The Highest Calling, page 10
DR: Washington got mad at him and they stopped talking?
AGR: Washington got mad at him because Jefferson kept trying to convince him that Alexander Hamilton was the devil. And Washington didn’t believe that. And he didn’t like the bickering, because people didn’t think, strangely enough, that you should have parties. They thought that there shouldn’t be factions. In the “Federalist 10” essay, Madison talks about the problem with factions. People should get together and find out what the public interest was. Washington certainly didn’t like partisan bickering.
DR: In hindsight, one of the greatest things Jefferson did when he was president, in my view at least, was the Louisiana Purchase. How could he justify that when he was a small-government person and there’s no authority in the Constitution for buying half of the country?
AGR: He thought you might need a constitutional amendment. So he drafted one, then put it in a drawer and considered he really didn’t need it. The first law is self-preservation, and he thought that expanding the country by taking the entire continent was the safest thing to do. If you had part of the landmass of the country under the control of other countries, there would always be an attempt to pull people back into European power politics. So he justified it by saying that this is something that will ultimately be for the safety of the United States.
DR: In terms of his intellect, you’ve had a chance to read his letters and so forth. Would you say, on the IQ scale, would he do 800 SATs? Was he a pretty smart person?
AGR: He was a pretty smart person. If he were alive today, he probably would be an engineer or an architect or something like that. He was mechanical.
DR: Pauline Maier, who was a distinguished historian at MIT, said that he was the most overrated person in American history.
AGR: I love Pauline but I think she’s wrong.
DR: You would say he deserves his memorial in Washington, D.C.?
AGR: Absolutely. The grid of the country is a Jefferson grid. There are just too many things that he was involved in, whether you like him or not. History’s not just about all the people you like. It’s about people who have done things that are important and helped shape the country, and he did.
4 TED WIDMER
on Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865; president from 1861 to 1865)
Without George Washington, it is unlikely that the history of the United States would have occurred as it did. The Revolutionary War would likely have been lost, the Constitution (which saved the country from the unworkable Articles of Confederation) would never have been written or ratified, and the strength and dignity of the presidency might have never occurred. But for all of Washington’s contributions to the country and to the office, it is still difficult to say that anyone other than Abraham Lincoln was the country’s greatest president.
Lincoln kept the Union together when most other Northerners would likely have allowed the Confederacy to go its own way. He was determined to hold the country together, and in the process felt it was necessary to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing some slaves during the war. Then, at the war’s end, he helped ensure passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, permanently ending slavery in the United States. And he accomplished those goals with a humility and eloquence unmatched by any other president. His Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address, both of which he wrote himself, are still among the gold standards of presidential speeches.
So it comes as no surprise that more books (over 16,000) have been written about Abraham Lincoln than any other American, each with a slightly different take or nuanced perspective on our sixteenth president. For instance, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s well-known Team of Rivals emphasized the unique nature of Lincoln’s cabinet, which was largely composed of his competitors for the presidency. (That book was the basis for Steven Spielberg’s award-winning Lincoln.) Since Team of Rivals, one particular Lincoln book stood out to me as really providing new information.
In Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington, historian Ted Widmer follows the circuitous, dangerous route Lincoln took from Springfield, Illinois, to Washington, D.C., for his first inauguration. The trip, by train, had to be careful not to go through Confederate territory, and to be on the lookout for possible assassins. During this journey, Lincoln stopped at 70 cities and made many speeches, including one at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. It was the first time that most Americans had a chance to see Lincoln in person, and they generally liked what they saw. Of course, he was elected because of his support in the North. He received no electoral votes in the Southern—later Confederate—states, and was not even on the ballot in many of them.
Upon arriving in Washington, Lincoln was not disguised as a woman, as has often been written, but he was wearing clothing that hid his identity, for there was a real fear that assassins were waiting for him. (The most serious assassination effort was to occur in Baltimore, but Lincoln’s security team was alerted to it, and managed to use an unexpected train for the final leg of the trip.) From the train station, he was taken by his security team to the Willard Hotel, where he stayed during the remaining 10 days before his inauguration. It was felt that keeping Lincoln there was the most sensible way to protect him.
I am often asked who I would most like to interview, dead or alive, and I invariably say Lincoln. He had intellect, humility, wisdom, and a self-deprecating sense of humor. The significance of being president during the country’s worst period would easily make for the most interesting of interviews. Yet no Lincoln interviews exist. In his day, the interview was not a format that really existed.
Lincoln was a truly unique individual, and the country is fortunate that he served as president when he did. Without him, the United States probably would have broken into two countries, making impossible so many of the creations and outcomes which have made the country the envy of so much of the world for so long.
I interviewed Ted Widmer at the New-York Historical Society on Feb. 5, 2021.
* * *
DAVID RUBENSTEIN (DR): So what prompted you to want to write a book about the 13 days that Abe Lincoln took to go from Springfield to Washington, D.C., in 1861?
TED WIDMER (TW): I’ve loved Lincoln since I was a little kid. I also was a bit of a train buff, so it seemed like a natural marriage of two topics I cared a lot about. Lincoln on a train—I thought it was an interesting way to see him moving across the landscape. The moving part was good because we always think of him as still, in a photograph or a statue. And I wanted the reader to get an experience of the landscape, of seeing what America looked like in 1861.
DR: It’s said that there are more books written about Abraham Lincoln than any other American. I’ve read my fair share, but I honestly had never read or known about a book on just the trip to Washington. Have there been other books?
TW: Yes. In 1960 a guy named Victor Searcher wrote a book that’s a little hard to find now, about this trip. It didn’t have footnotes, which made it very hard for me to fact-check to make sure what he was saying was true. The journey has crept into other books about Lincoln. In a lot of them, it’s a couple of paragraphs here and there, maybe more than that in some other books. But I think this is by far the longest book on just these 13 days.
DR: How many years of research and writing did it take you?
TW: When I finished it, I realized it had taken me nine years. I’m a little embarrassed. I realized that was twice the length of the Lincoln administration, just to cover 13 days. But I dropped down very deeply into the research, and I hope that shows.
DR: It does. You spent nine years with Abraham Lincoln. Did you emerge feeling better about him than you had before, not as good, or about the same as when you started the research?
TW: That’s a really good question, and it produces a complicated answer, which is that he was like a close friend for nine years. I would wake up and go spend time with this friendly presence. Of course he’s not living, but you get to know someone pretty well. He was a comforting presence, and I looked forward to being with him. I often worried about my objectivity as a historian, because I was admiring or worried about admiring him too much. But I really thought hard about it and I saw him under incredible duress, growing every day of this trip and surviving great adversity and then saving the country. So I felt okay. When I considered “Am I too pro Lincoln?” I felt good about where I landed.
DR: Abraham Lincoln is elected president in 1860. Does he have an overwhelming mandate in his election victory?
TW: No. He wins the Electoral College by a fair amount. He has 180. There are four candidates running. The next closest has 72. But because there were four candidates, his percentage of the overall vote is very small. It’s under 40 percent, which is tiny. It’s 39.8 percent, the second-smallest margin of victory or plurality any president has ever had. John Quincy Adams had less. But when you think about how famous Lincoln is, it’s shocking to think he won with such a small percentage of the vote. So he wasn’t that solid as he was thinking about forming his government.
DR: Did he win any Southern states?
TW: No, he didn’t even come close. He got about 1 percent, and no votes in some states. He was not allowed on the ballot in many Southern states. But in Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky he got like 1 or 2 percent. He got a few votes in the German American section of St. Louis, if you want to call that a Southern place. It was a striking election because all of his support came from the North and the Midwest.
DR: In my home state of Maryland, he got 4 percent of the vote or something like that.
TW: Maryland was always a headache for him, including the difficulty of crossing Maryland to get to Washington.
DR: So today we have elaborate situations for presidential transitions. Once somebody is elected president, that person gets staff. They go through elaborate efforts to figure out who their cabinet’s going to be. They are surrounded by press all the time. Was that the case in 1860? Did Lincoln have a big staff to help him with his transition? Who was advising him on appointments and things like that?
TW: His staff was basically two young men: John Nicolay, his first secretary, and John Hay, his second secretary. He was lucky they were incredibly talented. And we are lucky because they wrote beautifully about him and about their time with him. But he only really had those two young men, and they could barely keep up with the correspondence. I think they didn’t keep up with it, and they had the overwhelming difficulty of forming the cabinet and figuring out, delicately, the things he had to say to try to keep the South in the country. That was hard. He was also very far away. Springfield, Illinois, was and is far away from Washington, D.C. And the Republican Party was so new, they had no federal strategy. It wasn’t like a party that had been in power once and then came back. They were in power for the very first time.
DR: Had the American people ever seen him in person much outside of Illinois? What was the perception of him?
TW: With only a couple of exceptions, and they’re not that impressive, no one had ever seen Lincoln. He was a one-term congressman, from 1847 to 1849, just two years. And he did not leave a deep or good impression after his one term in Congress. A few people remembered him from Washington, from Congress in the late 1840s. And he’d gone on a couple of isolated trips around the Midwest, to Cincinnati, Wisconsin, and Kansas, mostly speaking before modest crowds. He had one significant trip. He came to New York in February 1860, only a couple of months before he got the nomination, and gave a famous speech at the Cooper Union. But that’s just one trip, one speech, one city. There are a few other little speeches. So most Americans had never seen Lincoln.
DR: In those days the elections were held in November but the inauguration was held when?
TW: March 4th back then.
DR: So you had from November to February, a long time. In the 1930s, the inauguration was moved to January. Once Lincoln’s elected, what does he decide to do? Does he prepare? Why did he decide not to come to Washington until right before the inauguration, and what does he do for all those months he’s sitting around Springfield?
TW: He doesn’t do a whole lot for a while. He wins on November 6th, and then a couple of weeks later he goes on a short trip to Chicago. And it’s an important trip. He barely knows his running mate, Hannibal Hamlin. He remembers Hamlin from the late 1840s, but Hamlin does not remember him, which says a lot about Lincoln’s stature. But Hamlin comes out to meet him and they see Chicago, and the press is around and reports on him. Then he goes back to Springfield and attends to his correspondence, walking to his office every day. It’s understood that he’s beginning to write his inaugural address, but it’s very slow. He’s also sitting for a sculpture, and people can just come around and walk right in to say hello to him.
A lot of curious people are coming to Springfield from Illinois or even other states. One time a Southerner comes in and walks away pleased to have met Lincoln. But it’s a kind of dicey time where he’s not saying much and the country is obviously falling apart. In South Carolina they’re saying they’re going to secede. And they do in late December, and he doesn’t really have a strategy. He’s not the president yet. President James Buchanan is falling apart personally, but Lincoln can’t intervene. He’s just a private citizen in Springfield, Illinois. So it’s a scary time for the United States.
DR: South Carolina secedes first and other states follow. Jefferson Davis resigns from the Senate to become the president of the Confederacy. But why? Lincoln did not say he was going to eliminate slavery. He specifically said he was going keep slavery as long as it was only in the states that had been around at the time of the Constitution being signed. Why did people fear that he was going to get rid of slavery? Those in the South feared it.
TW: You’re absolutely right. He goes to great lengths to say that he will not interfere with slavery where it already exists, which is actually a problem for Lincoln’s reputation today. Because there are all kinds of different opinions in the world of history, and many people dislike Lincoln from the left. They feel like he wasn’t abolitionist enough.
If he had been more abolitionist, there’s no way he could have gotten the nomination. It just would not have happened. So he was just in the right spot. He’d said things that were antislavery but he’d also expressed a desire to work with the South, to keep them in the country, to protect their institutions, meaning slavery, where they already existed. Where he drew a line—and it was an important line—was the expansion of slavery into the West, where the slave states had over and over again promised they would not try to expand slavery. Then they kept sneaking back and trying to do that. And Lincoln said, “No, you can’t do that.” They were very worried about that, because they felt they were losing influence in Congress as the North grew much faster than the South. The North was getting more House members, more senators as new states came in. Eighteen sixty is a census year too, and it’s counting overwhelming population growth in the North and not in the South. But there were things going on under the radar. I think the South was pretty excited to go its own way. There’s evidence that they were having meetings to plan it even before the election. They were interested in acquiring Cuba and even more of Mexico than already had come in. They wanted to make a bigger version of the South that sort of spread around the Gulf of Mexico.
DR: Put it in context, because it may be hard for people to believe: the Thirteenth Amendment ultimately ended slavery. James Buchanan as president was proposing a Thirteenth Amendment which was reaffirming slavery.
TW: Absolutely right. It’s shocking. There were two Thirteenth Amendments. I believe that the first one is still technically on the books, unratified. It’s been in limbo ever since then. There was an amendment proposed that would have been the Thirteenth Amendment, and Lincoln approved it in his first inaugural address. He said that if it was approved, he would go along with it. Later, what is now the real Thirteenth Amendment comes along. It’s the exact opposite. It abolishes slavery forever.
DR: So let’s go through the trip. When does Lincoln leave Springfield to head to Washington?
TW: February 11th, 1861.
DR: And who organized the trip for him?
TW: I studied that question and there is no clear answer, but there is a strong suggestion that it was his former rival William Henry Seward, who’s a senator from New York and a former governor. Most people thought he would be the Republican nominee a year earlier. He’s friends with a political boss based in Albany named Thurlow Weed, and they had extensive railroad connections and friendships. They send out some railroad people to meet with Lincoln and begin to plan the trip.
DR: Now if I were going to take a train today from Chicago to Washington, it wouldn’t take 13 days. Even if trains are quicker now, why did it take 13 days to go from Springfield to Washington then?
TW: He could not take the direct route. It was a little bit embarrassing to him that he couldn’t go through the state of his birth, Kentucky. That would have been the most direct route, to go through Kentucky and Virginia right into Washington. He wrote a letter to a close friend in Kentucky and said that if he went into the state of his birth, he was in danger of being lynched. So that’s how dangerous it was. But then, when he understood that he had to go the long way around, he turned it into a virtue. He met with a lot of Northern governors and legislatures. He went to every capital city. It was a kind of democracy tour from one state capitol to the next. They were all these little Greek Revival capitols. And Lincoln is going from one to the next. He’s based in Springfield, which is a capital. He goes to Indianapolis, makes it eventually to Columbus and then Albany. Trenton in New Jersey. Harrisburg is an important stop. Stopping at the state capitols was a good agenda for him. He picked up political strength from meeting with the governors. He also could express himself to the people of each state.
