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By Root 1775 0

” the editors complained, to equate the blood that “trickled from the lacerated backs of the negroes” with the carnage of “the bloodiest war in history.” “The president’s theology,” it added, “smacks as strongly of the dark ages as does Pope Pius’s politics.” But many Republicans also found the speech puzzling. Why, they asked, had Lincoln not promised an end to the war and laid out “some definite line of policy” regarding Reconstruction? A few contemporaries recognized the greatness of the address. Charles Francis Adams Jr., the colonel of a black regiment, wrote to his father, the ambassador in London, “That rail-splitting lawyer is one of the wonders of the day…. This inaugural strikes me in its grand simplicity and directness as being for all time the historical keynote of this war.” Overall, however, as Lincoln himself recognized, the address was “not immediately popular,” although he remained confident that it would “wear as well—perhaps better than—anything I have produced.” Lincoln thought he knew why people did not like his speech: “Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.” On one thing everyone agreed: as George Templeton Strong noted in his diary, the second inaugural was “unlike any American state paper of this century.”11

Nine days after the inaugural, after prolonged debate, the Confederate Congress authorized the enlistment of black soldiers in the southern armies. A few days later, Lincoln took note of this act of desperation in remarks to an Indiana regiment in Washington. “I have always thought that all men should be free,” he remarked, but if any deserved to be slaves it was those willing to fight to keep themselves or others in bondage.12

On April 3, 1865, Robert E. Lee’s army finally abandoned Petersburg. The road to Richmond, twenty miles to the north, now lay open. As government officials fled the defenseless city and a fire raged out of control, destroying much of the business district, Union forces led by the all-black Fifth Massachusetts cavalry entered the capital of the Confederacy. Scenes never before witnessed on this continent followed. Blacks thronged the streets, dancing, praying, and singing, “Slavery chain done broke at last.” Garland H. White, the chaplain of a black regiment, was called on to make a speech to a “vast multitude.” He “proclaimed for the first time in that city freedom to all mankind. After which the doors of all the slave pens were thrown open, and thousands came out shouting and praising God, and Father, or Master Abe.”

The next day Lincoln walked the streets of Richmond, accompanied only by a small detachment of sailors. “The colored population,” wrote T. Morris Chester, a black war correspondent for the Philadelphia Press, “was wild with excitement.” At every step, Lincoln was besieged by emancipated slaves, who, to his embarrassment, fell on their knees and hailed him as their messiah or pressed forward to kiss his hand. “I know that I am free,” one black woman exclaimed, “for I have seen Father Abraham and felt him.” The city’s white residents remained indoors. Having always considered their slaves loyal and contented, they were stunned by the reception the black population gave to Lincoln and the conquering (or liberating) Union army. Charles Sumner hoped that Lincoln’s reception in Richmond would affect his ideas about Reconstruction. “He saw with his own eyes,” Sumner wrote to Salmon P. Chase, “that the only people who showed themselves were negroes…. Never was I more convinced of the utter impossibility of any organization which is not founded on the votes of the negroes.”13

Hoping to bring the war to an immediate end, Lincoln met in Richmond on April 4 and 5 with John A. Campbell, a former justice of the Supreme Court and one of the emissaries who had taken part in the Hampton Roads conference. Campbell proposed that Lincoln allow Virginia’s Confederate legislature to convene in order to repeal the ordinance of secession and withdraw the state’s troops from southern armies, whereupon Lee