CHAPTER 37
Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Lincoln ~ Fillmore
In October, the New York Post observed that the presidential election was “mingling itself more or less with nearly all other public questions. Its shadow is everywhere . . . You can hardly send a man to the United States Senate but he begins to think of being one day President. Make a soldier a General, and the tempter whispers in his ear.
“There is scarce any chapter in those ample records which illustrate the vanity of human wishes . . . than that which related the failures of distinguished men who have aspired to the Presidency of the United States.”
The 1863 state elections would serve as a precursor. No race was perhaps more personal for Lincoln than Clement Vallandigham’s campaign for governor of Ohio, being waged from his exile in Canada. When his wife left Dayton to join him, she bragged that when she returned, it would be as the wife of Ohio’s governor.
Hearing of this, Lincoln said, “That reminds me of a pleasant little affair that occurred out in Illinois. A gentleman was nominated for Supervisor. On leaving home on the morning of election, he said: ‘Wife, tonight you shall sleep with the Supervisor of this town.’ The election passed, and the confident gentleman was defeated. The wife heard the news before her defeated spouse returned home. She immediately dressed for going out, and awaited her husband’s return, when she met him at the door. ‘Wife, where are you going at this time of night?’ he exclaimed. ‘Going?’’ she replied. ‘Why, you told me this morning that I should tonight sleep with the Supervisor of this town, and I was going to his house.’”
On October 14, Welles visited Lincoln to congratulate him on Union victories in Pennsylvania and Ohio, saying “the defeat of Vallandigham is emphatic.” Lincoln told him that “he had more anxiety in regard to the election results of yesterday than he had in 1860 when he was chosen,” Welles recorded. “He could not . . . have believed four years ago that one genuine American would, or could be induced to, vote for such a man as Vallandigham,” he said, displaying “a good deal of emotion.”
Army soldier J. H. Moore wrote to his uncle, Millard Fillmore, from Louisville, Kentucky, while in the largest hospital he had ever seen. He mentioned that one soldier there had voted for a Vallandigham ticket, “but he gets well paid for it.” General Boyd had him arrested and court-martialed, and sentenced to lie in the guard house for twenty-one days. Every morning he was taken out and made to stand on a barrel for two hours.
From the outset of his presidency, Lincoln had been forced to confront the Democrats, but also carefully threaded the needle between moderate and radical Republicans. Salmon Chase, in the latter category, had been not so subtly campaigning for president. Governor Denison of Ohio confided in Lincoln that Chase was “working like a beaver,” using his vast network of revenue collectors. Denison declined to talk to him, saying he was pledged to Lincoln. Lincoln replied that “it was in very bad taste, but that he had determined to shut his eyes to all these performances: that Chase made a good Secretary and that he would keep him where he is: if he becomes President, all right. I hope we may never have a worse man. I have all along clearly seen his plan of strengthening himself. Whenever he sees that an important matter is troubling me, if I am compelled to decide it in a way to give offense to a man of some influence he always ranges himself in opposition to me and persuades the victim that he has been hardly dealt by and that he would have arranged it very differently.” He concluded, “I am entirely indifferent as to his success or failure in these schemes, so long as he does his duty as the head of the Treasury Department.”
Lincoln’s remarkable magnanimity surfaced again, days later, when he commuted the sentence of Stephen Douglas’s brother-in-law, who was convicted of fighting a fellow soldier in the army. Lincoln told him to make the best of his reprieve, writing, “No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention.”
If Lincoln could not spare time for quarreling, he could occasionally indulge one of his favorite loves, the theater. On November 9, he went with his wife and Hay to see The Marble Heart at Ford’s Theatre. The star was John Wilkes Booth. And so for hours that evening, Lincoln was entertained by his murderer in the very place where he would be assassinated.
Lincoln was running late in departing for Gettysburg, where he had been invited to make “a few appropriate remarks” following the main speaker at the dedication of the Soldier’s Cemetery. The general sent to conduct him there was attempting to rush him. Lincoln replied, “I feel about that as the convict did in Illinois, when he was going to the gallows. Passing along the road in custody of the sheriff, and seeing the people who were eager for the execution crowding and jostling one another past him, he at last called out, ‘Boys! You needn’t be in such a hurry to get ahead, for there won’t be any fun till I get there.’”
Edward Everett spoke for two hours, followed by a “musical interlude.” According to Nicolay, Lincoln held his draft of the speech but did not appear to read from it. In 272 words, Lincoln spelled out a mission statement for the United States, which was itself a restoration of the vision that prevailed at the nation’s founding. He committed the country to “the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” He resolved that “these dead shall not have died in vain.” And pledged “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Nobody had heard nor seen this speech before he delivered it. His audience was shocked by its brevity, perhaps none more so than the photographer who managed to take one hasty shot before the speaker returned to his seat. Sitting down, Lincoln confessed to his friend, Ward Hill Lamon, “It is a flat failure, and the people are disappointed.”
Those who had accompanied him may not have shared his harsh assessment, but believed him capable of better. Hay’s diary did not give the address its own sentence: “. . . and the President in a firm free way, with more grace than is his wont said his half dozen lines of consecration and the music wailed and we went home through crowded and cheering streets.” More than twenty years later, the biography of Lincoln he wrote with Nicolay gave the address its own chapter and thirteen pages.
Many initial press accounts realized what has later come to be accepted as fact, that the speech represented something transformative. Biographer David Donald takes note of the criticism as well, which attacked Lincoln’s definition of the war, presenting as evidence “that Lincoln had succeeded in broadening the aims of the war from Union to Equality and Union.”