June 20, 2022 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, we have the story of President Abraham Lincoln's harrowing train trip to Washington, D.C., to be sworn in as the leader of a new—and divided—nation. Joining us to tell the story is Ted Widmer, author of Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Leehabi with our American stories, and we tell
stories about everything here on this show, and our favorite
storytelling involves American history. And always our history stories have
brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College.
And today we're telling the story of Lincoln on the
verge thirteen days to Washington. The author of this remarkable
(00:33):
story is Edward Widmer. Edward, thanks for joining us. So
November sixth, eighteen sixty, Lincoln gets elected and you write this,
you say in the book quote, could the news of
Lincoln's election be turned back as if it was a
piece of mail delivered to the wrong address. Many Southerners
thought so. Even many Northerners found that the news was
(00:56):
difficult to believe. Talk about these two reactions around the country.
Lincoln's a shock to everybody. He's only ever been a
one term congressman twelve years earlier, so that's not very impressive.
He's running against much more famous senators. There's a list
of twenty one likely Republicans to get the nomination published
(01:21):
at the end of eighteen fifty nine. Lincoln doesn't even
crack that list of twenty one, so that's how obscure
he is, but he helps himself. He gives a speech
in New York City in February, the Cooper Union Address,
that really impresses people in New York. And then he's
lucky that the Republican Convention is held in Chicago, so
(01:42):
he has a lot of friends in Chicago who help him,
and he gets the nomination. And then he's lucky again
because the Democratic Party, which is a much bigger party
than the Republican Party, it splits in half, and that
means the Republicans are much more likely to win, which
they do. Are actually four people running by the time
it's November. It's just all the chips fall in a
(02:05):
way that's perfect for Lincoln to win the election. And
the South is shocked that this Northerner, I mean, he's
really a Westerner. He has cracked their defenses, their system.
For almost the entirety of American history. Since seventeen eighty nine,
(02:25):
when George Washington becomes the first president, the South has
really controlled national politics. They have had most of the presidents.
Even the few Northern presidents were generally under the control
of the South. And Lincoln isn't from their system. He's
an outsider, so they're really upset, and they know that
(02:47):
he's anti slavery. Just how anti slavery is not yet
really known, but they worry a lot that he's very
anti slavery. In fact, a lot of people in the
North worry the opposite, worry that he's not antislavery enough.
The North is also a little worried because he just
doesn't seem presidential. His body shape is sort of wrong.
(03:10):
He's tall and skinny and angular just looks lowborn. That
was something people cared about in eighteen sixty. Does he
look statesman like? Does he look well educated? In a word, No,
he didn't look refined. He had kind of rough country features.
(03:30):
Apparently his voice was a little bit odd too. He
had a western twangy accent, and even though he was
very tall, he did not have a deep voice. He
had a kind of high pitched voice. So they're just
all these eyes, these millions of eyes on this man
coming through the country to become the new president, and
(03:50):
everyone is worried about him. Is he made of the
right stuff? Will he be strong enough to keep the
country together. So intense curiosity and a kind of immediate
celebrity for someone who was absolutely unknown nine months earlier.
Let's talk about succession. You're right that it became more
(04:10):
real just six weeks after Lincoln was elected December twenty,
eighteen sixty, is when South Carolina left the Union. More
states would follow. What a mess Lincoln was walking into.
Talk about that. How did Lincoln react? It was the
worst mess any precedent has ever inherited. As you just said,
(04:31):
South Carolina seceeds on twentieth and so there's this weird
period of about six weeks between his election in the
secession of South Carolina where they begin to act like
a country. They're not yet a country, but they called
themselves the Palmetto Republic. The Palmetto is the tree that's
(04:52):
on the flag of South Carolina. And it was just
a crazy time where nobody knew if the US would
hold together or not. It never happened that a Southern
states succeeded. It had almost happened in eighteen thirty two
when John C. Calhoun was a Senator and he was
upset by some financial policies of Andrew Jackson, and he
(05:16):
threatened secession, but it didn't happen. Andrew Jackson in a
very kind of intimidating way kept it all together. But
with Lincoln coming in, Lincoln is in a much weaker
position than Jackson, and Lincoln has very little experience that
one term as a congressman twelve years earlier. He does
(05:37):
not have relationships in Washington, so he's just kind of
walking into this catastrophe and he's not getting a lot
of help from anybody. The Senate is dysfunctional, the House
is dysfunctional. Washington is falling apart. The president before him,
who's still the president, James Buchanan, is useless. He can't
(05:59):
make up his mind. He's falling apart in meetings, nobody
knows what he thinks, and the South is just doing
whatever it wants to do. So when Lincoln is on
the train in February of eighteen sixty one coming in
to Washington, a third to a half of the United
States of America is no longer in the United States
(06:22):
of America, or so they feel, and he's got to
respond with what he feels. And that's going to be
his first inaugural address, and he's going to tell them,
you're still in the United States. You have not succeeded
because the Union is perpetual, and you've been listening to
Edward Whitmer, and he has told a fantastic story in
(06:45):
his book Lincoln on the Verge, Thirteen Days to Washington
and the chronicles the thirteen day train trip that Lincoln
can give his first inaugural speech in Washington, DC. And
it is a trip filled with treacher, opportunity, and so
much more. It is a thriller. If you love reading
(07:06):
great stories about this country, It's may be one of
the best books I've read in the past year. Go
to Amazon dot com and pick it up, or go
to a bookstore and pick it up, and heck, buy
a copy for someone else who loves reading this book?
Is that good? When we come back more with Edward
Whitmer Lincoln on the Verge. Here on our American Stories, Folks,
(07:30):
if you love the stories we tell about this great country,
and especially the stories of America's rich past, know that
all of our stories about American history, from war to politics,
to innovation, culture and faith, are brought to us by
the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students
study all the things that are beautiful in life and
all the things that are good in life. And if
(07:50):
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with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale
dot edu to learn more. And we continue with our
American stories and with historian Edward Widmer the book The
(08:15):
Story Lincoln on the Verge Thirteen Days to Washington. When
we last left off, Lincoln, an unknown one term senator
from Illinois, had been elected president and the Union was
splitting apart. He faced an existential dilemma. Could he even
reach Washington, DC for his inauguration? Would there even be
a DC when he arrived? Talk about that? What was
(08:37):
the mood like when he left Springfield? Well, the first
day was filled with drama. There were real fears that
DC would be in the hands of pro secessionist militious.
There's an organized country coming together, the Confederate States of America.
(08:58):
But then they're also people walking around Washington in sort
of armed vigilante mobs who might take over the capitol.
They had announced that they wanted the capital for themselves,
or they might take over the whole district. So as
he's starting on the trip on that first day, it's
not certain that he will be able to make it
(09:19):
to Washington and he's getting letters from close friends who
are in Washington saying we may not be able to
hold it. It's really a very dicey situation. And the
morning of his departure, it's February eleventh, eighteen sixty one.
It's the day before his fifty second birthday, and it's
kind of an overcast day. Some accounts say it was
(09:42):
snowing lightly, some say raining. I think it was sort
of in between. And he went out to the small
depot and he was pleased to see and it was
no surprise that a lot of the people of Springfield
had come out to say goodbye to him. You know,
he was a beloved member of the community. It was
(10:04):
an emotional scene, and he spontaneously gave a short speech.
It's about nine sentences, but profoundly beautiful and as it
turned out, really strategic too, because it put Lincoln before
the country in a new light. I'm not sure at
all that he intended that it just happened, and in
(10:26):
those nine sentences he just said, I've you know me,
I've lived among you for twenty five years. We've been
friends and neighbors. My children have grown up among yours.
I'm leaving one child buried here. I'm now going with
the hardest assignment any president has ever had since Washington.
(10:50):
With God's help, I cannot fail. Without God's help, I
cannot succeed. Please pray for me. And the words were transcribed.
There were journalists there at the platform, and then one
journalist got on the train with him, and only a
minute or two after the train left, he got Lincoln
(11:12):
to take a pencil and paper and write it out
all over again and give it to him, and he
was able to telegraph it all around the country. So
we think of that as a long time ago, eighteen
sixty one, but in fact, with internet quickness, they were
able to get the words of that beautiful short speech
with lightning speed, and the telegraph was called the Lightning
(11:36):
and it really humanized Lincoln. It helped people reading the
next day in the newspaper to think, this is a
human being, This is like a neighbor. I would want
him for my neighbor. I know people like this. My
children play with the children of this other family over here,
and he's kind of like us. And it was a
(11:56):
really brilliant political stroke. And if he didn't mean it
to be one, he's just saying goodbye to his friends
and neighbors. But it made him seem like an everyman,
and that was a really smart way to begin the trip.
Talk about the role the train and the telegraph, two
remarkable innovations, roles to those two play in Lincoln's plans
(12:19):
and to Lincoln's advantage, And is it true that the
South sort of rejected that kind of change in innovation.
The train comes in in the early eighteen thirties. The
telegraph is later. It's invented by Samuel F. B. Morse,
and it's one of the great American inventions of the
(12:40):
nineteenth century, and it immediately changes politics and business. And
they are perfect for train tracks. The wires want to
go straight and train tracks go straight. And it turns
out they're good for the railroad too, because you can
wire up ahead when the train is coming, helps plan
(13:00):
the scheduling of the trains, it helps plan the loading
of the freight, and so businesses love all of this.
If you're textile mill owner or in any business at all,
and you've got a load of goods you want to
ship from New York to Philadelphia or Philadelphia to Pittsburgh,
(13:22):
the telegraph is your friend. You send it down to
your business partner down the line, and it just picks
up everything, and business accelerates and westward migration accelerates, and
Chicago is booming in the eighteen fifties, and Lincoln is
deriving some of his lawyer work from the exploding business
(13:45):
culture of Chicago. And the big railroad of Illinois is
the Illinois Central and they hire Lincoln for a lot
of cases. So the North is just booming as Lincoln's
star is rising, and the South is growing. All of
America is growing, but the South is growing in a
(14:06):
weird way. It's not growing nearly as fast. It's not
growing demographically, it has a much lower rate of increase
from immigration, and wealth is concentrated at the top with
families that own a lot of land. It's not an
upwardly mobile society the way the North is. And they're
(14:29):
also controlling the spread of information much more than the North.
So the North just loves newspapers and telegraphs and railroads,
and in the South they have to bring in railroads.
They can't just reject something that's obviously so good for business,
but they build different kinds of railroads, and they don't
(14:52):
like the telegraph quite as much, and they want to
control information. And it's just a culture that is not
as comfortable with of different opinions as you would have
in the North, or with different kinds of ethnic people.
That's a point of tension. As the North is growing
so fast, the South is looking at it and it's
(15:12):
beginning to criticize the kind of society it is, where
anybody can say anything, and they're all these poor white
people who are starting businesses for themselves, and there's a
kind of unattractive word Southerners begin to use. They call
them mudsills, kind of you know, lower middle class whites
(15:34):
in the North. They don't like all the immigrants either,
and they really don't like the free people of color.
They are free African Americans in the North, and it
just seems like a mess up there to an aristocratic
Southern wealthy family. And it's not just social snobbery, it's
(15:54):
also political fear because so many people are coming into
the North that the South is worried that the North
is going to have a lot of political power, which
is true, and what a time to be alive. But
for Lincoln, what a precarious time to be president. Assassination
blots were afoot. Following his election, Lincoln had only one
(16:15):
thirty eight percent of the popular vote in what was
a four way race. Talk about Lincoln leaving behind for
a relative of his wife, papers of a personal nature,
and the comment he made a fore voting comment that
his own death was on his mind. Talk about that. No,
it's shocking that our most beloved president became president with
(16:38):
such a tiny vote. I mean, the second lowest successful
vote in our history, less than forty percent is really
pretty bad. It's less than Herbert Hoover as the losing
candidate won when he lost in a landslide to Franklin
Roosevelt nineteen thirty two. So it's really not very impressive.
(16:59):
And how Lincoln turned that dismal result into his powerful
presidency and winning the Civil War and becoming our greatest
president is really an extraordinary conversion of a bad situation
into a huge triumph. He understands the seriousness of what
(17:22):
he's going into, and I mean, he's getting a lot
of death threats in the mail, and the political news
is bad, and the threats are coming really close to home.
There are things like, you know, drawings of him with
a noose around his neck. His wife saw that and
was very upset. He knows he's not coming back. When
we come back, more of this remarkable story, remarkable piece
(17:44):
of American history, Lincoln on the Verge. Here on our
American stories, and we continue with our American stories and
(18:10):
with Edward Widmer his book Lincoln on the Verge Thirteen
Days to Washington. When we last left off, Lincoln had
left Springfield, Illinois on a train bound for Washington, DC
to face the largest crisis in American history. Edward, let's
talk about New York City, a big part of this trip.
At the time, New York City had a larger population
(18:32):
than the entire Confederacy, but Lincoln only one about thirty
percent of the city's vote. It's a northern city, but
it had a lot of Southern influence. Talk about that
New York City is so much bigger than any other
city that it's almost like it's already a twentieth century city,
forty years before the twentieth century has actually arrived, and
(18:55):
no other city comes close. I think Philadelphia might be
the largest, and it's not that close to New York's size.
And New York is interesting. These different reasons don't all
make sense together, but they're all part of the picture
of New York. It's very northern feeling in some ways.
(19:16):
It's teeming with immigrants, primarily German and Irish. At that point,
a lot of immigrants are living in immigrant neighborhoods in
New York City. That feels pretty pretty northern. And it's
also filled with media culture, with newspapers and magazines. And
it's also Southern in powerful ways. And there are business interests,
(19:42):
primarily around Wall Street that love investing in Southern plantations
and in slavery itself. And it's also a place where
Southern ships come. One of the ways in which slavery
made a lot of money for the South cotton was
turned into clothing. And a lot of textile mills are
(20:05):
in Europe. I mean they're in the North too, but
huge numbers are in places like Birmingham, Manchester and the
north of England. France has textile mills. And so the
South is shipping its cotton from its ports like New
Orleans and Savannah, and they would stop in New York
for a rest, and then the ship would would either
(20:26):
offload it's cotton or just keep going to Europe, and
so New York shipping is very involved in slavery. But
then also New York finance Wall Street is investing and
giving loans, helping Northern investors to make money by investing
in Southern slavery. So it's really important for everyone to
(20:49):
understand that the South wasn't the only evil actor, and
so our slavery was concerned that a lot of northern
business investors concentrated then as now around Wall Street, were
propping up the whole system of slavery, and they paid
off politicians. New York's mayor at the time Lincoln came
(21:10):
through was a pretty pro slavery guy named Fernando Wood,
and Lincoln had to deal with him as he came through.
So it wasn't just people throwing flowers in his path.
There was a lot of aggressive behavior toward Lincoln as
he's coming toward Washington. And talk about the way Lincoln
worked New York, because my goodness, he went everywhere from
(21:31):
Wall Street to a night at the opera. How did
he swing that when he knew that the elites in
that city were probably looking at him as if he
were some kind of Western hick. I mean, he and
his wife were a little bit uncomfortable in New York.
I think she was more uncomfortable than he was. He
did awkward things. He wore the wrong colored gloves when
(21:53):
he went to the opera. You're supposed to wear white gloves,
and he wore black gloves, and people laughed at him.
I wouldn't have known that, and he didn't know that. So,
you know, he had to endure a little bit of
snickering at his expense. But he could handle that a
little more easily than Mary Todd Lincoln could. But he
was you know, he had advisors who were helping him.
(22:16):
One of his advisors was the man he beat for
the nomination, William Seward, who was a New York senator.
He's actually from upstate New York, but you know he
knows New York City too, and he's got his friends
helping Lincoln, and they are helping to plan the train
trip too. So I think Lincoln had friends as well
as enemies everywhere along the route, and he always had
(22:40):
friends among the people. The people came out everywhere he
was to look at him. And my book benefited a
lot from some descriptions Walt Whitman, who was a kind
of working class Carpenter and poet wrote a beautiful description
of seeing Lincoln going into his hotel. So I was
grateful for some of the people who kept diaries or
(23:02):
just wrote about it in their journals or later after
the fact. And New York had, you know, it had
a great working class population in addition to all of
the financial types on Wall Street, and those people were
behind Lincoln. Lincoln then goes to Philadelphia where he gives
an important speech an Independence Hall, the place where, of course,
(23:24):
the Declaration of Independence was written. The Declaration of Independence
states quote that all men are created equal. Talk about
that word all, because it's an important word to Lincoln.
What did it mean to him? All men are created equal.
So the word all is right there, and it strongly
(23:45):
implies all human beings. So it's a pretty loaded word all.
And so Lincoln is holding this truth against the South
and saying, you are violating the spirit of our country.
And it was a very effect of argument, and it
was a form of soft abolitionism that really worked for
(24:06):
him at one over Middle America. And yet he could
keep running with it up to and including the Emancipation
Proclamation and then the tremendous amendments to the Constitution, the
first of which was done in his lifetime, but following
the Civil War, that made real freedom, civil rights, the
(24:26):
freedom to participate in our politics and our society available
to all people in the United States of America. All
of that came out of his reading of the Declaration
of Independence, and he gave a beautiful speech to that
effect in Philadelphia. He leads up to it at Trenton,
(24:46):
and then the next morning he goes into Independence Hall
and it achieves a liftoff and says, every feeling I've
ever had politically has come to me from the Declaration
of Independence. And it's a powerful moment, and people in
the room knew it. They knew that it meant something
emotionally to him, not just politically, and that becomes the
(25:09):
Lincoln message at Gettysburg two years later, it's basically the
same thing. I mean, yes, he uses exquisite language at Gettysburg,
he takes lift off even higher, but he's gone a
long way towards that message, even with what he says
in Independence Hall in Philadelphia in February eighteen sixty one.
(25:31):
Lincoln would go on to add at the very end
of this speech the following words quote, I have said
nothing but what I am willing to live by, and
if it be the pleasure of Almighty God, die by.
He meant those words, didn't he Edward. I think everyone
listening to this speech believed. He believed those words talk
(25:52):
about that there was a feeling in the room of
something very powerful had just happened. After he talked about
what the declaration meant to him, and then I'm glad
you reminded me that he added that incredible closing thought
about assassination would not stop him from loving his country
(26:13):
and wanting to serve his country. And what made it
so powerful was, in fact, he had just been told
that there was a huge assassination conspiracy trying to take
his life. The next day as he went through Baltimore,
and already he was trying to figure out how to
get around Baltimore or through it without getting killed. Even
(26:35):
with that heavy pressure on him, he still was able
to speak beautifully. And then he's beginning to plan a
secret railroad journey that will take him through Baltimore in
the middle of the night by a different route than
the one that has been announced. So there are all
these converging lines in his head at that moment, and
it's just it's like a thriller at that moment. And
(26:57):
when we return, those lines will verge in Baltimore, Maryland.
The book is Lincoln on the Verge, Thirteen Days to Washington.
The author is Edward Whitmer. More of this remarkable story,
the last part of this story here on our American story,
(27:37):
and we returned to our American stories and the final
part of the story of Lincoln's train trip to Washington
from Springfield, Illinois in eighteen sixty one. The book is
Lincoln on the Verge, Thirteen Days to Washington, and the storyteller,
the author, the historian, is Edward Whitmer. When we last
(27:58):
left off, Lincoln had given an all important speech at
Independence Hall in Philadelphia, talking about the word all in
the Declaration of Independence and what it meant to him.
Now he was on his way to Baltimore, Maryland, the
biggest slave city in the country, and there it was
just a few miles from DC. There is also something
(28:18):
of foot in Baltimore that caused Lincoln to have to
change up dates. Talk about that well. His destination of Washington,
d C. Is a very southern city, and I argue
at the beginning of the book that there was a
bit of a mistake made in seventeen ninety when Alexander
Hamilton and James Madison and Thomas Jefferson probably made a
(28:42):
secret deal to move the capital to the Potomac River
in return for some legislation that Hamilton really wanted. In
seventeen ninety, it was just two southern Baltimore to the north,
is the biggest city in the slave holding part of
the country, so Washington is south of other slave places,
and it's just really hard for Lincoln to get there
(29:05):
as an antislavery politician. So in the winter following his election,
there are all these rumors flying around the country that
there may be people trying to kill him, but no
one really knows when and where until a remarkable woman
named Dorothea Dix finds out all of the details of
the plot. She's a mental health advocate. She's actually from
(29:26):
the North, but she's accepted in southern circles. But while
traveling through the South in the fall of eighteen sixty,
she picks up the intelligence that a huge plot to
kill Lincoln is focusing on Baltimore and on railroad tracks
and bridges coming into Baltimore. They might blow up a
bomb under the train as it comes through, or they
might try to shoot Lincoln or stab him as he's
(29:49):
transferring from one station to another. That's how you got
through Baltimore. You got off at one station and did
a transfer in a horse and carriage to another station,
and then kept going. And so she goes to the
head of the railroad and tells him about this plot.
The head of the railroad hires this detective, Alan Pinkerton,
to come from Chicago East to infiltrate the plot. And
(30:13):
he brings a very strong woman as one of his agents,
and she's a genius of disguise and impersonation, and they
get all the intelligence up to Lincoln's entourage, and Lincoln
understands he doesn't want to do it, but he understands
he has to go in the middle of the night
because that's safer than trying to force his way through.
(30:34):
He doesn't have a lot of security with him, and
he makes it, and he goes through all night and
arrives at Washington at six in the morning. Lincoln finally
does make it to DC, and you paint this picture
of DC at the time you talk about the throngs
of people who are there to see him, including African Americans,
people who hate Lincoln, and sharpshooters trying to keep Lincoln safe.
(30:57):
This is a remarkable display of American diversity, not only
in the people, but what's on everybody's minds. Talk about
this final part of the trip and this great triumph
in Washington. The day of the first inaugural speech, there
was a lot of fear in the air that the
danger was still there. Paper I read I read only
(31:20):
a few days ago. I reread it describing a fear
that someone would try to shoot him as he was
giving his inaugural address. And you think about it, when
you're a president, you have to give that inaugural and
you want as many people to see you as possible.
It's a democratic ritual, it's our main democratic ritual. But
(31:42):
that also makes you incredibly exposed. You stand out on
the east portico of the Capitol and people can see
you for half a mile around, you know. And so
they did their best to protect him. There were army
sharpshooters on the roof near by, and there were plain
(32:03):
closed police in the crowd. But still people could get
close to Lincoln, and so there was a great fear
that day, but he made it, and you know, he
consistently made brave decisions. He was picked up by the
outgoing President James Buchanan in a horse and carriage and
(32:24):
he was offered the choice, we could have a closed
top or an open top, and he said, absolutely open
it up. So he was a brave person on the
way to the Capitol and always standing straight up as
he gave the speech. And he always wanted to fortify
(32:45):
the larger not just the country, the United States, but
what democracy meant to people everywhere. And because of his
courage in propping up American democracy, other friends of democracy
in other countries really took heart. And even though he
(33:06):
was assassinated, as we all know, he was assassinated after
saving American democracy, and in France, people like Victor Hugo
were inspired by America's success at keeping the democratic system going.
And in the late nineteenth century you see real progress
in France and in Western Europe. And then when World
(33:28):
War One breaks out, I mean many decades after Lincoln,
Woodrow Wilson calls it a war to save democracy and
the triumph of democracy in the twentieth century, especially in
World War Two. I really think can be linked to
Lincoln's courage in these dark days in eighteen sixty one,
(33:49):
you right as you close out quote nearly eight hundred
thousand brave young men gave their lives and service to
their conflicting ideas of the nation. No America and was
untouched by it. It touches us still, Yet the Republic survives,
sustained by the same perseverance Lincoln showed on this trip.
(34:10):
From the moment he arrived, things improved. Democracy refused to die,
It deepened. Talk about that, well, thank you for reading that.
I remember working hard on that language because I wanted
to include the South. I wanted to include Southerners, even
(34:30):
those who fought against Lincoln and the United States of America.
I wanted to include them the way he did, and
he was very clear in his second inaugural address that
they were included in his idea of America. There were
two truths that he fought the war over. The one
is that all men are created equal, really important truth
(34:53):
about human beings and their capacities, and the others that
the United States of America is a permanent union of
its states, that they cannot succede unless all of them
agree to it, and that was a kind of legal
fiction of sorts. You could argue that not everyone agreed
(35:16):
with that when he said it at the beginning of
the Civil War, but he made it true by winning,
and now it really is true. I mean, now we
are inseparable, and I wanted the South to feel included
in this story. It's their victory too, because we made
a great country together before the Civil War and after
(35:37):
the Civil War. And that's why it's such a hard
ward to talk about, because some people would like to
say it was pure treason to fire on the flag
of the United States and the cause was not good.
They did fight with incredible bravery and skill, but I
think the overall population, you know, think of the women
(36:03):
enduring so much suffering, and the African Americans who were
suffering in unbelievable ways as they were asked to do
more and more to support the economy of the South
while not having any rights. And finally at the end
they were asked to fight, but again not with any rights.
And yet I share with Lincoln a feeling that we
(36:24):
wanted them to feel like Americans. As soon as the
war was over, to be repatriated and to be included
in our history, to be included in a meaningful and
affectionate way. It's strongly tainted by racism. I don't think
you can separate it from slavery and the terrible injustices
(36:47):
that were done to black people under the flag of
the Confederacy. But I think we can appreciate Southern courage
and ways in which Southerners themselves worked out some of
these things which they did. I mean Northerners helped sometimes,
and Southerners did it on their own sometimes too, and Northerners,
(37:07):
like I tried to say, had plenty of problems of
their own as well. So I do love Lincoln, and
I think his vision of history was correct, and democracy
is beautiful, and immigration has been a good thing, and
being color blind has been a great thing in America.
And when we finally included women in who gets to
(37:28):
be a part of this great democracy, that was a
good thing too. But in the spirit of inclusivity, I
like to include the South also. We can just learn
from all of their mistakes, Northern and Southern. And Lincoln
wanted us all to be together in his final speeches
and so I wanted to end the book in that spirit.
(37:50):
And you've been listening to Edward Widmer, and his book
is Lincoln on the Verge Thirteen Days to Washington, and
it's a terrific read. Go to Amazon dot com, cut
up for yourself, pick up a copy for a friend,
anyone who's interested in this nation's history. Lincoln on the
Verge the story of his thirteen day trip to Washington, DC.
(38:11):
That story here on our American Story
This is Leehabi with our American stories, and we tell
stories about everything here on this show, and our favorite
storytelling involves American history. And always our history stories have
brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College.
And today we're telling the story of Lincoln on the
verge thirteen days to Washington. The author of this remarkable
(00:33):
story is Edward Widmer. Edward, thanks for joining us. So
November sixth, eighteen sixty, Lincoln gets elected and you write this,
you say in the book quote, could the news of
Lincoln's election be turned back as if it was a
piece of mail delivered to the wrong address. Many Southerners
thought so. Even many Northerners found that the news was
(00:56):
difficult to believe. Talk about these two reactions around the country.
Lincoln's a shock to everybody. He's only ever been a
one term congressman twelve years earlier, so that's not very impressive.
He's running against much more famous senators. There's a list
of twenty one likely Republicans to get the nomination published
(01:21):
at the end of eighteen fifty nine. Lincoln doesn't even
crack that list of twenty one, so that's how obscure
he is, but he helps himself. He gives a speech
in New York City in February, the Cooper Union Address,
that really impresses people in New York. And then he's
lucky that the Republican Convention is held in Chicago, so
(01:42):
he has a lot of friends in Chicago who help him,
and he gets the nomination. And then he's lucky again
because the Democratic Party, which is a much bigger party
than the Republican Party, it splits in half, and that
means the Republicans are much more likely to win, which
they do. Are actually four people running by the time
it's November. It's just all the chips fall in a
(02:05):
way that's perfect for Lincoln to win the election. And
the South is shocked that this Northerner, I mean, he's
really a Westerner. He has cracked their defenses, their system.
For almost the entirety of American history. Since seventeen eighty nine,
(02:25):
when George Washington becomes the first president, the South has
really controlled national politics. They have had most of the presidents.
Even the few Northern presidents were generally under the control
of the South. And Lincoln isn't from their system. He's
an outsider, so they're really upset, and they know that
(02:47):
he's anti slavery. Just how anti slavery is not yet
really known, but they worry a lot that he's very
anti slavery. In fact, a lot of people in the
North worry the opposite, worry that he's not antislavery enough.
The North is also a little worried because he just
doesn't seem presidential. His body shape is sort of wrong.
(03:10):
He's tall and skinny and angular just looks lowborn. That
was something people cared about in eighteen sixty. Does he
look statesman like? Does he look well educated? In a word, No,
he didn't look refined. He had kind of rough country features.
(03:30):
Apparently his voice was a little bit odd too. He
had a western twangy accent, and even though he was
very tall, he did not have a deep voice. He
had a kind of high pitched voice. So they're just
all these eyes, these millions of eyes on this man
coming through the country to become the new president, and
(03:50):
everyone is worried about him. Is he made of the
right stuff? Will he be strong enough to keep the
country together. So intense curiosity and a kind of immediate
celebrity for someone who was absolutely unknown nine months earlier.
Let's talk about succession. You're right that it became more
(04:10):
real just six weeks after Lincoln was elected December twenty,
eighteen sixty, is when South Carolina left the Union. More
states would follow. What a mess Lincoln was walking into.
Talk about that. How did Lincoln react? It was the
worst mess any precedent has ever inherited. As you just said,
(04:31):
South Carolina seceeds on twentieth and so there's this weird
period of about six weeks between his election in the
secession of South Carolina where they begin to act like
a country. They're not yet a country, but they called
themselves the Palmetto Republic. The Palmetto is the tree that's
(04:52):
on the flag of South Carolina. And it was just
a crazy time where nobody knew if the US would
hold together or not. It never happened that a Southern
states succeeded. It had almost happened in eighteen thirty two
when John C. Calhoun was a Senator and he was
upset by some financial policies of Andrew Jackson, and he
(05:16):
threatened secession, but it didn't happen. Andrew Jackson in a
very kind of intimidating way kept it all together. But
with Lincoln coming in, Lincoln is in a much weaker
position than Jackson, and Lincoln has very little experience that
one term as a congressman twelve years earlier. He does
(05:37):
not have relationships in Washington, so he's just kind of
walking into this catastrophe and he's not getting a lot
of help from anybody. The Senate is dysfunctional, the House
is dysfunctional. Washington is falling apart. The president before him,
who's still the president, James Buchanan, is useless. He can't
(05:59):
make up his mind. He's falling apart in meetings, nobody
knows what he thinks, and the South is just doing
whatever it wants to do. So when Lincoln is on
the train in February of eighteen sixty one coming in
to Washington, a third to a half of the United
States of America is no longer in the United States
(06:22):
of America, or so they feel, and he's got to
respond with what he feels. And that's going to be
his first inaugural address, and he's going to tell them,
you're still in the United States. You have not succeeded
because the Union is perpetual, and you've been listening to
Edward Whitmer, and he has told a fantastic story in
(06:45):
his book Lincoln on the Verge, Thirteen Days to Washington
and the chronicles the thirteen day train trip that Lincoln
can give his first inaugural speech in Washington, DC. And
it is a trip filled with treacher, opportunity, and so
much more. It is a thriller. If you love reading
(07:06):
great stories about this country, It's may be one of
the best books I've read in the past year. Go
to Amazon dot com and pick it up, or go
to a bookstore and pick it up, and heck, buy
a copy for someone else who loves reading this book?
Is that good? When we come back more with Edward
Whitmer Lincoln on the Verge. Here on our American Stories, Folks,
(07:30):
if you love the stories we tell about this great country,
and especially the stories of America's rich past, know that
all of our stories about American history, from war to politics,
to innovation, culture and faith, are brought to us by
the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students
study all the things that are beautiful in life and
all the things that are good in life. And if
(07:50):
you can't get to Hillsdale. Hillsdale will come to you
with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale
dot edu to learn more. And we continue with our
American stories and with historian Edward Widmer the book The
(08:15):
Story Lincoln on the Verge Thirteen Days to Washington. When
we last left off, Lincoln, an unknown one term senator
from Illinois, had been elected president and the Union was
splitting apart. He faced an existential dilemma. Could he even
reach Washington, DC for his inauguration? Would there even be
a DC when he arrived? Talk about that? What was
(08:37):
the mood like when he left Springfield? Well, the first
day was filled with drama. There were real fears that
DC would be in the hands of pro secessionist militious.
There's an organized country coming together, the Confederate States of America.
(08:58):
But then they're also people walking around Washington in sort
of armed vigilante mobs who might take over the capitol.
They had announced that they wanted the capital for themselves,
or they might take over the whole district. So as
he's starting on the trip on that first day, it's
not certain that he will be able to make it
(09:19):
to Washington and he's getting letters from close friends who
are in Washington saying we may not be able to
hold it. It's really a very dicey situation. And the
morning of his departure, it's February eleventh, eighteen sixty one.
It's the day before his fifty second birthday, and it's
kind of an overcast day. Some accounts say it was
(09:42):
snowing lightly, some say raining. I think it was sort
of in between. And he went out to the small
depot and he was pleased to see and it was
no surprise that a lot of the people of Springfield
had come out to say goodbye to him. You know,
he was a beloved member of the community. It was
(10:04):
an emotional scene, and he spontaneously gave a short speech.
It's about nine sentences, but profoundly beautiful and as it
turned out, really strategic too, because it put Lincoln before
the country in a new light. I'm not sure at
all that he intended that it just happened, and in
(10:26):
those nine sentences he just said, I've you know me,
I've lived among you for twenty five years. We've been
friends and neighbors. My children have grown up among yours.
I'm leaving one child buried here. I'm now going with
the hardest assignment any president has ever had since Washington.
(10:50):
With God's help, I cannot fail. Without God's help, I
cannot succeed. Please pray for me. And the words were transcribed.
There were journalists there at the platform, and then one
journalist got on the train with him, and only a
minute or two after the train left, he got Lincoln
(11:12):
to take a pencil and paper and write it out
all over again and give it to him, and he
was able to telegraph it all around the country. So
we think of that as a long time ago, eighteen
sixty one, but in fact, with internet quickness, they were
able to get the words of that beautiful short speech
with lightning speed, and the telegraph was called the Lightning
(11:36):
and it really humanized Lincoln. It helped people reading the
next day in the newspaper to think, this is a
human being, This is like a neighbor. I would want
him for my neighbor. I know people like this. My
children play with the children of this other family over here,
and he's kind of like us. And it was a
(11:56):
really brilliant political stroke. And if he didn't mean it
to be one, he's just saying goodbye to his friends
and neighbors. But it made him seem like an everyman,
and that was a really smart way to begin the trip.
Talk about the role the train and the telegraph, two
remarkable innovations, roles to those two play in Lincoln's plans
(12:19):
and to Lincoln's advantage, And is it true that the
South sort of rejected that kind of change in innovation.
The train comes in in the early eighteen thirties. The
telegraph is later. It's invented by Samuel F. B. Morse,
and it's one of the great American inventions of the
(12:40):
nineteenth century, and it immediately changes politics and business. And
they are perfect for train tracks. The wires want to
go straight and train tracks go straight. And it turns
out they're good for the railroad too, because you can
wire up ahead when the train is coming, helps plan
(13:00):
the scheduling of the trains, it helps plan the loading
of the freight, and so businesses love all of this.
If you're textile mill owner or in any business at all,
and you've got a load of goods you want to
ship from New York to Philadelphia or Philadelphia to Pittsburgh,
(13:22):
the telegraph is your friend. You send it down to
your business partner down the line, and it just picks
up everything, and business accelerates and westward migration accelerates, and
Chicago is booming in the eighteen fifties, and Lincoln is
deriving some of his lawyer work from the exploding business
(13:45):
culture of Chicago. And the big railroad of Illinois is
the Illinois Central and they hire Lincoln for a lot
of cases. So the North is just booming as Lincoln's
star is rising, and the South is growing. All of
America is growing, but the South is growing in a
(14:06):
weird way. It's not growing nearly as fast. It's not
growing demographically, it has a much lower rate of increase
from immigration, and wealth is concentrated at the top with
families that own a lot of land. It's not an
upwardly mobile society the way the North is. And they're
(14:29):
also controlling the spread of information much more than the North.
So the North just loves newspapers and telegraphs and railroads,
and in the South they have to bring in railroads.
They can't just reject something that's obviously so good for business,
but they build different kinds of railroads, and they don't
(14:52):
like the telegraph quite as much, and they want to
control information. And it's just a culture that is not
as comfortable with of different opinions as you would have
in the North, or with different kinds of ethnic people.
That's a point of tension. As the North is growing
so fast, the South is looking at it and it's
(15:12):
beginning to criticize the kind of society it is, where
anybody can say anything, and they're all these poor white
people who are starting businesses for themselves, and there's a
kind of unattractive word Southerners begin to use. They call
them mudsills, kind of you know, lower middle class whites
(15:34):
in the North. They don't like all the immigrants either,
and they really don't like the free people of color.
They are free African Americans in the North, and it
just seems like a mess up there to an aristocratic
Southern wealthy family. And it's not just social snobbery, it's
(15:54):
also political fear because so many people are coming into
the North that the South is worried that the North
is going to have a lot of political power, which
is true, and what a time to be alive. But
for Lincoln, what a precarious time to be president. Assassination
blots were afoot. Following his election, Lincoln had only one
(16:15):
thirty eight percent of the popular vote in what was
a four way race. Talk about Lincoln leaving behind for
a relative of his wife, papers of a personal nature,
and the comment he made a fore voting comment that
his own death was on his mind. Talk about that. No,
it's shocking that our most beloved president became president with
(16:38):
such a tiny vote. I mean, the second lowest successful
vote in our history, less than forty percent is really
pretty bad. It's less than Herbert Hoover as the losing
candidate won when he lost in a landslide to Franklin
Roosevelt nineteen thirty two. So it's really not very impressive.
(16:59):
And how Lincoln turned that dismal result into his powerful
presidency and winning the Civil War and becoming our greatest
president is really an extraordinary conversion of a bad situation
into a huge triumph. He understands the seriousness of what
(17:22):
he's going into, and I mean, he's getting a lot
of death threats in the mail, and the political news
is bad, and the threats are coming really close to home.
There are things like, you know, drawings of him with
a noose around his neck. His wife saw that and
was very upset. He knows he's not coming back. When
we come back, more of this remarkable story, remarkable piece
(17:44):
of American history, Lincoln on the Verge. Here on our
American stories, and we continue with our American stories and
(18:10):
with Edward Widmer his book Lincoln on the Verge Thirteen
Days to Washington. When we last left off, Lincoln had
left Springfield, Illinois on a train bound for Washington, DC
to face the largest crisis in American history. Edward, let's
talk about New York City, a big part of this trip.
At the time, New York City had a larger population
(18:32):
than the entire Confederacy, but Lincoln only one about thirty
percent of the city's vote. It's a northern city, but
it had a lot of Southern influence. Talk about that
New York City is so much bigger than any other
city that it's almost like it's already a twentieth century city,
forty years before the twentieth century has actually arrived, and
(18:55):
no other city comes close. I think Philadelphia might be
the largest, and it's not that close to New York's size.
And New York is interesting. These different reasons don't all
make sense together, but they're all part of the picture
of New York. It's very northern feeling in some ways.
(19:16):
It's teeming with immigrants, primarily German and Irish. At that point,
a lot of immigrants are living in immigrant neighborhoods in
New York City. That feels pretty pretty northern. And it's
also filled with media culture, with newspapers and magazines. And
it's also Southern in powerful ways. And there are business interests,
(19:42):
primarily around Wall Street that love investing in Southern plantations
and in slavery itself. And it's also a place where
Southern ships come. One of the ways in which slavery
made a lot of money for the South cotton was
turned into clothing. And a lot of textile mills are
(20:05):
in Europe. I mean they're in the North too, but
huge numbers are in places like Birmingham, Manchester and the
north of England. France has textile mills. And so the
South is shipping its cotton from its ports like New
Orleans and Savannah, and they would stop in New York
for a rest, and then the ship would would either
(20:26):
offload it's cotton or just keep going to Europe, and
so New York shipping is very involved in slavery. But
then also New York finance Wall Street is investing and
giving loans, helping Northern investors to make money by investing
in Southern slavery. So it's really important for everyone to
(20:49):
understand that the South wasn't the only evil actor, and
so our slavery was concerned that a lot of northern
business investors concentrated then as now around Wall Street, were
propping up the whole system of slavery, and they paid
off politicians. New York's mayor at the time Lincoln came
(21:10):
through was a pretty pro slavery guy named Fernando Wood,
and Lincoln had to deal with him as he came through.
So it wasn't just people throwing flowers in his path.
There was a lot of aggressive behavior toward Lincoln as
he's coming toward Washington. And talk about the way Lincoln
worked New York, because my goodness, he went everywhere from
(21:31):
Wall Street to a night at the opera. How did
he swing that when he knew that the elites in
that city were probably looking at him as if he
were some kind of Western hick. I mean, he and
his wife were a little bit uncomfortable in New York.
I think she was more uncomfortable than he was. He
did awkward things. He wore the wrong colored gloves when
(21:53):
he went to the opera. You're supposed to wear white gloves,
and he wore black gloves, and people laughed at him.
I wouldn't have known that, and he didn't know that. So,
you know, he had to endure a little bit of
snickering at his expense. But he could handle that a
little more easily than Mary Todd Lincoln could. But he
was you know, he had advisors who were helping him.
(22:16):
One of his advisors was the man he beat for
the nomination, William Seward, who was a New York senator.
He's actually from upstate New York, but you know he
knows New York City too, and he's got his friends
helping Lincoln, and they are helping to plan the train
trip too. So I think Lincoln had friends as well
as enemies everywhere along the route, and he always had
(22:40):
friends among the people. The people came out everywhere he
was to look at him. And my book benefited a
lot from some descriptions Walt Whitman, who was a kind
of working class Carpenter and poet wrote a beautiful description
of seeing Lincoln going into his hotel. So I was
grateful for some of the people who kept diaries or
(23:02):
just wrote about it in their journals or later after
the fact. And New York had, you know, it had
a great working class population in addition to all of
the financial types on Wall Street, and those people were
behind Lincoln. Lincoln then goes to Philadelphia where he gives
an important speech an Independence Hall, the place where, of course,
(23:24):
the Declaration of Independence was written. The Declaration of Independence
states quote that all men are created equal. Talk about
that word all, because it's an important word to Lincoln.
What did it mean to him? All men are created equal.
So the word all is right there, and it strongly
(23:45):
implies all human beings. So it's a pretty loaded word all.
And so Lincoln is holding this truth against the South
and saying, you are violating the spirit of our country.
And it was a very effect of argument, and it
was a form of soft abolitionism that really worked for
(24:06):
him at one over Middle America. And yet he could
keep running with it up to and including the Emancipation
Proclamation and then the tremendous amendments to the Constitution, the
first of which was done in his lifetime, but following
the Civil War, that made real freedom, civil rights, the
(24:26):
freedom to participate in our politics and our society available
to all people in the United States of America. All
of that came out of his reading of the Declaration
of Independence, and he gave a beautiful speech to that
effect in Philadelphia. He leads up to it at Trenton,
(24:46):
and then the next morning he goes into Independence Hall
and it achieves a liftoff and says, every feeling I've
ever had politically has come to me from the Declaration
of Independence. And it's a powerful moment, and people in
the room knew it. They knew that it meant something
emotionally to him, not just politically, and that becomes the
(25:09):
Lincoln message at Gettysburg two years later, it's basically the
same thing. I mean, yes, he uses exquisite language at Gettysburg,
he takes lift off even higher, but he's gone a
long way towards that message, even with what he says
in Independence Hall in Philadelphia in February eighteen sixty one.
(25:31):
Lincoln would go on to add at the very end
of this speech the following words quote, I have said
nothing but what I am willing to live by, and
if it be the pleasure of Almighty God, die by.
He meant those words, didn't he Edward. I think everyone
listening to this speech believed. He believed those words talk
(25:52):
about that there was a feeling in the room of
something very powerful had just happened. After he talked about
what the declaration meant to him, and then I'm glad
you reminded me that he added that incredible closing thought
about assassination would not stop him from loving his country
(26:13):
and wanting to serve his country. And what made it
so powerful was, in fact, he had just been told
that there was a huge assassination conspiracy trying to take
his life. The next day as he went through Baltimore,
and already he was trying to figure out how to
get around Baltimore or through it without getting killed. Even
(26:35):
with that heavy pressure on him, he still was able
to speak beautifully. And then he's beginning to plan a
secret railroad journey that will take him through Baltimore in
the middle of the night by a different route than
the one that has been announced. So there are all
these converging lines in his head at that moment, and
it's just it's like a thriller at that moment. And
(26:57):
when we return, those lines will verge in Baltimore, Maryland.
The book is Lincoln on the Verge, Thirteen Days to Washington.
The author is Edward Whitmer. More of this remarkable story,
the last part of this story here on our American story,
(27:37):
and we returned to our American stories and the final
part of the story of Lincoln's train trip to Washington
from Springfield, Illinois in eighteen sixty one. The book is
Lincoln on the Verge, Thirteen Days to Washington, and the storyteller,
the author, the historian, is Edward Whitmer. When we last
(27:58):
left off, Lincoln had given an all important speech at
Independence Hall in Philadelphia, talking about the word all in
the Declaration of Independence and what it meant to him.
Now he was on his way to Baltimore, Maryland, the
biggest slave city in the country, and there it was
just a few miles from DC. There is also something
(28:18):
of foot in Baltimore that caused Lincoln to have to
change up dates. Talk about that well. His destination of Washington,
d C. Is a very southern city, and I argue
at the beginning of the book that there was a
bit of a mistake made in seventeen ninety when Alexander
Hamilton and James Madison and Thomas Jefferson probably made a
(28:42):
secret deal to move the capital to the Potomac River
in return for some legislation that Hamilton really wanted. In
seventeen ninety, it was just two southern Baltimore to the north,
is the biggest city in the slave holding part of
the country, so Washington is south of other slave places,
and it's just really hard for Lincoln to get there
(29:05):
as an antislavery politician. So in the winter following his election,
there are all these rumors flying around the country that
there may be people trying to kill him, but no
one really knows when and where until a remarkable woman
named Dorothea Dix finds out all of the details of
the plot. She's a mental health advocate. She's actually from
(29:26):
the North, but she's accepted in southern circles. But while
traveling through the South in the fall of eighteen sixty,
she picks up the intelligence that a huge plot to
kill Lincoln is focusing on Baltimore and on railroad tracks
and bridges coming into Baltimore. They might blow up a
bomb under the train as it comes through, or they
might try to shoot Lincoln or stab him as he's
(29:49):
transferring from one station to another. That's how you got
through Baltimore. You got off at one station and did
a transfer in a horse and carriage to another station,
and then kept going. And so she goes to the
head of the railroad and tells him about this plot.
The head of the railroad hires this detective, Alan Pinkerton,
to come from Chicago East to infiltrate the plot. And
(30:13):
he brings a very strong woman as one of his agents,
and she's a genius of disguise and impersonation, and they
get all the intelligence up to Lincoln's entourage, and Lincoln
understands he doesn't want to do it, but he understands
he has to go in the middle of the night
because that's safer than trying to force his way through.
(30:34):
He doesn't have a lot of security with him, and
he makes it, and he goes through all night and
arrives at Washington at six in the morning. Lincoln finally
does make it to DC, and you paint this picture
of DC at the time you talk about the throngs
of people who are there to see him, including African Americans,
people who hate Lincoln, and sharpshooters trying to keep Lincoln safe.
(30:57):
This is a remarkable display of American diversity, not only
in the people, but what's on everybody's minds. Talk about
this final part of the trip and this great triumph
in Washington. The day of the first inaugural speech, there
was a lot of fear in the air that the
danger was still there. Paper I read I read only
(31:20):
a few days ago. I reread it describing a fear
that someone would try to shoot him as he was
giving his inaugural address. And you think about it, when
you're a president, you have to give that inaugural and
you want as many people to see you as possible.
It's a democratic ritual, it's our main democratic ritual. But
(31:42):
that also makes you incredibly exposed. You stand out on
the east portico of the Capitol and people can see
you for half a mile around, you know. And so
they did their best to protect him. There were army
sharpshooters on the roof near by, and there were plain
(32:03):
closed police in the crowd. But still people could get
close to Lincoln, and so there was a great fear
that day, but he made it, and you know, he
consistently made brave decisions. He was picked up by the
outgoing President James Buchanan in a horse and carriage and
(32:24):
he was offered the choice, we could have a closed
top or an open top, and he said, absolutely open
it up. So he was a brave person on the
way to the Capitol and always standing straight up as
he gave the speech. And he always wanted to fortify
(32:45):
the larger not just the country, the United States, but
what democracy meant to people everywhere. And because of his
courage in propping up American democracy, other friends of democracy
in other countries really took heart. And even though he
(33:06):
was assassinated, as we all know, he was assassinated after
saving American democracy, and in France, people like Victor Hugo
were inspired by America's success at keeping the democratic system going.
And in the late nineteenth century you see real progress
in France and in Western Europe. And then when World
(33:28):
War One breaks out, I mean many decades after Lincoln,
Woodrow Wilson calls it a war to save democracy and
the triumph of democracy in the twentieth century, especially in
World War Two. I really think can be linked to
Lincoln's courage in these dark days in eighteen sixty one,
(33:49):
you right as you close out quote nearly eight hundred
thousand brave young men gave their lives and service to
their conflicting ideas of the nation. No America and was
untouched by it. It touches us still, Yet the Republic survives,
sustained by the same perseverance Lincoln showed on this trip.
(34:10):
From the moment he arrived, things improved. Democracy refused to die,
It deepened. Talk about that, well, thank you for reading that.
I remember working hard on that language because I wanted
to include the South. I wanted to include Southerners, even
(34:30):
those who fought against Lincoln and the United States of America.
I wanted to include them the way he did, and
he was very clear in his second inaugural address that
they were included in his idea of America. There were
two truths that he fought the war over. The one
is that all men are created equal, really important truth
(34:53):
about human beings and their capacities, and the others that
the United States of America is a permanent union of
its states, that they cannot succede unless all of them
agree to it, and that was a kind of legal
fiction of sorts. You could argue that not everyone agreed
(35:16):
with that when he said it at the beginning of
the Civil War, but he made it true by winning,
and now it really is true. I mean, now we
are inseparable, and I wanted the South to feel included
in this story. It's their victory too, because we made
a great country together before the Civil War and after
(35:37):
the Civil War. And that's why it's such a hard
ward to talk about, because some people would like to
say it was pure treason to fire on the flag
of the United States and the cause was not good.
They did fight with incredible bravery and skill, but I
think the overall population, you know, think of the women
(36:03):
enduring so much suffering, and the African Americans who were
suffering in unbelievable ways as they were asked to do
more and more to support the economy of the South
while not having any rights. And finally at the end
they were asked to fight, but again not with any rights.
And yet I share with Lincoln a feeling that we
(36:24):
wanted them to feel like Americans. As soon as the
war was over, to be repatriated and to be included
in our history, to be included in a meaningful and
affectionate way. It's strongly tainted by racism. I don't think
you can separate it from slavery and the terrible injustices
(36:47):
that were done to black people under the flag of
the Confederacy. But I think we can appreciate Southern courage
and ways in which Southerners themselves worked out some of
these things which they did. I mean Northerners helped sometimes,
and Southerners did it on their own sometimes too, and Northerners,
(37:07):
like I tried to say, had plenty of problems of
their own as well. So I do love Lincoln, and
I think his vision of history was correct, and democracy
is beautiful, and immigration has been a good thing, and
being color blind has been a great thing in America.
And when we finally included women in who gets to
(37:28):
be a part of this great democracy, that was a
good thing too. But in the spirit of inclusivity, I
like to include the South also. We can just learn
from all of their mistakes, Northern and Southern. And Lincoln
wanted us all to be together in his final speeches
and so I wanted to end the book in that spirit.
(37:50):
And you've been listening to Edward Widmer, and his book
is Lincoln on the Verge Thirteen Days to Washington, and
it's a terrific read. Go to Amazon dot com, cut
up for yourself, pick up a copy for a friend,
anyone who's interested in this nation's history. Lincoln on the
Verge the story of his thirteen day trip to Washington, DC.
(38:11):
That story here on our American Story
Host
Lee Habeeb
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