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By Root 6707 0

dinner prepared.” As Buchanan bade farewell, he said to Lincoln, “If you are as happy, my dear sir, on entering the house as I am in leaving it and returning home, you are the happiest man in this country.” After some hasty unpacking, the Lincolns dressed for the Inaugural Ball, held in the rear of the City Hall, in a room referred to as the Muslim Palace of Aladdin “because of the abundance of white draperies trimmed with blue used in its decoration.” Brightened by five enormous chandeliers, the room accommodated two thousand people, though the hooped crinolines worn by the women took up a good deal of space. Seward was there with his daughter-in-law Anna. Chase was accompanied by the lovely Kate. Still, this night Mary shone as the brightest star. “Dressed all in blue, with a necklace and bracelets of gold and pearls,” she danced the quadrille with her old beau Stephen Douglas and remained at the ball for several hours after the departure of her exhausted husband.

While the party was still in full swing, word of Lincoln’s inaugural speech was making its way across the country, carried by telegraph and printed in dozens of evening newspapers. In Auburn, Frances and Fanny waited in suspense throughout the night for the paper to arrive. Finally, Fanny heard a sound downstairs and raced to find out the news. “What an inappreciable relief,” Fanny wrote in her diary when she read that the ceremony went off without violence. “For months I have felt constant anxiety for Father’s safety—& of course joined in the fears so often expressed that Lincoln would never see the 5th of March.” The news traveled more slowly west of St. Joseph, Missouri, where the telegraph lines stopped. Dozens of pony express riders, traveling in relays, carried the text of the address to the Pacific Coast. They did their job well. In a record time of “seven days and seventeen hours,” Lincoln’s words could be read in Sacramento, California.

Reactions to his speech varied widely, depending on the political persuasion of the commentators. Republican papers lauded the address as “grand and admirable in every respect,” and “convincing in argument, concise and pithy in manner.” It was “eminently conciliatory,” the Philadelphia Bulletin observed, extolling the president’s “determination to secure the rights of the whole country, of every State under the Constitution.” The Commercial Advertiser of New York claimed that the inaugural was “the work of Mr. Lincoln’s own pen and hand, unaltered by any to whom he confided its contents.”

In Northern Democratic papers, the tone was less charitable. A “wretchedly botched and unstatesmanlike paper,” the Hartford Times opined. “It is he that is the nullifier,” the Albany Atlas and Argus raged. “It is he that defies the will of the majority. It is he that initiates Civil War.” Not surprisingly, negative reactions were stronger in the South. The Richmond Enquirer argued that the address was “couched in the cool, unimpassioned, deliberate language of the fanatic…pursuing the promptings of fanaticism even to the dismemberment of the Government with the horrors of civil war.” In ominous language, the Wilmington, North Carolina, Herald warned that the citizens of America “might as well open their eyes to the solemn fact that war is inevitable.”

But beneath the blustery commentary in the majority of Southern papers, the historian Benjamin Thomas notes, the address “won some favorable comment in the all-important loyal slave states” of Virginia and North Carolina. This was the audience Seward had targeted when he told Lincoln to soften the tone of his speech. Indeed, Seward was greatly relieved, not only because he realized many of his suggestions had been adopted, but because Lincoln’s conciliatory stance had given him cover with his critics in Congress. He could now leave the Senate, he told his wife, “without getting any bones broken,” content with having provided a foundation “on which an Administration can stand.”

Likewise, Charles Francis Adams, Sr., felt that a great burden had been lifted from his shoulders when Lincoln