Lincoln (118 page)

Lincoln never explained why he chose this forum, and this occasion, for a major statement on reconstruction, but the final sentences of his talk gave a hint of his purpose. “In the present
‘situation’
as the phrase goes, it may be my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South,” he said in conclusion, after many of his listeners had grown bored and drifted off elsewhere in search of more conventional oratory. “I am considering, and shall not fail to act, when satisfied that action will be proper.”

The meaning of that cryptic message puzzled his hearers, who guessed that he intended anything from an announcement of amnesty for all rebels to a proclamation putting the entire South under military rule to a decree imposing universal suffrage on the rebellious states.

None of these expectations was realistic. Certainly, Lincoln was not in favor of punishing the Confederates. As he said to the Marquis de Chambrun shortly after his talk, it was “his firm resolution to stand for clemency against all opposition.” He had no wish to capture and try even the leaders of the Confederacy. “He hoped there would be no persecution, no bloody work, after the war was over,” he told the cabinet. “None need expect he would
take any part in hanging or killing those men, even the worst of them.” “Frighten them out of the country, open the gates, let down the bars, scare them off,” he said—making a gesture as if herding sheep. But he wished to avoid making a public pronouncement on this point. At City Point, when Sherman asked what was to be done with Jefferson Davis and the other Confederate leaders, Lincoln intimated that they ought to “escape the country,” though he could not say so openly. To make his position clear he told Sherman one of his favorite stories, about the man who declined a drink because he had taken a total-abstinence pledge and asked for lemonade instead. When a friend suggested that it would taste better with a little brandy in it, the man said he would not object if it could be added “‘unbeknown’ to him.”

Nor was he about to issue a proclamation for the general reorganization of the Southern states. The sole item on his agenda was peace, and Lincoln did not in this speech—or elsewhere—offer a broad vision of the future, outlining how the conquered South should be governed. He stipulated only that loyal men must rule. His was not the view of the Conservatives, who simply wanted the rebellious states, without slavery, to return to their former position in the Union, nor was it the view of the Radicals, who wanted to take advantage of this molten moment of history to recast the entire social structure of the South. He did not share the Conservatives’ desire to put the section back into the hands of the planters and businessmen who had dominated the South before the war, but he did not adopt the Radicals’ belief that the only true Unionists in the South were African-Americans.

Equally improbable was any announcement that African-Americans must have full political and economic equality. Lincoln had not given much thought to the role that the freedmen would play in the reorganization of the South. The stalwart service rendered by nearly 200,000 African-Americans in the military had eroded his earlier doubts about their courage and intelligence. Perhaps he still questioned whether blacks could ever achieve equality with whites in the same society, but the failure of his colonization schemes had taught him that African-Americans were, and would remain, a permanent part of the American social fabric. He believed that the more intelligent blacks, especially those who served in the army, were entitled to the suffrage. Hence he encouraged the education of the freedmen, and he supported the Freedmen’s Bureau to protect them from exploitation by their former masters. But beyond this he was not prepared to go. Unlike the Radicals, he gave no thought to dividing up the estates of the defeated Southern planters and giving each black family forty acres and a mule. He offered no opinions on school integration, interracial marriages, or social equality between blacks and whites. In April 1865 he thought these were all hypothetical questions, pernicious abstractions, which could have no other effect than to divide the friends of the Union at a time when they ought to be united in a search for peace.

The announcement he contemplated probably had to do with his plan to
allow the members of the rebel legislature of Virginia to assemble in order to withdraw their state from the Confederacy. He was prepared to extend the same offer to other states. In his mind this move did not amount to recognition of the Confederate governments in these states, nor was he conceding that they had ever seceded from the Union, a point central to his thinking throughout the war. But he contemplated giving a limited recognition to interim governments for the specific purpose of withdrawing troops from the Confederate armies. He had returned from City Point with a new sense of urgency about reconstruction. He now had firsthand knowledge of the devastation wrought by the war and a fuller understanding of the suffering it had caused soldiers and civilians in the South. More strongly than ever he felt that immediate action must be taken to restore stability in the conquered region. “Civil government must be reëstablished... as soon as possible,” he told Welles; “there must be courts, and law, and order, or society would be broken up, the disbanded armies would turn into robber bands and guerrillas, which we must strive to prevent.”

Aware that his plan would arouse opposition, he intended his speech, as he told an old friend the next day, “to blaze a way through the swamp” of legal entanglements and political objections to his course. He had good reason to anticipate that Radicals would oppose his efforts in Virginia. Many of them had not accepted their defeat in the recent session of Congress. Some, like Sumner, were now implacable in their hostility to Lincoln’s plans. Aware that the President was likely to make some pronouncement on reconstruction on April 11, the senator had declined Mrs. Lincoln’s invitation to view the victory celebration from the White House. He felt that his presence at the inaugural ball had been interpreted as giving symbolic approval of the Lincoln administration, and he was not going to allow himself to be so used again. Other Radicals also continued to agitate for harsh terms toward the South. For instance, Benjamin F. Butler demanded that leaders of the rebellion should be disfranchised and disqualified from holding any public office and that “the masses, including the negroes, should have the rights of citizenship.” Chief Justice Chase, who did not give up his political interests when he joined the Court, enjoined the President to remember that “the easiest and safest way” to reorganize the Southern states was through “the enrollment of the loyal citizens without regard to complexion.”

Lincoln’s April 11 speech was an attempt to defuse such criticisms by making significant concessions to his Radical critics. Though he defended the Unionist government of Louisiana, he explicitly disavowed any claim that reconstruction was exclusively a function of the executive branch; he reminded his audience that he had from the outset “distinctly stated that this was not the only plan which might possibly be acceptable” and “that the Executive claimed no right to say when, or whether members should be admitted to seats in Congress from such States.” Admitting that he had promised General Banks to sustain the Louisiana regime, he was ready to retract it: “As bad promises are better broken than kept, I shall treat this as
a bad promise, and break it, whenever I shall be convinced that keeping it is adverse to the public interest.” “But,” he cautioned, “I have not yet been so convinced.” Recognizing that Radicals objected to the Louisiana constitution because it did not give African-Americans the ballot, he declared that he shared their discontent: “I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.” This was an opinion Lincoln had previously expressed in private, but never before had any American President publicly announced that he was in favor of Negro suffrage.

At least one member of the crowd outside the White House that night recognized how much Lincoln was conceding to the Radicals. John Wilkes Booth fumed with hatred for the President. Born in Maryland in a slaveholding community, the twenty-six-year-old actor thought of himself as a Northerner who understood the South. He was a handsome, vain young man, the next-to-the-youngest son and his mother’s darling in her brood of ten children. He grew up on the family farm near Bel Air, Maryland, to which his alcoholic and mentally unstable father repaired between bouts of acting, and in Baltimore. Erratic attendance at several private schools in the vicinity supplied him with a smattering of learning, some elements of military drill, and a conviction that he belonged to the Southern gentry.

He seemed destined for the theater. His father, Junius Brutus Booth, and his brother Edwin were great actors; his brother Junius Booth, Jr., was a major producer; and his brother-in-law was a noted comedian. From his debut at the age of seventeen Wilkes Booth was almost constantly on the stage. He had no training, and his early performances were crude and sometimes laughable. But he constantly improved as an actor, and he learned a formidable number of roles. He looked the part of the hero. Though he was only five feet eight inches tall, he held himself erect, and his broad chest contributed to the impression of greater height. Strikingly handsome, with curly black hair and a full mustache, he had a slightly exotic look, which women often found irresistible. “He had an ivory pallor that contrasted with his raven hair,” one of them remembered, “and his eyes had heavy lids which gave him an Oriental touch of mystery.”

It was in Southern theaters, notably in Richmond, that he first gained recognition. Southerners appreciated his flamboyant, athletic style of acting: the twelve-foot leaps he sometimes used to make his first appearance on stage, the duels that were so realistic that blood was shed, the impassioned love scenes. When he began playing Shakespearean roles, considered the real test of an actor in the 1850s, he reminded audiences of his father, perhaps the greatest Shakespearean performer of his generation, and of Edwin Forrest. Southern audiences preferred Wilkes Booth’s portrayal of Hamlet as an unmistakably mad prince and of Richard III as a diabolical
monster to the coolly intellectual characterizations offered by his older brother Edwin.

Offstage, Southerners found Wilkes Booth delightful, and they were charmed by his quick excitability, his love of fun, and his joyousness. “He was one of the best
raconteurs
to whom I ever listened,” a fellow actor recalled. “As he talked he threw himself into his words, brilliant, ready, enthusiastic.” Young Southern men were impressed by his ability to hold his liquor. His excellent manners won him access to social circles in the Deep South from which he had been excluded in Maryland, where people remembered that he was illegitimate. Deserting a first wife in England, his father had come to America with Mary Anne Holmes, who became the mother of John Wilkes Booth and his nine siblings.

Southerners also liked Wilkes Booth because he held conventional Southern views about slavery, which he considered “one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us) that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation.” He firmly believed “the country was formed for the white, not for the black man.” As sectional tensions mounted, he denounced what he called the treasonable activities of the abolitionist Republicans and called for retribution: “The South wants justice, has waited for it long, and she will wait no longer.” Acting in a Richmond theater when he heard the news of John Brown’s capture, he borrowed a uniform and went with the Richmond Grays to witness the execution of the old abolitionist.

When the war broke out, Booth made no attempt to conceal his sympathies for the Confederacy. “So help me holy God!” he swore to his sister, “my soul, life, and possessions are for the South.” But he did not rush to enlist in the Confederate army, explaining to his brother Edwin, a loyal supporter of the North, that he had promised their mother to keep out of the quarrel. His contempt for President Lincoln was open. He was offended by “this man’s appearance, his pedigree, his coarse low jokes and anecdotes, his vulgar similes, and his frivolity” as much as he was by Lincoln’s efforts “to crush out slavery, by robbery, rapine, slaughter and bought armies.”

Booth did little more than grumble about Lincoln until August or September 1864, when the reelection of the President seemed increasingly probable, but he then decided that something must be done to rid the country of this “false president,” who clearly was “yearning for kingly succession.” No doubt the chronic hoarseness that was clouding his career as a theatrical star and the failure of his investments in Pennsylvania oil schemes to pay off contributed to his general unhappiness, which was now directed against the President. Exactly how Booth got in touch with the Confederate secret service is not known, but he had many contacts in the South, and the private funds he had used to buy quinine and other needed medicines to be smuggled into the Confederacy gave evidence of his good faith. Presently, after conferring with Southern agents in Maryland, in Boston, and in Canada, he came up with the scheme of kidnapping Lincoln, taking him behind the
Confederate lines in Virginia, where he would be held hostage for the release of thousands of Southern soldiers languishing in Northern prisons. It cannot be proved that any Confederate authority—much less the heads of the Confederate government—knew about, authorized, or even approved Booth’s plan, though it is clear that, at least at the lower levels of the Southern secret service, the abduction of the Union President was under consideration. Indeed, Booth’s scheme was very much like the one that Confederate authorities permitted Thomas N. Conrad to attempt in the fall of 1864.

Booth recruited for his plot two of his boyhood friends from Baltimore, Samuel B. Arnold and Michael O’Laughlin. Expecting to take the President across the Potomac below Washington, he added the Prussian-born George A. Atzerodt from Port Tobacco, Maryland, because he had ferried Confederate spies across the river and knew all the creeks and inlets. John H. Surratt, who had repeatedly served as a courier between secessionist sympathizers in Baltimore and Southern authorities in Richmond, added firsthand knowledge of the Confederate underground that was active in southern Maryland, and his mother, Mary Surratt, who may or may not have known the plots that were being hatched, offered headquarters for the conspirators in the inn she owned at Surrattsville, Maryland, and in the boardinghouse she opened on H Street in Washington. For brute strength needed to overcome any resistance on the part of the President, Booth enrolled the burly, violent Lewis Paine (or “Payne,” or “Powell,” or “Wood,” as he variously called himself), who had served in Mosby’s Confederate Rangers before taking the oath of allegiance to the Union cause. And finally he allowed the young druggist’s clerk, David E. Herold, to join the group; Herold was a trifler who gave the appearance of being not very bright but, as an avid bird hunter, he was supposed to know the poorly mapped roads below Washington. It was a loose, informally organized group, tied together only by devotion to the Confederate cause, personal attachment to Booth, and the considerable amounts of money that the actor paid to house and feed his team in Washington.