Lincoln (119 page)

During the fall and winter of 1864, while Booth was recruiting his band of conspirators, he spent much time studying the maps and exploring the roads in Charles County, Maryland, in order to plan for carrying the kidnapped President across the Potomac. The whole venture, despite its deadly seriousness, had a theatrical quality about it, and at times Booth, who had trouble separating fantasy from reality, seemed to be playing one of his more melodramatic theatrical roles. To make sure that nobody misunderstood the script that he was following, he took time to write an impassioned letter explaining his actions in advance, which he sealed and entrusted to his brother-in-law. “There is no time for words,” he asserted—only to run on for some thirteen hundred words attacking Lincoln, defending the South, and announcing that he intended “to make for her a prisoner of this man to whom she owes so much misery.” He signed the document, “A Confederate
at present doing duty on his own responsibility.” Then he paused and struck through “at present.”

How much of this was playacting is hard to determine. Certainly Booth’s first plan, to capture Lincoln while he was attending Ford’s Theatre on January 18, bind him and lower him from the box to the stage, and then carry him off to the Confederacy was pure theater, more akin to farce than to tragedy. Only an inferior playwright could conceive a scenario in which the powerful six-foot-four-inch Lincoln could be bound and gagged while a thousand spectators quietly watched the abduction. The plan was never tried, because the President stayed at home on this stormy night.

A more practicable plan for abducting the President, similar to that of Conrad, the Confederate agent, was to capture him while he was riding in his carriage on the outskirts of the city. Learning that Lincoln planned to attend a performance of
Still Waters Run Deep
at the Campbell Hospital, near the Soldiers’ Home, on March 17, the conspirators decided to intercept the President, overpower him and his coachman, and rush him through southeastern Maryland and across the Potomac. At the last minute the attempt had to be aborted when Booth learned that Lincoln had remained in the city to review a returning regiment of Indiana volunteers rather than attend the play.

Instead of discouraging Booth, these failures led him to contemplate a new course of action. As early as March 4—even before the failure of the kidnapping scheme—he had begun to think of assassination rather than abduction. Standing in the rotunda of the Capitol as Lincoln passed through to the portico, where he gave his second inaugural address, Booth reflected on the excellent chance he had to kill the President if he wished.

The failure of the abduction scheme made that wish an obsession. Because the collapse of the Confederacy removed the source of any orders or suggestions for his conspiracy, Booth was now acting entirely on his own, and there was nothing to curb his fervid imagination. Drinking very heavily at this time, he increasingly came to think of himself as not just a self-appointed Confederate secret agent but as the reincarnation of one of the tragic theatrical heroes whose lines he mouthed so eloquently. Sometimes he fancied himself a present-day William Tell. More often he saw himself as Brutus, striking down the despotic Caesar. Always he brought death to the tyrant.

Lincoln’s address on April 11 triggered Booth’s shift from thought to action. In the crowd outside the White House that evening, he heard the President recommend suffrage for blacks who were educated or had served in the Union armies. “That means nigger citizenship,” the actor muttered, and he vowed, “That is the last speech he will ever make.” He urged Lewis Paine to shoot the President on the spot. When Paine refused, Booth turned in disgust to his other companion, David Herold, and exclaimed, “By God, I’ll put him through.”

Lincoln, of course, knew nothing of these plots as he continued to plan for a speedy restoration of the Union under lenient terms of reconstruction. But he found few were ready to follow his lead. In Virginia, Campbell and his associates in the Virginia legislature seemed to be dragging their feet. On April 6 the President had authorized them to meet, but nothing much happened. During the next three days, while fighting continued, Campbell took time to constitute a committee of the legislators; the committee took time to compose an address; the military took time to approve the address and then it had to be published in the newspapers; it took more time to assure the members of the legislature that they would be given safe-conduct and provided with transportation to Richmond. Lacking any sense of urgency, Campbell took an increasingly enlarged view of his role in the negotiations, calling for an armistice—something that Lincoln had explicitly refused—and suggesting peace negotiations with the Confederate legislature of South Carolina as well as that of Virginia. It seems not to have occurred to him that Lee’s surrender on April 9 made his activities largely irrelevant.

Along with foot-dragging from the Confederates, Lincoln had to deal with opposition in the North. Radicals overwhelmingly rejected the compromises he had offered in his April 11 speech. One of Sumner’s abolitionist correspondents in Boston thought that it again demonstrated Lincoln’s “backwardness” and argued that “it will be wicked and blasphemous for us as a nation to allow any distinction of color whatever in the reconstructed states.” Sumner agreed. He rejected Lincoln’s egg-and-fowl metaphor for the Louisiana government—an image the President was particularly pleased with—noting grimly that only crocodiles emerge from crocodile eggs. By failing to adopt “a just and safe system” of reconstruction—meaning one that enfranchised all the freedmen—the President was going to promote “confusion and uncertainty in the future—with hot controversy.” “Alas! Alas!” he grieved.

The President’s immediate advisers also objected to the proposed meeting of the Virginia legislators, which seemed much less urgent after Lee surrendered at Appomattox. He had deliberately not broached the subject in the cabinet meeting before he gave his speech, but some of the members knew about the plan because Charles A. Dana, who was with the President at City Point, sent Stanton detailed reports on Lincoln’s meetings with Campbell. Stanton apparently leaked news of the Virginia peace negotiations to Speed and Dennison, and he possibly also informed Chief Justice Chase.

On April 12, when Lincoln brought the question of Virginia reconstruction before the cabinet, nobody favored his plan. Afterward both Stanton and Speed had private interviews with the President in order to express their marked dissatisfaction and irritation with the proposal. In a second
conversation that afternoon at the War Department, Stanton vehemently argued against “allowing the rebel legislature to assemble, or the rebel organizations to have any participation whatever in the business of reorganization,” and he warned that Lincoln’s action “would put the Government in the hands of its enemies; that it would surely bring trouble with Congress; [and] that the people would not sustain him.”

With Seward bedridden, Lincoln thought his strongest supporter would be Gideon Welles, but the Secretary of the Navy, to his surprise, also objected to “the policy of convening a Rebel legislature.” The President explained that all he was trying to do was “to effect a reconciliation as soon as possible, and he should not stickle about forms, provided he could attain the desired result.” But Welles was not convinced. “As we had never recognized any of [the Confederate] organizations as possessing validity during the war,” he argued, “it would be impolitic, to say the least, to now recognize them and their governments as legal.” Besides, he pointed out, there already was a Unionist government of Virginia, headed by Francis Pierpont.

Rather feebly the President countered that the Pierpont government “could be considered legal, but public sentiment or public prejudice must not be overlooked.” But Welles’s argument registered, and shortly afterward, when Pierpont came to the White House for a conference, Lincoln assured him, “I intended to recognize the restored government, of which you were head, as the rightful government of Virginia.”

With all his advisers opposed to the reassembling of the Virginia legislature, the President concluded, as he told Welles, that “he had perhaps made a mistake, and was ready to correct it if he had.” He decided to get out of the Virginia scheme with the best grace he could. If he had blundered, because of insufficient preparation and imprecise directives, he could blame the Southerners for dilatoriness and misinterpretation of his orders. On April 12 he wired General Weitzel that Campbell had exceeded his authority. Reminding the general that he had permitted the calling not of the legislature but of “the gentlemen who have
acted
as the Legislature of Virginia in support of the rebellion,” Lincoln denied that he had ever intended to recognize them “as a
rightful
body”; they were only a group of influential individuals who had the power to withdraw Virginia support from resistance to the United States. Their action was not needed now, “particularly as Gen. Grant has since captured the Virginia troops, so that giving a consideration for their withdrawal is no longer applicable.” “Do not now allow them to assemble,” he directed Weitzel; “but if any have come, allow them safe-return to their homes.” Consequently Lincoln never made the announcement to the people of the South, promised in his speech of April 11.

What he considered a temporary setback did not dishearten him, and he continued to plan a speedy restoration of the Confederate states to the Union on the most generous terms. This was the principal subject of discussion in the cabinet meeting on Friday, April 14, which General Grant attended. The President was in great form. Speed thought he had never seen him in better
spirits, and Stanton remarked he was “grander, graver, more thoroughly up to the occasion than he had ever seen him.” According to Frederick W. Seward, who attended in place of his injured father, all members expressed “kindly feeling toward the vanquished, and [a] hearty desire to restore peace and safety at the South, with as little harm as possible to the feelings or the property of the inhabitants.” The cabinet quickly agreed on the importance of promptly restoring normal commercial relations with the former Confederate states and of abolishing, as soon as possible, all the military and Treasury regulations that had been necessary during the war to govern trade with the South. With obvious pleasure the President responded to a petitioner who asked for a pass to permit him to travel to Virginia: “No pass is necessary now to authorize any one to go to and return from Petersburg and Richmond. People go and return just as they did before the war.”

How the Southern states were to be governed during the transition from disunion to loyalty remained to be settled. Lincoln had now given up the idea of temporarily working with the rebel legislatures, admitting to the cabinet that he “had perhaps been too fast in his desires for early reconstruction.” But he felt strongly that the reorganization of these states could not be directed from Washington. “We can’t undertake to run State governments in all these Southern States,” he told the cabinet. “Their people must do that,—though I reckon that at first some of them may do it badly.”

Stanton brought up a plan for the appointment of military governors, who would rule under martial law in the South until civilian rule could be reestablished. Under his proposal, which he had submitted to the President the previous day and had also discussed with Grant, the military authorities would preserve order and enforce the laws while the several executive departments resumed their normal functions in the South: the Treasury Department would proceed to collect the revenues; the Interior Department would set its Indian agents, surveyors, and land and pension agents to work; the Postmaster General would reestablish post offices and mail routes, and so on. This was, Lincoln noted approvingly, “substantially, in its general scope, the plan which we had sometimes talked over in Cabinet meetings,” and it would bear further study. But Stanton also called for a single military governor for Virginia and North Carolina, and Welles strongly objected to the eradication of state boundaries and stressed the commitment that the administration had made to the Pierpont regime in Virginia.

Tactfully Lincoln handled the disagreement among his advisers by asking Stanton to revise his proposal, making separate plans for Virginia and North Carolina, which required different treatment. As to the former, the President said, “We must not... stultify ourselves as regards Virginia, but we must help her.” Declaring that he had not yet had a chance to study the details of Stanton’s proposal, he urged all the members to think carefully about the subject of reconstruction, because “no greater or more important one could come before us, or any future Cabinet.”

It was providential, he observed, that the administration could settle on a
plan for reconstruction without interference from “the disturbing elements” of Congress, which was in recess. “If we were wise and discreet,” the President told his cabinet, “we should reanimate the States and get their governments in successful operation, with order prevailing and the Union reestablished, before Congress came together in December.” “We could do better,” he assured his advisers; “accomplish more without than with them.” “There were men in Congress,” he observed, “who, if their motives were good, were nevertheless impracticable, and who possessed feelings of hate and vindictiveness in which he did not sympathize and could not participate.”

The discussion then drifted to the military situation, and everybody wanted to hear Grant’s account of the surrender at Appomattox. Asking what terms had been extended to the common soldiers in the rebel army, Lincoln beamed when Grant said, “I told them to go back to their homes and families, and they would not be molested, if they did nothing more.” Cabinet members wanted to know whether there was any news from Sherman in North Carolina. Grant replied that he was expecting word momentarily. Lincoln remarked that he was confident that there soon would be good news, since the previous night he had had the recurrence of a dream: he was on the water, and “he seemed to be in some singular, indescribable vessel, and... he was moving with great rapidity towards an indefinite shore.” This dream, he said, had come to him before nearly every important Union victory—Antietam, Gettysburg, Stones River, Vicksburg, Fort Fisher, and so on.