All the way from Springfield Lincoln carried a small handbag containing
the manuscript of his inaugural address, upon which it was believed
that the issue of peace or war would depend. The whole country waited
anxiously to hear what the rail-splitter had to say, now that he had
command of the army, navy and treasury.
Would he dare to send troops to the rescue of Major Anderson and his
men, besieged in Charleston harbor by rebellious South Carolina?
Would he relieve the loyal garrisons hemmed in by insurgent Florida?
To use force meant instant civil war. To refrain from using force meant
the destruction of the Union.
Only three months before, Mr. Holt, Buchanan’s loyal Postmaster
General, had written to one of Lincoln’s partners:
“I doubt not, from the temper of the public mind, that the Southern
States will be allowed to withdraw peacefully; but when the work of
dismemberment begins, we shall break up the fragments from month to
month, with the nonchalance with which we break the bread upon our
breakfast table.... We shall soon grow up a race of chieftains who will
rival the political bandits of South America and Mexico, who will carve
out to us our miserable heritage with their bloody swords. The masses
of the people dream not of these things. They suppose the Republic
can be destroyed to-day, and that peace will smile over its ruins
to-morrow.”
Away out in his Illinois home Lincoln had written these words in his
inaugural address:
“In _your_ hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in
_mine_, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not
assail _you_. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the
aggressors. _You_ have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the
government, while _I_ shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve,
protect and defend it.’”
This was the spirit in which he made that journey from the West,
knowing that the question of war or peace hung as upon a hair trigger.
Backwoodsman and provincial though he might be, he knew the underlying
American character well enough to hope, in his own heart, in spite of
the secession of so many States, what was bluntly said to Jefferson
Davis and his Cabinet: “Unless you sprinkle blood in the face of the
people of Alabama, they will be back in the old Union in less than ten
days.”
But when Lincoln went through the guarded streets of Washington to the
bayonet-girt Capitol, to have the pro-slavery Chief Justice administer
the oath of office, the speech he carried in his pocket had been
greatly altered. He had even been persuaded by Mr. Seward, his new
Secretary of State, to modify this brave sentence:
“All the power at my disposal will be used to reclaim the public
property and places which have fallen; to hold, occupy and possess
these, and all other property and places belonging to the government.”
They thought he might be murdered before he could take the oath. There
was artillery in the streets and ominous swarms of soldiers. Even on
the roofs sharpshooters were to be seen.
Grizzled old General Scott had sent this word from his sick bed to
the President-elect: “I’ll plant cannon at both ends of Pennsylvania
Avenue, and if any of them show their heads or raise a finger I’ll blow
them to hell.”
Yet when Lincoln’s long body reared itself before the hushed crowd, and
when he laid aside his new ebony, gold-headed cane, set his iron-bound
spectacles on his nose and removed his hat--there was Douglas, his
old rival for Mary Todd’s hand, his competitor for the Senate and the
Presidency, his antagonist in the struggle against slavery; but a new
Douglas, loyal to the Union, who was content to reach out his hand in
the presence of that high-strung multitude and hold Lincoln’s hat.
President Buchanan was there, withered, bent, slow, insignificant,
in flowing white cravat and swallowtail coat. Beside him towered
the homely rail-splitter--also in an unaccustomed and distressing
swallowtail coat and wearing a stubby new beard, grown to please a
little girl--who dared at last to give the national authority a voice
and to say that “No State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get
out of the Union,” that “resolves and ordinances to that effect are
legally void,” and that “I shall take care, as the Constitution itself
expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully
executed in all the States.”
How hard it is for us now to realize the appalling strain of
responsibilities that could persuade a valiant frontiersman like
Lincoln--knowing that Fort Sumter was already besieged; that the
Florida forts were threatened and that an organized Confederate
government, with drilled troops, was actually in possession of many
States--to say so softly to the armed and defiant South:
“I trust that this will not be regarded as a menace, but only as the
declared purpose of the Union that it will constitutionally maintain
and defend itself.”
Just before he closed his speech Lincoln looked up from his manuscript,
and his gray eyes--those eyes that could be so tender as to make his
gaunt face beautiful--sought the silent, listening crowd. There were
dark circles under his eyes. His whole bearing was that of a man in
pain. Then he raised his splendid head and made that last sublime
appeal against war:
“I am loath 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
battlefield 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.”
As Lincoln kissed the open Bible in the hands of Chief Justice
Taney--who wrote the Dred Scott opinion supporting slavery--the thunder
of artillery announced his vow to defend the Union.