Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
Lincoln went on to make his powerful case for continued federal authority over what he insisted, “in view of the Constitution and the laws,” was an “unbroken” Union. While “there needs to be no bloodshed,” he intended to execute the laws, “to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion—no using of force against, or among the people anywhere….
“Physically speaking, we cannot separate,” Lincoln declared, prophetically adding: “Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides, and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions, as to terms of intercourse, are again upon you….
“In
your
hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in
mine,
is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail
you.
You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors.”
He closed with the lyrical assurance that “the mystic chords of memory…will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely as they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
At the end of the address, Chief Justice Taney walked slowly to the table. The Bible was opened, and Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as the sixteenth President of the United States.
“T
HE
M
ANSION
was in a perfect state of readiness” when the Lincolns arrived, Mary’s cousin Elizabeth Grimsley observed. “A competent chef, with efficient butler and waiters, under the direction of the accomplished Miss Harriet Lane, had an elegant dinner prepared.” As Buchanan bade farewell, he said to Lincoln, “If you are as happy, my dear sir, on entering the house as I am in leaving it and returning home, you are the happiest man in this country.” After some hasty unpacking, the Lincolns dressed for the Inaugural Ball, held in the rear of the City Hall, in a room referred to as the Muslim Palace of Aladdin “because of the abundance of white draperies trimmed with blue used in its decoration.” Brightened by five enormous chandeliers, the room accommodated two thousand people, though the hooped crinolines worn by the women took up a good deal of space. Seward was there with his daughter-in-law Anna. Chase was accompanied by the lovely Kate. Still, this night Mary shone as the brightest star. “Dressed all in blue, with a necklace and bracelets of gold and pearls,” she danced the quadrille with her old beau Stephen Douglas and remained at the ball for several hours after the departure of her exhausted husband.
While the party was still in full swing, word of Lincoln’s inaugural speech was making its way across the country, carried by telegraph and printed in dozens of evening newspapers. In Auburn, Frances and Fanny waited in suspense throughout the night for the paper to arrive. Finally, Fanny heard a sound downstairs and raced to find out the news. “What an inappreciable relief,” Fanny wrote in her diary when she read that the ceremony went off without violence. “For months I have felt constant anxiety for Father’s safety—& of course joined in the fears so often expressed that Lincoln would never see the 5th of March.” The news traveled more slowly west of St. Joseph, Missouri, where the telegraph lines stopped. Dozens of pony express riders, traveling in relays, carried the text of the address to the Pacific Coast. They did their job well. In a record time of “seven days and seventeen hours,” Lincoln’s words could be read in Sacramento, California.
Reactions to his speech varied widely, depending on the political persuasion of the commentators. Republican papers lauded the address as “grand and admirable in every respect,” and “convincing in argument, concise and pithy in manner.” It was “eminently conciliatory,” the
Philadelphia Bulletin
observed, extolling the president’s “determination to secure the rights of the whole country, of every State under the Constitution.” The
Commercial Advertiser
of New York claimed that the inaugural was “the work of Mr. Lincoln’s own pen and hand, unaltered by any to whom he confided its contents.”
In Northern Democratic papers, the tone was less charitable. A “wretchedly botched and unstatesmanlike paper,” the
Hartford Times
opined. “It is he that is the nullifier,” the Albany
Atlas and Argus
raged. “It is he that defies the will of the majority. It is he that initiates Civil War.” Not surprisingly, negative reactions were stronger in the South. The
Richmond Enquirer
argued that the address was “couched in the cool, unimpassioned, deliberate language of the fanatic…pursuing the promptings of fanaticism even to the dismemberment of the Government with the horrors of civil war.” In ominous language, the Wilmington, North Carolina,
Herald
warned that the citizens of America “might as well open their eyes to the solemn fact that war is inevitable.”
But beneath the blustery commentary in the majority of Southern papers, the historian Benjamin Thomas notes, the address “won some favorable comment in the all-important loyal slave states” of Virginia and North Carolina. This was the audience Seward had targeted when he told Lincoln to soften the tone of his speech. Indeed, Seward was greatly relieved, not only because he realized many of his suggestions had been adopted, but because Lincoln’s conciliatory stance had given him cover with his critics in Congress. He could now leave the Senate, he told his wife, “without getting any bones broken,” content with having provided a foundation “on which an Administration can stand.”
Likewise, Charles Francis Adams, Sr., felt that a great burden had been lifted from his shoulders when Lincoln accepted the controversial amendment that prevented Congress from ever interfering with slavery. Having sponsored the amendment in the House, to the great dismay of the hard-liners, Adams now felt that he had “been fully justified in the face of the country by the head of the nation as well as of the Republican party…. Thus ends this most trying period of our history…. I should be fortunate if I closed my political career now. I have gained all that I can for myself and I shall never have such another opportunity to benefit my country.”
Of the reactions to the inaugural speech, perhaps the most portentous came from within the Republican Party itself. Radicals and abolitionists were disheartened by what they considered an appeasing tone. The news of Lincoln’s election had initially provided some desperately needed hope to the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
The dramatic life of the former slave who became an eloquent orator and writer was well known in the North. He had been owned by several cruel slaveholders, but his second master’s kindly wife had taught him to read. When the master found out, he stopped the instruction immediately, warning his wife that “it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read…there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave…. It would make him…discontented and unhappy.” These words proved prescient. Young Douglass soon felt that “learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy.” He fervently wished that he were dead or perhaps an animal—“Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking!” Only the faraway hope of escaping to freedom kept him alive. While waiting six years for his chance, he surreptitiously learned to write.
At the age of twenty, Douglass managed to escape from Maryland to New York, eventually becoming a lecturer with the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, headed by William Lloyd Garrison. His autobiography made him a celebrity in antislavery circles, allowing him to edit his own monthly paper in Rochester, New York. Throughout all his writings, the historian David Blight argues, there was “no more pervasive theme in Douglass’ thought than the simple sustenance of
hope
in a better future for blacks in America.”
Douglass believed that the election of a Republican president foretold a rupture in the power of the slaveocracy. “It has taught the North its strength, and shown the South its weakness. More important still, it has demonstrated the possibility of electing, if not an Abolitionist, at least an
anti-slavery reputation
to the Presidency.” But when Douglass read the inaugural, beginning with Lincoln’s declaration that he had “no lawful power to interfere with slavery in the States,” and worse still, no
“inclination”
to do so, he found little reason for optimism. More insufferable was Lincoln’s readiness to catch fugitive slaves, “to shoot them down if they rise against their oppressors, and to prohibit the Federal Government
irrevocably
from interfering for their deliverance.” The whole tone of the speech, Douglass claimed, revealed Lincoln’s compulsion to grovel “before the foul and withering curse of slavery. Some thought we had in Mr. Lincoln the nerve and decision of an Oliver Cromwell; but the result shows that we merely have a continuation of the Pierces and Buchanans.”
T
HE
W
HITE
H
OUSE FAMILY QUARTERS
were then confined to the west end of the second floor. Lincoln chose a small bedroom with a large dressing room on the southwest side. Mary took the more spacious room adjacent to her husband’s, while Willie and Tad occupied a bedroom across the hall. Beyond the ample sleeping quarters, there was only one other private space—an oval room, filled with bookcases, that Mary turned into the family’s library. At the east end of the same floor was a sleeping chamber shared by Nicolay and Hay and a small, narrow workspace that opened onto the president’s simply furnished office. The rest of the mansion was largely open to the public. In the first few weeks, Seward reported to his wife, “the grounds, halls, stairways, closets” were overrun with hundreds of people, standing in long winding lines and waving their letters of introduction in desperate hope of securing a job.
For Willie and Tad, now ten and almost eight, respectively, the early days in the White House were filled with great adventures. They ran from floor to floor, inspecting every room. They talked with everyone along the way, “from Edward, the door keeper, Stackpole, the messenger, to the maids and scullions.” Willie was “a noble, beautiful boy,” Elizabeth Grimsley observed, “of great mental activity, unusual intelligence, wonderful memory, methodical, frank and loving, a counterpart of his father, save that he was handsome.” Willie spent hours memorizing railroad timetables and would entertain his friends by conducting “an imaginary train from Chicago to New York with perfect precision” and dramatic flair. He was an avid reader, a budding writer, and generally sweet-tempered, all reminiscent of his father.
Tad, to whom Willie was devoted, bore greater resemblance to his mother. Healthy and high-spirited, he had a blazing temper, which disappeared as quickly as it came. He was a “merry, spontaneous fellow, bubbling over with innocent fun, whose laugh rang through the house, when not moved to tears.” Irrepressible and undisciplined, never hesitant to interrupt his father in the midst of a cabinet meeting, he was “the life, as also the worry of the household.” A speech impediment made it hard for anyone outside his family to understand his words, but he never stopped talking. He had, John Hay recalled, “a very bad opinion of books and no opinion of discipline.”
The boys harried the staff at the executive mansion, racing through the hallways, playing advocate for the most anguished office seekers, organizing little plays in the garret, and setting off all the servants’ bells at the same time. Fearing that her boys would grow lonely and isolated, Mary found them two lively companions in twelve-year-old Horatio Nelson “Bud” Taft and his eight-year-old brother, Halsey, nicknamed “Holly.” Together with their older sister, Julia, who later wrote a small book recording their adventures in the White House, the Taft children quickly formed a tight circle with Willie and Tad. “If there was any motto or slogan of the White House during the early years,” Julia recalled, “it was this: ‘Let the children have a good time.’”
Mary, too, seemed happy at first, surrounded by friends and relatives, who stayed on for weeks after the inauguration. Her confidence that she could handle the demands of first lady was buoyed by the great success of the first evening levee on the Friday after they moved in. Seward had proposed that he would lead off the social season from his own mansion, but Mary immediately took exception. Like her husband, Mary had no desire “to let Seward take the first trick.” She insisted that the new administration’s first official entertainment take place at the White House. Though she had little time to prepare, she arranged an unforgettable event. “For over two hours,” Nicolay wrote his fiancée, Therena, “the crowd poured in as rapidly as the door would admit them, and many climbed in at the windows.” The president and first lady shook hands with as many of the five thousand “well dressed and well behaved” guests as they could. Even the blue-blood Charles Francis Adams was impressed by Mary’s poise, though he found Lincoln to be wholly ignorant of formal “social courtesy.” Nonetheless, according to Nicolay, the levee “was voted by all the ‘oldest inhabitants’ to have been the most successful one ever known here.”
Mary was thrilled. “This is certainly a very charming spot,” she wrote her friend Hannah Shearer several weeks later, “& I have formed many delightful acquaintances. Every evening our
blue room,
is filled with the elite of the land, last eve, we had about 40 to call in, to see us
ladies,
from Vice. P. Breckinridge down…. I am beginning to feel so perfectly at home, and enjoy every thing so much. The conservatory attached to this house is so delightful.” Scarcely concealing her pride at having outdone her older sister Elizabeth, she told Hannah that Elizabeth had so enjoyed herself at the festivities that she “cannot settle down at home, since she has been here.”