Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [454]
The crowd stirred uneasily, and the men on the dais tried with varying success to conceal their dismay. “Stanton looked like a petrified man,” Noah Brooks observed. “All this is in wretched bad taste,” Speed whispered to Welles. “The man is certainly deranged.” Welles whispered to Stanton that “Johnson is either drunk or crazy.” Dennison, the new postmaster general, “was red and white by turns,” while Justice Samuel Nelson’s jaw “dropped clean down in blank horror.” Seward and Lincoln alone appeared unruffled. Seward remained as “serene as summer,” charitably suggesting to Welles that Johnson’s performance was a by-product of “emotion on returning and revisiting the Senate.” Lincoln listened in silence, “patiently waiting” for the harangue to end, his eyes shut so that no one could discern his discomfort. “You need not be scared,” he said a few days later; Johnson had “made a bad slip” but was not “a drunkard.”
When Johnson finished at last, the audience proceeded outside to the east front of the Capitol for the inaugural ceremony. As the president appeared on the platform, observed Noah Brooks, “the sun, which had been obscured all day, burst forth in its unclouded meridian splendor and flooded the spectacle with glory and light.” It seemed to many, including the superstitious Lincoln, an auspicious omen, as did the appearance of the newly completed Capitol dome, topped with the statue of Freedom.
If the spirited crowd expected a speech exalting recent Union victories, they were disappointed. In keeping with his lifelong tendency to consider all sides of a troubled situation, Lincoln urged a more sympathetic understanding of the nation’s alienated citizens in the South. There were no unbridgeable differences, he insisted: “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”
In his Springfield speech a decade earlier, Lincoln had maintained that he could not condemn the South for an inability to end slavery when he himself knew of no easy solution. Now the president suggested that God had given “to both North and South, this terrible war” as punishment for their shared sin of slavery. Speaking with “the eloquence of the prophets,” he continued, “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’”
Drawing upon the rare wisdom of a temperament that consistently displayed uncommon magnanimity toward those who opposed him, he then issued his historic plea to his fellow countrymen: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and