Abraham Lincoln Read online

  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 reconstruction, 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 courts—to 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 leadership—all 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.

  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 adversity—inner adversity as well as the terrible problems of his day—is 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 dilemmas—identity crises, ambivalences, hurts, setbacks, and even a loss of will—which 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.

  Part Five

  FINAL ACT

  Is not here indeed the point underlying all tragedy?

  WALT WHITMAN

  1: THE THEATER

  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 country—then 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 poses—from 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 business—often 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 productions—not 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 interior—the lobby, stage, furnishings and flags, even the state box—look 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 t
ask 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 couples—Mary on Lincoln’s arm, pretty young Clara on Rathbone’s—up 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 night—among 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 cause—“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 Union—“How I loved the old flag can never be known”—but 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 I—so 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 pronouncements 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 u
p 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 heavily—on 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.

  On the night of April 11, Booth and Davy Herold were in the audience on the White House lawn, awaiting an address by the President. It was a misty evening, but even so one could see the new illuminated dome of the Capitol. In the distance, across the Potomac, Lee’s Arlington plantation was aflame with colored candles and exploding rockets, as scores of ex-slaves sang “The Year of Jubilee.” Lincoln appeared at an upstairs window and read his speech by candlelight. It was about reconstruction. When he endorsed limited Negro suffrage in Louisiana and expressed sympathy for the black man’s desire for the vote, Booth turned to Herold in a rage. “That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through.”