A Disease in the Public Mind (48 page)

“Dixie,” Lincoln said. He was telling the crowd that the South's favorite song (and one of his favorites) belonged to everyone now. It was another way of saying America was one country again.

•      •      •

On April 12, Lincoln met with his cabinet and discovered several of them disapproved of his policy of forgiveness toward the South. Ohio-born Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who shared many abolitionist views, was especially vehement. “It would surely bring trouble with Congress and the people would not sustain you,” he growled. The president assured him and the other doubters that he would do his best to meet their objections.
⁶

Two days later, Lincoln convened another cabinet meeting and resumed discussing his policy. This time everyone, even the short-tempered Stanton, agreed with his approach. Frederick Seward, the son of the secretary of state, who sat in on the meeting for his ailing father, reported that there was “a unanimously kindly feeling toward the vanquished Confederates and a
hearty desire to restore the peace and safety of the South with as little harm as possible to the feelings and property of the inhabitants.”

General Ulysses Grant was at this cabinet meeting. Lincoln nodded with approval as the general told how he had advised Robert E. Lee's soldiers to go back to their homes and families, and promised they would not be harassed or prosecuted if they did no more fighting.

This change of mood, if not of mind, suggests Lincoln the politician had been at work, reassuring the cabinet critics that he would listen to their advice in the months to come. The president ended the discussion by noting that Congress was not in session. If he and the cabinet were “wise and discreet,” they could get the governments of the southern states in successful operation before the legislators returned in December. “We can accomplish more without them,” he said. There were too many men among them who had “good motives” but were full of “hate and vindictiveness.” There was no doubt that he was talking about Senator Wade and his fellow abolitionists.
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•      •      •

In Charleston, South Carolina, on that same day, April 14, 1865, abolitionists celebrated raising the American flag over Fort Sumter. The city had been in Union hands since General William Tecumseh Sherman's army had occupied it after their destructive march through Georgia. The chief speaker was the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of
Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Beside him on the platform sat William Lloyd Garrison, the man who had launched the abolitionist movement.

Beecher had been a strong supporter of the Union cause throughout the war. Garrison too, while not always able to restrain his sharp tongue, had backed the president after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. A grateful Lincoln had yielded to their desire to go to Charleston for the symbolic flag raising.

Henry Ward Beecher paid no attention whatsoever to Lincoln's inaugural plea for malice toward none and charity towards all. “I charge the whole guilt of this war upon the ambitious, educated, plotting political leaders of the South,” he roared. There could be no lasting reunion without the kind of retribution that the God of the Old Testament so often visited upon the
enemies of ancient Israel. “God shall say: Thus shall it be to all who betray their country!”
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Nothing illustrates the psychological and spiritual limitations of the abolitionists more than this heartless speech, flung in the face of a defeated South. The seeds of a hundred years of future sectional and racial antagonism were in those words. One of their first by-products was an indictment for treason against Robert E. Lee, issued by a Federal grand jury three months later. General Grant threatened to resign as the Union army's commander in chief and the charge was dropped.
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Late on the night of April 14, the telegraph in the Union army's Charleston headquarters clicked words that changed the history of the nation and the world: “The President was shot in a theater tonight and perhaps mortally wounded.”

•      •      •

If Lincoln had lived to serve out his term, could he have overcome the abolitionist haters and maintained a policy of forgiveness that healed the wounds of the war? Would he have been able to win acceptance and equality for black Americans in both the North and the South? No one can or should minimize the hugeness of both these tasks. But one of the most important things to remember about Lincoln was the nickname his White House aides gave him: The Tycoon.
¹⁰

Four years of wielding the presidency's war powers had made him a political leader in every sense of the word: a man who was ready to master every challenge that confronted him, from winning the most terrible war in America's history to surmounting the difficulties of peace. He had become a master at rallying a divided people at war. Now he was ready to master the even more difficult art of modifying the public mind for the politics of peace. During the war his aides placed dozens of anonymous articles in key newspapers, backing his policies. The Associated Press, coming into its own as a news source for papers everywhere, seldom published anything that opposed his views. Reporters like Noah Brooks became virtual disciples, committed to his ideals.

At least as important for meaningful reconciliation were numerous southerners who were ready to cooperate with Lincoln. None was more central to this hope than Robert E. Lee. Even before the last Confederate armies surrendered, Lee had given an interview to a northern reporter. He told the man that he was prepared “to make any sacrifice or perform any honorable act that would lead to the restoration of peace.”
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•      •      •

Let us close with a recollection of the potential Lincoln, the Tycoon with this southern ally, in the words of a senator who visited him on the last day of his life. The senator was used to seeing a haggard, sleepless president enduring a seemingly interminable war. On April 14, the visitor could scarcely believe his eyes. Lincoln's “whole appearance, poise and bearing had marvelously changed,” the senator said. “He seemed the very personification of supreme satisfaction. His conversation was exhilarating.”
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The senator was looking at a triumphant Tycoon. It is heartbreaking—but also somehow inspiring—to imagine what this extraordinary man might have accomplished if he had lived. Remembering this Lincoln may persuade the Americans of the twenty-first century to achieve the central message of his legacy—and the reason for writing this book—genuine brotherhood between North and South, and between blacks and whites. An understanding of the diseases of the public mind that caused the war's cataclysm of blood and fury is now possible, thanks to the work of generations of historians. The truth, as Lincoln once remarked, is often “the daughter of time.”

•      •      •

When the Marquis de Chambrun heard the news of Lincoln's assassination, the stricken Frenchman remembered the day he and the president and Mrs. Lincoln were returning from their visit to Richmond. As they approached Washington, DC, the capitol's looming dome reminded Mary Lincoln of her husband's congressional critics. “This place is full of enemies,” she said.

“Enemies?” Lincoln said. He shook his head, thinking of the devastated South. “We must never use that word again.”
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My favorite metaphor for writing a history book is the image of an author standing on the shoulders of dozens of previous scholars. This image is especially true for this book. My debt to various writers, some of them friends, is large and humbling. At the top of my friend list is Harold Holzer, Lincoln scholar extraordinaire, whose books have helped me see Father Abraham's greatness and his complexity. In the same category is Charles Bracelen Flood, whose riveting narrative,
1864: Lincoln at the Gates of History
, prompted Mr. Holzer to say, “No one can comprehend Lincoln without reading this essential book.”

A similar thank you must ascend to Elysium for the late James Thomas Flexner, who stirred similar realizations for George Washington. Allied with him in my mind is a biographer of Washington whose insights into various aspects of his personality, especially his relationship to his slaves, is unparalleled—Peter Henriques. Although I have met him only briefly, letters and emails have more than justified the word friendship.

If there is one book that awoke my desire to understand more about American slavery, it is
Time on the Cross: The Economics of Negro Slavery
, by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. This controversial attempt to find a new, more positive view of the black American experience in bondage resonated with me for a special reason, aside from its original point of view. It stirred comparisons to the Irish/Irish-American experience
of the long dark night of three hundred years of semi-slavery in Great Britain's oppressive grip, and the impact of freedom for those who emigrated to America's shores, like my four grandparents. I am equally indebted to Mr. Fogel's later books,
Without Consent or Contract
,
The Rise and Fall of American Slavery
, and
The Slavery Debates
. The latter is an essential tool for anyone writing about the complex, ever-evolving scholarship on this sensitive subject.

Closely allied in my psychological historical map is Stephen Hahn, whose groundbreaking books on black achievements as slaves and as a pseudo-free (a.k.a. segregated) minority I have read with special interest. I have known Steve since I played a part in bringing his Yale Ph.D. thesis to the attention of the Society of American Historians, which awarded him the Allen Nevins prize. Later published as
The Roots of Southern Populism
, the book won the Frederick Jackson Turner award of the Organization of American Historians, launching Steve's notable career. His 2004 book,
A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
, won three major prizes and has deeply influenced my understanding of the slave experience.

Next on my gratitude list comes my wife, Alice Fleming, author of more than thirty superb history books for young readers. She devoted two of these books to the very different lives of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. They are full of insights into the black struggle for freedom that have put me in her debt in a new way. For years beyond counting, she has been my in-house editor, and more recently, thanks to her proficiency on the computer, my researcher-in-chief in the exploding world of internet sources. Even a casual glance through my endnotes will make this apparent.

Two friendships that I have valued were with Ralph Ellison, author of
The Invisible Man
, and with John A. Williams, author of
The Man Who Cried I Am.
I praised the latter book in the
New York Times Book Review.
This led to a visit to my apartment, during which we talked with memorable frankness about black-white relationships in America. Thanks to these two men, I glimpsed the wound that slavery and segregation inflicted on even
the most gifted and generous-spirited black Americans, who were ready to reach across the barrier to extended white hands.

Linked to these black friends in memory is the late Benjamin Quarles, the gifted black historian whose book
The Negro in the American Revolution
was a revelation to me—and to many others. I invited him to speak at a dinner meeting of the American Revolution Round Table of New York. Talking with him for several hours made me realize we were soul brothers—an extravagance that I hasten to add neither of us uttered aloud.

Next comes a debt that anyone and everyone writing about slavery must acknowledge: to David Brion Davis. His magisterial books on the history of slavery, most notably that remarkable summation of his life's work,
Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
, are in a class unto themselves. I owe a special debt to his brief but oh-so-pungent volume,
The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style
. During the same period of study, I discovered David Blight's
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
, a searing exploration of the abolition-driven hatred of the South in a post–Civil War nation shorn of Lincoln's healing power.

Among other books I should mention as contributors in a large way to this book's point of view are
The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States
by Laird Bergad and
Written in Blood: the Story of the Haitian People, 1492–1971
by Robert Debs Heinl and Nancy Gordon Heinl. The latter was recommended to me by my close friend Robert Cowley, who was the editor. The book brings alive in awful detail the source of the South's primary disease in their public mind, the dread of a race war. Equally important is Henry Mayer's
All on Fire
, a definitive biography of the founder of abolitionism, William Lloyd Garrison. Again and again we see Garrison's inability to summon an iota of sympathy for or understanding of the Southerners' anxiety as the number of slaves swelled to four million and fear of an insurrection clotted the good intentions of men like Thomas Jefferson and his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph.

Perhaps most influential to my overall view of the war as a gigantic tragedy is Drew Gilpin Faust's
The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American
Civil War
. With sympathy and clarity and not a trace of sentimentality, Faust has rediscovered the tidal wave of pain and grief and loss that the war flung over both the North and the South.