Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [486]
“You see in these armies,” Stanton predicted, “the foundation of our Republic—our future railway managers, congressmen, bank presidents, senators, manufacturers, judges, governors, and diplomats; yes, and not less than half a dozen presidents.” (He was very nearly right, for five of the next seven presidents would be Civil War veterans: Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, and William McKinley.)
Over a quarter of a century earlier, in 1838, young Abraham Lincoln had spoken with fervor of the veterans of the Revolutionary War, who were by then mostly gone, the fabled scenes of their great struggle for American independence growing “more and more dim by the lapse of time.” In that war, “nearly every adult male had been a participant,” he said, “in the form of a husband, a father, a son or a brother,” until “a living history was to be found in every family.” Such he had said was no longer true for his generation.
Now a new “living history” had been forged in the families of nearly three million Union soldiers who had fought to create what their matured leader had called “a new birth of freedom” to ensure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The soldiers marching down Pennsylvania Avenue that warm spring day knew they had accomplished something that would change their lives and their nation forever.
The second day belonged to the Army of the West, marching with solemn dignity behind General Sherman. “The streets were filled with people to see the pageant,” Sherman recalled. “When I reached the Treasury-building, and looked back, the sight was simply magnificent. The column was compact, and the glittering muskets looked like a solid mass of steel, moving with the regularity of a pendulum.”
When Sherman came to the corner of Lafayette Square, someone pointed to an upper window of a brick house where Seward, still too feeble to walk on his own, had been carried to witness the parade. “I moved in that direction and took off my hat to Mr. Seward,” Sherman recalled. “He recognized the salute, returned it, and then we rode on steadily past the President, saluting with our swords.”
All of Washington was present, Gideon Welles sadly noted—congressmen, senators, justices, diplomats, governors, military officers, the members of the cabinet, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. “But Abraham Lincoln was not there. All felt this.” None felt that absence more keenly than the members of his cabinet, the remarkable group of rivals whom Lincoln had brought into his official family. They had fiercely opposed one another and often contested their chief on important questions, but, as Seward later remarked, “a Cabinet which should agree at once on every such question would be no better or safer than one counsellor.” By calling these men to his side, Lincoln had afforded them an opportunity to exercise their talents to the fullest and to share in the labor and the glory of the struggle that would reunite and transform their country and secure their own places in posterity.
“I HAVE NO DOUBT that Lincoln will be the conspicuous figure of the war,” predicted Ulysses S. Grant. “He was incontestably the greatest man I ever knew.”
The poet Walt Whitman felt much the same. “I have more than once fancied to myself,” Whitman wrote in 1888, “the time when the present century has closed, and a new one open’d, and the men and deeds of that contest have become somewhat vague and mythical.” He fancied that at some commemoration of those earlier days, an “ancient soldier” would sit surrounded by a group of young men whose eyes and “eager questions” would betray their sense of wonder. “What! have you seen Abraham