Lincoln (55 page)

Lincoln missed his wife. He was trying to keep house alone, and, the
New York Herald
reported, “Whatever his other qualifications may be, it is well known that in the management of the kitchen and in other domestic concerns he is sadly destitute of both talent and experience.” On three consecutive nights he went in the snow and cold to meet the train from the East until Mary returned on January 25.

Five days later the President-elect set out on a journey of his own to see his stepmother in Coles County. He had to use a passenger train, a freight train, and a buggy to complete the difficult trip, but, away from journalists and job-hunters, he was in fine spirits. At dinner in Charleston, when an enthusiastic admirer vowed to shed the last drop of his blood to prevent any interference with his inauguration, Lincoln said he was reminded of the young man about to go to war whose loving sisters were making him a belt handsomely embroidered with the motto “Victory or death.” “No, no,” said the youth, “don’t put it quite that strong. Put it ‘Victory or get hurt pretty bad.’”

He found the seventy-three-year-old Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln living with her daughter in Farmington, near Goosenest Prairie, and had a long and emotional visit with her. Afterward he visited his father’s grave and said he intended to have a suitable tombstone erected, but he never did so. When he said good-bye, his stepmother was in tears. “I did not want Abe to run for Presdt.,” she recalled years later, “did not want him, elected—was afraid somehow or other ... that Something would happen [to] him ... and that I should see him no more.” “No No Mama,” he comforted her. “Trust in the Lord and all will be well. We will See each other again.”

On February 6 the Lincolns said good-bye to their friends in Springfield at a reception described in the New York papers as “the most brilliant affair
of the kind witnessed here in many years.” Standing side by side in their first-floor parlor from 7
P.M
. until midnight, they welcomed seven hundred guests who, according to the
Baltimore Sun,
composed “the political elite of Illinois and the beauty and fashion of the area.” The house was jammed, and it took twenty minutes to get in the hall door, but everybody reported the affair was a great success. “Mrs. Lincoln’s splendid toilette,” it was remarked, “gave satisfactory evidence of extensive purchases during her late visit to New York.”

Dozens of practical details had to be arranged before leaving Springfield. The house at Eighth and Jackson streets was rented to Lucian Tilton, a retired railroad executive, for $350 a year. For $24 a year Lincoln took out an insurance policy on the house, valued at $3,000, and outbuildings. Surplus furnishings, like an extra mattress, a wardrobe, and six chairs, were sold and the rest put in storage. Designating Robert Irwin of the Springfield Marine & Fire Insurance Company as his fiscal agent, Lincoln drew up a list of the notes, mortgages, and bonds that he owned, which totaled $10,004.57, and authorized Irwin to collect interest on them and also to pay any bills that might come in after he left for Washington. Working day and night to make sure that everything was packed perfectly, Mary burned stacks of old letters and papers in the back alley.

All the Lincolns made affectionate farewell visits to their Springfield friends. One of Lincoln’s last calls was on Herndon, whom Lincoln had not seen frequently during the months after the election. The partners discussed legal matters and talked about the state of the country and the pressure Lincoln was under from job-seekers. Exhausted, the President-elect told Herndon, “I am sick of office-holding already.” After a time he asked, “Billy ... how long have we been together?”

“Over sixteen years,” was Herndon’s answer.

“We’ve never had a cross word during all that time, have we?”

Promptly Herndon replied, “No, indeed we have not.”

There was an awkward pause, and Lincoln said hesitantly: “Billy... there’s one thing I have, for some time, wanted you to tell me I want you to tell me ... how many times you have been drunk.”

Herndon, flustered, had no quick reply. Lincoln changed the subject to tell of several attempts to have him take another partner. Having made his point, he gathered up some books and papers and talked for a moment or two more before going downstairs. Looking back, Lincoln glanced at the law shingle of Lincoln & Herndon. “Let it hang there undisturbed,” he said, lowering his voice. “Give our clients to understand that the election of a President makes no change in the firm of Lincoln and Herndon. If I live I’m coming back some time, and then we’ll go right on practising law as if nothing had ever happened.”

February 11 was cold and rainy, but a crowd of Springfield residents gathered at the Great Western Railroad depot to see Lincoln off. (Mary Lincoln had gone to St. Louis for additional shopping and would join her husband in Indianapolis.) The President-elect himself had roped the family trunks and labeled them A. LINCOLN, THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C. A special train had been chartered for the trip, at this point consisting of the Hinckley engine, the
L. M. Wiley,
a baggage car, and a “saloon” for the President and his party. At 7:55
A.M
. the President-elect climbed the steps to his private car and paused to say a final farewell to his neighbors, one of whom reported that his “breast heaved with emotion and he could scarcely command his feelings sufficiently to commence.”

For the next twelve days the presidential train slowly moved across the country, in a journey of 1,904 miles over eighteen railroads. In addition to the President and his immediate family, the party included Nicolay, John Hay, Dr. William S. Wallace, Lincoln’s brother-in-law and personal physician, and Elmer Ellsworth, arrayed in his Zouave uniform. Both Judd and David Davis, political enemies and rivals for Lincoln’s affection, were aboard, and Hatch, Dubois, Yates, and Browning went part or all the way to Washington. No military officer was detailed to accompany the President-elect, but Colonel E. V. Sumner of the First United States Cavalry and Major David Hunter, the paymaster at Fort Leavenworth, volunteered to serve as escorts, as did Captain John Pope, who joined the party at Indianapolis. Ward Hill Lamon, resplendent in his personally designed uniform as an aide to the Illinois governor, remained close to the President-elect as his burly bodyguard. The presidential train moved from Springfield to Indianapolis to Cincinnati to Columbus; then, after a diversion to Pittsburgh, it proceeded to Cleveland, Buffalo, Albany, and New York City. On the final leg of the journey the President-elect visited Philadelphia and Harrisburg before going on to Washington. Special precautions were taken to prevent sabotage or accident along the route, and flagmen were stationed at every road crossing and at half-mile intervals along the tracks. For most of the journey the presidential
train consisted of three cars—a fourth was sometimes added—with the first assigned to journalists, who covered the journey in great detail, the second to local dignitaries who gained prestige from traveling part of the way with the President-elect, and the third for the Lincoln family.

The procession combined all the elements of a traveling circus, a political campaign, and a national holiday. Along the route people gathered to cheer the train and, perhaps, to catch a glimpse of Lincoln. At little Ohio towns like Milford, Loveland, Morrow, and Xenia, where the train stopped only long enough for the President-elect to appear on the rear platform and bow, large crowds assembled, often with bands playing and artillery booming. At Columbus, which a New York reporter dismissed as “only a second class city,” perhaps 60,000 citizens joined in the celebration. In the larger cities the throngs were immense, and police could not keep them from pressing close around the incoming President. At Buffalo there was such wild confusion that Major Hunter dislocated his shoulder in his efforts to protect the President-elect from his overenthusiastic admirers.

The stated object of this roundabout journey was to give the people an opportunity to become acquainted with their new Chief Executive, the first American President to be born west of the Appalachian Mountains. To satisfy this natural curiosity Lincoln made very frequent appearances at the rear of the train, where, as he said, he could offer people the opportunity “of observing my very interesting countenance.” Presently he developed a formula that he used repeatedly: he came before the public, he announced, so “that I may see you and that you may see me, and in the arrangement I have the best of the bargain.” He could afford to joke, because he generally made a favorable impression. From Columbus the
New York Herald
reported that “his personal appearance was pronounced by all much better than had been inferred from his portraits.” Future President Rutherford B. Hayes, who met the President-elect in Indianapolis, could not help being amused by Lincoln’s awkward attempt to bow to the crowds: “His chin rises—his body breaks in two at the hips—there is bend of the knees at a queer angle.” But, “homely as L. is,” Hayes concluded, “if you can get a good view of him by
day light
when he is talking he is by no means ill looking.”

The journey offered superb opportunities for a politician, and Lincoln played the crowds with consummate skill. He complimented everybody and everything. At Cincinnati he said that the greeting he had received “could not have occurred in any other country on the face of the globe, without the influence of the free institutions which we have increasingly enjoyed for three-quarters of a century.” Repeatedly he expressed admiration for the many “good-looking ladies” in his audiences. At Westfield, New York, he called up Grace Bedell, who had urged him to let his whiskers grow, and gave her a big kiss. He praised the bands, and, to avoid making a speech at London, Ohio, urged them to “discourse in their more eloquent music than I am capable of” while “the iron horse stops to water himself.”

Recognizing that the crowds were interested in his family as well as himself, Lincoln from time to time urged Mary to join him at whistle stops, but, as he told the ladies at Ashtabula, “he should hardly hope to induce her to appear, as he had always found it very difficult to make her do what she did not want to.” By the end of the journey her reserve had sufficiently broken down that she consented to appear on the platform of the train at the side of her tall husband, who told the audience that now they could see “the long and the short of it!”

Curiosity extended to the other members of the Lincoln family. The two little boys were largely shielded from the public, though they immensely enjoyed the long train ride. To relieve boredom, when visitors came aboard, Tad or Willie would ask, “Do you want to see Old Abe?” and then point out someone else. Robert was much in the public eye. Labeled the “Prince of Rails”—a pun that combined reference to his father’s manual prowess and to the enthusiastic reception the Prince of Wales had received on his recent visit to the United States—he abandoned for once his natural taciturnity, flirted with the girls, drank too much Catawba wine, and even took a turn at driving the locomotive. The excitement apparently went to his head, and he forgot the one duty his father had asked him to perform: to guard the satchel containing copies of the inaugural address. Robert carelessly entrusted it to a hotel porter, who threw it on an unguarded pile of luggage behind the hotel desk. Expressing anger at one of his children for perhaps the only time in his life, the President-elect had to burrow through unclaimed baggage to identify his case, but fortunately it had not been tampered with and no harm was done.

The journey had the larger purpose of encouraging support for the Union and fostering loyalty among the Northern people. For this reason Lincoln insisted that all reception committees and demonstrations along the route be nonpartisan. He set the tone early in the journey in his remarks at Lafayette, Indiana: “While some of us may differ in political opinions, still we are all united in one feeling for the Union. We all believe in the maintainance of the Union, of every star and every stripe of the glorious flag.” Repeatedly he emphasized that the tumultuous welcome he received was not a personal tribute. He had been elected President, he said, with what was surely excessive modesty, “by a mere accident, and not through any merit of mine”; he was “a mere instrument, an accidental instrument, perhaps I should say,” of the great cause of Union. He called himself “the humblest of all individuals that have ever been elected to the Presidency,” a man “without a name, perhaps without a reason why I should have a name.”

The journey was punctuated by constant calls on Lincoln to speak—to welcoming committees, at receptions, to state legislatures in Indiana, Ohio, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The demands were so numerous that he became hoarse, and at times he lost his voice. For some of the major occasions he had prepared little addresses while he was sitting for his bust
in Thomas Jones’s studio, but mostly he had to improvise. Inevitably there was a good deal of repetition, and some of the speeches he made along the route seemed aimless and inconsequential. Supercilious young Charles Francis Adams, Jr., was appalled to learn that the “absolutely unknown” President-elect was “perambulating the country, kissing little girls and growing whiskers.” But a more sober observer, the New York diarist George Templeton Strong, who carefully followed the presidential progress, reached a sounder judgment: “Lincoln is making little speeches as he wends his way toward Washington, and has said some things that are sound and creditable and raise him in my esteem.”