Gathering to Save a Nation: Lincoln and the Union's War Governors

Gathering to Save a Nation

CIVIL WAR AMERICA

Gary W. Gallagher, Peter S. Carmichael, Caroline E. Janney, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, editors

This landmark series interprets broadly the history and culture of the Civil War era through the long nineteenth century and beyond. Drawing on diverse approaches and methods, the series publishes historical works that explore all aspects of the war, biographies of leading commanders, and tactical and campaign studies, along with select editions of primary sources. Together, these books shed new light on an era that remains central to our understanding of American and world history.

STEPHEN D. ENGLE

Gathering to Save a Nation

Lincoln and the Union’s War Governors

The University of North Carolina Press   Chapel Hill

© 2016 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

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Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Engle, Stephen Douglas, author.

Title: Gathering to save a nation : Lincoln and the Union’s war governors / Stephen D. Engle.

Other titles: Civil War America (Series)

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2016] | Series: Civil War America

Identifiers: LCCN 2015044922 | ISBN 9781469629339 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469629346 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865—Relations with governors. | Governors—United States—Powers and duties. | Federal government—United States—History—18th century. | United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Recruiting, enlistment, etc. | United States—States—Politics and government. | United States—Politics and government—1861–1865.

Classification: LCC E459 .E54 2016 | DDC 973.7092–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044922

Jacket illustrations: Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln at the U.S. Capitol, 1861 (courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-53445); inset of Abraham Lincoln from 1864 portrait (courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-19190).

An earlier version of Chapter 10 was published as It’s Time for the States to Speak to the Federal Government: The Altoona Conference and Emancipation in Civil War History 58:4 (December 2012). © 2012 by The Kent State University Press. Reprinted with permission.

For Stephanie, Claire, and Taylor

Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

It Is Your Business to Rise Up and Preserve the Union

CHAPTER TWO

If Blood Must Flow

CHAPTER THREE

I Don’t Believe There Is Any North

CHAPTER FOUR

The Grandest Spectacle of the Century

CHAPTER FIVE

Doing the Very Best We Can

CHAPTER SIX

This Fearful Awakening

CHAPTER SEVEN

Crossing the Alps

CHAPTER EIGHT

Does the Governor Say He Will Come for Us?

CHAPTER NINE

The Duty of the Governors to Save the Country’s Cause

CHAPTER TEN

They Are a Body of Wise and Patriotic Men

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Sinking in Despair

CHAPTER TWELVE

There Can Be No Difference of Purpose

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Is It Well or Ill with Us?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Just Such Affliction

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A Tub Thrown to the Whale

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Rebellion Still Refuses to Give Us Either Peace or Rest

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I Claim Not to Have Controlled Events

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Revolutions Never Go Backward

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The People Are Conscious of the Power

CHAPTER TWENTY

It Is Worth While to Live in These Days

EPILOGUE

Majestic Parts of That Magnificent Whole

Acknowledgments

Appendix. List of Governors

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Gathering to Save a Nation

Introduction

The American Civil War was as much a story of cooperation as it was of conflict. For all we know about why Southerners left the United States, historians still grapple over how and why Northerners restored them to the Union. Secession provided Unionists with an alarming example of just how fragile the federal system was in the mid-nineteenth century. Withdrawal in any form appeared destructive, almost madness, and it inspired loyal political leaders to demonstrate that states had more rights in the Union than outside of it. This revelation motivated loyal state leaders to unite in hopes of vindicating democracy. The ensuing war caused by the Southern departure, ironically, forged a powerful federal-state alliance that produced a Northern army powerful enough to defeat Confederates. Scholars seeking to uncover the Union’s formula for victory have therefore expanded their investigations to include the character of governments (Northern and Southern) as contributing factors.

Northerners witnessed a surge of governmental activism at both the state and national levels that sustained mobilization throughout the war. The Union’s defense in 1861 revealed intense nationalist feelings, but marshalling the resources necessary required an extraordinary coordination between the federal government and the states. Yet before Northern soldiers organized and marched off to war, the mobilization of men and matériel necessary to fight the war rested on the partnership between Abraham Lincoln and loyal state governors. It was this alliance that established and shaped the ways the Union applied its military power against the Confederacy in pursuit of victory. Only by examining this crucial partnership can we begin to understand how it contributed to the new nation Lincoln referred to at Gettysburg. In short, this work explores how Lincoln dealt with the war governors, and they with him.

For all that has appeared in print on Lincoln and the Civil War in the 150 years since the conflict, only William Best Hesseltine’s classic, Lincoln and the War Governors, serves as the seminal work on this important relationship. Characteristic of its time in contributing to the Lincoln idolatry, Hesseltine portrayed Lincoln as a master manipulator of political opinion and of conflicts with governors over mobilization. He argued that the president was the key figure who brought Northern governors into tow, doing what was needed despite them. The victory of nationalism over localism, of centralization over states’ rights, Hesseltine maintained, was, in the last analysis, a victory of keener intellect over men of lesser minds. Consequently, the history of the Civil War merges into the biography of the man in the White House.¹ That much is true.

Yet, in as much as scholars credit Lincoln for engineering Union victory, he also benefitted from the governors’ collective efforts in aiding him. Hardly did the president regard his loyal chief executives as men of lesser minds, or dismiss them as insignificant spectators watching the war unfold from the state capitals. Quite the contrary, loyal governors (whether Republican or Democrat) demonstrated considerable influence by collaborating with the president, partnering with him to mobilize for war, and, at times, pushing him toward greater national efforts. Governors experienced the same expansive powers that Lincoln enjoyed during the war. Given the federal structure of antebellum mobilization that leaned on state militias, governors held extraordinary power in wartime. The partnership between Lincoln and the governors came most dramatically in the area of national mobilization. Lincoln understood their importance far better than Hesseltine allowed. The president was neither in conflict with his loyal governors, nor did he see them as rival executives. Yes, they had disagreements, but Lincoln was not trying to overpower them politically, ruin their prestige, or dominate their affairs. Rather, he included them as essential and representative parts of the whole, which was essential to the Union’s preservation and thus reinforced the federal-state partnership necessary to vindicate democracy. Without the willingness of loyal governors who agreed independently to uphold the Union, marshal their states’ resources, and cooperate in establishing a national army, Lincoln would have been hard pressed to preserve the Union. William C. Harris takes this view in his volume Lincoln and the Union Governors, which provides a point of departure for challenging Hesseltine’s thesis. In short, Harris argues that Lincoln recognized and respected the governors’ political and constitutional authority and worked with them to maintain a unified war effort. He emphasizes their contributions and stresses that Lincoln relied upon these governors to win the war and preserve the Union.²

Northerners who remained in the Union clung to the notion that the bond between the nation and the states would have to be strengthened to achieve military victory. On a practical level, this took shape as Unionists mobilized for war. Through their cooperative spirit and willingness to coordinate military operations, loyal governors exercised important powers, and citizens looked to them for leadership. Governors’ partnerships with Lincoln offer impressive examples of federal-state and state-federal cooperation that not only resulted in a Union victory, but also registered a triumph for the federal Union. Antebellum governance had been legislatively centered and regionally driven as a consequence of a decentralized political system. Both Lincoln and Jefferson Davis unavoidably fought the Civil War by summoning their states to action within, at first, a vastly decentralized federal system. As much as many Northerners accepted and even supported states’ rights, however, they rejected the presumption of states’ sovereignty over national sovereignty. The war presented them with the opportunity to emphasize the mutual respect and kinship among states that obliged all citizens to preserve the Union—even a union that contained slavery. In raising Northern armies, governors functioned as agents of a national coalition that stressed governmental activism and emphasized the United States as single nation. As such, preserving the Union gave the appearance of nationalism and required governors to play a crucial role in the war effort. By answering Lincoln’s April 1861 call to arms, Northerners chose to emphasize the same rights Southerners did in leaving the Union, only they used them to cooperate with Lincoln. In doing so, they placed nation above state and relied on the Union’s strengths to support a national authority. That strength sprang from the alliance between Lincoln and the governors, and it reinforced the federal Union’s resiliency.³

Yet, fighting for the Union did not mean that Northerners lessoned their commitment to local governance. On the contrary, the struggle between eastern conservatism and western liberalism kept popular sovereignty alive and pitted agrarian and industrial interests against one another. Supporting the national government and vindicating democracy, many Northerners believed, would preserve state and local autonomy. Lincoln understood the fusion of state politics and nationalist ideology and that state regiments organized by governors comprised his armies. Union governance derived from the mutually dependent relationship between national and state leaders who navigated the political shoals of mobilization, emancipation, and conscription. When Lincoln expanded his war aims and his national power to assist governors in maintaining support for the war, it tested popular sovereignty’s limits. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles had predicted as much. The government will, doubtless, be stronger after the conflict is over, than it ever has been, he confided to his wife, and there will be less liberty perhaps with greater security.⁴ Even so, state executives clung to a wide range of powers and displayed skill in bringing together political worlds that prior to the war had existed independently of each another. Mobilizing and sustaining a volunteer spirit forced them, despite harbored jealousies and competing ambitions, to reach across state lines as well as cooperate with the national government. Governors worried as much about the expansion of national power as they did about the conduct of war, restoring Southern states to the Union, and freedom for slaves after the conflict. Unity was important for Northerners to achieve victory, yet they debated the nature of the Union they were preserving.

Governors were party spokesmen and policy formulators, yet in times of peace, they served as civic figureheads. Legislatures held nearly all administrative authority and delegated to governors limited powers suitable for the times. They had two primary functions as assigned by their state constitutions, executive and administrative. As the chief executive, governors supervised appointed and elected officials in the execution of state laws. Typically, state constitutions relegated them to be commanders in chief of the state militia, granted them the power to convene the legislature, create and submit budgets, fill vacancies in state offices, and some appointive powers. Administratively, however, constitutions limited their powers, often qualifying governors’ veto power and restricting their oversight of elective officers. Before the war, the governors’ cabinets were small and included a lieutenant governor, secretary of state, treasurer, auditor of public accounts, superintendent of schools, and, in some states, an attorney general. In many states, these positions were elective rather than appointive, thus minimizing control over these offices. With the assistance of an executive secretary and one or two clerks, governors supervised correspondence that attended to legal matters associated with state government, including institutions for the deaf and the insane, prisons, public schools, public works, and the Office of the Adjutant General. Chief executives gave an annual address surveying the state’s government and recommended changes to improve their citizens’ economic and social conditions.

The exigencies of war turned governors into powerful politicians, and voters closely monitored their performance not only in attending to soldier welfare, but also in maintaining a balance between local and national priorities. Governors relied on financiers and merchants to advise them in mobilizing the resources to raise and maintain armies and worked with legislators to accommodate the changes wrought by war. They made use of advances in weaponry, refrigeration, camp accouterments, medicine, and relied on agents to procure items essential to soldiering. Because governors assumed such vast power so quickly, citizens kept them accountable for their decisions. Because most gubernatorial terms were short, war governance was all the more answerable to the electorate. New Englanders went to the polls annually to elect governors, while California, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, West Virginia, and Wisconsin voters went to the polls biennially. Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania held elections every three years, while Delaware, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, and Oregon allowed their governors four-year terms. Most important, however, was that their authority as commanders in chief allowed them to issue executive orders and take emergency actions. Still, their formal powers did not equip them with the tools for leadership, and governors often relied on local, political, and financial advisors better suited to offer assistance.

Many chief executives came into office having won popularity and credibility because of their practical business experience, legal acumen, or previous political service. They had been farmers, merchants, journalists, lawyers, doctors, and bankers. Some were lifelong Democrats, some had been Whigs, while others rode the tide of a political movement over Kansas statehood that formed the Republican Party. They helped engineer victories that tied them across state lines and established a sectional identity composed of a vast new political assemblage dedicated to preserving the Union. With the war’s outbreak they forged a stronger relationship between the government and its citizens by infusing a patriotic spirit among locals that tied them to a national cause. Along the way, governors politicized the regiments that went off to war to mobilize voters and maintain alliances at home. Thus, most of the Northern states remained strongly Republican throughout the war. The most prominent Republican governors included John A. Andrew (Massachusetts), Austin Blair (Michigan), William A. Buckingham (Connecticut), Andrew Curtin (Pennsylvania), Samuel Kirkwood (Iowa), Edwin D. Morgan (New York), Oliver P. Morton (Indiana), Israel Washburn Jr. (Maine), and Richard Yates (Illinois).⁵

The task of preserving the Union also fell on loyal Democratic governors, who while championing their party’s causes, including states’ rights and slavery, nonetheless supported the Union war effort. Notable Democrats (as well as those who joined the Union ticket in 1864) included Thomas Bramlette (Kentucky), John Brough (Ohio), William Burton (Delaware), John Downey (California), Joel Parker (New Jersey), Horatio Seymour (New York), David Tod (Ohio), and John Whiteaker (Oregon). The choice to remain loyal and direct their states’ resources to support Lincoln at first revealed the complex interplay of loyalty and locality. The war forced these political leaders to choose between their states’ economic ties to vast Northern wage-based markets and their conservatism, which associated them with small government and hostility toward fugitive slaves. Those states that elected Democratic governors and legislatures in 1862 did so because of Union military defeat and the increasing radicalization of an administration that employed confiscation, emancipation, and conscription to win the war. In 1863–64, however, the military situation turned in the Union’s favor, and Republicans regained much of the political ground they had lost.

Still, governors suffered intractable state legislators who fought them over appropriations, military arrests, and expansive national government. Such hostility often led to tension, as governors struggled to meet their national obligations to win the war while maintaining popular support at home. Despite governors’ party affiliations, citizens counted on them to direct an expanding administrative structure to preserve the Union while implementing policies beneficial to the state. In short, they served as the Union’s mainsprings of nationalism, but represented vast and diverse constituencies that left them unprotected by Washington bureaucracy.

Lincoln understood this direct accountability. He began the struggle aiming only to bring the old Union back together, fully aware of state integrity. As the conflict wore on, however, he far surpassed his opposite in making a federal system work—persuading, cajoling, relying on governors, encouraging their best efforts, and, through them, securing most of the support necessary from the state legislators who passed the various enabling bills. Yet the president brought unique strengths to the work of politicking with these men—unusual humility (studied, purposeful) and a quality that Harriet Beecher Stowe once described as peculiar. It is not aggressive so much as passive, she argued, and among passive things it is like the strength not so much of a stone buttress, as of a wire cable. It is strength swaying to every influence, yielding on this side and on that to popular needs, yet tenaciously and inflexibly bound to carry its great end.⁶ In short, Lincoln needed the loyal governors to preserve the Union. Through the political tug-of-war between federal and state executives, Union leadership found and justified a way to preserve the Union while accepting emancipation as a necessary part of the war effort. Consequently, the Union ultimately prevailed because loyal governors stood by Lincoln’s war aims and encouraged him to undertake measures necessary to win, even at the risk to state authority and the alienation of its citizens.⁷

Questions that animate this study consider how and why the nature of the war—first defeating a rebellion and then liberating slaves—defined, limited, and intensified the partnership between governors and Lincoln. The Lincoln-governor alliance remained a powerful force during the war, and this work explores the ways in which military events influenced politics and civilian society, as well as the dual national and state allegiances that Americans in and out of uniform held during the mid-nineteenth century. Before the outbreak of hostilities, chief executives worked independently in responding to secession and the Confederacy’s formation. Prewar cooperation among the governors carried into the mobilization that followed the firing on Fort Sumter, and it laid a foundation of cooperation that strengthened as the conflict expanded. The experience of war gave birth to a new understanding of the United States by 1865, one that governors and Lincoln designed. Still, as much as they worked toward a more perfect Union, it did not survive the peace they achieved.

Yet, for such an enormous subject, we know so little about it. The void is so impressive that it calls for an integrated approach in extracting from the governors’ considerable perspective how this relationship prevailed during the conflict. While I have consulted the voluminous secondary literature about the war for contextualizing nation/state and civil/military affairs, I have remained close to the governors throughout the conflict. I have relied primarily on firsthand letters, diaries, government documents, and newspapers in telling their story. The net result is a book that focuses on a collection of leaders who helped Lincoln gather the resources to save a nation.⁸

CHAPTER ONE

It Is Your Business to Rise Up and Preserve the Union

Abraham Lincoln’s departure from Springfield on 11 February 1861 was an inauspicious beginning for a president-elect. A cold rain fell from the early morning skies over the capital city. Illinois’s favorite son stood on the Great Western Railroad platform about to board the two-car private train that would carry him to the nation’s capital. There he would assume the presidency of a vast republic. Perhaps they expected him to assume the air and tone of the president elect of thirty millions, wrote an observer, and so awe them into forgetfulness of their old familiar intercourse with him as a citizen.¹ Even if Illinoisans did not remember any American president-elect asking people to pray, Lincoln would make the request. Just the week before, the United States had ideologically and geographically divided. Citizens of six slave states had removed themselves from the republic and, on 6 February, created a Confederacy. Shocked by the Southern departure, Northerners had trouble understanding how any state or citizen could survive outside the federal Union. The vast majority of Americans cannot realize the idea that the Southerners really do not like the Union, wrote British correspondent Edward Dicey. To themselves, he argued, the Union appears so natural, so liberal, and so good a government, that it is impossible that anybody who has lived beneath its rule should leave it willingly. Yet, in Northern eyes, secession was an unaccountable and inexplicable act of madness.²

Political compromise in previous decades confirmed that states had ample sovereignty. It remained to be seen if Southerners would enjoy this same autonomy in their new confederation. Northerners, however, had yet to test such sovereignty. Nevertheless, Lincoln removed his hat, paused a few seconds, and began to speak. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, he told the crowd, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Lincoln prayed, Without the assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail, he implored. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, he concluded, I bid you an affectionate farewell. Lincoln departed the quiet prairie city that had given him comfort and a homespun character. The echo from the crowd, we will pray for you, lingered with him for miles.³ Lincoln’s journey to the White House began.

Long Road to Washington

Lincoln meant for his journey to Washington to strengthen his ties to Northerners. He believed the South’s secession was only a temporary expression, and so he refused to respond to it before he departed from Springfield. He did not, however, discourage the efforts of governors already working behind the scenes to mobilize. The president-elect wanted to see the people and they him. Among those who joined Lincoln was the newly elected Republican governor of Illinois, Richard Yates. The Yateses and Lincolns shared a past in Illinois. Lincoln had been a regular patron at the Yates’s Springfield store. Illinoisans knew Dick Yates because he and Lincoln had both served in the state legislature as Whigs from the same district, but at different times. Yet they were unlike. At six feet four inches, Lincoln towered over most people of his time, making him seem gangly and awkward, while his ill-arranged dress and shocking bad hat made him appear folksy. His grizzled look mirrored the hardships he had endured in his life and reflected his republican virtues of civility, honesty, self-discipline, and forward thinking. Even if he appeared unsophisticated, Lincoln was perceptive, ambitious, and had a gift for managing people.⁴

Yates also had some distinguishing features. His winning ways and skilled oratory won him wide acclaim as one of the ablest, if not the ablest and most impressive speakers in the country. John Hay characterized him as someone who stole hearts by his frank blue eyes and sunshiny smile, as by the truth and eloquence of his fervid orations, something he honed at a young age. Yates credited his political aspirations to the distinguished Kentuckian Henry Clay, whose sparkling oratory convinced him to walk twelve miles to hear the great conciliator.⁵ Wise in counsel, eloquent in the forum, warmly attached to his country, remarked the editor of the Illinois State Journal, Yates has now the respect of the State, the confidence of his party and the love of his friends.⁶ Yates had campaigned unsuccessfully for a senatorial seat in the 1850s, and opponents labeled him an abolitionist. Lincoln urged him to run again, and in 1860 he won the Republican ticket for governor. Publicly, he supported Lincoln for the presidency, but privately he considered him inferior to Edward Bates of Missouri. He once jokingly said of Lincoln that we know he does not look very handsome, and some of the papers say he is positively ugly. Well, he continued, if all the ugly men in the United States vote for him, he will surely be elected.⁷

Lincoln and Yates had become close friends over the years, and the president-elect was known to enjoy a good joke at his own expense. After his election, Lincoln used the Illinois Statehouse as his headquarters, and Yates took advantage of the president-elect’s proximity to discuss secession, war, and cabinet appointments. It was in these days that Yates tried to enlist Lincoln’s counsel about the January address he had prepared for the legislature. In it, he argued that the striking feature of the nation’s political Union was that it could not be dissolved by one State, nor by the people of one State or of a dozen States. He asserted that This government was designed to be perpetual, and could be dissolved only by revolution.⁸

The presidential train left Springfield and steamed 200 miles east across the midwestern prairie before it rolled into Indianapolis. Indiana’s new Republican governor, Oliver P. Morton, welcomed Lincoln. Despite Lincoln’s wish to minimize ceremonies, Morton arranged a king’s reception. He tried to goad Lincoln into responding to the national crisis, but the president-elect declined. Instead, he told the Indianans that to save the Union, he needed the hearts of a people like yours. It is your business, he told them, to rise up and preserve the Union and liberty for yourselves and not for me.⁹ These simple words captured his journey’s meaning—the Union’s fate belonged to the people. Afterward, Lincoln and Morton rode together to the Bates House, where they found a crowd demanding a speech. I feel for Mr. Lincoln, noted Calvin Fletcher, a wealthy and influential associate of Morton’s, he assumes a fearful responsibility.¹⁰ The following morning Lincoln and Morton shared breakfast at the governor’s mansion and returned to the hotel. Around noon the governor escorted Lincoln back to the station, where he boarded the train to Cincinnati. Yates returned to Springfield with friend Orville Browning, who remarked that he had had enough of the grandstanding.¹¹

Lincoln’s visit pleased Morton. After all, Indiana was the anchor of the midwestern states that bordered the great Ohio River, which separated Northerners and Southerners. In Morton’s mind, the key border state was Kentucky, and he wanted to know Lincoln’s plans for keeping the state in the Union. Convinced that war was unavoidable, Morton had not waited on officials in Washington for direction, nor from lame-duck President James Buchanan. In fact, the approach of a showdown highlighted the governor’s most distinguishing feature as a political figure: he was tenaciously protective of his citizens and his party. The Republican Party originated in the West, not the East, and political leaders wanted to steer the party toward industrial and agricultural connections that centered it on markets more than moral reform.¹²

Morton wanted to be a soldier, but the governorship suited him better. A Chicago Tribune editorial noted at his inaugural that he was one of the most intellectual men of the state, who possessed a large Websterian head and noble forehead, and upon the stump or at the bar few men [were] his equals.¹³ Strong, earnest, logical, the thirty-eight-year-old natural chieftain had all the markings of an urbane man, yet he came from humble beginnings.¹⁴ Reared by old-fashioned Scottish Presbyterian aunts, the young Morton rejected his conservative upbringing and became an independent thinker.¹⁵ After graduating from Miami Ohio University, he decided on a career in law, and soon his legal reputation reached far beyond Indiana, and he impressed his colleagues by his capacity to hold court on the political issues of the day. He entered the political arena when the Republican Party was in its infancy and assumed prominence in the new party. Expecting war and aware of the state’s horrendous financial condition, Morton had wired the War Department in January about weapons and had petitioned the legislature for the authority to collect and distribute weapons at his discretion. Some Indiana legislators, suspicious of the new Republican chieftain, reluctantly agreed. The previous November Morton had declared that if South Carolina left the Union it would be at the point of a bayonet. If it was worth a bloody struggle to establish this Nation, he declared, it is worth one to preserve it.¹⁶

Having deposited Lincoln into the hands of Ohio and Kentucky loyalists in Cincinnati, Morton returned to Indianapolis. On his train ride home he may have reflected on the letter he had written to Lincoln weeks before about Pennsylvania Republicans and the compromise measures before Congress. Morton believed these Republicans might compromise the integrity and future of the Republican Party by choosing to cooperate with secessionists over slavery. "The Union feeling is very strong—it is stronger than any party," he warned Lincoln, counseling him that, for all the intensity at the moment, time would wear out the revolution.¹⁷

Ohioans and Kentuckians, especially Ohio governor William Dennison, also worried about potential war that February. The Republican governor sent a legislative delegation to Cincinnati to meet Lincoln and escort him to Columbus the following day. The president-elect made his way to Dennison’s executive chambers, and from there the governor accompanied him to the legislative hall, where Lincoln addressed the assemblymen. Lincoln and Dennison retired to the executive mansion, and Dennison told Lincoln the discouraging news from his agents in Kentucky and about the suspect loyalties of Kentucky’s Democratic governor Beriah Magoffin. Magoffin had called the Kentucky legislature into special session in January to consider Kentucky’s future relations with the Union. He hoped legislators would follow his lead in calling for a convention. In the meantime, Magoffin warned Lincoln that Kentucky would never stand by with arms folded while those States are struggling for their constitutional rights and resisting oppression, or being subjugated to an antislavery government.¹⁸

Lincoln was content to gather information and survey affairs as he rode the rails to Washington. After a reception at Deshler Hall, the president-elect and his wife took refuge in Dennison’s home. The day was exhausting, but Lincoln’s spirits brightened by the evening reception. He took time to greet the daughter of William T. Coggeshall, one-time editor of the Ohio State Journal and Dennison’s current secretary. The child’s face reddened as she asked: Mr. President, what shall you do when you get to Washington? Placing his hand on top of her head, Lincoln remarked: What shall I do? Ask God. He knows best. But you, little one, can say when you grow up, that Abraham Lincoln bent half way to meet you.¹⁹ A night telegram from Ohio senator Salmon P. Chase affirming Congress’s approval of the Electoral College returns relieved Lincoln. Equally comforting was the news that Washington was calm, despite rumors that Southerners would use the approval as justification to seize the White House.²⁰

At the age of forty-five, Dennison was governor of the nation’s third largest state. A Miami University graduate of 1835, he spent several years studying law and accepted an appointment to the bar five years later, setting up his practice in Columbus. He supported Whig political doctrines that stressed an American economy of federal tariffs, national banks, and federally funded internal improvements. His legal acumen groomed him for politics, and in 1848 he won a seat in the Ohio Senate. As a legislator he fought to extend U.S. mail contracts and stage transport, while opposing Texas annexation and slavery’s expansion. He also campaigned to remove Ohio’s Black Laws, and saw them through to repeal in 1849. The following year, he left public life and returned to legal practice. He became an authority in railroad finance and eventually accepted the presidency of both the Exchange Bank in Columbus and the Columbus and Xenia Railroad. Both positions allowed him to exercise his Whig principles, and in 1856 he seized the opportunity to work in the state to secure the nomination of Republican John Frémont. Ohioans elected Dennison a Republican governor in 1859.²¹

After a few days of traveling through small towns and cold weather, on 18 February, Lincoln’s train steamed into Buffalo, where Governor Edwin D. Morgan’s staff greeted him. That afternoon Lincoln’s train arrived in Albany, where he delivered a brief speech to the throngs braving the cold. The 360-mile rail journey from Buffalo to Albany traced the Erie Canal, the nation’s single greatest interregional market highway. The canal’s success improved northern transportation and accounted for a surge in western population as well as increased markets in New York City. Lincoln’s party then wound its way to the capital and passed under a banner stretching across a street that read: Welcome to the Capital of the Empire State—No More Compromises. New York senator William Seward, soon to be secretary of state, had written to Morgan days before that he felt that displaying the American flag in these times was more effective than the most eloquent speech.²²

Lincoln met Morgan and other state officials in the executive chambers. Once inside, he turned to Morgan and asked, do you think we can make these people hear us? Morgan nodded approvingly and waved his hat back and forth to silence the crowd. If you have found your fellow citizens in larger numbers elsewhere, Morgan declared, you have not found, and I think, will not find, warmer hearts or a people more faithful to the Union, the constitution and the laws than you will meet in this time-honored city.²³ Morgan arranged to spend a private moment with the president-elect in his chambers, and that evening he hosted a small private dinner. Perhaps it was during this interlude that Morgan discussed a letter he had received from Worthington Snethen, a loyal Baltimore resident, warning of the unfriendly reception Lincoln would face in Baltimore. Seward also had advised Morgan that Maryland governor Thomas Hicks and the nation’s highest-ranking commander, General Winfield Scott, shared apprehensions of a revolutionary movement in Maryland. Seward thought it wise to have a force of five thousand to ten thousand men in readiness within twenty-four hours’ notice in case of a plot. Snethen, however, warned against any military mobilization, arguing that federal forces in Washington would agitate loyal Southerners. Snethen had given Lincoln cause for concern about Hicks declaring weeks before that, although the Union sentiment in Maryland was overbearing all resistance, Hicks was following, not leading, that sentiment.²⁴

The following morning, Morgan accompanied Lincoln’s party south along the Hudson to New York City, where it arrived at 3:00 P.M. to Mayor Fernando Wood’s reception. A Democratic opportunist, Wood brazenly advocated New York City’s secession to preserve the business relationship between New York’s cotton merchants and southern planters. Illinoisan John Pope was part of the entourage that accompanied Lincoln from Springfield and remembered the long ride through the city streets. Crowds of people, he recalled, who lined the sidewalks and occupied every window and doorway which opened on the street, crowded and jammed together so it seemed that many of them must be trampled to death. The ride down the city through these crowds of excited and anxious people was not encouraging, wrote Pope, and seemed a chilly welcome of the President of the United States to the metropolis of the country.²⁵

Walt Whitman later recalled that mild February day when he sat atop a covered carriage and gazed at the crowd of a quarter of a million people. Only the visit by Edward VII, Prince of Wales, the year before had drawn larger numbers, noted the editor for Harper’s Weekly. The city’s residents greeted the president-elect during the hour it took the procession to make its way to the Astor House Hotel. Lincoln thanked the crowd from the hotel balcony and retired to the quiet of his room. The following morning, he shared breakfast with Norman B. Judd, his chief advisor; Thurlow Weed, editor of the Albany Evening Journal; James W. Webb, also a prominent New York journalist, and Rhode Island’s Republican governor William Sprague.²⁶

The self-proclaimed boy-governor, Sprague was wealthy, handsome, and exuded an air of confidence beyond his years. Sprague was thirteen when his father died, forcing him and his brother Amasa into the family cotton-mill business. During those years, the aspiring soldier enlisted in the Providence Marine Artillery Company. When his uncle died, he inherited the family business and became an accomplished businessman. By 1860, Sprague was a household name, and Rhode Island voters nominated him for governor on a ticket that fused Democrats, conservative Republicans, and conditional Unionists. By using his personal fortune to campaign, Sprague had broken the power of the opposition Radical candidate, Seth Padelford. Overshadowed by the small circle of companions he dined with on that cold February morning, Sprague nonetheless impressed Lincoln.²⁷

The president-elect spent the afternoon receiving guests, and that evening he attended the reception at the Astor House. Morgan decided to slip into a chair next to Lincoln’s right at dinner, and continue his earlier conversations.²⁸ Tall and dignified looking, Morgan was hard to miss. He had a schoolmaster’s confidence and flare for business. The onetime grocer moved from Massachusetts to New York and entered a mercantile career of high finance that brought him into prominent political circles. He had many talents, wrote a friend to Lincoln, and was inflexibly honest, someone who had rare administrative abilities, a rock-like solidity, and unimpeachable character that inspired confidence.²⁹ Morgan made the most of his time with Lincoln. Times were pressing, and Morgan needed financial relief for his mercantile and banker colleagues who had invested heavily in Southern goods. New York financiers had floated millions in loans to banks in the states forming the Confederacy. Amid the financial panic on Wall Street, financiers looked to the governor for relief. Approaching his second term, Morgan looked to the federal government to aid him in preserving financial stability.³⁰

Prominent in the Republican Party and well connected in financial circles, Morgan may have thought himself qualified for a cabinet position. Governing the Union’s largest and wealthiest state, however, allowed him considerable influence in shaping national affairs. He was a seasoned politician, who, as the Republican Party’s national chairman in 1856 and 1860, played a role in Lincoln’s rise to prominence. By 1861, his eleven-year political career had served him well. So popular was Morgan that New Yorkers had reelected him by an overwhelming majority the year before. He had made great strides in pulling the state out of deep fiscal problems in his first term and relaxed after the legislature adjourned. Secession prompted Morgan to prepare for war, while his recalcitrant legislature prescribed a normal peacetime program.³¹ He upheld two fundamental points about the nation’s most pressing crisis over slavery: he thought it unlawful to interfere with state institutions, but argued that Congress had the right to legislate slavery out of the territories.³²

A thirty-four-gun salute signaled Lincoln’s arrival in Trenton, New Jersey, where Republican governor Charles S. Olden and Attorney General William Dayton welcomed him. After a short carriage ride to the capitol, the president-elect addressed New Jersey legislators. Obstreperous Democrats, unreceptive to Lincoln, held a majority and shamelessly resolved that when they saw him, they will have seen the ugliest man in the country. Recognizing Lincoln’s height, members resolved to always have a democratic member that shall exceed the President-elect by two and a half inches in height.³³ New Jersey was a bitterly divided state politically, and Olden sought to heal the breach by inviting Lincoln to the capital. Without delving into slavery and states’ rights, Lincoln requested legislators to assist him in piloting the ship of State through this voyage, surrounded by perils as it is. For if it should suffer attack now, he declared, there will be no pilot ever needed for another voyage.³⁴

Later that afternoon Lincoln left the Jersey shore and arrived at Kensington Station in Philadelphia on his way to Harrisburg. Snethen’s earlier suggestions of an unfriendly Baltimore reception for Lincoln turned out to be disconcerting. Scottish-born Allen Pinkerton, who ran a Chicago-based detective agency, had uncovered an elaborate assassination plot and explained these developments to Norman Judd. He advised Lincoln to cancel further appearances and steam to Washington secretly that evening. Equally alarming were the rumors that secessionists were plotting to murder Hicks to throw Maryland into the hands of disunionists. The pressure there upon Hicks is fearful, Alexander McClure, Pennsylvania journalist and political ally, warned Lincoln weeks before. If he should be compelled to yield you could never get to Washington except within a circle of bayonets.³⁵

The news did not deter Lincoln, who decided to make his scheduled appearances. After a flag-raising ceremony at Independence Hall on the morning of 22 February, Lincoln’s train left for the Pennsylvania capital. He arrived in Harrisburg four hours later, where Republican governor Andrew Curtin greeted him. By this time, Confederates had inaugurated Jefferson Davis provisional president, and news from the South worsened. Curtin reassured Lincoln that Pennsylvanians had prepared for war should peace discussions fail.³⁶

Lincoln addressed the legislature later that day and spent the balance of his time in private at the Jones House hotel. He dined that evening with Curtin when close associates produced further evidence that an attempt would be made on Lincoln’s life should he proceed as planned. Lincoln should return to Philadelphia, they urged, and from there he would leave for Washington. After dinner, Curtin and Ward Hill Lamon, a close friend of Lincoln’s, who single-handedly served as his bodyguard, prepared to leave. Before going, Curtin pulled Lamon aside and asked if he was armed. Lamon confidently pulled open his coat and displayed a small arsenal of deadly weapons, showing he was literally armed to the teeth.³⁷ Lamon then whisked Lincoln outside, and off they traveled to the outskirts of the city to board a special train bound for Philadelphia. There they would meet the late night train that would transport him to Washington. Illinois senator Elihu Washburne met Lincoln at the station at six o’clock the next morning. Lincoln took up residence at Willard’s Hotel, where he met Seward and, according to the New York Times, achieved the "coup d’état."³⁸

Lincoln delivered more than one hundred speeches along the extraordinary journey. Its pageantry and extravagance rivaled the ascension of European kings, and yet he arrived in the capital city in darkness and without fanfare. He tried to impress the people even by the nature of the prudent caution in his words that he needed time to consider the best approach to the national crisis confronting him. He confessed that he had not developed any mature judgment about his reactions to the Confederacy’s formation. He chose to be brief and self-deprecating, which endeared him to the people gathered at every stop. As the weary president-elect made speech after speech during the weeklong journey from Springfield, he reduced his whistle-stop performances to a few well-rehearsed phrases that revealed his characteristic caution, pragmatism, and humility. It is with your aid, as the people, he declared at Poughkeepsie, New York, that I think we shall be able to preserve—not the country, for the country will preserve itself, (cheers), but the institutions of the country—(great cheering). One New Yorker got close enough to shake hands with Lincoln, commenting to the president-elect, I hope you will take [care] of us, to which Lincoln fittingly responded, But, you must take care of me.³⁹

Southerners had taken much from Lincoln and the Union. Secession and the Confederacy’s formation had altered the republic. His goal as president, however, had changed. His task was not only to lead the nation, but also to save it from itself. The Union was dissolving, and Lincoln rode the rails to Washington, passing tens of thousands of Northerners from whom much would be expected in the coming months, and even years. Many of the faces he had seen along his journey would soon be called forth to save the Union. Yet, it was not clear whether Lincoln was more impressed by his constituents or whether they were more impressed him. The times were impressive enough.⁴⁰

Peace Conference

Washingtonians were not to be outdone by the brilliant ceremonies in honor of Lincoln during his journey that preceded his arrival. It would be a formidable effort, however, to improve the city’s appearance, which, according to John Hay, resembled a wilderness of a town.⁴¹ Despite housing more than 60,000 inhabitants, the capital boasted few public buildings. One visitor observed that the place seemed like a large village, with its preponderance of plain, low brick or wooden structures, wide, mostly unpaved streets, small shops, general lack of business activity, and a distinctly Southern air of indolence and sloth. The city’s hotels were spacious, but were poorly kept, and according to this correspondent, the city could not boast a single decent restaurant, but had no end of bar rooms. To further diminish the capital’s appeal was that there were neither omnibuses nor streetcars, and the shabby public carriages, with their ragged black drivers, were disgusting. Nonetheless, wrote one political correspondent, it was the most important place in the Union. Someone even managed to place the American flag atop the partially constructed Washington Monument that towered some 228 feet above the Washington skyline, mirroring the unfinished work of solidifying the Union of states itself.⁴²

In the initial days of his reception, Lincoln made time to confer with the Maryland governor. An Eastern Shore Maryland slave owner, Hicks was the most important of all the loyal governors. His state surrounded the nation’s capital, and Baltimore was one of the most prominent railroad and harbor cities on the East Coast. These geographically distinguishing features, however, were beset by the complications of an intensely divided population. Maryland contained a free black population almost equal to its slave population, which helped explain its move toward universal emancipation in the previous decades. Hicks was ten years’ Lincoln’s senior and a seasoned politician. The Dorchester County native had worked the docks and the mercantile business before becoming sheriff. His long political life began as a Democrat in the 1830s, when he served as a Maryland Senate elector. He later served on the Governor’s Council, until assuming the position of Register of Wills for Dorchester County, which he held until he became governor. He abandoned the Democratic Party for the Whigs and then switched to the Know-Nothing Party before joining the Republican Party in 1860.⁴³

Elected governor in 1858, Hicks declared that Maryland was devoted to the Union and all of the states, had never listened to the suggestions of disunion from Southern states, and conversely refused to join with the misguided people of the Northern states in their assaults on slavery.⁴⁴ John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859 had so alarmed Marylanders, that Hicks sought a legislative appropriation of $70,000 to strengthen county militias and prevent further hostilities. The following year he refused to send a delegation to a Southern convention to consider resolutions aimed at adopting some concerted action, in case of further Northern aggression. The assembly itself adopted the position that should the hour ever arrive when the Union must be dissolved, Maryland will cast her lot with her sister states of the South and abide their fortune to the fullest extent.⁴⁵ Hicks had supported Tennessee Constitutional Union candidate John C. Bell in the recent election, and his loss discouraged Hicks and his supporters.⁴⁶

In these critical months Hicks fell under the spell of John Pendleton Kennedy, Maryland’s most famous literary son. Known for his 1832 classic of Virginia plantation life, Swallow Barn; or a Sojourn in the Old Dominion, Kennedy had recently written a critique of the sectional debate entitled The Border States: Their Power and Duty in the Present Disorder of the Country. Hicks read this work and it shaped his attitude about the crisis. He refused to allow secessionists or abolitionists to bully him and balked at summoning a special session of the General Assembly. He hoped to neutralize the approaching danger. Former Illinois newspaper editor Josiah M. Lucas had moved to Washington years before and became Hicks’s close friend. Lucas was so concerned over events that he wrote Lincoln of Hicks’s situation before the new president departed Springfield. I know that he is undergoing a terrible pressure, Lucas confided to the president, and it is even probable that the speaker of the House of Delegates and the president of the Senate will call the legislature together—if so, one of their first acts will be to pass an act putting the routes of travel under martial law.⁴⁷ During the secession winter, Hicks remained committed to the Union. I have felt it necessary to hold the Executive rein with a firm hand, he wrote to William L. Wilcox, boasting that he was proud to preside over his loyal Marylanders, standing firmly by the Union ready to face the disunionists, if they dare to lay violent hands upon that sacred legacy of our Patriot Fathers.⁴⁸ Marylanders’ devotion to the Union and the Constitution was unalterable, he replied to the Alabama commissioners hoping to lure him into the Confederacy. "If there must be secession or desertion from this Union, he maintained, the people of Maryland think that those alone who refuse to comply with its duties should be deprived of its benefits."⁴⁹

Loyalists stood by Hicks, and with good reason. His firm and manly resistance of the efforts which have been made to swerve you from the path of duty which you had wisely resolved to follow had impressed Curtin.⁵⁰ I am a native of Maryland, Hicks responded to Curtin, the owner of a number of slaves, and my feelings and sympathies are naturally with the South; but above and beyond all these, I am for the Union, and forgetting all but honor, am ready to sacrifice life and fortune to save and perpetuate the Union of the States formed by our Fathers under the Providence of God.⁵¹ The editor of Harper’s Weekly confirmed this sentiment. We know of no man who occupies a more prominent position at the present time than the Governor of the State of Maryland, the editor declared.⁵²

Hicks held up to the pressure, and his resistance to convening the legislature impressed his border state colleagues. Olden, for example, implored Hicks not to yield to the demands of the ‘secessionists.’ He declared that Lincoln’s peaceful inauguration depended on his loyalty. Even Iowa’s Republican governor Samuel J. Kirkwood, a Maryland native, interrupted plowing his fields to thank the governor for the patriotic and manly stand you have taken against disunion and treason.⁵³ Before Lincoln left Springfield, Hicks had encouraged the border state governors of Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri to work together to maintain the balance of power between North and South until Congress reached a compromise. He wrote to John J. Crittenden, Kentucky’s Unionist senator and encouraged him to lead the forces toward compromise. Crittenden took the lead that December by bringing forth a series of conciliatory resolutions that fell into the hands of a committee of thirteen congressmen who, while inspired to save the Union, failed to agree on how they would work slavery into that Union. Congress’s paralysis thus placed the Union’s fate in the hands of the states.⁵⁴

Virginia congressmen spearheaded the idea of a national conference and called on twenty-one states to dispatch delegates to the nation’s capital to participate in a Peace Conference. Morgan praised the idea, arguing that all efforts at peace be tried, yet others refused, desiring to wait until after Lincoln’s inauguration. Maine governor Israel Washburn and Ohio’s Dennison, however, opposed it and urged Yates to refuse the meeting because of Virginia’s involvement. They feared such a meeting would undermine the Republican Party. Yates’s close association with Lincoln convinced them that the president-elect was counseling his old colleague, and they wanted Lincoln’s reaction. Washburn was also concerned about Seward’s influence upon Lincoln, writing to his colleague Republican senator William Pitt Fessenden that having read the dispatches from his Washington friends he had a [most] gloomy foreboding, about affairs. If Mr. Seward has declared in substance, that the Union even for slavery is paramount to an organization where life & soul is liberty & justice & the constitution as it was made, there is henceforth—what but demoralization & defeat?⁵⁵ But, he concluded, I will not, cannot harbor the fear. I will wait for proof.⁵⁶ To New York congressman Charles Sedgwick, the governor was more emphatic. The only fault in Seward’s speech, he argued, is that only wise men understand it—fools read ‘compromise.’ ⁵⁷

Morton shared Washburn’s concerns, but he considered it better to accept the invitation and act as a powerful restraint upon any disposition desiring to compromise the integrity and future of the Republican party.⁵⁸ He believed it far better to take hold of the conference and "control it, than to stand by and suffer the consequences of its action when we have had no share in moulding [sic] it.⁵⁹ As for Lincoln’s counsel, Yates found the president-elect uncomfortable with the peace proposition, and Lincoln advised the governor not to take any action. In his words, he would rather be hung by the neck till he was dead on the steps of the Capitol, before he would buy or beg a peaceful inaugeration."⁶⁰ This masterful silence was not weakness on Lincoln’s part. Quite the contrary, it was power, and Lincoln exercised a cautious pragmatism until Chief Justice Roger B. Taney had sworn him into office as president.⁶¹

The Peace Conference presented problems for national governance. In previous decades much of the nation’s political course had relied on legislatively centered decisions. For governors, whose power suffered from constitutional limits, the appointment of delegates to a national conference to save the Union carried special importance, especially since some legislatures were not in session. These were unchartered waters, and governors weighed the alternatives carefully, recognizing the problems of acting independently. Yates consulted prominent state Republicans before deciding how to proceed. Charles Robinson, governor of the newly admitted state of Kansas, had no choice but to appoint delegates without the state legislature. He tapped close friend George W. Deitzler and counseled him that the true policy for every good citizen to pursue is to set his face like flint against secession, to call it by its name, treason. The Ohio General Assembly allowed Dennison to appoint representatives, but required that the Senate confirm them. Morton bulldozed his way into appointing delegates and requested each delegate to draft an agreement that would promise their opposition to any new guarantee of slavery.⁶² Curtin also appointed a radically minded Pennsylvania delegation, but was legislatively censored for choosing a partisan course."⁶³ New England governors fell into line behind Massachusetts governor John Andrew and supported the conference. New Jersey, Delaware, and Iowa either sent commissioners or drew on their congressional delegations to attend. Bullied by a Democratic Senate, Olden offered a conciliatory response in his address to assemblymen that New Jersey would make the reasonable concessions to save the Union.

Some 3,000 miles west, Democratic governor John W. Downey was heading off secession and a rumored Pacific Republic movement among his Californians. John Whiteaker, Oregon’s proslavery governor, wanted to keep his newly admitted state neutral, but he did little to deter secessionism. The Democrat saw no need to attend the conference and instead worked to maintain peace among his divided population, which was connected to the Union only by a 2,700-mile-long trail dubbed the Overland Trail. Besides, the conference might well be over before any West Coast delegates reached Washington. Alexander Randall, Wisconsin’s Republican governor, reluctantly allowed legislators to decide, but they could not agree on whom to send, so they sent no one. Republican Alexander Ramsey balked at the thought of sending Minnesota delegates to the conference. Austin Blair, Michigan’s Radical Republican governor, agreed with his assemblymen that he would not entertain any concession to traitors.⁶⁴

Congress gave little attention to the conference regarded as the last hope of the country, but it had served two purposes for Republicans and governors.⁶⁵ It centered the political debate in Washington on peace rather than on war, thus allowing Lincoln a quiet transition to the capital city. More important, it previewed the political cooperation among Northern states. Governors worked independently from one other, but shared a common goal of assisting the national administration. As party leaders, deciding on representation at the conference was an important exercise for governors. When, for example, the convention delegates had agreed on a series of compromises, Michigan’s Radical Republican senator Zachariah Chandler looked to Blair for support. He feared these men might compromise Republican principles and wrote the governor, seeking send some "stiff-backed men to counter those of weaker political constitutions, meaning those representing the manufacturing states. Without a little blood-letting, Chandler chided, this Union will not be worth a rush.⁶⁶ Still, no Michiganders came forth. In line with Blair’s radicalism, Andrew, however, had reversed his position on the conference’s merits and dispatched seven commissioners to Washington. He came to believe that its failure would provide the nation with no other alternative than war. To drive the point home, he wrote to Sumner that if these seven men come home and report in Faneuil Hall that New England must stand ALONE—we can stand there."⁶⁷

Hicks’s encouragement of the Peace Conference cost him dearly. Anti-Lincoln Marylanders denounced him. Lincoln, however, admired the governor’s determination to keep the state out of the hands of a faction of scoundrels who are striving to make Maryland a cat’s paw for the seizure of the seat of Government, as acknowledged by one proslavery Unionist, and of course the battle ground of the civil war that must ensue.⁶⁸ Lincoln polled 2,204 Maryland votes out of 92,441, and preserving the Union was no easy course. Hicks understood his state’s complex interplay of locality and loyalty. It did not help matters that Lincoln denied Marylanders the opportunity to see him as he passed through to Washington.⁶⁹

Inauguration

The golden days have fallen upon the capital, wrote Hay, signaling the arrival of the inauguration day.⁷⁰ New York political correspondent Henry Villard had finally arrived in Washington. He had traveled with Lincoln’s train, but only as far as New York City, where, after ten days of the wearisome sameness of the performances, he abandoned the traveling show. A German native, Villard first met Lincoln years before, during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which he covered for the New York press. When Lincoln became president, Villard held a fair degree of journalistic fame, and the New York Herald assigned him the task of covering Lincoln in Springfield. Now in Washington, amid the chaos of nearly 25,000 people hoping to catch a glimpse of the new president, Villard reacquainted himself with Lincoln. Shaking his hand after the ceremony, Villard remarked to Lincoln about having to ward off the crowd around Willard’s Hotel hovering about. Yes, replied Lincoln, it was bad enough in Springfield, but that was child’s play compared with this tussle here. I am fair game for everybody of that hungry lot.⁷¹

Lincoln grew wise to the reporters and politicians seeking to undo his presidency before it began. The Washington spotlight would expose his weaknesses as well as highlight his strengths. His unusual appearance and his knack for relying on backcountry metaphors to answer important questions would be fodder for critics looking to undermine his modest public reputation made famous by his House Divided speech and his address at the Cooper Union Institute. Except for these addresses, many Southerners hoped the painfully awkward-looking president would