be developed.”
The ambition to establish a reputation worthy of the esteem of his fellows so that his story could be told after his death had carried Lincoln through his bleak childhood, his laborious efforts to educate himself, his string of political failures, and a depression so profound that he declared himself more than willing to die, except that “he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.” An indomitable sense of purpose had sustained him through the disintegration of the Union and through the darkest months of the war, when he was called upon again and again to rally his disheartened countrymen, soothe the animosity of his generals, and mediate among members of his often contentious administration.
His conviction that we are one nation, indivisible, “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” led to the rebirth of a union free of slavery. And he expressed this conviction in a language of enduring clarity and beauty, exhibiting a literary genius to match his political genius.
With his death, Abraham Lincoln had come to seem the embodiment of his own words—“With malice toward none; with charity for all”—voiced in his second inaugural to lay out the visionary pathway to a reconstructed union. The deathless name he sought from the start had grown far beyond Sangamon County and Illinois, reached across the truly United States, until his legacy, as Stanton had surmised at the moment of his death, belonged not only to America but to the ages—to be revered and sung throughout all time.
A
GAINST ALL ODDS,
Seward and his son Frederick eventually recovered from their frightful injuries, but the “night of horrors” took its ultimate toll on Frances Seward. Six weeks afterward, convinced that she had taken on the afflictions of her loved ones through “vicarious suffering,” she collapsed and died. Her funeral in Auburn was said to have brought together “the largest assemblage that ever attended the funeral of a woman in America.” In the months that followed, Fanny remained at her father’s side, trying to compensate for her departed mother until she herself fell desperately ill from tuberculosis. When she died two months short of her twenty-second birthday, Seward was inconsolable. “Truly it may be said,” the
Washington Republican
noted, “that the assassin’s blows passed by the father and son and fell fatally on the mother and daughter.”
Seward remained secretary of state throughout President Andrew Johnson’s term. While his attempts to mediate Johnson’s bitter struggles with the radicals in Congress failed, he took great pride in what was originally lampooned as “Seward’s Folly”—the purchase of Alaska. After retiring from public office, he spent his last years traveling. With Fred and Anna, he embarked on an eight-month journey to Alaska, California, and Mexico. Returning to Auburn, he immediately made plans for a trip around the world, visiting Japan, China, India, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, and France. He died peacefully in 1872 at the age of seventy-one, surrounded by his family. When his daughter-in-law Jenny asked if he had any deathbed advice to impart, he said simply: “Love one another.” Thurlow Weed, who served as a pallbearer, wept openly as the body of his oldest friend was lowered into the grave.
Stanton’s remaining days in the cabinet were acrimonious. His sympathy with the congressional radicals on Reconstruction brought him into open conflict with the president, who asked for his resignation. Refusing to honor Johnson’s request even after he was handed a removal order, Stanton “barricaded himself” in his office for weeks, taking his meals in the department and sleeping on his couch. He argued that his dismissal violated the Tenure of Office Act, recently passed by congressional radicals over the president’s veto, which required Senate consent for the removal of any cabinet officer. Johnson’s disregard for the Tenure of Office Act became one of the articles of impeachment lodged against him in 1868. When the impeachment failed by one vote in the Senate, Stanton finally submitted his resignation.
Although exhausted by the ordeal, Stanton had little time to rest. His fortune had been depleted during his tenure in the cabinet. After returning to the practice of law, he was overjoyed when President Grant nominated him to the Supreme Court, the “only office” he had ever desired to hold, in December 1869. His happiness was short-lived. Three days later, as his family gathered for the Christmas holidays, he suffered a severe asthma attack, lapsed into unconsciousness, and died. He had just turned fifty-five. “I know that it is useless to say anything,” Robert Todd Lincoln wrote to Stanton’s son Edwin, Jr., “and yet when I recall the kindness of your father to me, when my father was lying dead and I felt utterly desperate, hardly able to realize the truth, I am as little able to keep my eyes from filling with tears as he was then.”
Edward Bates spent his remaining years with his close-knit family, reunited with his son Fleming, whom he had welcomed home from the Confederate Army once the war ended. When Bates died in 1869 at the age of seventy-six, he was revered as much for his character as for his public accomplishments. Above all, one eulogist noted, “it was in his social and domestic relations that his character shown brightest; it was as a husband, as a father and a friend that he has endeared himself to others by ties which death cannot sever.”
After presiding over the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, Salmon Chase turned his addicted gaze to the 1868 presidential race, his hopes resting with the Democrats after Grant had secured the Republican nomination. With Kate serving as his campaign manager, he had his name placed before the delegates, but when Ohio announced for New York’s Horace Seymour, Chase’s candidacy was doomed. Once more, his home state had derailed his ambitions. Four years later, still hoping for the presidential nod, he switched his allegiance to the Liberal Republican Party. Again the nomination eluded him, going instead to Horace Greeley. His physical condition weakened by a heart attack and a stroke, Chase fell into depression, confiding to a friend that he was “too much of an invalid to be more than a cipher. Sometimes I feel as if I were dead.” Death came on May 7, 1873, with Kate and Nettie by his side. He was sixty-five.
After her father’s death, Kate saw her marriage to Sprague fall apart. An affair with New York senator Roscoe Conkling ended in scandal when Sprague, finding the couple together at his Narragansett mansion, went after Conkling with a shotgun. Following a violent argument during which Sprague tried to throw Kate from a bedroom window, she sued for divorce. She returned to Washington, where she died in poverty at fifty-eight.
The Blairs returned to the Democratic Party. Though Frank Blair was selected as Seymour’s vice presidential candidate in 1868, his intemperate denunciations of opponents cut short what might have been a promising political future. He died from a fall in his house in 1875 at the age of fifty-four. Old Man Blair outlived his son by one year, maintaining “his physical vigor, his mental faculties and his sprightliness of disposition” until his death at eighty-five. Montgomery served as counsel to Democrat Samuel Tilden in the disputed election of 1876, which Republican Rutherford B. Hayes eventually won. Blair was writing a biography of Andrew Jackson when he died in 1883 at the age of seventy.
Gideon Welles supported Andrew Johnson during the impeachment trial, remaining in the cabinet until 1868. Returning to Connecticut, he wrote a series of historical essays and was among the first to depict Lincoln as “a towering figure, coping admirably with herculean tasks.” His perceptive diary, which he edited in his last years, remains one of the most valuable sources on the dynamics within the Lincoln administration. Welles was seventy-five when he died from a streptococcus infection in 1878.
John Nicolay and John Hay remained friends until the end of their lives, coauthoring a massive ten-volume study of Lincoln based on his then-unpublished papers. Nicolay was at work on an abridged version of their study when he died in 1901 at sixty-nine. Hay served as secretary of state under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Shortly before he died from a blood clot at the age of sixty-six in 1905, he dreamed that he had returned “to the White House to report to the President who turned out to be Mr. Lincoln. He was very kind and considerate, and sympathetic about my illness…. He gave me two unimportant letters to answer. I was pleased that this slight order was within my power to obey.” Forty years after the assassination of his beloved chief, Hay awoke with an “overpowering melancholy.”
Mary Lincoln never recovered from her husband’s death. After returning to Illinois, she confided to Elizabeth Blair Lee that “each morning, on awakening, from my troubled slumbers, the utter impossibility of living another day, so wretched, appears to me, as an impossibility.” Were it not for her “precious Tad,” she told her boy’s tutor, she “would gladly welcome death.”
Mother and son were nearly inseparable. Tad journeyed with Mary to Europe, demonstrating what John Hay described as “a thoughtful devotion and tenderness beyond his years.” Not long after returning to America, Tad suffered what doctors termed “compression of the heart.” He died two months later at eighteen. “The modest and cordial young fellow who passed through New York a few weeks ago with his mother will never be known outside the circle of his mourning friends,” commented John Hay in a touching obituary written for the
New York Tribune.
“But ‘little Tad’ will be remembered as long as any live who bore a personal share in the great movements whose center for four years was Washington. He was so full of life and vigor—so bubbling over with health and high spirits, that he kept the house alive with his pranks and his fantastic enterprises.”
Mary’s misery was compounded by her ever-consuming worries over money. “It is very hard to deal with one who is sane on all subjects but one,” Robert confided in Mary Harlan, the young woman who would become his wife. “You could hardly believe it possible, but my mother protests to me that she is in actual want and nothing I can do or say will convince her to the contrary.” Her increasingly erratic behavior persuaded Robert to commit her to a state hospital for the insane where she remained for four months until she was released to the care of her sister Elizabeth in Springfield. The episode permanently estranged Mary from her only remaining child. After a final trip to Europe, she lived her remaining years as a virtual recluse in the Edwards mansion, where, in happier days, she and Abraham Lincoln had met and married. She was sixty-three in 1882 when her oft-stated longing for death was fulfilled at last.