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THE TRAGIC ERA

The Revolution after Lincoln

THE TRAGIC ERA

A

CHAPTER I

'THE KING IS DEAD; LONG LIVE THE KING'

I

DISMAL drizzle of rain was falling as the dawn came to

Washington after a night of terror. In the streets men stood in groups discussing the tragic drama on which the curtain had not yet fallen. The city was 'in a blaze of excitement and rage.' 1 Then, at seven-thirty, the tolling of all the church bells in the town, and a hush in the streets. Lincoln was dead.

At the Kirkwood Hotel 2 soldiers stood guard within and without, and before the door of a suite on the third floor an armed sentinel was stationed. The night before, Andrew Johnson, occupant of these rooms, had been awakened from a deep slumber and told of the tragedy at Ford's Theater. Shaken with emotion, he had clung momentarily to the fateful messenger, unable to speak. Then, disregarding the protests of his friends, he had turned up his coat collar, drawn his hat down over his face, and walked through the crowded streets to the deathbed of the stricken chief. There he had stood a brief moment, looking down with grief-corrugated face upon the dying man.' Thence he had hurried back to his closely guarded rooms.

With the tolling of the bells, he had been formally notified by the Lincoln Cabinet that the chief magistracy had passed to him; and at ten o'clock, in the presence of the members of the Cabinet, Senators, and a few intimate friends, he stood before Chief Justice Chase, with uplifted hand, and took the oath of office. He 'seemed to be oppressed by the suddenness of the call upon him,' and yet, withal, ‘calm and self-possessed.' The sobering ef

1 Julian, MS. Diary, April 15, 1865.

* Sumner to Bright, Pierce, IV, 241.

2 On the site of the present Raleigh.

4 Men and Measures, 376.

fect of power and responsibility accentuated his natural dignity of mien. Kissing the Bible, his lips pressed the twenty-first verse of the eleventh chapter of Ezekiel.1

'You are President,' said Chase. 'May God support, guide, and bless you in your arduous duties.'

The witnesses pressed forward to take his hand, and he spoke briefly, pledging that his policies would be those of his predecessor 'in all essentials.' 2 Then, requesting the Cabinet to remain, as the others filed out, he instructed them to proceed with their duties,3 and ‘in the language of entreaty' asked them to 'stand by him in his difficult and responsible position.' That very night Charles Sumner, bitterly hostile to the reconstruction plans of Lincoln, intruded upon the new President with indecent haste to discuss 'public business,' 5 and that very day one of the Radical leaders was complaining that Johnson 'has been already in the hands of Chase, the Blairs, Halleck, Grant & Co.'

II

Nowhere did the murder fall so like a pall as in the South. 'A canard!' cried Clay, of Alabama, in concealment with other Confederate leaders in the country home of Ben Hill in Georgia, when the news reached him; and when the verification came he exclaimed in tones of anguish, "Then God help us! If that is true, it is the worst blow that has yet been struck the South.'' Even the young Southern girls were horrified and instantly sensed the significance of the deed. Vallandigham, the 'copperhead,' thought it the 'beginning of evils,' since even those who had opposed Lincoln's policy had come 'to turn to him for deliverance,' because 'his course in the last three months has been most liberal and conciliatory.' 99

It was this very policy of conciliation that so easily reconciled the party leaders in Washington to Lincoln's death. They had launched their fight against it long before; had sought to prevent

1 Chase's story, Warden, 640.

3 Ibid.

5 Sumner to Bright, Pierce, Iv, 241.

Belle of the Fifties, 245.

2 Welles, п, 289.

Men and Measures, 376.

Julian, MS. Diary, April 15, 1865.

8 Confederate Girl's Diary, 436; Mrs. Brooks, MS. Diary, April 21, 1865.

9 Life of Vallandigham, 406.

his nomination in 1864; and it was just a little while before that the Wade-Davis Manifesto had shaken and shocked the Nation with its brutal denunciation of Lincoln's reconstruction plan. At the moment of his death there was no lonelier man in public life than Lincoln.

This Manifesto was an accurate expression of the spirit of the congressional leadership of his party. It referred contemptuously to 'the dictation of his political ambition'; denounced his action on the Wade-Davis reconstruction plan as 'a stupid outrage on the legislative authority of the people'; warned that Lincoln had 'presumed on the forbearance which the supporters of his Administration had so long practiced'; and demanded that he 'confine himself to his executive duties.' A more outrageous castigation of a President had never been written. The exigencies of a presidential campaign had forced a semblance of harmony, but the feeling of hostility which bristles in this document was beating fiercely beneath the surface when the assassin's bullet removed this conciliatory figure from the pathway of the leaders. 'Its expression never found its way to the people,' wrote Julian, though in both branches of Congress there were probably not ten Republicans who really favored the renomination of Lincoln in 1864.1 Thus, among the Radicals, 'while everybody was shocked at his murder, the feeling was nearly universal that the accession of Johnson would prove a Godsend to our cause.' 2

With a strange insensibility, these men, soon to dominate, left the Nation to bury its dead, while they turned instantly to devices definitely to end the Lincoln policies through his successor. That Johnson would fall in with their plans they had no doubt. Had any one surpassed the violence of his denunciations of the Southerners in 1864? Had he not talked of confiscation and punishment for treason? Thus, they reasoned, he would readily agree to a reconstruction imposed upon the South by the 'Loyalists' there and the Radicals of the North. Besides, they thought, Johnson's previous association with the Committee on the Conduct of the War would put him onto the right track.' They thought, too, that Grant's was a descending star, because 'his terms with Lee

3

1 Julian, Recollections, 244.

2 Ibid., 255.

Julian, MS. Diary, April 16, 1865.

Sherman, Recollections, 1, 359.

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