CHAPTER NINE
And is this the ground Washington trod?
—WALT WHITMAN,
“The Centenarian’s Story” (1861)
Washington, July 1861
ONE SUNDAY NIGHT in early summer, James Ferguson, assistant astronomer of the United States Naval Observatory, was making a routine survey of the skies above Washington when he noticed an unusual ray of light pulsating just above the northern horizon. As the night was somewhat overcast, he was unable to determine the exact nature of this phenomenon, and decided that it was probably just a stray beam of the aurora borealis.1
The following evening, the first night of July, a rainstorm swept the capital. Afterward, when Ferguson returned to the Observatory dome, he saw the same pale streak flickering in a slightly different place, once again half hidden amid drifting banks of heavy cloud. At last, just past midnight, the sky cleared and the mysterious object swam free into his view. Indeed, it soon glowed so bright that Ferguson pushed the telescope aside and simply stared in astonishment at the ball of luminescence that swelled and became more brilliant by the minute, soon outshining every star and planet. A pale brushstroke of light trailed behind, streaming higher and higher above the horizon, waxing like the flame of a lamp newly lit.
Millions of people across the country saw the comet—indeed, half the world did. By the next night, its head looked as large as a three-quarters moon, and the tail traversed more than half the sky, seeming to one observer as if it were made of “infinitesimal specks of fire” that swayed from side to side. It cast a faint shadow, and reflected on the surface of the sea. Some even claimed they could see it by day.
Scientists were as dazzled as the general public. They were accustomed to watching comets approach earth gradually, from a great distance; none had imagined that such a spectacular celestial body could loom up so unexpectedly. One overstimulated astronomer in Pittsburgh, confessing that the first glimpse made his hair “fairly [stand] up with wonder and excitement,” announced to the press: “I think by the cut of her jib she will probably be remembered, and also recorded, as one of the most extraordinary craft that has floated into our horizon in hundreds of years.”
At Fortress Monroe, Edward Pierce observed the comet as it burst into full splendor just past dusk on July 2, its tail sweeping across the zenith of the sky like a second Milky Way. Thomas Starr King saw it in San Francisco and was reminded of the fiery dragon in the Book of Revelation. In Manhattan on the night of the 3rd, according to the New York Herald, one enterprising citizen set up a large telescope at the corner of Broadway and Warren Street, the usually jaded city lining up to pay for a quick peep. Perhaps inevitably, the Herald, not fully satisfied with the news value of a mere cosmic event, dubbed the celestial apparition the “War Comet of 1861.”
On the following night, the Fourth of July, the New York Fire Zouaves watched it from their camp in Alexandria. “While a grand pyrotechnic display was taking place throughout the loyal States,” one observer there wrote, “a still grander and more beautiful one took place in the heavens.”
INDEPENDENCE DAY WAS CELEBRATED throughout the rebellious states as well as the loyal ones, it so happened. Early that morning, as the garrison at Fortress Monroe was busy preparing for its festivities—which were to include a speech by General Butler, a reading of the Declaration (postponed indefinitely, it would turn out, when no one could locate a copy), and then an opportunity for officers and men to get blind drunk—the Yankees were startled to hear artillery booming on the far side of the James, volley after volley in stately cadence. For a moment everyone thought it might be some sort of surprise attack. But it was only the enemy’s salute to the holiday.2
In the latter years of the Civil War, most of the Confederacy would let the day go unobserved, or even openly scorn it. In 1861, however, the Fourth of July was one of the few things that the two halves of the sundered nation still kept in common—more or less, anyway.
Across the South, editors and orators proclaimed their own region the true heir to the Revolutionary legacy. After all, what had the thirteen colonies done but secede from the mother country? Indeed, the Founding Fathers—led by Virginia’s immortal Washington, Jefferson, and Henry, slaveholders all—had established the very principles on which the Confederate states based their own claim to independence. Governments, the leaders of 1776 had said, derive their just power from the consent of the governed, and the subjects of a despotic regime have not only the right but a sacred duty to take up arms against it. “The people of the Confederate States of the South,” wrote the editor of the New Orleans Daily Picayune, “alone remain loyal to the principles of the Revolution.… To them now belongs of right the custody of all the hopes of human progress, of which the Fourth of July is the symbol in history, and it is by their swords that it is to be saved for mankind.”3
True, there was ambivalence in many Confederate quarters about certain aspects of the past. Jefferson, in particular, was a problem. Some of the fiercer secessionists called him a traitor to his state and to his race; Vice President Stephens, in his “cornerstone” speech a few months earlier, had stated flatly that the author of the Declaration had been “fundamentally wrong” when he wrote that all men were created equal. President Davis, more tactfully, had ignored Jefferson’s later statements against slavery and argued, in his farewell speech to the U.S. Senate, that the doctrine of universal equality applied only to “the men of the political community.”4
The North had long harbored its own mixed feelings. Only the previous summer, Lincoln’s Republican Party had argued bitterly over whether to include the Declaration’s principles in its national platform, conservatives deeming this too inflammatory. Meanwhile, Frederick Douglass spoke for many black Americans and white abolitionists when in 1852 he extolled the Founding Fathers’ “sublime faith in the great principles of justice and freedom”—but railed in almost the same breath that American hypocrisy never seemed more “hideous and revolting” than it did each Fourth of July.
Northerners’ response to the holiday in 1861 reflected new internal divisions, too. The editors of the Philadelphia Inquirer, in their office just down Chestnut Street from Independence Hall, exulted: “This day inaugurates a second war of Independence.… We shall look forward to the United States of the Future as a still closer approximation than the United States of the Past to that bright ideal of Government, the vision of which has ever haunted the Seers and Thinkers of mankind.” Other Americans, though, found little to celebrate. Some considered it a mockery that President Lincoln had chosen Independence Day, of all moments, to convene the national legislature for its emergency session in Washington. “What a melancholy contrast between the Congress of 1776 and the Congress of 1861,” a Democratic editor in Ohio wrote. “One was the Star of Bethlehem, the other the darkness which rent the [veil] of the Temple. The Christ and the Crucifixion.”5
This was more than slightly melodramatic. Still, as the Congress of 1861 prepared to convene, no cosmic portents—with the possible exception of the comet—were yet evident, and no one visiting Washington would have mistaken it for Bethlehem. The charms of the capital in summertime, an acquired taste in the best of circumstances, had not been enhanced much by the presence of a hundred thousand troops, unless one’s tastes ran to ladies of pleasure. “Beauty and sin done up in silk, with the accompaniment of lustrous eyes and luxurious hair, on every thoroughfare offer themselves for Treasury notes,” a Union officer wrote in his diary. Sin did not come in such uniformly luxurious guise, though: just after the national holiday, Private Thomas Curry of the Fire Zouaves was found knifed to death in front of one particularly “low” brothel.
And prostitutes were not the only ones making heavy use of L’Enfant’s stately boulevards; the constant passage of army wagons had deepened Pennsylvania Avenue’s ruts and morasses to the point that unwary pedestrians almost risked sinking out of sight, never to reemerge, while Second Street had gotten so bad that one poor gentleman’s carriage toppled off the eroding curbside and into the adjacent Tiber Creek canal, drowning him in the miasmal waters. (The capital’s sanitation system, if the term can be applied to a crude network of drainage ditches, was so overtaxed that official government reports used phrases like accumulated filth … hotbed of putrefaction … immense mass of fetid and corrupt matter.)6
Things had improved considerably at the Capitol itself, however. Arriving regiments were now shunted off to less stately campsites, as workmen readied the building for the legislators’ return, expunging every visible trace of the Fire Zouaves and their comrades-in-arms. Furniture was refinished; carpets replaced; graffiti scrubbed from the frescoes. The Senate chamber was painstakingly deloused. The paneling in the House chamber, formerly blazing red, was repainted a quiet “dove color,” perhaps in a belated attempt to tranquilize the distinguished members, perhaps to address the aesthetic concerns of critics like Theodore Winthrop, whose posthumously published essay in the July Atlantic suggested that the Capitol’s décor had “a slight flavor of the Southwestern steamboat saloon.” A less pleasant job was scooping up and hauling off what the building’s shell-shocked chief architect described to his wife as “cart loads of ---- in the dark corners,” apparently deposited there by certain members of the soldiery. (To be fair, one might argue that this particular commodity, then as now, was even more abundantly produced by Congress itself.) President Buchanan’s portrait had been removed to a private office to protect it “from threatened indignity,” while Tyler’s was exiled to deep storage. (It now hangs in the Blue Room of the White House.)7
In another respect, too, the Capitol was returning to normal, not counting a few important absences. On the morning of July 4, the two chambers began filling up again with senators and congressmen—mostly the same men who “dressed like parsons, said Sir, and chewed tobacco” whom Winthrop had mocked as belonging to a bygone epoch. Clearly their epoch was not wholly bygone just yet. But they were lonelier, and it did not take an especially sharp eye to discern that their desks and chairs had been artfully rearranged, a bit more widely spaced than before, to conceal the thinning of ranks. One significant absence was not the result of secession—or at least not quite as directly as the others. Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s old rival, the man whose popular sovereignty doctrine had promised Americans the freedom to commit a state to slavery, had died a month earlier, after a grueling lecture tour on which he rallied Northern Democrats “to protect this government and [our] flag from every assailant.”8
For form’s sake, the clerk of the House called on each of the seceded states’ delegations when he took roll, pausing just a moment as if by some remote possibility they would come creeping back, all past sins forgiven and troubles forgotten. Before this, however—perhaps more fruitfully, perhaps not—a Methodist chaplain addressed the Almighty at considerable length, in terms that made it clear he thought God was a Republican.9
Lincoln’s summons to Congress had coincided with his demand for seventy-five thousand troops, on April 15, perhaps suggesting his belief that the decision for war would have to be ratified first by the people themselves, in the form of the volunteer militia, even before their elected representatives considered it. In the same vein, he had resisted calls to convene the national legislature immediately, deferring the special session almost three months. There were good political reasons for him to do this. The president feared, justly, that Congress would try to take the conduct of the war into its own hands—or worse, that it might try to broker a dishonorable peace, offering terms that coddled slavery even more than the Crittenden, Corwin, and Peace Conference plans had done. Clearly he intended to make his own decisions first and seek congressional blessing later.10
But the unusual timing of July 4 for the special session’s opening day also signaled that in Lincoln’s mind, the business before the nation’s representatives in 1861 was somehow related to the business of their predecessors in 1776. The president made it known that he would issue a written communiqué to Congress on the session’s first day. Perhaps it would clarify the connection more fully.
Almost from the moment of the April announcement, Lincoln threw himself tirelessly into drafting his message. This in itself was remarkable, even astonishing. Most chief executives, faced with the war’s multitudinous and urgent demands, would probably have let military undertakings trump literary ones. In fact, Lincoln’s Confederate counterpart, Jefferson Davis, had not even begun work on his own unmemorable inaugural address until the day before the ceremony.11
As early as May 7, however, John Hay recorded in his diary that Lincoln was “engaged in constant thought upon his Message: It will be an exhaustive review of the questions of the hour & of the future.” That was the same day that the Tycoon had made his intriguing statements to Hay about the philosophical underpinnings of the Union cause, while dropping a hint about the future of slavery; he was clearly rehearsing the ideas he planned to air publicly on the Fourth of July.12 (Elmer Ellsworth and John Nicolay had both been at the White House that morning, too; Nicolay was definitely present during Lincoln’s conversation with Hay and Ellsworth may well have been also.)
Curiously, Lincoln tried his ideas on a second audience on that same day in May, a most unlikely one: the “regent captains” of the minuscule European nation of San Marino. He had recently received by letter a conferral of honorary citizenship from them, and it was now his duty to acknowledge their gracious gesture. He could easily have asked one of his secretaries to dash off a pro forma response. But the president knew that San Marino was more than just a five-mile-wide enclave of Italian-speaking sheep farmers. It was also the longest-lived constitutional republic in the world, claiming origins in the fourth century a.d. So, when Lincoln picked up his pen and addressed the regent captains, he did so as the leader of a young and immense democratic nation speaking to the leaders of an old and tiny one:
Although your dominion is small, your State is nevertheless one of the most honored, in all history. It has by its experience demonstrated the truth, so full of encouragement to the friends of Humanity, that Government founded on Republican principles is capable of being so administered as to be secure and enduring.
You have kindly adverted to the trial through which this Republic is now passing. It is one of deep import. It involves the question whether a Representative republic, extended and aggrandized so much as to be safe against foreign enemies can save itself from the dangers of domestic faction. I have faith in a good result.13
In choosing to share these ideas with the Sammarinesi rather than with political associates closer at hand, Lincoln was being characteristically discreet; he was not yet ready to address the American public, and the regent captains were unlikely to be in regular communication with James Gordon Bennett or Horace Greeley. Yet he also revealed a deep belief that the conflict in America was one of critical significance to the rest of the world, and that in his July Fourth message he needed to speak not only to Congress, not only to the American people, but perhaps, in a sense, to all of humanity. Perhaps posterity, too. In 1861, republics were still rarities: tiny San Marino was one of only two in Europe. Since they were so few, the American Civil War would matter not so much in terms of preserving existing democracies (clearly the Sammarinesi were doing just fine) as in stimulating or inhibiting the birth of future ones. Like the Forty-Eighters in St. Louis, Lincoln was well aware of the impact that the Union’s ultimate victory or defeat might have among the restless nations of Europe and even beyond.
By mid-June, Lincoln was “engaged almost constantly in writing his message,” Nicolay recorded. On the 19th, with two weeks left, the president took the extraordinary step of announcing publicly that he would receive no visitors until after submitting it to Congress.14 (Indeed, Lincoln worked far harder on his July Fourth document than Jefferson had done on his own, more famous one; the Declaration of Independence was written and revised over the course of seventeen days at most.) By this point, Lincoln had developed a keener appreciation of the potential damage of ill-considered remarks. “Nobody hurt,” a quotation from one of Lincoln’s ill-considered speeches during his train trip through Ohio, was still a national catchphrase, a barbed joke that grew sharper-edged with each fresh report of war casualties. He would not allow himself a second such rhetorical disaster.
Even so, many Americans shook their heads in disbelief at how much time the president was spending on his message. Would this end up like the last presidential epistle to Congress, Buchanan’s fourteen thousand words of ineffectual wind? No less a literary craftsman than Emerson himself wrote reproachfully in his journal that Lincoln “writes his own message instead of borrowing the largest understanding as he so easily might.” The apostle of self-reliance was arguing in favor of crowdsourcing, or at least the time-honored American habit of plagiarism.15
As the momentous date grew near, Lincoln shared a rough draft with a few select counselors. One, predictably, was Seward, who did not stint in offering suggestions, although he would play a far smaller role than he had in drafting the inaugural address: the secretary of state prevailed upon the president to tone down several passages, substituting more tactful language in places. But the president’s other sources of advice were somewhat surprising. Among them was Charles Sumner, to whom he read his draft aloud in late June; the two men were hardly close, and in fact their few face-to-face encounters had left each somewhat put off by the other. Another of Lincoln’s chosen confidants was a man he had never even met before, the eminent historian John Lothrop Motley, who was visiting the capital and dropped by the White House to call on the president; Lincoln not only broke his vow of seclusion but impulsively scooped up the scattered sheets of manuscript on his desk and read Motley nearly the entire draft. Finally, the night before sending off the message, still engrossed in last-minute revisions, he shared it with Orville H. Browning, the old Illinois friend who had written him that fierce letter about emancipating the slaves.16
One cannot help looking to Lincoln’s choices to find clues to his thoughts and preoccupations at the time. Sumner and Browning, of course, were both ardent antislavery men. Sumner and Lothrop, meanwhile, shared an expertise in European affairs, an area of weakness for Lincoln: the former had recently become chairman of the Senate’s committee on foreign relations, while the latter had spent much of his adult life on the Continent and was best known for his widely acclaimed history of the defunct Dutch Republic. Yet none of Lincoln’s various drafts of the July Fourth message mentioned slavery directly at all, nor did any address foreign relations in anything but the most brief and perfunctory fashion. (Sumner, for this reason, was disappointed by the document; Lothrop was impressed by the “untaught grace and power” of Lincoln’s writing; Browning did not record his own response.) Could it be, however, that by selecting these three men, Lincoln was sounding out—more for himself than for them—the unspoken but implicit parts of what he wanted to communicate to Congress, the nation, and the world?
At last the document was complete, and Lincoln put it into Nicolay’s hands to deliver it to the Capitol. In keeping with the tradition of that time, it would be read aloud not by the president himself but rather by the clerks of the respective chambers. (The Senate clerk performed his duty in a nearly inaudible monotone.)17
In a sense, Nicolay’s simple trip down Pennsylvania Avenue was an eloquent statement of its own. This ritual of the democracy reaffirmed the chief executive’s accountability to Congress and to the American people. And the grueling labor that Lincoln had put into his message attested to his faith in the power and necessity of words, of arguments, of explanations, in a democratic system. By contrast, the lackluster, shopworn rhetoric of the new Southern republic’s leading statesmen was not merely a failure of aesthetics, but proof of the intellectual poverty and moral laziness undergirding their entire enterprise. The Confederacy was never truly much of a cause—lost or otherwise. In fact, it might better be called an effect; a reactive stratagem tarted up with ex post facto justifications. This was borne out in the practices of the two national legislatures. Over the next four years, the Confederate Congress would transact nearly all its important business in secret, and even some of the most fervent secessionists would decry its lack of true accountability to the Southern public. (Indeed, Robert Barnwell Rhett, a leading fire-eater in 1860 and 1861, ultimately blamed the South’s loss on the absence of any informed public debate within the Confederacy that might have held the Davis administration’s policies up to scrutiny.) By contrast, the Congress of the United States—notwithstanding all the bitter infighting that lay ahead—would never once go into closed session during the course of the war.18 President Davis opened his executive messages (like his inaugural address) with the words “Gentlemen of the Congress of the Confederate States of America.” President Lincoln began his with “Fellow-citizens.”
The first half of the July Fourth message was a historical narrative. Lincoln recapitulated the events that had transpired since the start of his presidency, exactly four months earlier. He made clear, to begin with, that he had held firm to the pledge of his inaugural address: not to fire the war’s first shot. Indeed, he deftly turned the Union’s relative military unpreparedness into evidence of its honorable intentions: while the rebels had been arming for war, the North’s citizens had continued striving for peace, keeping faith in the instruments of democracy—“time, discussion, and the ballot-box”—to resolve the national crisis. Lincoln described the letter from Major Anderson that had arrived on his first full day in office, presenting him with the stark choice of surrendering the fort or trying to supply it with fresh provisions. (In a very early draft, the president had even mentioned General Scott’s support for evacuating Sumter, heedless, it seems, of how this revelation would publicly humiliate the general-in-chief; clearly he was still working through the last remnants of his political naïveté.)19 He spoke of Captain Fox’s relief expedition and the advance notice he had given the rebels, casting their bombardment of Sumter as an act of deadly aggression provoked merely by “the [attempted] giving of bread to the few brave and hungry men of the garrison.”
As conciliatory as Lincoln made his military policies sound, he was unwilling to concede a single inch of rhetorical ground to the enemy. From his experience as a lawyer, he knew the fatal effect of allowing one’s opponent to define the terms of an argument. Whereas the Northern press and public had more or less automatically begun referring to “the Confederate States,” Lincoln pointedly referred to “this illegal organization in the character of confederate States.” The lowercase spelling and lack of a definite article made clear that he was using the word confederate as it might apply to a member of a gang of highway robbers.
In fact, this idea lay at the core of Lincoln’s argument: that the very existence of the Southern Confederacy (or confederacy) was not merely a threat but a crime. And not a victimless crime, either—not, as the rebel leaders would have it, a benign act of withdrawal from a voluntary political compact. It was a crime against their fellow citizens, collectively and individually. It was an act of theft: the rebels had appropriated federal property paid for by loyal taxpayers, while defaulting on their own share of the federal debt and leaving their former countrymen holding the bag. More important, though, secession was an act of vandalism—terrorism even—against the very foundation of democratic government: the concept of obedience to majority rule. “If we now recognize this doctrine, by allowing the seceders to go in peace,” Lincoln wrote, “it is difficult to see what we can do, if others choose to go, or to extort terms upon which they will promise to remain.” (Such an act of extortion, this Congress knew well, had come quite close to success.)
Indeed, secession would render democracy’s survival impossible, not just in the Northern states but, ironically, in the Southern ones, too: what besides force could keep Virginia or Louisiana in the Confederacy as soon as they found themselves in the minority on some important national issue?
Here was the difference between the American colonies’ revolution and the Southern states’ rebellion. The colonists had been subjects, not citizens; they were parties to no formal political compact with the mother country; they were not voters in parliamentary elections even to the limited extent allowed to their English cousins, suffering taxation without representation among other tyrannies of government without consent of the governed. Their withdrawal from the British Empire may have hurt that empire economically, but it did not threaten it existentially. Lincoln directly refuted the Southerners’ claim to be Jefferson’s legitimate heirs. Referring to the various state ordinances of secession, he wrote:
Our adversaries have adopted some Declarations of Independence; in which, unlike the good old one, penned by Jefferson, they omit the words “all men are created equal.” Why? They have adopted a temporary national constitution, in the preamble of which, unlike our good old one, signed by Washington, they omit “We, the People,” and substitute “We, the deputies of the sovereign and independent States.” Why? Why this deliberate pressing out of view, the rights of men, and the authority of the people?
Lincoln returned again and again to the idea of “the people.” He was determined to prove that the Union was not fighting against the cause of freedom, as the Confederates maintained, but actively for it—and according to a very different understanding of the word. To the secessionists, freedom meant the ability to elude authority. To Lincoln, freedom was in itself a form of authority—indeed, the only legitimate form of authority, as the only alternative was authoritarianism. “And this issue embraces more than the fate of these United States,” he wrote.
It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes. It presents the question, whether discontented individuals, too few in numbers to control administration, according to organic law, in any case, can always, upon the pretences made in this case, or on any other pretences, or arbitrarily, without any pretence, break up their Government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. It forces us to ask: “Is there, in all republics, this inherent, and fatal weakness?” “Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”
Here Lincoln was not merely echoing, more eloquently, what he had told the regent captains of San Marino two months earlier. He was also foreshadowing what he would tell a crowd of Americans at Gettysburg two years hence. A government of the people, by the same people. That superfluous word same, like a lead weight, tethers the phrase to earth, keeping Lincoln’s prose from rising into poetry; the reader longs to cut it loose. But Lincoln’s thought is the same, and would remain a lodestar for him throughout the stormy years to come. Although he might not have scribbled his 1863 address on the back of an envelope, as legend would have it, it should be no surprise that he wrote it fairly quickly. Lincoln had already done the hard work of the Gettysburg Address, the heavy intellectual lifting, in 1861. The two intervening years would go to pare away the nonessentials, to sculpt 6,256 words of prose into 246 words of poetry.
When people like Emerson had criticized Lincoln for spending so long toiling over the Independence Day message, they did not understand that the president, in doing so, had in a very real sense been fighting the war. Through his lonely Emersonian struggle, all those torturous hours alone with his thoughts and his half-filled pages, he had been arming himself for the terrible conflict ahead.
Again and again over the next four years, those who knew Lincoln would express their amazement at his lack of self-doubt, his tenacity in staying the course—so different from the early weeks of his presidency. But once he had written his address to Congress, Lincoln never again needed to ask himself whether he should be fighting or what he was fighting for. With these large questions settled, the smaller ones of how to fight often answered themselves. The proper resolution of the Sumter crisis, which had tortured Lincoln in March and early April, seemed almost obvious in retrospect. Reasoning backward from the principles he articulated on July Fourth, he could not possibly have behaved any differently. Reasoning forward, much of his course ahead was clear.
This is not to say by any means that Lincoln’s thinking remained static after 1861—far from it. The difference between the July Fourth message and the Gettysburg Address is not simply a matter of elegance or conciseness; it also reflects what had happened in the meantime. The story that Lincoln would tell America in 1863, like his earlier one, began in 1776: four score and seven years ago. But the importance of the additional time accounts perhaps for his chronological precision. The later document is suffused with a sense of national tragedy, understandably enough—hundreds of thousands of Americans had died in the war by that point—and is deeply informed by a tragic understanding of world history, as well as by very ancient ideas about redemption through sacrifice. The political compact that Lincoln had described earlier had now been sanctified by death. The other immense fact of the last two years, along with all the deaths, was the Emancipation Proclamation. Thus the soaring final line of the Gettysburg Address contains not just a rearticulation of the 1861 idea, government of the people, by the people, for the people, but also something wholly novel: a new birth of freedom.
Yet were these two things entirely missing from the earlier document? By July 4, 1861, Lincoln, along with millions of other Americans, had already caught a glimpse of emancipation: those bold contrabands escaping slavery, hailing Lincoln and his armies as liberators. He had also felt the terrible stab of loss with Ellsworth’s sacrificial death. And in fact, his message to Congress carries in itself hints of the inevitable sacrifices ahead—both the price to be paid by ordinary Americans and what they would gain by paying it:
This is essentially a People’s contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life. Yielding to partial, and temporary departures, from necessity, this is the leading object of the government for whose existence we contend.
After publication, Lincoln’s message would be roundly criticized by abolitionists, who accused him of skirting—in fact, entirely omitting—the very issue that had sparked the war. “Any one reading that document, with no previous knowledge of the United States, would never dream from any thing there written that we have a slaveholders war waged upon the Government,” Frederick Douglass lamented.20
But it may have been the proslavery forces, this time, who inferred a subtler understanding of Lincoln’s words. The editors of the Baltimore Sun, unbending in its defense of slaveholders’ rights, described the document as “strikingly at variance with all our preconceived ideas of the principles of [American] government.” They pointed specifically to the “People’s contest” passage:
This paragraph has been understood to signify, in somewhat ambiguous terms, the amplest doctrines of the abolitionists. “To elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders,” &c., is scarcely susceptible of any other practical application than to the colored race, slave and free. It seems to mean the abolition of slavery, and the social, civil, and political equality of the Ethiopian, Mongolian, Caucasian, and all other races.
Lincoln, the newspaper complained, was claiming to find ideas and intentions embodied in the Constitution that its framers had never intended to put there: “The President might [as well] assert that it is one particular design of the Union to regulate the tail of the comet, the cut of a coat, or the size of a lady’s hoops.”21
The Sun was right: when Lincoln wrote of “an unfettered start,” he chose his words deliberately. An earlier draft had used the phrase “an even start,” an image that fit much more neatly with the “race of life” metaphor.22 But when the president crossed out the word even and wrote unfettered above it, he sacrificed metaphorical coherence for an unmistakable evocation of the plight of the slaves. The Sun was also correct in discerning another new idea: the government as guarantor of “a fair chance, in the race of life,” something that might well have left the nation’s founders scratching their heads. Lincoln was speaking not in the voice of the eighteenth century but that of the nineteenth, a voice informed by new ideas in science—the race of Life—as well as in politics.
This came as no small shock to some of Lincoln’s longtime doubters: those members of the nation’s intellectual establishment who had seen him as a half-educated Midwestern rube, a man unequal to the times. George W. Curtis, the journalist and Republican activist, had originally dismissed him as a cipher, believing that William Seward was the man who must save the Union. But now, still reeling from the death of his friend Winthrop at Big Bethel, Curtis wrote privately:
I envy no other age. I believe with all my heart in the cause, and in Abe Lincoln. His message is the most truly American message ever delivered. Think upon what a millennial year we have fallen when the President of the United States declares officially that this government is founded upon the rights of man!… I can forgive the jokes and the big hands, and the inability to make bows. Some of us who doubted were wrong.23
Indeed, Lincoln’s 1861 message to Congress stands as a milestone not just in the development of his thought but also in the evolution of his reputation. The Rail-Splitter had crafted a subtle and brilliant work of political science, and at the same time had succeeded, as one man present at the Capitol wrote, in narrating “the whole story of our troubles so that every man woman & child who can read it can understand.” Henceforth he might be—would be—reviled, but he would never be underestimated. Some would denounce him as a tyrant, but after July 4, fewer and fewer would mock him as an “ape” or a rube. His eloquence and intellect were in themselves powerful arguments for why all Americans, even an unschooled backwoodsman from Kentucky, even a slave, deserved a fair chance in the race of life.
“In this hour of its trial,” one Philadelphian wrote, “the country seems to have found in Mr. Lincoln a great man.”24
NOT LONG BEFORE JULY 4, the author Nathaniel Parker Willis visited the nation’s capital. While there, he crossed the Potomac to the Virginia side in order to see Arlington House, the splendid mansion recently evacuated by Robert E. Lee and his wife, Mary Custis Lee, great-granddaughter ofMartha Washington. Federal troops had occupied the property, setting up a telegraph station in the dining room and digging entrenchments in the surrounding fields. Exploring the garden behind the house, the writer came upon an elderly Negro hard at work weeding a bed of strawberries, as if all the military commotion around him did not exist, and as if his master and mistress might return at any moment to check on their plantings. “Well, uncle, what do you think of the war?” Willis asked him.
The old man hesitated for a moment. “Well, massa,” he said, “it’s all about things we’ve been so long a puttin up with.” And then, Willis wrote, he went diligently back to work.25
Other visitors’ accounts from the summer of 1861 describe curious encounters with a white-haired Negro at Arlington House whom they came upon faithfully tending the grounds—he must have been the same man. (One report gives his name as Daniel.) John Nicolay and Robert Lincoln had a conversation with him one afternoon when they took a ride on horseback into Union-occupied Virginia. On that occasion, the philosophical old man—who was delighted to meet the president’s son—shared a piece of information that none of the other accounts mention: he had been born at Mount Vernon, back before the turn of the century. He had been Mrs. Washington’s slave.26
This particular kind of Revolutionary connection was not much on people’s minds as the nation’s capital celebrated the first Independence Day of the war. At dawn’s first light, the deep boom of a columbiad sounded from the Arsenal grounds, and before its echoes could fade they were answered by other cannons among the far-flung encampments, the fields of tents whose occupants were just stirring themselves to dress and shave. Soon, a witness reported, “for ten miles along the whole line of entrenchments on the Virginia side, there was a continuous sheet of flame, volumes of smoke, and thunders of artillery that must have shaken the earth even under the feet of the rebels at Manassas Junction.” In the streets of the federal city itself, schoolboys by the thousand, roused from their beds with greater alacrity than on any other morning of the year, applied themselves gravely to the task of setting squibs alight at every curbside, adding their small detonations to the overall din.27
Flags lined the thoroughfares, of course. The most conscientious patriots had stitched on one extra star before raising them: as of that day, the national banner officially bore thirty-four, the final acknowledgment of Kansas’s entry into the Union.28
By eight o’clock, a crowd was gathering on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, where a reviewing stand had been set up for the president and other dignitaries to watch the military parade from beneath a large canopy. They were fortunate; the broiling sun soon began taking its toll on the waiting soldiers, buttoned up smartly in their woolen dress uniforms. “That was the hardest Fourth I ever saw,” an infantryman in the Thirty-second New York wrote to his brother afterward. “All N. York regiments were reviewed that day by Old Abe and Gen Scott. The day was very warm and some of the boys dropped down, overcome by the heat and fatigue.”29
Old Abe and the general, accompanied by Seward and the other cabinet secretaries, emerged together from the White House a moment before nine and took their places just as a brass band strode up the avenue playing “Hail to the Chief,” and struggling a bit to manage the tune as the throngs pressed in from all sides. But then the way was cleared, and the parade began to pass. At its head strode the First German Rifles under Colonel Max Blenker, an old Forty-Eighter from Bavaria turned prosperous Manhattan merchant. Next was the Twelfth New York, from out near Elmira, with a fine regimental band. The Cameron Highlanders made a colorful impression with their skirling bagpipes and kilted officers; as a peacetime militia regiment, they had made a similarly jaunty showing the year before, parading for the Japanese ambassadors and the Prince of Wales.
The day’s great sensation was the Thirty-ninth New York, a regiment known as the Garibaldi Guard. Its ranks included not just Italians but Germans, Frenchmen, Hungarians, Spaniards, and Swiss, along with a smattering of Russian Cossacks and Indian Sepoys. The men wore green-plumed bersaglieri hats and red shirts, just like their namesakes, and marched behind three different flags: the Stars and Stripes, the Hungarian ensign, and, most honored of all, the very same red, green, and white tricolor that General Garibaldi had planted on Rome’s Capitoline Hill in 1848, a gift to the New York regiment from an emigré Italian officer. (Garibaldi fever would reach its climax in America later that month, when William Seward tried unsuccessfully to entice the “distinguished Soldier of Freedom” to leave his Mediterranean homeland and accept a major-generalship in the Union army.) The soldiers had already delighted Washington with their habit of singing “La Marseillaise” as they marched along with baguettes speared on their bayonets, the way French troops were supposed to carry their field rations. Now each of the dashing warriors sported a sprig of evergreen or a small bouquet of flowers tucked into his hatband. As they passed, the men flung these botanical offerings onto the reviewing stand with Continental panache. Most seemed aimed at Winfield Scott—whether in tribute to him as head of the army or because he presented such a large target—and before long, the nonplussed general-in-chief resembled nothing so much as a mountainside in springtime.30
But then came the drabber, blue-uniformed ranks of plain American soldiers: Manhattan shop clerks, upstate farm boys, Buffalo flatboatmen. They had no storied tricolors to wave, no bouquets to throw, so that the next day’s newspapers simply listed their regimental numbers, one after another, with very little comment.
One regiment, the Twenty-sixth New York, was apparently so ordinary that the journalists could report only one distinctive thing: as it swung up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House, a young Negro contraband marched alongside. He saluted Lincoln smartly as he passed.31
EVENTUALLY, ASTRONOMERS WOULD LEARN a good deal about the mysterious comet—still known today as the Great Comet of 1861—which happened to arrive at a moment in history when scientists’ ability to gauge, measure, and predict the natural world was improving at an astonishing rate. They quickly ascertained its size, velocity, trajectory, and distance from Earth. Comparing their measurements to historical data, they decided initially that it was the same comet that had last passed by in 1556, alarming Charles V to the point of abdicating the throne of the Holy Roman Empire; upon further consideration, however, they decided that the new comet was in fact previously unknown, an uncharted traveler of the heavens. It turned out to have been first spotted on May 13 by a sheep farmer and amateur stargazer in New South Wales. Not long after this, it appeared in the skies above Cape Town, and Dr. Livingstone, the explorer, saw it from his campsite in deepest Africa.
Telegraphic communications in the Southern Hemisphere were still a few years away from the point when scientists there would have been able to alert their colleagues in London, Berlin, and Washington. So by the time the comet blazed into view of the top half of the globe, in late June, it was already extremely close by the standards of astronomy—about twelve million miles away. One reason it had been so hard to spot at first is that it was headed almost straight for Earth (but, luckily, not quite). Astronomers calculated—correctly, it seems—that on the comet’s closest approach, Earth actually passed through its tail, which was believed to explain why certain vicars in rural England reported a strange greenish haze in the air that night, requiring them to light their altar candles unusually early.
Yet, for all the closely printed columns of explanatory data in all the major newspapers, many Americans were still not really sure what to make of the wandering star.
For some, the magnificent nocturnal spectacle was simply a pleasant distraction from the political troubles around them. Eighteen sixty-one was a time just before electric light would pollute the skies above the world’s cities and towns—a time when the heavens were, at least for the moment, still visible. Mary Chesnut, who had followed the Confederate government to Richmond, described how gentlemen enticed ladies out under the stars during those humid Southern nights: “Heavens above, what philandering there was, done in the name of the comet! When you stumbled on a couple in the piazza they lifted their eyes—and ‘comet’ was the only word you heard.”32
Others gazed at it a bit more searchingly. Like grizzled Ralph Farnham on the train to Boston, they were uncertain travelers between an old world and a new one, a world of faith and a world of reason. They laughed about how astronomy had debunked the ancient superstition that comets were omens from Heaven, portending war and the death of kings—and then they proceeded to speculate on what it might foretell.
So much had changed in the past few years—even in the past few months. Fixed truths seemed to be casting themselves adrift; familiar stars departing from their orbits. Revolution, in the sense that astronomers at Washington’s Naval Observatory used the term, meant something stately and predictable, an orbit tethered by the gravity of the sun. Elsewhere in the capital city, of course, the word meant something quite different; elsewhere in the nation, different things still. Until recently, America’s own revolution had come to seem like a fact moored safely to the ever-more-distant year 1776. That was now no longer the case. It blazed again across the sky, a thing of wonder and terror, still uncertain in its import.
Groping for words adequate to express their thoughts, some yoked the language of science to that of prophecy. “History is like the progress of a comet, moving slowly, at a snail’s pace, for hundreds of years, far away in the unfathomable abysses of space, then pitching down headlong on the sun,” one essayist wrote. “We are now, as a nation, in our perihelion of light and heat. We are in our blossoming period.… [These] are times in which a whole people or a community are filled with a common conviction, united in the same faith, inspired by the same purpose, are of one heart and one soul.”33
This announcement of universal harmony seems to have been premature, in light of other responses to the comet. Americans may all have looked up at the same starry wanderer, but each saw something different.
Yankees, flattered that it graced the northern part of the sky, hailed it as an augury of triumph for the Union, though several also expressed the fond hope that it would change course and hit Richmond. Meanwhile, a Southerner noticed on closer inspection that “the tail of the comet sweeps directly over the north star, which is the fixed representation of northern power, and bans it with its baleful influence, while its light gleams as a pillar of flame to the south, beckoning her armies on to victory.” Abolitionists, naturally, said it heralded the liberation of the slaves, like the ancient Hebrews’ pillar of fire. One artist drew a cartoon that showed the comet with the head of Lincoln, trailing red stripes across a starry blue sky; he captioned this “Star of the North, or the Comet of 1861.” Another artist copied this drawing, but gave the comet the unmistakable jowly head ofWinfield Scott, while an editorial writer, for reasons not fully explained, compared it to Colonel Frank Blair. A Richmond newspaper proposed that the comet be dubbed “the Southern Confederacy” in tribute to the new nation, to which one in Providence retorted: “The name might be appropriate to that body, which has the least conceivable head with the largest conceivable tail, and is running away as fast as possible.”
The president saw the comet, too.
Seventy years later, a woman who had played often as a girl with the Lincoln children, until Willie’s death from typhoid fever in 1862, wrote down her recollections of that long-ago spring and summer. The memoirist, Julia Taft Bayne, remembered how the Negroes of Washington “cowered under the great war comet blazing in the sky.” There was, she said, one particular slave named Oola, a woman so old she was said to have been born in Africa, and to possess the gift of prophecy. “You see dat big fire sword blazin’ in the sky?” she supposedly said. “De handle’s to’rd de Norf and de point to’rd de Souf and de Norf’s gwine take dat sword and cut de Souf’s heart out. But dat Linkum man, chilluns, if he takes de sword, he’s gwine perish by it.” Mrs. Bayne described how she had gone and told Tad and Willie of this prediction, leaving out the part about their father, and how they, in turn, ran immediately to tell him.
“I noticed him, a few evenings later, looking out of the window intently at the comet and I wondered if he was thinking of the old Negro woman’s prophecy,” Mrs. Bayne wrote in 1931. But she was very old herself by then, grasping at a few frayed strands of memory, and if there had ever been any truth to the story, it may have been lost somewhere along her passage from one century into the next.34
Perhaps it was James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald that, for once, came closest to the truth—closest, even, to prophecy. On Independence Day, 1861, a remarkable article appeared on the paper’s editorial page. It was headlined “Annus Mirabilis”:
The present is a year productive of strange and surprising events. It is one prolific of revolution and abounding in great and startling novelties. Our own country is resounding with war’s alarms, and half a million of Northern and Southern men are preparing to engage in a deadly conflict. And meanwhile all Europe is threatened with one tremendous revolution, growing out of our own, which will shake thrones to their foundations. The premonitory symptoms of change are already observable here and there. Even Russia will not escape; for the troubles in Poland and the emancipation of the serfs have already made her empire ripe for revolt. In China and Japan, too, the hand of revolution is also busy. This is indeed a wonderful year; for while all the world is more or less filled with apprehension and commotion, a luminous messenger makes its appearance in the heavens, to the consternation of astronomers.… That we are entering, to say the least, upon a new and important epoch in the history of the world, all these wars and rumors of wars, these miracles on earth and marvels in the sky, would seem to indicate.35
In any event, the comet began to fade as quickly as it had appeared. By the Fourth of July, it had already peaked; over the next few days, it would rapidly dwindle. Late that month, as the shattered Union army retreated from the field of Bull Run, it could still be discerned with the naked eye, a fast-receding pinpoint among the night stars.
In April of the following year, an astronomer at the Imperial Russian Observatory near St. Petersburg glimpsed it one last time through the lens of his telescope. And then it was gone, continuing on its own mysterious errand toward some incalculable future rendezvous, beyond human sight.
Fort Sumter, April 14, 1865 (photo credit 9.1)