A new collection edited by Harold Holzer “brings readers back to the very moment of Lincoln’s death 150 years ago”

For the sesquicentennial of Lincoln’s murder, The Library of America has just published President Lincoln Assassinated!! The Firsthand Story of the Murder, Manhunt, Trial, and Mourning, which gathers more than eighty eyewitness reports, newspaper articles, medical records, trial transcripts, speeches, letters, diary entries, and poems.

Harold Holzer, editor of the volume, is one of the country’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War era. He has authored, coauthored, and edited more than forty books, including Lincoln and the Power of the Press; Lincoln at Cooper Union; and, for The Library of America, The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now. He is Roger Hertog Fellow at the New-York Historical Society.  (Photo: Dan Pollard)

What’s the aim of this collection, what sorts of insights and discoveries do you hope readers will find?

The idea is to bring readers back to the very moment of Lincoln’s death one hundred and fifty years ago and show how his mourners, his avengers, his admirers, and his foes all reacted. From the people in the Lincolns’ box that night to the funeral to the testimony at the trial of the conspirators, here are the fascinating firsthand accounts of the unfolding events, expressing shock, sorrow, indignation, and thirst for revenge. In the days of emotional upheaval that followed, and later, we see the event fully considered, what it meant for posterity, and the elevation of Lincoln, in literature and memory, into an American icon. It’s pretty remarkable to hear these voices again.

What does the experience of reading these contemporary, firsthand eyewitness accounts offer readers that standard narrative histories don’t?

There are many wonderful books about the assassination and its aftermath. But they’re unavoidably reflective and interpretive. The firsthand accounts, written in a rush of immediate emotion, have a palpable reality to them that one can’t find in narrative history. These writers did not know how events were going to turn out. Newspaper reports were long and beautifully written. The true-crime-type reports of the manhunt for the conspirators are edge-of-seat dramatic. And the lamentations, familiar and unseen, prose and poetry, take a reader’s breath away.

What do the pieces tell us about the diversity of responses to Lincoln’s murder in the North and the South?

Not everyone mourned Lincoln, as my introduction tries to make clear. But I think it’s fair to say that the overwhelming number of Northern responses, even from Democrats, was respectful, bordering on reverential. Partisan politics was for a time forgotten in the wave of mass grief. Recent studies suggest a wave of celebratory defiance, but in truth these were isolated incidents—quantitatively they add up to very, very little. Read, for example, the reporting from the anti-Lincoln New York World. They once ridiculed Lincoln—taunted him—and now they echoed the voice of grief.

What does the volume tell us about Lincoln’s place in the stories Americans tell about themselves, then and now?

Murdered or not, Lincoln would always have occupied a significant place in American history as the president who preserved the Union and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. He certainly thought so, and I couldn’t agree more. But as this book reveals, Lincoln achieved an almost divine status in America’s so-called civil religion by becoming the symbolic final casualty of the war for union and freedom. In giving his life that the nation might live—as some saw it, and to paraphrase his own tribute to fallen soldiers at Gettysburg—he became a martyr to liberty, and you can see that sacred place emerging for him as the literature continues to appear in the months and years following his death.

Are there writers you came particularly to like or admire while working on the book?

I love the newspaper writers—and I am assuming that the “Big Three” New York editors, Henry Raymond of the Times, James Gordon Bennett Sr. of the Herald, and Horace Greeley of the Tribune, wrote or contributed much to the most important editorials their papers ever published. I am also quite taken with the overseas eulogies, from Ibsen, Tom Taylor in London, and the somewhat cooler comments by Disraeli. I can’t help adoring Whitman—he was unparalleled in wringing every last drop of literary opportunity he could wrest for himself after Lincoln’s death. On the one hand the masterful long elegy “Lilacs,” on the other the simpler “Captain,” which was his big performance encore for the rest of his career as a lecturer and reader. I guess my newest favorite is diarist George Templeton Strong, who scrawled daily entries in a tiny hand in his journals for his entire life—he’s quite extraordinary, great attention to detail.

Most interesting discovery you made while assembling the book?

The letter from Clara Harris, the senator’s daughter who was in the presidential box when Lincoln was shot. She confides to a friend that all the spurting blood that souvenir-hunters later swabbed, saved, or sold from the scene, belonged not to Lincoln (she was right—his wound was impacted), but to her poor fiancé, Henry Rathbone, whom Booth slashed with a knife before jumping to the Ford’s Theatre stage. Henry bled profusely and nobody paid much attention with the president of the United States lying unconscious. All those blood-stained fabrics that collectors lust after today—boy, would their owners be shocked if they were somehow subjected to a DNA test.

Piece or pieces you think readers will find most surprising?

I think readers will be galvanized by the testimony we reprint from the trial of the assassination conspirators. It’s rarely printed in such detail. I think it takes the alleged mystery out of the plot—it was all Booth’s and he was rather crazy. No Catholic Church plot, no Confederate government last gasp. One racist, wild-eyed actor who couldn’t differentiate between his stage roles like Marc Antony and real life, and a small band of impressionable followers. Although their audacious plot to dismember the entire government wasn’t entirely successful—the conspirator assigned to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson couldn’t bring himself to do it, and General Ulysses S. Grant left town rather than join the Lincolns at Ford’s Theatre—Lincoln was not the only victim. Secretary of State William Seward nearly died as a result of a brutal knife attack that same night. To some Americans, the world as they knew it was coming to an end.

How does Lincoln’s assassination compare with more recent national traumas, such as the assassination of President Kennedy and the September 11 attacks?

I lived through the JFK assassination and even for/as a kid, the shock and sadness were palpable. But Kennedy died a man of great promise unfulfilled; we mourned for a beautiful family of course, but also a presidency largely incomplete—what might have been. Lincoln, on the other hand, died at the apex of his power and popularity, triumphant. I wasn’t there, although sometimes I feel I was, but this volume shows us that Americans mourned the senselessness of the tragedy—an act that made a huge hero into an even greater one (perhaps more like FDR). September 11 was yet another kind of story—that one compares more, I think, to Pearl Harbor, a day that provoked grief and anger over wanton destruction and an assault on the homeland. They’re all somehow linked I suppose in our national litany of violence and death. I still think that Lincoln’s murder stands out—the first presidential assassination, of a man who had been underappreciated in his lifetime and was for many becoming truly beloved.

Do you have a favorite piece in the collection?

I’m divided between the brilliant metaphor of Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” and the incredibly professional report AP Washington bureau chief Lawrence Gobright somehow composed and filed just minutes after learning of Lincoln’s assassination—after rushing to the scene and somehow getting into the presidential box for a few minutes so he could report firsthand. He knew Lincoln well, had covered him ably during the war. He must have been in genuine shock, probably grieving too. But what a consummate professional. He wrote the stories that the whole country first read, before the analysts, eulogists, and odists took over. By the way, Lincoln was a pretty fair writer too, to say the least. The coda to the volume features Lincoln’s own unsurpassed comments on death and sacrifice—Gettysburg and the Second Inaugural—as well as his breathtakingly poignant condolence letters (Ellsworth, McCullough, and Bixby). It doesn’t get any better than that.

Book excerpt: Read Gideon Welles’s account of the night of the assassination and of the chaotic days immediately following.

The “Mud March” of the Army of the Potomac (January 20, 1863)

Guest blog post by Brooks D. Simpson, professor of history, Arizona State University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It (the first two volumes of which have appeared; the third will appear this spring).

After its bloody defeat in December 1862 the Army of the Potomac settled down for the winter around Falmouth, Virginia, on the north bank of the Rappahannock River across from Fredericksburg. Aware that several of his subordinates were actively intriguing for his replacement as the army’s commander, Ambrose Burnside was determined not to sit still for long. He issued orders calling for a march westward, looking to cross the Rappahannock upriver from Fredericksburg and outflank the defensive line held by Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

The movement commenced on the morning of January 20, 1863. That night it began to pour. High winds whipped through the army’s columns and camps, rendering it impossible to set a fire or erect a tent, while the heavy rains continued to fall. “You have no idea of how soon the roads turn from good to bad here in Virginia,” wrote Lieutenant Theodore A. Dodge, the adjutant of the 119th New York Infantry. “A clayey soil is hard and the very best for marching on in favorable weather, but let it rain but an hour and troops and wagons march over the road, and the mud is worse than anyone who has not be in Virginia can conceive of.” Yet the rain did not stop. The mud swallowed wagons and cannon as soldiers struggled to make their way through the quagmire. As Dodge observed, “The horses sank into mud up to their bellies, and it is said down near the river you sometimes have to put sticks under the mules’ necks to prevent their being engulfed in the very slough of despond.”¹

Burnside called off the movement on January 22, but it took his men several more days to make their way back to their previous encampments. He faced ridicule, scorn, and pity from generals, officers, and soldiers. “I never felt so disappointed & sorry for any one in my life as I did for Burnside,” George G. Meade wrote. “He really seems to have all the elements against him.”² Exacerbated by the increasingly mutinous behavior of several outspoken subordinates, Burnside traveled to Washington to meet with Lincoln. He gave the President a choice: either punish the generals opposing his continuance in command or replace him with someone else.

Lincoln chose the latter course, and in the process rewarded one of Burnside’s most outspoken critics, Joseph Hooker. Months of whispering behind the backs of Burnside and George B. McClellan had paid off for the man they called “Fighting Joe.” But the President was not deaf to the dangers posed by insubordinate commanders. “I have heard, in such way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a Dictator,” Lincoln wrote to Hooker. “Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.” The President also observed that there was one more thing Hooker might keep in mind. “I much fear that the spirit which you have aided to infuse into the Army, of criticising their Commander, and withholding confidence from him, will now turn upon you,” Lincoln warned. “Neither you, nor Napoleon, if he were alive again, could get any good out of an army, while such a spirit prevails in it.”³ Less than four months would pass before Hooker would have cause to agree.

¹ Theodore A. Dodge: Journal, January 21–24, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, ed. Brooks D. Simpson (Library of America, forthcoming, 2013).
² George G. Meade to Margaret Meade, January 23, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It.
³ Abraham Lincoln to Joseph Hooker, January 26, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It.

(This item is cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: Lincoln’s Cabinet crisis (December 1862)
• Brooks D. Simpson: Lincoln and the midterm elections (November 1862)

Lincoln’s Cabinet crisis (December 1862)

Guest blog post by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Eberly Family Professor of Civil War History at West Virginia University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It (the first two volumes of which have appeared).

Less than a week after the disastrous Union defeat at Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862, Abraham Lincoln confronted one of the most serious political crises he faced during the war. The debacle fed mounting frustration among Republicans over the administration’s conduct of the war. Led by its Radical members, the Senate Republican caucus tried to force Secretary of State William H. Seward out of the cabinet. The Radicals accused Seward of opposing vigorous prosecution of the war, exercising undue influence on the President, overruling other cabinet members, and blamed him for the administration’s slowness in embracing emancipation. Many of the Radicals hoped his ouster would increase the influence of their favorite in the cabinet, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase.

Seward had indeed entered the administration in 1861 imagining that he might guide Lincoln, who, he believed, had little sense of how to respond to the great crisis facing the country. But Lincoln’s relative paucity of national experience obscured his considerable political skills. The two men developed a close working relationship in which Lincoln made it plain that he would decide and issue executive branch policies. His reluctance to endorse immediate emancipation came about because of his own astute evaluation of border state politics, and not from Seward’s influence.

A committee of predominantly Radical senators went to the White House on December 18 and shared with the President their concern about Seward’s influence in the administration. Lincoln had little patience for their conspiratorial view of his administration, exclaiming to his friend Orville H. Browning, “Why will men believe a lie, an absurd lie, that could not impose upon a child, and cling to it and repeat it in defiance of all evidence to the contrary.”¹ Nonetheless, Seward resigned in order to avoid becoming a liability to the administration. Lincoln did not accept his resignation but instead convened a meeting with his cabinet on December 19, without Seward, to ascertain their views about how the cabinet operated. Despite reservations, most of the cabinet members agreed with Lincoln’s assessment that he fairly valued their opinions and that the cabinet sought agreement in its deliberations. The President then called the senators back to the White House, where they were surprised to find themselves in a meeting with the cabinet (absent Seward). Lincoln explained that, contrary to what the senators had heard, cabinet members freely debated issues and reached a consensus before policies were announced. Although Chase offered a mild dissent, no other cabinet member contradicted the President.

Embarrassed by this turn of events, Chase submitted his resignation, precisely the turn of events Lincoln needed in order to maintain the political balance in his cabinet. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles recorded Lincoln’s response when Chase handed him his resignation: “This said he, looking towards me with a triumphal laugh cuts the Gordian knot. An air of satisfaction spread over his countenance such as I have not seen for some time. I can dispose of this subject now he added.”² Knowing that he needed the support of both radical and conservative Republicans, Lincoln refused to accept either resignation, and both Seward and Chase remained in the cabinet. As the President reportedly told Senator Ira Harris of New York in one of his characteristic rural analogies, “Now I can ride: I have a pumpkin in each end of my bag.”³ Lincoln accomplished two important goals in these delicate maneuvers. By managing the disparate personalities and ideologies in his administration he continued to enjoy the counsel of some of the North’s best political minds. The episode also preserved the President’s prerogative to administer his cabinet and the executive branch as he saw fit. Republicans, Democrats, and border state Unionists in Congress would continue to use their legislative and investigative power to promote their own agendas, but as commander-in-chief, Lincoln would possess ultimate authority in a time of war.

¹ Orville H. Browning: Diary, December 18, 1862, in The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It, ed. Stephen W. Sears (Library of America, 2012), 684.
² Gideon Welles: Diary, December 19–20, 1862, The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It, 692.
³ An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln: John G. Nicolay’s Interviews and Essays, ed. Michael Burlingame (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996).

(This item will be cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• Brooks D. Simpson on Lincoln and the midterm elections (November 4, 1862)
  
• Aaron Sheehan-Dean on the Battle of Perryville (October 8, 1862)

Brooks D. Simpson on Lincoln and the November 4, 1862, midterm elections

Guest blog post by Brooks D. Simpson, professor of history, Arizona State University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It (the first two volumes of which have appeared).

In the midterm elections of 1862, which concluded on November 4, the Lincoln administration and the Republican party suffered a serious setback at the polls. Proclaiming “the Constitution as it is and the Union as it was,” Democrats pointed to the promised Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln’s recent nationwide suspension of the writ of habeas corpus as evidence of the Republicans’ desire to impose a tyrannical dictatorship upon the republic. Nor did the prospects for decisive military victory seem bright: whatever optimism had been expressed in the wake of Antietam, Corinth, and Perryville had faded away as Union armies failed to capitalize on their successes.

Democrats claimed victory in New York with the election of Horatio Seymour as governor; they also won the governorship of New Jersey and assumed control of state legislatures in New Jersey, Indiana, and Lincoln’s home state of Illinois. The Democrats’ sizeable gains in the House of Representatives, mostly in the lower North from New York to Illinois, reduced the Republican majority to a plurality, although the Republicans would be able to control the new House with the support of Unconditional Unionists from the border states. Fortunately for the administration, the state election calendars in Pennsylvania and Ohio mandated elections in odd-numbered years, while Republican governors Richard Yates of Illinois and Oliver P. Morton of Indiana had been elected in 1860 to four-year terms. And as historian James M. McPherson has pointed out, Republicans still held most of the governorships and a solid majority of state legislatures, allowing the party to eventually pick up five Senate seats as the terms of Democrats elected in 1856–57 expired and Republican-controlled legislatures chose their replacements.

President Lincoln weathered the electoral defeat as well as could be expected. In responding to a rather harsh note from General Carl Schurz, a leading Republican who claimed, as Lincoln put it, “that we lost the late elections, and the administration is failing, because the war is unsuccessful; and that I must not flatter myself that I am not justly to blame for it,” the President wrote: “I certainly know that if the war fails, the administration fails, and that I will be blamed for it, whether I deserve it or not. And I ought to be blamed, if I could do better. You think I could do better; therefore you blame me already. I think I could not do better; therefore I blame you for blaming me.”

Even as news of the administration’s setback circulated through the newspapers, Lincoln moved decisively in removing George B. McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac on November 5, replacing him with Ambrose Burnside. The change was made just two weeks after the President had replaced Don Carlos Buell with William S. Rosecrans at the head of the Union army in Middle Tennessee. But whether new generals meant an improvement in Union military fortunes, and the political standing of the administration, remained to be seen.

(This item will be cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• Aaron Sheehan-Dean on the Battle of Perryville (October 8, 1862)
• September 17, 1862: The Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg), the bloodiest single day in American history

Remembering Gore Vidal: playwright, novelist, essayist, critic

“To find someone writing in English, who, like Gore Vidal, distinguished himself as a historical novelist, a commercial playwright, a political activist, and a dandy, attracting controversy and opprobrium along the way, one would have to go back to Edward Bulwer-Lytton,” writes Laurence Senelick in The American Stage. Reviewing Vidal’s life and work in The New York Times, Charles McGrath also conjures with evocations of another era, describing “Mr. Vidal” as “at the end of his life, an Augustan figure, who believed himself to be the last of a breed. He was probably right.”

Vidal often weaved scenes and people from his life into his writing, and his close friendships with fellow playwrights, including Tennessee Williams, disinclined him to criticize plays. However, on those occasions when he wrote about theater, Senelick observes, he delivered “the elegantly styled responses of a discriminating and intelligent insider.” Here he traces the theater’s “beautiful circle of love”:

The desire to give pleasure is a fundamental characteristic of the popular artist. . . .The literary pleasure givers are happiest using the theater, loneliest in the novel. . . And it is understandable. A most tangible audience responds like a lover to pleasure given, and in his audience’s response the artist is himself ravished by what he has done. The result is a beautiful circle of love which at its truest has been responsible for much good art in the theater along with most of the bad.

Vidal joined the lonelier pleasure givers in crafting some twenty-five novels, the most popular being his series of scrupulously researched historical novels. By far the most popular was his lively portrait of our sixteenth president in Lincoln, published in 1984. In one scene, excerpted in The Lincoln Anthology, Lincoln and William H. Seward pay an unannounced visit to lame duck president James Buchanan at the White House in 1861:

Lincoln was staring at a pile of white marble blocks, at whose center the base of an obelisk rose. “They’ve still not finished that monument to Washington?” 

“No, sir. In fact, nothing is ever finished here! No dome on the Capitol. No street pavings. No street lamps. Nothing ever done to completion here except, sir, one thing.” The old man’s head now rested on his shoulder and the bad eye was entirely shut as, with a quiet joy, he pointed out the window. “There,” he said. “Look.” 

 Lincoln stared at a huge red-brick wall. “The one thing that the Executive Mansion has dearly needed since Mr. Jefferson’s time was a proper barn. . . . You don’ t know the pleasure it has given me these last four years to see this beautiful barn slowly rise from that swamp they call the President’s Park.”

“And watch the Union fall apart,” said Lincoln to Seward as the two men crossed the President’s Park . . .

McGrath writes in his obituary that in the opinion of many critics “Mr. Vidal’s ultimate reputation is apt to rest less on his novels than on his essays.” Objections to America’s foreign policies permeate Vidal's political essays, yet, as Shelly Fisher Fishkin notes in The Mark Twain Anthology, “Any attempt to read Vidal’s blunt dissent from American pieties as anti-American is of necessity derailed by the fact that Mark Twain was there first.” Reveling in their shared antipathies to the course of American empire, Vidal wrote the introduction to an edition of Twain’s Following the Equator and Anti-Imperialist Essays.

[Twain’s] To the Person Sitting in Darkness was published as a pamphlet in 1901, a year in which we were busy telling the Filipinos that although we had, at considerable selfless expense, freed them from Spain they were not yet ready for the higher democracy, as exemplified by Tammany Hall, to use Henry James’ bitter analogy. Strictly for their own good, we would have to kill one or two hundred thousand men, women and children in order to make their country into an American-style democracy.

In other essays Vidal studiously reappraised and resurrected the work of writers he deemed underappreciated. When he declared Dawn Powell a “comic writer as good as Evelyn Waugh and better than Clemens” in The Antioch Review in 1981, he sparked a revival of interest in her work that led to many of her books returning to print and, eventually, to her inclusion in The Library of America. Six years later, he published an extensive title-by-title review of her fourteen novels in The New York Review of Books, (the review appears in full on The Library of America’s Dawn Powell website):

For decades Dawn Powell was always just on the verge of ceasing to be a cult and becoming a major religion. But despite the work of such dedicated cultists as Edmund Wilson and Matthew Josephson, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, Dawn Powell never became the popular writer that she ought to have been. In those days, with a bit of luck, a good writer eventually attracted voluntary readers and became popular. Today, of course, "popular" means bad writing that is widely read while good writing is that which is taught to involuntary readers. Powell failed on both counts. She needs no interpretation and in her lifetime she should have been as widely read as, say, Hemingway or the early Fitzgerald or the mid O'Hara or even the late, far too late, Katherine Anne Porter. But Powell was that unthinkable monster, a witty woman who felt no obligation to make a single, much less a final, down payment on Love or The Family; she saw life with a bright Petronian neutrality, and every host at life's feast was a potential Trimalchio to be sent up.

Vidal was a close friend of Richard Poirier, the founding chairman of The Library of America who died in 2009, and he dedicated the 1983 novel Duluth to him. He also served for many years on the board of advisors for The Library of America, and he closely followed the progress of the series, offering advice and suggestions and writing an introduction especially for a paperback edition of Lincoln’s writings and speeches. His presence, advice, generosity, and wit will be missed.

Related LOA works: The American Stage: Writing on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner; The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now; The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works; Dawn Powell: Novels 1930–1942; Dawn Powell: Novels 1944–1962

Brooks D. Simpson on the “Seven Days,” June 25–July 1, 1862, and Emancipation

Guest blog post by Brooks D. Simpson, professor of history, Arizona State University and co-editor of The Civil War: The First Year

On June 25, 1862, the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac clashed outside Richmond, Virginia, and continued to do so for a week. The series of engagements that followed has become known as the Seven Days, and at their conclusion, Robert E. Lee had succeeded in driving George B. McClellan’s bluecoats from the outskirts of the Confederate capital. For the next twelve months, Lee and his army would achieve a series of magnificent victories in Virginia, reviving hopes for a Confederate triumph on the battlefield; it would be a year to the day of the final engagement of the Seven Days that lead elements of that army would encounter two brigades of bluecoat cavalry outside a small town in Pennsylvania named Gettysburg.

McClellan refused to accept responsibility for the outcome of the Seven Days. Ever desirous of more men, he declared to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton that he had lost one battle “because my force was too small. I again repeat that I am not responsible for this & I say it with the earnestness of a General who feels in his heart the loss of every brave man who has been needlessly sacrificed today.” This assertion was not enough to satisfy his sense of grievance: “If I save this Army now I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or any other persons in Washington—you have done your best to sacrifice this Army.” Fortunately for McClellan, a War Department telegraph operator struck the offensive sentence; it says something about the general’s forthrightness (or cluelessness) that he reprinted it in full in his report of operations, published in 1864.

Lincoln pondered the significance of the setback to Union fortunes. Initially he thought it would be best to continue to press forward in the western theater along the Mississippi River and into Tennessee while raising reinforcements for McClellan to renew his offensive. Now was no time to show the white feather. “I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me,” he informed his secretary of state, William Henry Seward. However, as McClellan’s men rallied and drove off Lee’s final determined assault at Malvern Hill on July 1, it seemed that perhaps things were not as desperate as they first appeared. It was time to consider what to do next.

Elmer Ellsworth, the first Union officer killed in the Civil War—and Lincoln's letter home

Perhaps the most memorable and poignant character in Adam Goodheart’s splendid new book 1861: The Civil War Awakening is Elmer Ellsworth, the self-made young colonel and friend of Lincoln, whose death, at twenty-four, on May 24, 1861,

even more than his life, seemed to mark the passing away of one era and the beginning of another. He would be, briefly, the war’s most famous man. And for that moment, the entire conflict, the irreconcilable forces that set state against state and brother against brother, would seem distilled into—as one who knew him well would write—“the dark mystery of how Ellsworth died.”

Ellsworth first achieved fame as a bold and innovative military drill instructor in the late 1850s when his chance meeting with a fencing teacher who had served in the French Zoaves—the elite fighting force named for a band of fierce Algerian warriors—led him to adopt the Zoaves’ exotic drills for his volunteer cadre of Chicago law clerks and shop assistants. Goodheart describes their first public performance:

Some forty cadets in the traditional blue-and-buff uniforms of eighteenth-century militias—Algerian Zouave-style attire had been ordered but didn’t arrive in time—gave a performance that was more like a gymnastics event (or a nineteenth-century version of Cirque de Soleil) than any military drill the onlookers had ever seen. Instead of forming neat lines, shouldering their guns, and marching straight ahead, these militiamen leapt and rolled and yelled, loaded muskets while lying on their backs, jumped up to fire them and then fell again, thrust and twirled their bayonets like drum majors’ batons—all with a beautiful and precise synchrony.

When Ellsworth and his Zouaves toured the north in 1859–60, they started a “Zou-Zou” mania. Twenty-five thousand watched them drill in Albany, New York. Ellsworth, benefiting from the new invention that could reproduce many photographs from a single negative, became “the first male pin-up in America’s—and perhaps even the world’s—history.” The tour also brought Ellsworth into contact with Illinois attorney Abraham Lincoln. When the tour ended, Ellsworth became, in short order, Lincoln’s law clerk, his enthusiastic and effective presidential campaigner, his bodyguard, and his friend.

After the firing on Fort Sumter President Lincoln called for the mustering of 75,000 militiamen and Ellsworth undertook to create a new regiment of Zoaves under his own command from the ranks of New York’s firefighters. In The Civil War: The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It Lincoln’s secretary John Hay describes his first encounter with the new creation:

In the afternoon we went up to see Ellsworth’s Zouave Firemen. They are the largest sturdiest and most magnificent men I ever saw collected together. They played over the sward like kittens, lithe and agile in their strength.

Following Virginia’s decision to secede on May 23, Ellsworth’s “Zouave Firemen” were selected to lead the first major Northern incursion into rebel-held territory, an amphibious assault on Alexandria, where, just across the Potomac, a large Confederate banner flew atop the Marshall House, in full view of the White House. Ellsworth’s decision to cut down that flag himself proved his undoing. As he descended through the trap door, swathed in the huge unfurled flag, the innkeeper, a devout secessionist, leveled a shotgun at him at point-blank range and fired, instantly killing Ellsworth.

On May 25 Lincoln wrote to Ellsworth’s parents:

My dear sir and Madam, In the untimely loss of your noble son, our affliction here, is scarcely less than your own. So much of promised usefulness to one’s country, and of bright hopes for one’s self and friends, have rarely been so suddenly dashed, as in his fall. In size, in years, and in youthful appearance, a boy only, his power to command men, was surprisingly great. This power, combined with fine intellect, an indomitable energy, and a taste altogether military, constituted in him, as it seemed to me, the best natural talent, I ever knew.

News of the killing inspired new rounds of Union recruits. In the beginning of May Lincoln had asked for 42,000 more volunteers. Within four weeks of Ellsworth’s death, five times that number would enlist. As Goodheart writes, “Ellsworth’s death made the North not just ready to take up arms, but ready to kill.”

Also of interest:

• The Death of Colonel Ellsworth at Smithsonian.com
• An NPR interview with Adam Goodheart on Fresh Air about 1861 with an excerpt about Elmer Ellsworth
• Kevin Baker cites Lincoln’s letter to the Ellsworths in his essay about how presidents have honored the war dead

Related LOA works: The Civil War: The First Year as Told by Those Who Lived It; Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1859-1865

Christopher Benfey on Lincoln’s Gettysburg sonnet

Guest blog post by Christopher Benfey, author of American Audacity: Literary Essays North and South and editor of Stephen Crane: Complete Poems and Lafcadio Hearn: American Writings, both published by The Library of America.

A couple of months ago, I was asked to speak at Deerfield Academy about Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. The subject of the Civil War, during this 150th anniversary year, came up repeatedly, most pointedly in the contrast between Whitman’s open engagement with the war, both in the poems of Drum-Taps and in his nursing of wounded soldiers in Washington, and Dickinson’s less explicit response—in poems that seem, however cryptically, to register the distant fighting and dying. “War feels to me an oblique place,” she wrote her friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was leading an African-American regiment in Florida. Inevitably, we talked about Whitman’s elegies for Lincoln: the stilted allegory “O Captain! My Captain!” (which reads as though protean Whitman was trying to squeeze himself into Dickinson’s tight meters) and the grand and mysterious masterpiece “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

One bright student raised his hand and asked, “Would you say that Lincoln was just a failed poet?” Well, no, I wouldn’t say that, I replied. In fact, I found myself saying instead that Lincoln was the third of the great American poets of the nineteenth century. Based on his three greatest speeches alone—his Gothic “House Divided” speech, the Gettysburg Address, and the Second Inaugural—Lincoln, for the sheer pressure of his language and the surprising new uses he found for the rhythms and buried eloquence of our ordinary speech, stands above any American poet of his time other than Dickinson and Whitman.

Lincoln’s greatest poem is the Gettysburg Address. Scholars have teased out its echoes from Thucydides and noted its Biblical grandeur. But I think that beneath its artistry lie the formal skeleton and the verbal machinery of the sonnet. (I should note that there have been attempts to “translate” the address into the traditional 14-line structure of a sonnet.) For Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats, the sonnet provided a small field for exploring the shifting meanings of a few words. It generally had a simple, two-part structure, with a so-called “turn” signaling the seam. The two parts often fused an emotional subject with an analytic treatment, summed up in an epigram at the end.

At this point, someone will want to object that Lincoln’s sonnet is in prose. Well, so it is! But Emerson wrote “Woods: A Prose Sonnet,” in which he asked the woods to give him something new to say, “along with “the tune wherein to say it.” Lincoln finds a new tune for the sonnet in the sinewy prose of the Gettysburg Address. The specific words he “worries” include simple ones like “here,” used nine times, and most beautifully in the contrast between words and deeds: “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.”

The more elaborate word of course is “dedicate,” used six times, which shifts from abstract (“dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”) to more literal (“to dedicate a portion of” the battlefield). After the great “turn” of the sonnet, which occurs with the reflection “But in a larger sense we can not dedicate…” Lincoln proclaims that “It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here…” Then comes the closing, cinching epigram: “this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” What poet could have said it better?

Also of interest:

• H. L. Mencken, Adlai Stevenson on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• Lincoln as storyteller: “Remarkable Case of Arrest for Murder,” a previous Story of the Week
• A recent LOA interview with Chrisopher Benfey about Stephen Crane: Complete Poems

Related LOA works: The Lincoln Bicentennial Collection (3-book boxed set); Abraham Lincoln: Selected Speeches and Writings (paperback)

150 year ago: The Civil War really begins—in Baltimore

"Massachusetts militia passing through Baltimore,"
oil on Canvas (1861).


Guest blog post by Harold Holzer, editor of The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now

Writers and readers alike usually mark their Civil War sesquicentennial calendars by the so-called “official” beginning of the conflict: the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861.

In fact, that show of firepower cost no lives, and caused little damage save for the temporary splintering of the flagpole that hoisted the American flag. The “real” war began a week later, in a state that never seceded: Maryland. On April 19, the 6th Massachusetts Infantry, passing from one train station to another in Baltimore en route to the defense of Washington, fell under attack from local toughs. When the smoke cleared, four soldiers and nine civilians lay dead in the streets.

Horrifically bloody as it was, the fury that the pro-secession mob unleashed that day should have surprised no one—least of all President Abraham Lincoln. Just two months earlier, the festering hostility there nearly ended his presidency before it began.

Bowing to warnings of violence, even assassination, he had reluctantly but wisely cancelled his planned pre-inaugural public visit to the city and slipped through town secretly overnight en route to Washington. Had he chosen to brave the gangs committed to preventing his safe passage to the capital, President-elect Lincoln might not have lived to become President Lincoln.

Baltimore remained a particularly churning pro-slavery hotbed—especially after the President called for volunteers to suppress the Rebellion after the attack on Fort Sumter. To many Baltimoreans, Lincoln threatened nothing less than invasion of sovereign states, and no doubt the President’s decision to send troops to prevent formation of a Maryland secession convention fueled the fear and resentment further.

Lincoln long remained embarrassed about slipping through Baltimore in February, but he never apologized for sending Massachusetts volunteers through the city in April—even into the fury of people he angrily condemned as “rowdies.” To objections from its Mayor, who insisted that the Administration divert further trainloads of troops, he erupted: “Our men are not moles, and can’t dig under the earth; they are not birds, and can’t fly through the air. There is no way but to march across, and that they must do.”

The following morning he met wounded survivors of the attack on the 6th Massachusetts and lamented, “I begin to believe that there is no North.” But in a tougher manner, he told one of Maryland’s senators that day that the capital would be defended no matter what. Striking a tone that he would maintain for the next four years, Lincoln declared bluntly of the secessionists: “I do not mean to let them invade us without striking back.”

“And,” as he put it four years later, “the war came.”

Also of interest:

• A recent blog post on Iron Brigader details the events of the Baltimore Riot
• Read Ralph Brave on how the “Pratt Street Riots” affected the history of Baltimore
• Read William Howard Russell’s famous report on the Battle of Fort Sumter, a previous Story of the Week
• Read Brooks D. Simpson on Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• Read Harriet Jacobs on the horror of slave auctions, a previous Reader's Almanac post

Related LOA works: The Civil War: The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It (includes eyewitness accounts of the April 19 Baltimore Riot); The Lincoln Bicentennial Collection (3-book boxed set)

Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, 150 years later: How he listened and revised

Lincoln delivers his inaugural address at the partly finished U.S. Capitol.

Guest blog post by Brooks D. Simpson, co-editor of The Civil War: The First Year

As Abraham Lincoln stepped forward to deliver his inaugural address on March 4, 1861, he certainly had cause to reflect on the course he was about to take. Washington D. C. resembled an armed camp as rumors flew that the new president would be the target of violence. General Winfield Scott’s troops, complete with cavalry and sharpshooters on the roofs of buildings, lined the short parade route. The president-elect had spent the last days in a different sort of warfare, wrangling over who would join his cabinet. Now it was time to speak to a divided nation and set forth a policy that was firm but not threatening, that sought peace without making concessions.

Lincoln had not always fared well in his remarks to waiting crowds as he made his way from Springfield to Washington. He had cut an embarrassing figure when, to avoid the possibility of assassination in Baltimore, he slipped into the capital in disguise. The document that he had initially composed in Springfield (and which, at one point on the trip, had been carelessly mislaid by his eldest son, Robert) he had revised in response to suggestions that it was too defiant, too confrontational. Half of its writing had indeed been in the rewriting; its composition reflected Lincoln’s willingness to listen to his supporters and advisers at a moment of impending crisis.

Among those readers was secretary of state–designate (and former rival presidential candidate) William Henry Seward, who had spent the better part of the previous week trying to get Lincoln to recast his cabinet by threatening to withdraw from it. Although the New Yorker failed in that endeavor, he succeeded in convincing Lincoln to make alterations that would soothe excited emotions and facilitate a possible reconciliation, if cooler heads ever prevailed. Coming from a man who had once predicted an irrepressible conflict between North and South, such comments showed how much Seward had changed over the last few years.

Lincoln accepted many of Seward’s suggestions, reworking the wording to suit his own style of expression. He knew he was introducing himself to the American people, including those already determined to seek independence. Lincoln sought to reach out while standing firm. “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war,” he reminded secessionists. “The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.”

Seward had been particularly critical of Lincoln’s close, which ended with the charge “Shall it be peace or sword?” His own urged reconciliation:

I close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies but fellow countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly they must not, I am sure they will not be broken. The mystic chords which proceeding from so many battle-fields and so many patriot graves pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation.

Adopting Seward's tone, Lincoln deftly transformed his prose into one of the most memorable passages he ever penned:

I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

But neither guardian nor better angels intervened. Nearly forty days later the Confederates fired upon Fort Sumter, and the war began.

Also of interest:

• Read more about Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address at Abraham Lincoln’s Classroom
• The Abraham Lincoln blog recounts the president-elect’s journey to the inauguration
• View the original pages of Lincoln’s Inaugural Address at the Library of Congress
• At Crossroads Brooks D. Simpson blogs about history, historians, and the academic life, much of it related to the Civil War
• Yale’s Avalon Project features links to the inaugural addresses of all the presidents

Related LOA works: Abraham Lincoln: Selected Speeches and Writings (paperback); The Lincoln Bicentennial Collection; The Civil War: The First Year Told By Those Who Lived It; American Speeches: Political Oratory from the Revolution to the Civil War

South Carolina secedes from the United States 150 years ago today

Edward Ball reminds us in yesterday’s New York Times that when 169 members of the South Carolina legislature voted unanimously on December 20, 1860, to secede from the United States, the reasons they offered had more to do with slavery than with “states’ rights.” The vote was a swift reaction to the election in November of Abraham Lincoln, who would not take office until March 4, 1861. The initial Ordinance of Secession was just 158 words, but within four days the legislature issued a more detailed declaration:

The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows:

"No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."

This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made. . . The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States. . . . For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution.

But the failure of the northern states to return fugitive slaves wasn’t the only problem:

A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.

For the reasons detailed, the “People of South Carolina” declared that their union with “the other States of North America is dissolved.” South Carolina hoped to spark a chain of secessions throughout the south, and seven other states seceded before Lincoln took office.

Also of interest:

• Lonnie Burch offers more background on South Carolina’s secession
• South Carolina’s plans to commemorate the 150th anniversary of its secession

Related LOA volumes: The Civil War: The First Year Told By Those Who Lived It

Whitman’s first thoughts on Lincoln

Today on The New York Times’s Disunion blog, which tracks the day-by-day events of the Civil War, writer Adam Goodheart describes his recent visit to the Library of Congress. There he perused Walt Whitman’s notebooks and found, in the entries dating from 1860–61, Whitman’s first thoughts on Abraham Lincoln.

In one entry, Whitman conjures a mythic Lincoln to mirror his hopes for the perfect President: “I would be much pleased to see some heroic, shrewd, fully-informed, healthy-bodied, middle-aged, beard-faced American blacksmith or boatman come down from the West across the Alleghanies [sic], and walk into the Presidency, dressed in a clean suit of working attire, and with the tan all over his face, breast, and arms; I would certainly vote for that sort of man, possessing the due requirements, before any other candidate.” (Last week on Reader’s Almanac, we explored the significance of Lincoln’s new beard for American letters). The Disunion blog has posted some remarkable scanned images from the inside of Whitman’s notebook.

Also of interest:

• For more Civil War multimedia, visit the Library of Congress’s Flickr page to see a collection of recently scanned “Civil War Faces,” ambrotype and tin type portraits of Civil War soldiers.

• The Library of America is getting ready to publish The Civil War: The First Year Told By Those Who Lived It, the first of a four-volume set collecting letters and diaries from the heat of battle, along with speeches, articles, poems, songs, military reports, legal opinions, and memoirs. The contents of the volume were posted  yesterday on our website, the books will arrive from the printer in early January and will be available in bookstores on February 3.

Abraham Lincoln and the Rise and Fall of Beards in American Literary History

In a recent New York Times blog post marking the sesquicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s beard, Adam Goodheart traces the history of how Lincoln became the first American president to sport facial hair.

Lincoln’s personal decision to grow a beard was sparked by an eleven-year-old named Grace Bedell, who wrote to him that if he grew one, “All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President,” but he was also participating in a nation-wide “beard movement.” Beards had become associated with revolutionary nationalism, and Northerners who sympathized with slave-owners were derided as “doughfaces.”

In the fifty years after Lincoln became president, only one man (William McKinley) would be elected to that office without any facial hair. But after William Howard Taft, who left office in 1913, no American president has had facial hair.

Curious, we made a list of the bearded Library of America authors. It turns out that most of our iconically bearded authors were indeed participating in the late-nineteenth-century beard trend, including Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, both Henry and William James, and even Walt Whitman. Since then, our authors have been mostly clean-shaven. Only two of our twentieth-century authors sported full beards for any length of time: Philip K. Dick and John Berryman.

Update: A couple of our loyal readers remind us that, late in life, Ezra Pound upgraded from his trademark goatee to a beard.

More fun with beards:

• What would Lincoln have looked like with a different style of beard?
• The Evolution of Lincoln’s beard
• Grace Bedell’s letter to Lincoln about his beard and his response

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln to move forward with the help of several LOA friends

The news out of Hollywood this week is that Daniel Day-Lewis has agreed to play the lead in the long-delayed Steven Spielberg–produced epic Lincoln. The project features the involvement of several writers who have also provided invaluable support and advice to The Library of America over the years:

• Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, a member of the LOA’s Committee of Consultants for History, wrote Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, the book on which the movie is based.
• John Logan, whose play Red won this year’s Tony Award for Best Drama, co-wrote the screenplay (with Paul Webb). Logan is a longtime supporter of The Library of America and is the Guardian of three LOA books, having provided the financing necessary to insure they will never go out of print. One of the books he adopted is Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1859–1865.
• Tony Kushner, whose Angels in America captured both the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, revised the screenplay. He recently joined The Library of America’s Board of Directors.

Spielberg’s isn’t the only Lincoln-themed motion picture on the horizon. Robert Redford’s “The Conspirator,” about the trial of Mary Surratt (convicted as an accomplice in the plot to assassinate Lincoln), will be in theaters this coming spring.

Of related interest: In September The Library of America reissued its paperback edition of Lincoln’s major writings and speeches, with an introduction by Gore Vidal.

H. L. Mencken, Adlai Stevenson on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

Seven score and seven years ago today Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. In The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now numerous writers uncover new meanings in Lincoln's spare 271 words. Here are two contrasting examples:

H. L. Mencken was determined to separate meaning from the myth:

The Gettysburg speech is at once the shortest and most famous oration in American history. . . Nothing else precisely like it is to be found in the whole range of oratory. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous.

But let us not forget that it is oratory, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it! Put it into the cold words of everyday! The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination—“that government of the people, by the people, for the people,” should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. What was the practical effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, i.e., of the people of the States? The Confederates went into the battle an absolutely free people; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision and vote of the rest of the country—and for nearly twenty years that vote was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely any freedom at all. Am I the first American to note the fundamental nonsensicality of the Gettysburg address? If so, I plead my aesthetic joy in it in amelioration of the sacrilege.

Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, at a ceremony marking the 88th anniversary of the address, discerns Lincoln's awareness of the world-historical moment:

Lincoln saw the war in its global dimensions. . . As Lincoln saw it, the Confederate states had rejected two fundamental precepts of democracy. First, in refusing to accept him as their President and making his election their justification for withdrawing from the Union, they had violated the first rule of democratic government, the obligation of a minority to abide by the result of an election. . . 

Second, in making slavery the foundation stone of their new government, the Confederacy was renouncing the doctrine of the equal rights of man in favor of the creed of the master race, an idea that Lincoln abhorred. . . . 

When we realize that Lincoln saw the dissolution of the Union as a threat to democratic aspirations throughout the world, his words at Gettysburg become more meaningful. Chancellorsville, Antietam, Chickamauga and Gettysburg were deciding more than the fate of these United States. Americans were dying for the new, revolutionary idea of the free man, even as they had died at Bunker Hill and Yorktown. They were dying to save the hopes of all people everywhere.

Of related interest:

• Joshua Zeitz of American Heritage on “The Radicalism of the Gettysburg Address”
• Listen to the Gettysburg Address read by Sam Waterston, Ken Burns, and others
• The Gettysburg Address exhibit at The Library of Congress

Related LOA works: The Lincoln Bicentennial Collection (3-book boxed set); H. L. Mencken: Prejudices: The Complete Series (2-book boxed set)

Robert E. Sherwood’s controversial version of Abraham Lincoln’s Election Night

Saturday, November 6, marks the sesquicentennial of the presidential election of Abraham Lincoln. In one of the last scenes of his Pulitzer Prize–winning 1938 play Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Robert E. Sherwood dramatized Election Night in Lincoln’s campaign headquarters in Springfield. Mark S. Reinhart, among many others, has attacked the controversial scene as “inflammatory and untrue. . . . No such incident took place on Lincoln’s election night.”

Sherwood defended his inventions in notes he added to the published version of the play. He recognized that in this scene “one speech has been much criticized and deplored by good people who revere Lincoln’s memory and cannot believe that he ever cursed at his wife.” Acknowledging that by all accounts Lincoln “treated the obstreperous Mrs. Lincoln with unfailing courtesy and tender considerateness” during their White House years, he maintained that an honest portrayal of Lincoln’s marriage required him to show that

. . . on occasion, his monumental patience snapped. That it did, before the move from Springfield, there can be no doubt. Usually he met her tirades with stony silence, or abrupt departure, or with laughter . . . But [William H. Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner] records that at least once, when she had run him out of the house and was chasing him down Eighth Street, and they approached some church-goers, he turned on her, picked her up, spanked her, and thrust her back into the house, saying, “There, now, stay in the house and don’t be a damned fool before the people.”

Herndon may not be the most reliable source here; he and Mary Todd Lincoln never got along and fought over her husband’s legacy. Although there is documentary support for occasional marital discord, Stephen Oates agrees with many historians that much of Herndon’s 1889 book, especially the sections about Mary, is “malicious gossip.”

Yet Sherwood accepted Herndon’s account as unfiltered truth and felt that the “most appropriate moment” to dramatize this was “Election Night . . . with the nerves of both so severely strained.” In the scene Mary has been growing increasingly agitated as the telegraphed results reported by Lincoln’s staff show his Democratic opponent Stephen Douglas leading. Lincoln sits at a table, calmly reading press clippings.

Mary: (her voice trembling) I can’t stand it any longer!
Abe: Yes, my dear—I think you’d better go home. I’ll be back before long.
Mary: (hysterical.) I won’t go home! You only want to get rid of me. That’s what you’ve wanted ever since the day we were married—and before that. Anything to get me out of your sight, because you hate me! And it’s the same with all of you—all of his friends—you hate me—you wish I’d never come into his life!

Lincoln then asks his staff to “step out a moment.” After they leave he “turns on Mary with strange savagery.”

Abe: Damn you! Damn you for taking every opportunity you can to make a public fool of me—and yourself! It’s bad enough, God knows, when you act like that in the privacy of our own home. But here—in front of people! You’re not to do that again. Do you hear me? You’re never to do that again!
(Mary is so aghast at this outburst that her hysterical temper vanishes, giving way to blank terror.)
Mary: (in a faint, strained voice) Abe! You cursed at me. Do you realize what you did? You cursed at me.
(Abe has the impulse to curse at her again, but with considerable effort, he controls it.)
Abe: (in a strained voice) I lost my temper, Mary. And I’m sorry for it. But I still think you should go home rather than endure the strain of this—this Death Watch.
(She stares at him, uncomprehendingly, and then turns and goes to the door.)
Mary: (at the door) This is the night I dreamed about, when I was a child, when I was an excited young girl, and all the gay young gentlemen of Springfield were courting me, and I fell in love with the least likely of them. This is the night when I’m waiting to hear that my husband has become President of the United States. And even if he does—it’s ruined, for me. It’s too late . . .
(She opens the door and goes out. Abe looks after her, anguished . . .)

Also of interest: A humorist imagines seeing Lincoln in his Springfield home after his election victory, in “Artemus Ward on His Visit to Abe Lincoln,” on the Story of the Week site.

Related LOA works: The Lincoln Bicentennial Collection (3-book boxed set, including The Lincoln Anthology, which excerpts the full Election Night scene from Abe Lincoln in Illinois)

Abraham Lincoln: The path to the Emancipation Proclamation

Right: First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln, painted by Francis Carpenter in 1864.

On September 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation declaring that on January 1, 1863, slaves would be free in all areas still in active rebellion against federal authorities. The proclamation did not address the status of slavery in the slave-holding border states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri—states that had not seceded from the Union. The final version, signed on January 1, specified ten states in which it would apply. Some have criticized the Proclamation for achieving little—for freeing slaves only in areas over which the government had no control. What these critics miss, according to Harold Holzer, is an awareness of the tremendous impact the proclamation had in its day—and the anguished path Lincoln took to find the right time to make the proclamation public.

Lincoln first introduced his idea of making an emancipation decree at a meeting of his cabinet on July 22, 1862. Secretary of State William Seward raised the concern that with the war going so badly, such an act would be received as “a cry for help—a last shriek on the retreat.” Seward proposed postponing any such proclamation until the Union could achieve a victory on the battlefield. Lincoln agreed, conceding that he didn’t want it to seem like a “Pope’s bull against the comet.”

Unbelievable as it may seem to us today, the Cabinet kept the prospect of the imminent emancipation of slaves a secret for the next two months. So it was on August 19, when editor Horace Greeley wrote a scathing “open letter” to Lincoln in The New York Tribune, calling on the president to free the slaves as a way of weakening the Confederacy, Lincoln responded:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.

It would not be until September 17, when General George B. McClellan’s army fought Robert E. Lee’s forces at Antietam—the bloodiest one-day battle in American history—that Lincoln would get his opportunity. While the battle’s outcome was inconclusive, it was enough of a victory for Lincoln. Five days later, Lincoln announced the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet and declared (according to Secreatary of Navy Gideon Welles’s diary entry for the day) that “he had made a vow, a covenant, that if God gave us victory in the approaching battle, he would consider it an indication of divine will and that it was his duty to move forward in the cause of emancipation.” The Proclamation gave the North the moral high ground and changed its war objective. There could no longer be a compromise to “save the Union” by preserving slavery. The war would not end until the South was defeated.

Related LOA works: The Lincoln Bicentennial Collection (3-book boxed set); Abraham Lincoln: Selected Speeches and Writings

Walt Whitman and the Meteor of 1860

The Richmonder blog is commemorating the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War with a series of posts following the history of the war as it occurred 150 years ago. This week’s post revisits the week of July 15 to July 21, which included campaign stops by Horace Greeley stumping for Abraham Lincoln and by Stephen A. Douglas, who broke with tradition by campaigning for himself.

But perhaps the most striking occurrence was the “Meteor of 1860,” what astronomers call an “Earth-grazing meteor procession,” a string of fireballs that began over Michigan late in the evening of July 20, 1860, and passed over New York and New Haven before disappearing over the Atlantic Ocean. An article in the July issue of Sky & Telescope describes how an English professor and an astronomer at Texas State University used the Frederic Church painting, The Meteor of 1860, to identify this event as the inspiration for Walt Whitman’s “Year of Meteors” (1859-1860).

Year of meteors! brooding year!

I would bind in words retrospective some of your deeds and signs,

I would sing your contest for the 19th Presidentiad,

I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair, mounted the scaffold in Virginia,

(I was at hand, silent I stood with teeth shut close, I watch'd,

I stood very near you old man when cool and indifferent, but trembling with age and your unheal'd wounds you mounted the scaffold;)

I would sing in my copious song your census returns of the States,

The tables of population and products, I would sing of your ships and their cargoes,

The proud black ships of Manhattan arriving, some fill'd with immigrants, some from the isthmus with cargoes of gold,

Songs thereof would I sing, to all that hitherward comes would welcome give,

And you would I sing, fair stripling! welcome to you from me, young prince of England!

(Remember you surging Manhattan's crowds as you pass'd with your cortege of nobles?

There in the crowds stood I, and singled you out with attachment;)

Nor forget I to sing of the wonder, the ship as she swam up my bay,

Well-shaped and stately the Great Eastern swam up my bay, she was 600 feet long,

Her moving swiftly surrounded by myriads of small craft I forget not to sing;

Nor the comet that came unannounced out of the north flaring in heaven,

Nor the strange huge meteor-procession dazzling and clear shooting over our heads,

(A moment, a moment long it sail'd its balls of unearthly light over our heads,

Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone;)

Of such, and fitful as they, I sing—with gleams from them would gleam and patch these chants,

Your chants, O year all mottled with evil and good—year of forebodings!

Year of comets and meteors transient and strange—lo! even here one equally transient and strange!

As I flit through you hastily, soon to fall and be gone, what is this chant,

What am I myself but one of your meteors?

Related LOA works: Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose; Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1859–1865