A Youth's History of the Great Civil War
Van Evrie, Horton & Co., ©1866
Revised edition, ©2006 www.ronie-mooney-encs.us
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CHAPTER XII, MR. LINCOLN'S JOURNEY TO WASHINGTON AND INAUGURATION
WHILE the Confederate Government was thus being peacefully organized in the South, matters in the North were in a state of doubt and uncertainty. No one knew what the policy of the new President was to be further than they could gather it from the platform and principles of the party upon which he was elected. I have explained what interpretation the South placed upon these, and every effort was made by patriotic and conservative men to induce Mr. Lincoln to make an avowal to quiet the country, and assure the Southern States that he would not use the Federal Government to destroy their domestic institutions. But all such efforts were in vain. Mr.Lincoln maintained an ominous silence up to the time of his departure from his home at Springfield, Illinois, for Washington.
But when he commenced his journey to Washington, he made such an exhibition of himself, by speeches all the way along, as to leave no doubt upon the minds of the Southern leaders that the Abolitionists had in him a convenient tool for all the villainy they had threatened to carry out. His progress to the capital of the United States was more like that of a harlequin than the President of a great country. While the country was agonized to its very heart, he amused the crowd which came out to greet him on his way with jokes, and often, with low stories. He even made jests that were at once surprising and disgusting to the respectable portion of his own party. To a young man who, in New York city, offered to measure height with him, he replied, "No,I have not time now to measure with you, but if you will bring on your sister I will kiss her." The whole style and manner of the man was that of a low joker, rather than that of a statesman and patriot. When publicly questioned as to what he thought would be the result of secession, he jocosely replied, "O, I guess, nobody is hurt."
In no one of his speeches, however, did Mr.Lincoln give the slightest indication of retracting any threat which his party had made. When he reached Philadelphia, however, he made a speech which evidently showed that he was determined to carry out the idea of "negro freedom" let what would happen. Making use again, as he often did, of Mr. Jefferson's phrase, "all men are created equal,"he pointed to Independence Hall, where it was first enunciated, and declared,that "he would rather be assassinated on the spot than to give it up."
Now, when we remember that he used these great words as referring to negroes, and not as Mr. Jefferson did, as applied to white men, we then see what a terrible significance there was in this speech. Mr.Lincoln meant to say, "I will be assassinated before I will give up my effort to carry out my idea that negroes are equal to white men." It was as much as to say, "I will change, I will revolutionize this Government from a white man's government to a mongrel government, in which negroes shall be placed upon equality with white men." At the time he made this remark, many people did not seem see the true meaning of it, but they have since learned it, by sore experience.
At Philadelphia a singular and ludicrous incident occurred. Some one started the report, that when Mr.Lincoln passed through Baltimore, he would be killed; that a conspiracy existed in that city to take his life. Instead of boldly meeting the danger, if any existed,as a brave man and a great man would have done, who had been elected President of such a country, Mr. Lincoln appears to have got greatly frightened, and instead of going directly to Washington, ran away from his family, and dodged through Baltimore in disguise. As there never was any reliable evidence furnished the public of the alleged designs upon Mr. Lincoln's life, it is generally believed that the story was concocted to excite the North against the South, and pave the way for war.
Mr.Lincoln's inauguration was a singular spectacle. For the first time in our history had any President been afraid to meet the people face to face. In passing along Pennsylvania Avenue, he was hid from view in a hollow square of cavalry, three or four deep.Troops were posted all over the city, and sharp-shooters were stationed on the tops of the houses. He delivered his inaugural address surrounded by rows of glittering bayonets.
There was nothing in it to reassure the Southern mind or give it the slightest reason to hope for safety. It contained a few cheap words of affected fairness, but the heart of it was full of the temper and doctrines of the abolition party. He insinuated right in the face of the venerable Chief-Justice Taney, that he would not be governed in his Administration by the construction of the Constitution as had been laid down by the Supreme Court in the celebrated Dred Scott case, viz., that negroes were not citizens. This was, in effect, reaffirming the Helper declaration of war on the South, and so indeed her leading men regarded it.
The inaugural address of Mr. Lincoln, together with the selection of his Cabinet, now banished all hopes of peace. The worst and most violent abolitionists were appointed by him to office. William H. Seward, who had endorsed the Helper book, declaring it a work of "great merit," was made Secretary of State. Salmon P. Chase, of Ohio, was made Secretary of the Treasury. Cassius M. Clay, another endorser of the Helper book, was sent minister to Russia. Joshua R. Giddings was sent to Canada. This man had declared that "he wished to live to see the day when bayonets would be placed in the hands of Southern negroes." These are merely samples of Mr. Lincoln's appointments. They observed very plainly his spirit and temper, and the States that had hesitated to secede now began to take steps in that direction.
The statesmen of Virginia had been decidedly opposed to seceding, even after several of the Cotton States had withdrawn. Senator Hunter of Virginia said:"If the Southern States can obtain guarantees which will secure their rights in the Union, it is all we ask." Governor Letcher, who was then Governor of that State, said: "If the North will respect and uphold the rights of the States, the Union will be perpetual. Ex-Governor Morehead of Kentucky, came to Washington for a personal interview with Mr. Lincoln, in hopes that he could induce him to make some public declaration to the effect that the terrible things threatened in the Helper book, and in all the principal speeches of the abolition campaign,should not be carried out. But this patriotic visit, like many other similar visits from distinguished Southern statesmen, was in vain. Mr. Lincoln would give no assurance-no hope. Governor Morehead is a refined and accomplished gentleman, and the vulgar manner in which he was received by Mr. Lincoln, both filled him with disgust and drove from his bosom the last lingering hope that the country had anything but evil to expect from such a man.
Governor Morehead relates an incident that goes to show what sort of a man Mr.Lincoln was. He said that while conversing with him,Mr.Lincoln sat with his shoe off, holding his toes in his hand, and bending them backwards and forwards in an awkward manner. Such an exhibition of low manners was, perhaps, never before known in a President. Shortly after this Mr.Lincoln had Governor Morehead arrested, and locked up for a long time in Fort Lafayette at New York, with-out any cause whatever.
Mr.Lincoln had never been much in good society. While he was in Congress, his habit of telling low stories pretty effectually banished him from the company of refined people. In his debate with Senator Douglas, he made this remarkable confession himself: "I am not a gentleman, and never expect to be."
The Hon. George Lunt, of Boston, in his excellent work on "the Origin of the War," gives the following portrait of Mr.Lincoln, intellectually:
"The new President was a person of scarcely more than ordinary natural powers, with a mind neither cultivated by education, nor enlarged by experience in public affairs. He was thus incapable of any wide range of thought, or in fact, of obtaining any broad grasp of ideas. His thoughts ran in narrow channels." And the author might have added, "in low channels."
His messages and proclamations were shocking specimens of bad sense and bad grammar.
But I think that Mr.Lincoln must, after all, have possessed a good deal of what is called mother wit. Without that it seems impossible to account for his having risen from his extremely low origin to the posts he several times filled. He had the misfortune not to know who his father was; and his mother, alas, was a person to reflect no honor upon her child. Launched into this world as an outcast, and started on the road of being without parental care, and without the advantages of even a common school education, he certainly was entitled to great credit for gaining even the limited mental culture which he possessed.Running away from his wretched home at the early age of nine years, to escape the brutal treatment of the man who had married his mother, and forced to get his bread by working on a flatboat on the Mississippi River, he unfortunately contracted that fondness for low society and for vulgar jests and stories, which he ought to have known were out of place in the position he now occupied.
We cannot wonder that a gentleman of Governor Morehead's refinement should have gone out from that exhibition of toes in Mr.Lincoln's parlor, with a mind fully impressed with the unwelcome conviction that the Southern people had little to hope from the honor and justice of the incoming administration.
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