Lincoln, the unknown Read online

  Picking up his pen, Lincoln wrote the following words to Stanton across the bottom of the girl's letter: "Send him to her by all means."

  The terrible summer of 1864 dragged to an end, and the autumn brought good news: Sherman had taken Atlanta and was marching through Georgia. Admiral Farragut, after a dramatic naval battle, had captured Mobile Bay and tightened the blockade in the Gulf of Mexico. Sheridan had won brilliant and spectacular victories in the Shenandoah Valley. And Lee was now afraid to come out in the open; so Grant was laying siege to Petersburg and Richmond. . . .

  The Confederacy had almost reached the end.

  Lincoln's generals were winning now, his policy had been vindicated, and the spirits of the North rose as on wings; so, in November, he was elected for a second term. But instead of taking it as a personal triumph, he remarked laconically that evidently the people had not thought it wise "to swap horses while crossing a stream."

  After four years of fighting, there was no hatred in Lincoln's heart for the people of the South. Time and again he said: " 'Judge not that ye be not judged.' They are just what we would be in their position."

  So in February, 1865, while the Confederacy was already crumbling to dust, and Lee's surrender was only two months away, Lincoln proposed that the Federal Government pay the Southern States four hundred million dollars for their slaves; but every member of his Cabinet was unfriendly to the idea and he dropped it.

  The following month, on the occasion of his second inauguration, Lincoln delivered a speech that the late Earl Curzon, Chancellor of Oxford University, declared to be "the purest gold of human eloquence, nay of eloquence almost divine."

  Stepping forward and kissing a Bible open at the fifth chapter of Isaiah, he began an address that sounded like the speech of some great character in drama.

  "It was like a sacred poem," wrote Carl Schurz. "No ruler had ever spoken words like these to his people. America had never before had a president who had found such words in the depths of his heart."

  The closing words of this speech are, in the estimation of the writer, the most noble and beautiful utterances ever delivered by the lips of mortal man. He never reads them without thinking somehow of an organ playing in the subdued light of a great cathedral.

  Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

  With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

  Two months later, to a day, this speech was read at Lincoln's funeral services in Springfield.

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  n the latter part of March, 1865, something very significant happened in Richmond, Virginia. Mrs. Jefferson Davis, wife of the President of the Confederacy, disposed of her carriage horses, placed her personal effects on sale at a dry-goods store, packed up the remainder of her belongings, and headed farther south. . . . Something was about to happen.

  Grant had been besieging the Confederate capital now for nine months. Lee's troops were ragged and hungry. Money was scarce, and they were rarely paid; and when they were, it was with the paper script of the Confederacy, which was almost worthless now. It took three dollars of it to buy a cup of coffee, five dollars to buy a stick of firewood, and a thousand dollars was demanded for a barrel of flour.

  Secession was a lost cause. And so was slavery. Lee knew it. And his men knew it. A hundred thousand of them had already deserted. Whole regiments were packing up now and walking out together. Those that remained were turning to religion for solace and hope. Prayer-meetings were being held in almost every tent; men were shouting and weeping and seeing visions, and entire regiments were kneeling before going into battle.

  But notwithstanding all this piety, Richmond was tottering to its fall.

  On Sunday, April 2, Lee's army set fire to the cotton and tobacco warehouses in the town, burned the arsenal, destroyed the half-finished ships at the wharves, and fled from the city at

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  night while towering flames were roaring up into the darkness.

  They were no sooner out of town than Grant was in hot pursuit with seventy-two thousand men, banging away at the Confederates from both sides and the rear, while Sheridan's cavalry was heading them off in front, tearing up railway lines, and capturing supply-trains.

  Sheridan telegraphed to headquarters, "I think if this thing is pushed, Lee will surrender."

  Lincoln wired back, "Let the thing be pushed."

  It was; and, after a running fight of eighty miles, Grant finally hemmed the Southern troops in on all sides. They were trapped, and Lee realized that further bloodshed would be futile.

  In the meantime Grant, half blind with a violent sick headache, had fallen behind his army and halted at a farmhouse on Saturday evening.

  "I spent the night," he records in his Memoirs, "in bathing my feet in hot water and mustard, and putting mustard plasters on my wrists and the back part of my neck, hoping to be cured by morning."

  The next morning, he was cured instantaneously. And the thing that did it was not a mustard plaster, but a horseman galloping down the road with a letter from Lee, saying he wanted to surrender.

  "When the officer [bearing the message] reached me," Grant wrote, "I was still suffering with the sick-headache, but the instant I saw the contents of the note, I was cured."

  The two generals met that afternoon in a small bare parlor of a brick dwelling to arrange terms. Grant as usual was slouchily dressed: his shoes were grimy, he had no sword, and he wore the same uniform that every private in the army wore— except that his had three silver stars on the shoulder to show who he was.

  What a contrast he made to the aristocratic Lee, wearing beaded gauntlets and a sword studded with jewels! Lee looked like some royal conqueror who had just stepped out of a steel engraving, while Grant looked more like a Missouri farmer who had come to town to sell a load of hogs and a few hides. For once Grant felt ashamed of his frowzy appearance, and he apologized to Lee for not being better dressed for the occasion.

  Twenty years before, Grant and Lee had both been officers

  in the regular army while the United States was waging a war against Mexico. So they fell to reminiscing now about the days of long ago, about the winter the "regulars" spent on the border of Mexico, about the poker games that used to last all night, about their amateur production of "Othello" when Grant played the sweetly feminine role of Desdemona.

  "Our conversation grew so pleasant," Grant records, "that I almost forgot the object of our meeting."

  Finally, Lee brought the conversation around to the terms of surrender; but Grant replied to that very briefly, and then his mind went rambling on again, back across two decades, to Corpus Christi and the winter in 1845 when the wolves howled on the prairies . . . and the sunlight danced on the waves . . . and wild horses could be bought for three dollars apiece.

  Grant might have gone on like that all afternoon if Lee had not interrupted and reminded him, for the second time, that he had come there to surrender his army.

  So Grant asked for pen and ink, and scrawled out the terms. There were to be no humiliating ceremonies of capitulation such as Washington had exacted from the British at Yorktown in 1781, with the helpless enemy parading without guns, between long lines of their exultant conquerors. And there was to be no vengeance. For four bloody years the radicals of the North had been demanding that Lee and the other West Point office
rs who had turned traitor to their flag be hanged for treason. But the terms that Grant wrote out had no sting. Lee's officers were permitted to keep their arms, and his men were to be paroled and sent home; and every soldier who claimed a horse or a mule could crawl on it and ride it back to his farm or cotton-patch and start tilling the soil once more.

  Why were the terms of surrender so generous and gentle? Because Abraham Lincoln himself had dictated the terms.

  And so the war that had killed half a million men came to a close in a tiny Virginia village called Appomattox Court House. The surrender took place on a peaceful spring afternoon when the scent of lilacs filled the air. It was Palm Sunday.

  On that very afternoon Lincoln was sailing back to Washington on the good ship River Queen. He spent several hours reading Shakspere aloud to his friends. Presently he came to this passage in "Macbeth":

  Duncan is in his grave;

  After life's fitful fever he sleeps well;

  Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,

  Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,

  Can touch him further.

  These lines made a profound impression on Lincoln. He read them once, then paused, gazing with unseeing eyes through the port-hole of the ship.

  Presently he read them aloud again.

  Five days later Lincoln himself was dead.

  W.

  e must retrace our steps now, for I want to tell you of an amazing thing that happened shortly before the fall of Richmond—an incident that gives one a vivid picture of the domestic miseries that Lincoln endured in silence for almost a quarter of a century.

  It happened near Grant's headquarters. The general had invited Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln to spend a week with him near the front.

  They were glad to come, for the President was almost exhausted. He hadn't had a vacation since he entered the White House, and he was eager to get away from the throng of office-seekers who were harassing him once more at the opening of his second term.

  So he and Mrs. Lincoln boarded the River Queen and sailed away down the Potomac, through the lower reaches of Chesapeake Bay, past old Point Comfort, and up the James River to City Point. There, high on a bluff, two hundred feet above the water, sat the ex-hide-buyer from Galena, smoking and whittling.

  A few days later the President's party was joined by a distinguished group of people from Washington, including M. GeorTroi, the French minister. Naturally the visitors were eager to see the battle lines of the Army of the Potomac, twelve miles away; so the next day they set out upon the excursion—the men on horseback, Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Grant following in a half-open carriage.

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  General Adam Badeau, Grant's military secretary and aide-de-camp and one of the closest friends General Grant ever had, was detailed to escort the ladies that day. He sat on the front seat of the carriage, facing them and with his back to the horses. He was an eye-witness to all that occurred, and I am quoting now from pages 356-362 of his book entitled "Grant in Peace":

  In the course of conversation, I chanced to mention that all the wives of officers at the army front had been ordered to the rear—a sure sign that active operations were in contemplation. I said not a lady had been allowed to remain, except Mrs. Griffin, the wife of General Charles Griffin, who had obtained a special permit from the President.

  At this Mrs. Lincoln was up in arms. "What do you mean by that, sir?" she exclaimed. "Do you mean to say that she saw the President alone? Do you know that I never allow the President to see any woman alone?"

  She was absolutely jealous of poor, ugly Abraham Lincoln.

  I tried to pacify her and to palliate my remark, but she was fairly boiling over with rage. "That's a very equivocal smile, sir," she exclaimed: "Let me out of this carriage at once. I will ask the President if he saw that woman alone."

  Mrs. Griffin, afterward the Countess Esterhazy, was one of the best known and most elegant women in Washington, a Carroll, and a personal acquaintance of Mrs. Grant, who strove to mollify the excited spouse, but all in vain. Mrs. Lincoln again bade me stop the driver, and when I hesitated to obey, she thrust her arms past me to the front of the carriage and held the driver fast. But Mrs. Grant finally prevailed upon her to wait till the whole party alighted. . . .

  At night, when we were back in camp, Mrs. Grant talked over the matter with me, and said the whole affair was so distressing and mortifying that neither of us must ever mention it; at least, I was to be absolutely silent, and she would disclose it only to the General. But the next day I was released from my pledge, for "worse remained behind."

  The same party went in the morning to visit the Army of the James on the north side of the river, commanded

  by General Ord. The arrangements were somewhat similar to those of the day before. We went up the river in a steamer, and then the men again took horses and Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Grant proceeded in an ambulance. I was detailed as before to act as escort, but I asked for a companion in the duty; for after my experience, I did not wish to be the only officer in the carriage. So Colonel Horace Porter was ordered to join the party. Mrs. Ord accompanied her husband; as she was the wife of the commander of an army she was not subject to the order for return; though before that day was over she wished herself in Washington or anywhere else away from the army, I am sure. She was mounted, and as the ambulance was full, she remained on her horse and rode for a while by the side of the President, and thus preceded Mrs. Lincoln.

  As soon as Mrs. Lincoln discovered this her rage was beyond all bounds. "What does the woman mean," she exclaimed, "by riding by the side of the President? and ahead of me? Does she suppose that he wants her by the side of him?"

  She was in a frenzy of excitement, and language and action both became more extravagant every moment.

  Mrs. Grant again endeavored to pacify her, but then Mrs. Lincoln got angry with Mrs. Grant; and all that Porter and I could do was to see that nothing worse than words occurred. We feared she might jump out of the vehicle and shout to the cavalcade.

  Once she said to Mrs. Grant in her transports: "I suppose you think you'll get to the White House yourself, don't you?" Mrs. Grant was very calm and dignified, and merely replied that she was quite satisfied with her present position; it was far greater than she had ever expected to attain. But Mrs. Lincoln exclaimed; "Oh! you had better take it if you can get it. Tis very nice." Then she reverted to Mrs. Ord, while Mrs. Grant defended her friend at the risk of arousing greater vehemence.

  When there was a halt, Major Seward, a nephew of the Secretary of State, and an officer of General Ord's staff, rode up, and tried to say something jocular. "The President's horse is very gallant, Mrs. Lincoln," he remarked; "he insists on riding by the side of Mrs. Ord."

  This of course added fuel to the flame.

  "What do you mean by that, sir?" she cried.

  Seward discovered that he had made a huge mistake, and his horse at once developed a peculiarity that compelled him to ride behind, to get out of the way of the storm.

  Finally the party arrived at its destination and Mrs. Ord came up to the ambulance. Then Mrs. Lincoln positively insulted her, called her vile names in the presence of a crowd of officers, and asked what she meant by following up the President. The poor woman burst into tears and inquired what she had done, but Mrs. Lincoln refused to be appeased, and stormed till she was tired. Mrs. Grant still tried to stand by her friend, and everybody was shocked and horrified. But all things come to an end, and after a while we returned to City Point.

  That night the President and Mrs. Lincoln entertained General and Mrs. Grant and the General's staff at dinner on the steamer, and before us all Mrs. Lincoln berated General Ord to the President, and urged that he should be removed. He was unfit for his place, she said, to say nothing of his wife. General Grant sat next and defended his officer bravely. Of course General Ord was not removed.

  During all this visit similar scenes were occurring. Mrs. Lincoln repeatedly attacked her husband in the pre
sence of officers because of Mrs. Griffin and Mrs. Ord, and I never suffered greater humiliation and pain on account of one not a near personal friend than when I saw the Head of the State, the man who carried all the cares of the nation at such a crisis—subjected to this inexpressible public mortification. He bore it as Christ might have done; with an expression of pain and sadness that cut one to the heart, but with supreme calmness and dignity. He called her "mother," with his old-time plainness; he pleaded with eyes and tones, and endeavored to explain or palliate the offenses of others, till she turned on him like a tigress; and then he walked away, hiding that noble, ugly face that we might not catch the full expression of its misery.

  General Sherman was a witness of some of these episodes and mentioned them in his memoirs many years ago.

  Captain Barnes, of the navy, was a witness and a sufferer too. Barnes had accompanied Mrs. Ord on her un-

  fortunate ride and refused afterward to say that the lady was to blame. Mrs. Lincoln never forgave him. A day or two afterward he went to speak to the President on some official matter when Mrs. Lincoln and several others were present. The President's wife said something to him unusually offensive that all the company could hear. Lincoln was silent, but after a moment he went up to the young officer, and taking him by the arm led him into his own cabin, to show him a map or a paper, he said. He made no remark, Barnes told me, upon what had occurred. He could not rebuke his wife; but he showed his regret, and his regard for the officer, with a touch of what seemed to me the most exquisite breeding imaginable.

  Shortly before these occurrences Mrs. Stanton had visited City Point, and I chanced to ask her some question about the President's wife.

  "I do not visit Mrs. Lincoln," was the reply.

  But I thought I must have been mistaken; the wife of the Secretary of War must visit the wife of the President; and I renewed my inquiry.

  "Understand me, sir?" she repeated; "I do not go to the White House; I do not visit Mrs. Lincoln." I was not at all intimate with Mrs. Stanton and this remark was so extraordinary that I never forgot it; but I understood it afterward.