Authors: Stephen B. Oates
Abraham Lincoln (17 page)
Apart from eliminating slavery and the southern ruling class, Lincoln made it plain that he would be flexible in reconstructing the rebel South, that the ten percent plan was only one formula and that he would gladly consider others. As he set about restoring Louisiana and Arkansas by the ten percent plan, he indicated that his approach as to the mode of reconstruction would be empirical: what plan he adopted for other conquered areas would depend on the circumstances and exigencies of each place and moment. The ten percent plan above all was a wartime measure, designed to weaken the Confederacy and to create loyal state governments in occupied areas brimming with hostile rebel sympathizers.
In his reconstruction efforts, Lincoln sought Congress's approval and cooperation, for he acknowledged that Capitol Hill had a powerful voice in the reconstruction process, since both houses would decide whether to accept representatives from the states he restored. He did clash with advanced Republicans like Sumner, Stevens, and Wade, who argued that reconstruction was a congressional and not a presidential responsibility. Sumner also opposed Lincoln's military approach because he did not understand how the army could produce an American state. But, despite their differences, Lincoln and the advanced and moderate Republicans on Capitol Hill stood together on most crucial reconstruction issues. They agreed that the South must be remade. They meant to abolish slavery there forever, and they worked closely, as we have seen, in guiding the present Thirteenth Amendment through Congress. They were concerned about the welfare of the freedmen. And they intended for southern Unionists to rule in postwar Dixie. Above all, they wanted to prevent ex-Confederate leaders from taking over the postwar South and forming a coalition with northern Democrats that might imperil the gains of the war. Lincoln and his congressional associates often differed on how to implement their goalsânearly all congressional Republicans, for instance, demanded a tougher loyalty oath than that required by the President's ten percent plan. And they disagreed, too, on the issue of Negro voting rights, as I shall discuss in a moment. But even so, the President and congressional Republicans retained a close and mutually respectful relationship, so much so that many contemporaries thought they would remain as united in working out reconstruction problems as they had in prosecuting the war.
One more thing about Sumner and Lincoln. While the President had his differences with the high-minded Senator, he always felt closest to Sumner's wing of the party. He remarked that men like the senator were the conscience of the party, and during the course of the war, as we have seen, Lincoln moved over to Sumner's position on emancipation, Negro troops, and other
harsh war measures. Moreover, the two men remained warm personal friends. Mary Lincoln recalled how the President welcomed Sumner's visits and how they talked and laughed together “like
two
schoolboys.” While their disagreements over reconstruction were sometimes rancorous, Lincoln and Sumner knew they needed one another in the hard days ahead, and they maintained close personal and political ties.
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Inevitably bound up with any reconstruction program were pressing questions about the welfare of the freedmen. How were they to provide for themselves? Should they be given the right to vote, to run for political office? Lincoln's solution to the first question was the refugee system, which the army was already setting up in occupied Dixie. Through that system, officers enlisted liberated slaves as soldiers, employed others as military laborers, and hired still others to work in agricultural pursuits under government supervision. For a time in 1863, Lincoln vacillated as to whether the freed people should work for wages by contract, or whether they should first labor for whites as temporary apprentices. On several occasions he said he had no objection if white authorities assumed control of former slaves “as a laboring, landless, and homeless class” and adopted some temporary arrangement by which the two races in Dixie “could gradually live themselves out of their old relation to each other, and both come out better prepared for the new.” But when congressional Republicans steadfastly opposed any such arrangement, Lincoln dropped the apprenticeship idea and ordered those involved in the refugee system to employ contract labor for southern blacks, so that they could receive wages set by the government and become self-supporting. And he insisted that the government contracts be fair to them. Moreover, he happily approved when his ten percent government in Louisiana rejected apprenticeship and granted economic independence to Louisiana Negroes. In this respect, Lincoln doubtless expected Louisiana to serve as a model for other rehabilitated states.
While there were many faults with Lincoln's refugee system,
it was based on sound Republican dogma: it kept southern blacks out of the North, and it secured them jobs as wage earners on captured farms and plantations. The system thus helped southern blacks to help themselves and prepared them for life in a free society in postwar Dixie.
When it came to Negro suffrage, Lincoln displayed the same capacity for growth and change that had characterized his approach to emancipation. By 1864, with tens of thousands of black men fighting for the Union cause, Lincoln endorsed limited suffrage for Louisiana Negroes. He wrote Governor Michael Hahn that he wished “the very intelligent” blacks and especially those “who have fought gallantly in our ranks” could be enfranchised. Yet Lincoln would not force Negro suffrage on Louisianaâcertainly not in a presidential election yearâbecause he knew what a combustible issue it was in both the North and the South. What is more, he feared that mandatory Negro suffrage would alienate white Unionists in Louisiana and ruin all his reconstruction efforts there.
Nevertheless, when the Louisiana constitutional convention refused to give black men the vote, Lincoln helped persuade the lawmakers to reconsider their decision and forge a compromise: while the Louisiana constitution did not enfranchise Negroes, it did empower the legislature to do so. At the same time, the constitution not only outlawed slavery (as Lincoln insisted it must), but opened the courts to all persons regardless of color and established free public education for both races. For his part, Lincoln accepted this as the best that could be done in the Louisiana of 1864 and 1865, and he commentedâwith a touch of ironyâthat Louisiana's new constitution was “better for the poor black man than we have in Illinois.” Maybe Louisiana's all-white government was imperfect, but Lincoln thought it better than no government at all. While he wished it had provided limited Negro suffrage, he believed this could be accomplished faster “by saving the already advanced steps toward it, than by running backward over them.” In sum, the Louisiana government
was a foundation to build on for the futureâfor blacks as well as whites.
Yet, characteristically, Lincoln left himself room to maneuver on the Louisiana question. He publicly asserted that he would not be bound by an outmoded policy: he had promised to support Hahn's all-white government in occupied Louisiana, “but, as bad promises are better broken than kept, I shall treat this as a bad promise, and break it, whenever I shall be convinced that keeping it is adverse to the public interest.”
Contrary to what some have claimed, Lincoln's interest in Negro suffrage was not confined to Louisiana, with its relatively well-educated and outspoken black community in New Orleans. Over the winter of 1864-65, in fact, Lincoln approved some form of Negro suffrage for other rebel states if Congress would accept his Louisiana regime. This was part of a compromise he made with Sumner and a few other advanced Republicans, who demanded universal male suffrage for southern blacks so that they could protect their liberty. But the compromise fell apart because most congressional Republicans opposed even limited Negro suffrage as too radical. In the matter of black political rights, Lincoln was ahead of most members of his partyâand far ahead of the vast majority of northern whites at that time.
So far, Lincoln had supported limited Negro suffrage only in his correspondence and private negotiations. But in his last speech, on April 11, 1865, the President addressed reconstruction in Louisiana and publicly endorsed enfranchising “the very intelligent” blacks there and “those who serve our cause as soldiers.” In fact, he went further than that. In a telling line toward the end of his speech, Lincoln all but granted that the black man deserved the elective franchise. Though he was speaking in the context of Louisiana, he asserted that “what has been said of Louisiana will apply generally to other States.” Lincoln still did not make Negro suffrage mandatory, but he did not reject the idea either. As with other reconstruction issues, he left the matter open.
It appears obvious in what direction Lincoln was evolving. And
that was toward full political rights for the Negro, not away from them. Certainly Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Attorney General James Speed, and other champions of Negro suffrage thought the President now appreciated the need for southern blacks to vote and thus to protect themselves from their former masters. After Lincoln's last Cabinet meeting, Attorney General Speed told Salmon Chase, also an advocate of Negro enfranchisement, that the President “never seemed so near our views.”
By war's end, Lincoln seemed on the verge of a new phase of reconstruction, a tougher phase that would call for some form of Negro suffrage, more stringent voting qualifications for ex-Confederates (as hinted at in his 1864 Message to Congress), and probably an army of occupation for the postwar South. At his last Cabinet meeting, Lincoln and his secretaries unanimously agreed that such an army might be necessary to prevent the rebellious southern majority from overwhelming the small Unionist minority in Dixie and maybe even re-enslaving the blacks. In other words, the President was already considering in April, 1865, what Congress would later adopt in the days of “Radical Reconstruction.” Perhaps a new and tougher program was what Lincoln had in mind in the closing line of his last speech: “It may be my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South. I am considering, and shall not fail to act, when satisfied that action will be proper.”
He never got the chance to make an announcement. But given his position on reconstruction at war's end, it seems absurd to maintain that Lincoln was ready to restore the South with tender magnanimity. True, in his Second Inaugural Address, he'd said that he would bind the nation's wounds “with malice toward none” and “charity for all.” He would be charitable in the sense that he wouldn't resort to mass executions or even mass imprisonment of southern insurrectionists. He would not even have the rebel leaders tried and jailed, although he said he would like to drive them out of America, to “open the gates, let down the bars, scare them off.” But as he pondered the problems of reconstruc
tion, Lincoln clearly wanted to bring the South into the mainstream of American republicanism, to install a free-labor system there for blacks as well as whites, to establish public schools for both races, to look after the welfare of the freedmen, to grant them access to the ballot and the courtsâto build a new South dedicated like Lincoln to the Declaration of Independence. These were all consonant with Lincoln's core of unshakable convictions about the meaning and purpose of the American experiment, a set of convictions he had held since long before the Civil War.
Lincoln's approach to reconstruction was bound to put him on a collision course with unreconstructed rebels. It is folly to think that they would not have opposed him as obstinately as they resisted Congress two years later. After all, Lincoln stood for everything they had fought against for four long years. He
was
the hated Yankee. Under him they could look forward to an occupying army, Negro political rights, and disenfranchisement for almost the entire prewar and wartime southern leadershipâall of which they were certain to despise and resist. In sum, even if Lincoln had lived, reconstruction would have been a painful ordeal for his country and the most difficult problem of his second administration. He knew that, and he said so repeatedly in those final days of April, 1865.
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The historical Lincoln, as I have tried to approximate him, was a flawed and complex man who had the gift of vision that let him see things few others ever see. When I say that he was flawed, I am not profaning his memory, as many of my correspondents have accused me of doing. On the contrary, the historical Lincoln comes out more heroic than the immortal Man of the People, because we see him overcoming his deficiencies and self-doubts, often against tremendous odds. Lincoln's long struggle against adversityâinner adversity as well as the terrible problems of his dayâis something anybody can identify with and learn from. We can learn from Lincoln's life that even those who rise to supreme heights have personal dilemmasâidentity crises, ambivalences,
hurts, setbacks, and even a loss of willâwhich they have to anguish over and work their way through. When I think back over his life, back over his embattled presidency, I am still astonished that he survived the burdens of his office. But he not only survived them; he prevailed. He fought the war through to a total Union triumph, a triumph for popular government and a larger concept of the inalienable rights of man. He summoned Americans both North and South, Americans both black and white, to dedicate themselves to a new birth of freedom, so that government of, by, and for
all
the people would not perish from the earth.
Ford's Theater is the most authentic Lincoln shrine we have, and I try to visit there whenever I can, to recall and relive that terrible night in 1865 so that I might appreciate again what really happened there and what it meant to the countryâthen and ever since.
Heading for the theater in Washington's noisome traffic, I always have an uncanny feeling, for a visit to Ford's is really a journey back in time. I never have any sensations at the Lincoln Memorial, because its god of marble and stone is not the Lincoln I have come to know. I can't help but think that the historical Lincoln would have recoiled at sight of that giant statue of himself, sitting regally on its thronelike chair. No, that was not the Lincoln of
my
story. My Lincoln had been a man of rich humanity. That Lincoln had said “Mr. Cheermun,” had referred to his White House office as “the shop,” and had worn small, wire-rimmed spectacles when he prepared his state papers. That Lincoln astonished novelist Emerson Bennett, who observed him in various presidential posesâfrom a gentle, judicious statesman to a “towering, angry Chief of the Nation, enforcing his order to the Provost Marshal General with swinging arms, shaking fists and stamping feet.” That Lincoln said his “ear bones” ached to hear a good peal of honest laughter, engaged in preposterous repartee with Secretary of State William H. Seward, and still told stories on himself. One of his favorites was about two Quaker women discussing the end of the war. “I think,” the first said, “that
Jefferson Davis will succeed.” “Why does thee think so?” asked the second. “Because Jefferson is a praying man,” the first replied. “And so is Abraham a praying man,” the second rejoined. “Yes,” said the first woman, “but the Lord will think Abraham is joking.”
In truth, humor was one of the few ways he could find escape from the unending grind of his office. Beyond his carriage rides, he “had no notion of recreation as such,” Seward recalled, and “found his only recreation in telling or hearing stories in the ordinary way of businessâoften stopped a cabinet council at a grave juncture, to jest a half-hour with the members before going to work; joked with every body, on light & on grave occasions. This was what saved him.”
Well, that and his rare evenings out to the theater. When Lincoln could spare the time, he and Mary would dress up, climb into the presidential carriage, and venture forth to attend Ford's, Grover's, or one of the other thriving theaters in town. Mary adored the theater, and Lincoln found it a “wonderful” way to relax. He preferred Shakespearean productionsânot the tragedies, which he liked to read, but the comedies with their risqué scenes, earthy dialogues, and delicious absurdities.
Ford's Theater is situated on Tenth between E and F Streets N.W. Approaching it today is like stepping abruptly back into Lincoln's time, back into another Washington more than a century ago. The old red-brick theater has been so thoroughly restored that both the front and the interiorâthe lobby, stage, furnishings and flags, even the state boxâlook now just as they did that Good Friday of 1865, when the Lincolns came here with Clara Harris and her fiancé, Major Henry Rathbone, to enjoy a performance of the English comedy
Our American Cousin
.
The theater closed after that night and did not reopen until 1968, after a $2.7 million refurbishing. Today it is a meticulously restored three-story building that is both a museum and a functioning theater. Reproductions of the 1865 cane-bottomed chairs fill the main floor and the two balconies of the theater; the flag-draped state box, which is viewed through a window at the rear,
contains the original sofa, as well as a replica of Lincoln's rocker. The museum in the basement of the building not only features Lincoln memorabilia and the diary, dagger, and derringer of John Wilkes Booth, but also offers a shelf of excellent books about Lincoln and the assassination. With the help of Thomas Reed Turner's
Beware the People Weeping
, William Hanchett's
The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies
, George S. Bryan's
The Great American Myth
, Dorothy Meserve and Philip B. Kunhardt's profusely illustrated
Twenty Days
, and other modern studies of Lincoln, we can easily imagine what it was like to be outside the theater on that night of nights, awaiting the arrival of the presidential party as other bystanders were doing.
It was a foggy evening, and gaslights on the street corners glimmered eerily in the drifting mist. Because of last-minute visitors, the Lincolns did not leave the White House until 8:15, and the play had already begun by the time the presidential carriage came churning up muddy Tenth Street and stopped at a box on the curb where the ladies could climb down to the sidewalk without soiling their shoes.
Although in high spirits that morning (the last major Confederate force was expected to surrender in North Carolina at any time), Lincoln looked tired now, worn down by the awesome task of reconstructing his war-torn land. In truth, it was to get his mind off reconstruction and “have a laugh over the country cousin” that Lincoln had come to the theater. We follow the two couplesâMary on Lincoln's arm, pretty young Clara on Rathbone'sâup a winding stairway and across the dress circle at the back of the first balcony. We gaze over rows of wooden chairs at a deep stage fronted by an orchestra pit. Two other balconies loom overhead, and gas lamps bathe the auditorium in a golden light.
A thousand people packed the theater that nightâamong them, high army brass and assorted Washington socialites. When they spotted Lincoln, the audience gave him a standing ovation and the orchestra struck up “Hail to the Chief.” The presidential party swept around the back row of chairs, passed through a door
and down a gloomy hallway to the state box, which directly overlooked the stage. Had we been in the audience on the main floor, we would have seen Lincoln sink into a rocking chair provided by the management, with Mary seated beside him and Rathbone, an ebullient fellow with a walrus mustache, and Miss Harris to their right. Then, as it is today, the front of the box was adorned with drapes, a framed engraving of George Washington, and brilliant regimental and Union flags. On stage, Harry Hawk, the male lead, ad-libbed a line, “This reminds me of a story, as Mr. Lincoln would say.”
As the play progressed, Mary, wearing a gray silk dress and a bonnet to match, rested her hand on Lincoln's knee and called his attention to the situation on stage, and he laughed heartily from time to time. At one point, as if a cold wind had blown over him, he got up long enough to put on his overcoat.
Had we left during the third act and gone out to the lobby, we would have noticed a man talking with the doorkeeper, a nervous man in his late twenties, with ivory skin, thick black hair, black mustache, and lustrous eyes, and dressed in a black felt hat and high boots with spurs. It was John Wilkes Booth, a prominent Shakespearean actor with militant Confederate sympathies. Booth believed that most Americans hated Lincoln so adamantly that they would hail his assassin as a national hero. And Booth was here this night to become that hero.
Booth had grown up in Maryland, the scion of a famous acting family that included his father, “Junius the Elder,” and two brothers, Junius, Jr., and Edwin. “A singular combination of gravity and joy,” as a sister described him, John had studied drama and made his stage debut in Baltimore and then had toured southern cities like Richmond and Montgomery, where he had established himself as a rising young star. He told his sister Asia that he wanted most of all to be known as a southern actor, beloved of the fine gentlemen and fluttering ladies in crinoline who applauded him in the southern theater. Strikingly handsome, he mesmerized audiences in North and South alike with his spectacular leaps,
heroic speeches, and unpredictable oscillations between tenderness and violence.
When war came, Booth took the malignant southern view of Lincoln, blaming
him
for fomenting the conflict,
him
for putting the bayonet to the southern people and their sacred institutions. Yet he did not enlist in the rebel causeâ“I promised mother I would keep out of the quarrel,” he told Edwin later, “and I am sorry I said so.” He argued bitterly with his brothers, both Union men, and anybody else who challenged him. He professed his loyalty to the old Unionâ“How I loved the
old flag
can never be known”âbut by 1863 that flag had changed. Under Lincoln it had become the emblem of “
bloody deeds
,” of military arrests and draft riots in the North, of abolition and massive killing in Dixie, and Booth could not bear what was happening to the country. As Lincoln resorted to severe war measures to crush the rebellion, Booth's hatred for him smoldered and blazed. “You will see Lincoln made a King in America,” he swore to Edwin. And he became obsessed with the Confederate cause and the glory of slavery. In his mind, he
was
a Confederate, as surely as some plantation son battling with Robert E. Lee.
“If the North conquer us,” he gesticulated to Asia, “it will be by numbers only.”
“If the North conquer us,” Asia said gently, “we are of the North.”
“Not I!” Booth cried. “Not Iâso help me holy God! My soul, life, and possessions are for the South!”
“This country was formed for the
white
, not for the black man,” he wrote in 1864. “And, looking upon
African slavery
from the same standpoint held by the noble framers of our Constitution, I, for one, have ever considered it one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us) that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation.”
Wherever his career took him, to stages in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, Booth cursed and castigated the tyrant in the White House. And in Baltimore, his hometown, he
found a great many irreconcilables who shared his views. It was here that assassination threats had boiled up in 1861, here that a mob had fallen on Union troops, here that Lincoln had early clamped down the shackles of martial law, here that Booth found an atmosphere of anti-Lincoln hatred that reinforced his own.
He found that in many other towns and cities, too, where opposition newspapers regularly blazed with anti-Lincoln cartoons, lampoons, and editorial invective. “If he is elected to misgovern for another four years,” raged one Democratic sheet in 1864, “we trust some bold hand will pierce his heart with dagger point for the public good.”
By the late autumn of 1864, with Lincoln reelected and rebel armies on the defensive everywhere, Booth became increasingly distraught. He felt guilty for not fighting with Dixie against Lincoln's armies. Out of his guilt, out of his obsessions with Lincoln, out of the whole atmosphere of violence and anti-Lincoln hatred that fed him, Booth resolved to act. He would perform a breathtaking feat that would help the South; it would be the most spectacular performance of his life. He would kidnap Lincoln, haul the tyrant to Richmond, and hold him for ransom of all rebel prisoners. Oh, that would make a name for him in this war, that would get needed manpower for Dixie, that would help Lee and Davis fight on. “The South can make no choice,” Booth wrote a male intimate. “God is my judge. I love
justice
more than I do a country that disowns it; more than fame and wealth; more (Heaven pardon me if wrong), more than a happy home.” The old Union, he asserted, was doomed. “I look now upon my early admiration of her glories as a dream. My love (as things stand to-day) is for the South alone. Nor do I deem it a dishonor in attempting to make for her a prisoner of this man, to whom she owes so much of misery.” Booth ended his letter: “
A Confederate doing his duty upon his own responsibility
.”
In late 1864 and early 1865, he gathered up a motley band of six young conspirators from the dregs of the Baltimore and Washington area, holding them spellbound with theatrical pronounce
ments about their destiny. There were curly-haired Samuel Arnold and slight, reticent Michael O'Laughlin, former rebel soldiers and old chums of Booth's from Baltimore. There was hawk-nosed, boy-faced John Surratt, who once had studied to be a Catholic priest, sporting a tuft of whiskers on his chin. There was dim-witted George Atzerodt, a hulking wagonmaster with a scraggly beard and a German accent. There was little Davy Her-old, described as “light and trifling” by those who knew him, a former pharmacist's clerk at a Washington drugstore where the Lincolns bought their medicines. And there was six-foot Lewis T. Powell (alias Wood, alias Paine), a glowering drone from Florida who had fought in the rebel army at Gettysburg, ridden with Mosby's irregulars, and drifted north to Baltimore, where Booth found him roaming aimlessly. All of them had served the Confederacy in some capacity and all remained rebel sympathizers. Atzerodt, Herold, and Powell, looking up to Booth with stupefied reverence, would do almost anything he asked. Booth had also alerted Confederate sympathizers in lower Maryland about his intentions, for he might need their help in carting Lincoln into Virginia.
In Washington, the conspirators pored over maps and formulated plans. From hidden places around the White House, they watched the President come and go. They trailed him on his carriage rides about the city, observed his outings to the theater. On March 4, 1865, Booth himself was in the inaugural crowd at the capitol, looking down on Lincoln from up behind the railing of the right buttress. “What an excellent chance I had to kill the President,” he boasted afterward.
In mid-March, Booth and his cohorts made an abduction attempt, but it fizzled when Lincoln failed to materialize where they lay in wait. After that, Arnold, O'Laughlin, and Surratt turned away from Booth, and the kidnaping plot fell apart. Booth started drinking heavilyâon some evenings he downed an entire quart of brandy within two hours. As Lincoln's forces pounded at the collapsing Confederacy, Booth became more and more agitated, wild-
looking, and dangerous. When news of Appomattox sent Washington into paroxysms of joy, he plunged into black gloom.