ALTHOUGH constantly urged to take precautions for his own safety, Lincoln never did. He used to walk about the streets as freely as any ordinary citizen; and night after night, during the darkest period of the war, he would stroll across to Secretary Stanton’s office to talk over the latest news from the front. Stanton’s remonstrances he would dismiss with a weary smile, protesting that, as far as he was aware, he had not an enemy in the world, but if he had, anybody who wished to kill him had a hundred chances every day—so, why be uneasy? His second inaugural address was shorter than the first; he wrote it about midnight of the third of March, seated in an armchair where he was resting after a hard day’s work, and holding the cardboard sheets in his lap. Its concluding words were as memorable as those of four years before: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, let us go forward with the work we have to do: to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who has borne the{208} battle and for his widow and his orphan, and to do all things which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Early on the fourth, he went to the Capitol quietly and devoted the remaining hours of the morning to reading and signing bills. The procession which had been arranged to escort him was formed at the White House, with the President’s carriage at its head, occupied by Mrs. Lincoln and Senators Harlan and Anthony. A platoon of marshals pioneered it, and a detachment of the union Light Guard surrounded it. The crowd, recognizing the White House coachman on its box, but not seeing distinctly who sat behind, cheered it all along the line under the supposition that it held the President. Two companies of colored troops and a lodge of colored Odd Fellows were among the marchers, this being the first time that negroes ever took part in an inaugural pageant except in some servile capacity.
We have already seen how Washington received the news of the final triumph of the Federal arms, and how Lincoln fell in the midst of the general rejoicing. Many readers of his inaugural address of that year have since professed to discern between its written lines a veiled foreboding of the end. Certain it is that he was an habitual dreamer, and that one dream,{209} which came to him on the night before Fort Sumter was bombarded, was repeated on the eve of the first battle of Bull Run, and just before other important engagements. As he described it, he seemed to be on the water in an unfamiliar boat, “moving rapidly toward a dark, indefinite shore.” The last recurrence of the dream was in the early morning hours of April 14, 1865. We shall never know, now, whether it was this or some other portent that caused him to say to a trusted companion, not long before his death: “I don’t think I shall live to see the end of my term. I try to shake off the vision, but it still keeps haunting me.” He had received several threatening letters, which he kept in a separate file labeled: “Letters on Assassination.” After his death there was found among these a note about the very plot in which Booth was the chief actor.
Fate plays strange tricks. For a few hours that spring, one friend in Washington unconsciously held Lincoln’s life in his hand. Harriet Riddle, since better known as Mrs. Davis, the novelist, was a pupil at a local convent school. Shortly before the tragedy at Ford’s Theater, a teacher who had been on a brief visit to a Southern town returned, apparently laboring under some terrible excitement which she was trying to suppress. At the session of her class immediately{210} preceding their separation for Good Friday, she suddenly fell upon her knees, bade them all join her in prayer, and poured forth, in a voice and manner so agonizing that the children were thrilled with a nameless horror, an hysterical appeal for divine mercy on the souls who were soon to be called before their Maker without warning.
Harriet, who was an impressionable child, could hardly contain herself till she reached home and sought her father, to whom she attempted to relate the afternoon’s occurrence. He was the District-attorney, and an intimate of the President’s, and was so immersed in the cares of office that he put her off till he should have more leisure. When she was awakened on Good Friday night by the noise of citizens and soldiers hurrying through the streets and calling out the news of the assassination, she uttered an exclamation which caught her father’s attention, and then he listened to the tale which he had once waved aside. “Why did you not tell me this before?” he demanded. It was then too late to do more than collect such evidence as he might from the pupils to aid the detectives; but the teacher who had uttered that awful prayer had fled and could never be traced. No one could longer doubt her guilty knowledge of the plot, probably acquired during her visit in the South.{211}
The oath with which Vice-president Johnson took upon himself the obligations of the Presidency was administered to him at his rooms in the Kirkwood House, a hostelry on the Pennsylvania Avenue corner now occupied by the Hotel Raleigh. Of his administration, the most broadly interesting incident was the impeachment trial described in an earlier chapter; and in our reflections on how history is shaped, another personal anecdote seems worthy of a place. Its heroine was Miss Vinnie Ream, the sculptor, who later became Mrs. Hoxie.
As his trial drew near its close, and Johnson’s friends and enemies were able to figure out pretty accurately how the Senate was going to divide, it became plain that the issue would hang on a single vote. If all the Senators counted against the President stood firm, he would be convicted, thirty-six to eighteen; but Secretary Stanton insisted that Ross of Kansas was preparing to go over from the majority to the minority. Ross was occupying a room in the same house with Miss Ream on Capitol Hill, and General Daniel E. Sickles, who was acquainted with him, was deputed to see him on the night before the roll-call and try to hold him fast against the President. Miss Ream happened to meet the General at the door, ushered him into the parlor but refused to let him see the Senator,{212} and held him at bay till dawn the following morning, when he gave up the effort as fruitless and went home. If she had weakened for a moment, there is no telling what might have happened, for Sickles was in a position to have brought very heavy pressure to bear upon Ross. The roll-call showed thirty-five for conviction to nineteen against—less than the two-thirds required to convict; and it was Ross’s vote that saved Johnson.
At the inauguration of Grant, the relations between him and the retiring President were so strained, owing to the recent struggle at the War Department, that Johnson refused to attend the ceremonies unless it could be arranged that he and Grant should ride in separate carriages. General Rawlins therefore acted as escort to Grant and Vice-president Colfax. Grant was not much of a speaker, but the delivery of his inaugural address is remembered for a pretty incident. His little daughter Nellie, confused by the continuous bustle all about her, obeyed on the platform the same childish impulse which moved her in any exigency at home, and, running to his side, nestled against him, clasping one of his hands in both of hers and holding it all the time he was speaking. At the ball that evening, access to the supper-room and to the cloak-room was by the same door, which caused a blockade in the{213} passage. The servants in charge of the wraps became hopelessly demoralized, with the result that Horace Greeley had to wait two hours to recover his white overcoat and lost his hat entirely. The torrent of lurid expletives he let loose during his ordeal shared space and importance, in the next day’s newspapers, with the thirty-five thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds worn by Mrs. John Morrissey, wife of the prize-fighter.
Grant’s second inauguration began inauspiciously, his aged father falling down a flight of stairs at the Capitol and suffering injuries which finally caused his death. The day was stormy, and the evening the coldest known in Washington for years. Unfortunately, the only place where the ball could be held was an improvised wooden building, through the crevices of which the icy wind blew a gale; and, to complete everybody’s misery, the heating apparatus broke down, so that many of the ladies who had come in conventional toilets had to protect their shoulders with fur mantillas, while their escorts put on overcoats. The President was so cold that he forgot the figures in the state quadrille which he was to lead, and was obliged to depend on General Sherman to push him through them. The supper was ruined, the meats and salads competing in temperature with the ices; all{214} that could be saved was the coffee, which was kept hot over alcohol lamps. The breath of the members of the band congealed in their instruments, and several hundred canaries which were to sing in the intervals between band pieces shriveled into little downy balls on the bottoms of their cages and uttered not a trill.
The key-note of Grant’s administration on its political side was his steadfast faith that any friend of his was capable of filling any office in his gift. He named Alexander T. Stewart, the New York dry-goods merchant, for Secretary of the Treasury, but had to let him resign on account of technical objections raised in the Senate. Wendell Phillips having come to his defense at a hostile mass-meeting in Boston, Grant wished to make him Minister to England, but the offer was declined because Mrs. Phillips would not be able to go abroad at that time. Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts, though a stanch Democrat before the war, had become an “administration man” as soon as the union was threatened, and thereby aroused the admiration of Grant, who named him for Chief Justice after Chase’s death; but the same political independence which so won Grant had incensed a number of Senators, who caused the rejection of the nomination.
Later, however, Grant succeeded in sending Cushing{215} as Minister to Spain. Cushing was a man full of peculiarities, which strengthened with his years. At an early age he discarded the umbrella as a nuisance and braved storms unprotected. Naturally his hats suffered. At the time he received his billet for Spain, he was wearing one of the chimney-pot variety, which, from its appearance, he must have bought many years before. The nap was a good deal worn, there was a slight bulge in the top, and, thanks to the squareness of his head, he could wear it with either side in front. When some one suggested that he had better buy a new hat before presenting himself at the Spanish court, he considered the question solemnly, turning the old hat around and examining it with care before answering: “No, I think I shall wait and see what the fashions are in Madrid.” Though ready to spend his money freely for any public purpose, in private indulgences the frugal notions inherited from his New England ancestry came to the front. Hardly anybody ever saw him light a fresh cigar, but he used to carry about in his pocket a case packed with partly consumed stumps, to one of which he would help himself when he wished a smoke, only to let it die again as soon as he had become interested in talking.
It was because of his liking for both Blaine and Conkling that Grant strove, as his last act in the{216} White House, to reconcile the two men, who were intensely hostile to each other. Their quarrel had grown out of a passage in debate when Conkling had made some very sarcastic comments on Blaine. The latter retorted in kind. “The contempt of that large-minded gentleman,” said he, glancing toward Conkling, “is so wilting, his haughty disdain, his grandiloquent swell, his majestic, supereminent, overpowering, turkey-gobbler strut have been so crushing to myself and all the members of this House, that I know it was an act of temerity for me to venture upon a controversy with him.” Referring to a recent newspaper article in which Conkling had been likened to the late Henry Winter Davis, Blaine went on: “The gentleman took it seriously, and it has given his strut additional pomposity. The resemblance is great. It is striking. Hyperion to a satyr, Thersites to Hercules, mud to marble, a dunghill to a diamond, a singed cat to a Bengal tiger, a whining puppy to a roaring lion!”
Conkling never forgave this attack. It seems like a small thing to change the whole current of a nation’s history, but it probably cost Blaine the Presidency; for in 1884 the disaffection of the Republicans in Conkling’s old home in central New York gave the State to Cleveland. President Grant’s effort to bring the foes together failed because Blaine, though ready to{217} make any ordinary concessions, balked when Conkling demanded that he should confess his “mud to marble” speech to have been “unqualifiedly and maliciously false.”
In 1874, Miss Nellie Grant was married to Algernon Sartoris, a British subject. She was her father’s pet. At her wedding, he stood beside his wife to receive the guests, his face wearing a sphinx-like calm, though every one knew how he would feel the parting soon to follow. His forced composure continued till Nellie had left the house with her husband, and then he disappeared. An old friend, seeking him up-stairs, tapped at his chamber door, and, as there was no response, pushed it slightly ajar and looked in. There, on the bed, face downward, his eyes buried in his hands and his whole frame shaken with grief, lay the great soldier, sobbing like a child.
Throughout the Grant administration, the social arbiter for Washington was Mrs. Hamilton Fish, wife of the Secretary of State. She was a woman of the world, broad-minded and efficient, but the White House was not a very ceremonious place in that era. When the new Danish Minister called, for instance, in full regalia, to present his credentials, he found no one prepared to receive him, even the negro boy who met him at the door having to hurry into a coat before ushering{218} him in. Persons who attended the state dinners say that Grant often turned down his wine-glasses. It was, as far as I have ever heard, the first instance of a President’s doing this; and it paved the way for the reign of cold water which came in with the next President, Rutherford B. Hayes.
Hayes entered office under cloudy auspices. His competitor for the Presidency was Samuel J. Tilden, a powerful Democratic leader. In some of the Southern States which were still in the throes of reconstruction, United States troops were doing police duty, the Governors were appointees of a Republican President, and the election machinery was in the hands of Republican office-holders, though the bulk of the white voting population was Democratic. In these States the official canvassers had reported the Republican electors chosen, the electors had cast their ballots for Hayes, and the Governors had signed and forwarded their certificates accordingly, in defiance of Democratic protests that the returns were fictitious. Without these States, the Democratic candidate had one hundred and eighty-four of the one hundred and eighty-five electoral votes necessary to a choice, while the Republican candidate could win only with their aid; so a single electoral vote would tip the scale either way. The duty of opening the certificates and{219}
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St. Paul’s, the Oldest Church in the District
announcing the results devolved upon the President of the Senate, a strong Republican.
The Democrats made so serious charges of falsification of the records that the whole country became much excited, and fears were entertained in Congress that another civil war might be impending. In the midst of the turmoil, a joint committee of both chambers worked out a plan for a bi-partisan Electoral Commission, to consist of five Senators, five Representatives, and five Justices of the Supreme Court, before whom all the questions at issue should be argued by counsel, and whose decisions should place the result beyond immediate appeal. The Commission, as made up, contained eight Republicans and seven Democrats, and its decisions were always given by a vote of eight to seven. It held its sessions in the room now occupied by the Supreme Court, where it began its work on February 1, 1877, and at the end of a month rendered its last ruling, which gave the Presidency to Mr. Hayes.
As the fourth of March was to fall on Sunday, President Grant had Hayes meet Chief Justice Waite in the red parlor of the White House on the evening of the third and take the oath privately. The inaugural ball was omitted because the Electoral Commission had finished its work too late to enable preparations{220} to be made. President Hayes was not nearly so conspicuous a figure during the following four years as his wife, who was a woman of very positive convictions, especially on the subject of alcoholic stimulants. At her instance, wines were banished from the White House table, the only exception occurring when the Grand Dukes Alexis and Constantin of Russia visited Washington. It is said to have been some incident at the entertainment given in their honor which fixed Mr. and Mrs. Hayes definitely in the determination not to depart again from the rule of teetotalism.
The newspapers poked a good deal of innocent fun at the Hayes parties on the score that, though the ban was never lifted from the ordinary intoxicants drunk from glasses, there was always plenty of strong Roman punch served in orange-skins. The nickname which presently fastened itself to this deceptive course was the “life-saving station.” In his diary, however, Mr. Hayes has left us the statement: “The joke of the Roman punch oranges was not on us, but on the drinking people. My orders were to flavor them rather strongly with the same flavor that is found in Jamaica rum. This took! It was refreshing to hear the drinkers say, with a smack of their lips, ‘Would they were hot!’” I am bound to add that, in spite of the good man’s enjoyment of his ruse, the suspicion still{221} survives that his steward used to put a private and particular interpretation on his orders.
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