Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [453]
But Beall came from a prominent Virginia family, and a wide array of supporters petitioned Lincoln for clemency, including Orville Browning, Monty Blair, eight dozen congressmen, and six United States senators. They argued that Beall was acting as a commissioned officer in the Confederate army and should not be treated as “a robber, brigand, and pirate.” The case troubled Lincoln greatly, but he felt compelled to support General Dix. “I had to stand firm,” he told an acquaintance a few weeks later, “and I even had to turn away his poor sister when she came and begged for his life, and let him be executed, and he was executed, and I can’t get the distress out of my mind yet.”
The week before his second inaugural on March 4, Lincoln announced that he would “not receive callers (except members of the Cabinet) for any purpose whatever, between the hours of three and seven o’clock p.m.” He needed solitude to work on his inaugural speech. “The hopeful condition of the Union cause” had brought thousands of visitors to Washington, the National Republican reported. They were anxious not only to partake of the inaugural revelries but to share in the general elation that pervaded the capital. The city was so overcrowded that the parlors of all the leading hotels “were occupied by ladies and gentlemen, sitting up all night because no beds could be found for them.”
Frederick Douglass decided to join “in the grand procession of citizens from all parts of the country.” Blacks had been excluded from previous inaugural festivities, but with soldiers of both races “mingling their blood,” it seemed to him that “it was not too great an assumption for a colored man to offer his congratulations to the President with those of other citizens.” The evening before the inauguration, he visited Chase’s Sixth Street home. There, he later recalled, he helped Kate “in placing over her honored father’s shoulders the new robe then being made in which he was to administer the oath to the reelected President.” As he looked at the new Chief Justice, Douglass recollected the “early anti-slavery days” of their first acquaintance. Chase had “welcomed [him] to his home and his table when to do so was a strange thing.”
The steady rain on the morning of March 4 did not dampen the spirits of the estimated fifty thousand citizens gathered at the Capitol to witness the inauguration. Invited guests poured into the Senate chamber for the first part of the ceremony, which included a farewell address by the outgoing vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, and the swearing in of Andrew Johnson. Shortly before noon, a stir in the galleries revealed the arrival of the “notables”—generals, governors, the justices of the Supreme Court, the cabinet members, led by Seward, and finally, the president himself, whose chair was positioned in the middle of the front row. Mary Lincoln was seated in the Diplomatic Gallery, surrounded by members of the foreign ministries. “One ambassador was so stiff with gold lace,” Noah Brooks observed, “that he could not sit down except with great difficulty and had to unbutton before he could get his feet on the floor.”
After Hamlin delivered a graceful farewell address, Andrew Johnson rose to take the oath. His face was “extraordinarily red,” his balance precarious. He appeared to observers to be “in a state of manifest intoxication.” For twenty long minutes, he spoke incoherently, repeatedly declaring his plebeian background and his pride that such a humble man “could rise from the ranks, under the Constitution, to the proud position of the second place in the gift of the people.” Pivoting