Abraham Lincoln by Thomas Keneally

Author:Thomas Keneally
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US

Having rented out their home, the Lincolns had spent their last days in Springfield in the Chenery House hotel. Although it was hard to believe in exultant and apparently cordial Springfield, there were many threats abroad against Lincoln. Aware of this, he wanted Mary to travel separately from him. Since Mary had her own strong opinions on this, the best Lincoln could do was to arrange that he and Robert would leave by one train, and that Mary, Willie, and Tad would meet them in Indianapolis by a later one.

So Lincoln and Robert and their entourage went off to the depot at the Great Western Railroad, where, that icy day, a thousand people had gathered, demanding a speech. “To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything,” Abraham said. “Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I may return, with a task before me greater than ever rested upon Washington.” Then, since such a reference was necessary, he invoked the Divine Being, earnestly but in a somehow unspecific manner.

His traveling companions included John Nicolay and a more recently hired and adoring twenty-three-year-old secretary named John Hay. Besides the secretaries and Robert, Ward Lamon, heavily armed, also accompanied the president-elect, and Elmer Ellsworth, a young militiaman-law clerk for whom the Lincolns had a special affection. Orville Browning and Gov. Richard Yates intended to go as far as Indianapolis. Lincoln’s military escort consisted of officers who would have a large future in the coming conflict—Maj. David Hunter, Col. Edwin Sumner, Capt. John Pope.

At Indianapolis, Lincoln made a firm speech, asking, “If the United States should merely hold and retake its own forts and other property, and collect the duties on foreign importations, or even withhold the mails from places where they were habitually violated—would any or all of these things be ‘invasion’ or ‘coercion’?” For forts in the South had been occupied by Rebels, and post offices, treasuries, and customs houses taken over by secessionist states. Yet he still believed secession to be a mere foolish phase, a show of rebelliousness.

After Indianapolis he went through Columbus, then addressed the German Americans of Cincinnati. People remarked on how he “threw off his overcoat in an offhand, easy manner,” in a backwoods style that caused many good-natured remarks. But he was not at ease. At one stop he snapped at Robert in a hotel room when a draft of his inaugural address was temporarily misplaced. He had been working on it since Springfield and believed it might yet, with its sane, level tone, save the Union. Rolling into upstate New York, he heard that Jefferson Davis had taken an oath as president of the Confederacy, and the news, by giving a new solidity to the Confederacy, shook him so much that he apologized to the crowd at the statehouse at Albany for having neither the voice nor the strength for a longer address. In New York City, traveling in a barouche to the Astor House hotel, he saw banners pleading, WELCOME ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

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