Lincoln on the Verge by Ted Widmer

Author:Ted Widmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

Lincoln’s parade (New-York Illustrated News, March, 2, 1861)

THE PARADE

Lincoln’s parade was a glorious chaos from the start.105 One observer wrote, “Such a crowd as greeted his arrival I have never seen. A distance of probably six miles, on the route from the Depot to the Hotel, the streets were positively jammed with human beings, of all sizes, sexes, and colors.”106

The New York Herald noted that Lincoln’s parade route, down Ninth Avenue, was in a neighborhood that “seldom” received dignitaries. Whether consciously or not, Lincoln had chosen the perfect way to enter this vainglorious city. To the people around the station, his arrival was a “godsend.” They swarmed around the neighboring streets, which, the Herald observed, “are as clean as they usually are,” and cheered madly from windows and rooftops.

Once again, the simple fact of Lincoln’s physiognomy affected them. The Tribune wrote, “A glimpse of his plain, straightforward, honest face, so full of deep earnest honest thought… so won the multitude that they burst into such spontaneous, irrepressible cheers as gladdened the heart and moistened the eye.” Just to see him built confidence in “the coming man” and raised hopes that he would deal with the “almost civil war now raging in the land.”107

At Twenty-Third Street, the procession turned east toward Madison Square. At the corner of Twenty-Third Street and Fifth Avenue, a young woman named Lavinia Goodell, the daughter of an Ohio abolitionist, watched breathlessly from a balcony. “All the city was alive,” she wrote to her sister, using all of his nicknames:

“I have seen ‘Abe’—‘Old Abe’—‘Honest Old Abe’ &c - &c !!!”…

Lincoln was riding hatless, and she found him “much better looking than is represented.” She noticed his “long nose,” adding that he was “thin, energetic looking, smiling and pleasant, frank and open.” He looks young, she thought to herself, before concluding, “Altogether I was quite favorably struck with him, and feel deeply interested in his welfare.”108

A few minutes later, two blocks to the south, a twelve-year-old boy saw him pass by fleetingly. For Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the impression was seared forever into his consciousness as he saw “the figure of a tall and very dark man” bowing to the crowds. Many years later, he would create one of the great Lincoln sculptures, based on this memory of a few seconds.109

Some noticed the sadness inside him, though, and were troubled by it. A preacher, Dr. S. Irenaeus Prime, remembered later that Lincoln seemed “weary, sad, feeble, and faint” during the parade—and not at all like “the man for the hour.”110 George William Curtis noticed, “He looked at the people with a weary, melancholy air, as if he felt already the heavy burden of his duty.”111

But most were swept up in the day’s excitement. The procession continued down Fifth Avenue toward Union Square, where another throng was waiting. Inside the presidential party, John Nicolay looked out and beheld “a continuous fringe of humanity” crowding “the side streets, doors, balconies, windows” and “even the roofs of buildings” in their desperation to get “a clear view of the president-elect.

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