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By Root 1738 0

wounded Lincoln while he sat at Ford’s Theatre. He was carried to a house across the street, where his life slowly ebbed away. Before dawn, Secretary of the Navy Welles left Lincoln’s bedside and went outside. Already, mourners thronged the streets of Washington. “The colored people,” Welles wrote, “and there were at this time more of them perhaps than of whites, were painfully affected.” A little after seven in the morning, Lincoln died. His passing inspired an unprecedented outpouring of grief, and the first national funeral in the country’s history. Millions of men, women, and children viewed Lincoln’s casket as his remains made their way on a circuitous 1,700-mile journey from Washington to Springfield, with stops in more than 100 cities. It essentially retraced the route Lincoln had taken in February 1861 on the way to his inauguration. Reading the accounts of his funeral journey, one senses that Americans recognized that Lincoln’s experience during the war mirrored their own. For, as his bitter critic the New York World noted after his death, “some have changed more rapidly, some more slowly than he; but there are few of his countrymen, who have not changed at all.” Yet change was hardly total. When Lincoln’s body reached New York, the city council sought to prevent blacks from marching in the procession, only to be overruled by the War Department.21

Coupled with the achievements of piloting the United States through its greatest crisis and presiding over the emancipation of the slaves, the manner of his death ensured Lincoln’s place in the pantheon of the most revered American leaders. That the assassination occurred on Good Friday heightened the conviction that Lincoln had sacrificed himself to redeem a sinful nation. At the time of his death and for years thereafter, Lincoln was remembered primarily as the Great Emancipator. Not until the turn of the century, when the process of (white) reconciliation was far advanced, would Americans forget or suppress the centrality of slavery and emancipation to the war experience. Lincoln would then be transformed into a symbol of national unity, and the Gettysburg Address, which did not explicitly mention slavery, would, in popular memory, supplant the Emancipation Proclamation as the greatest embodiment of his ideas. More recently, we have returned to the insight Lincoln offered in the second inaugural: slavery was the war’s cause and emancipation its most profound outcome. To which may be added that these questions were central to Lincoln’s own rise to greatness.22

“WITH THE END OF THE WAR,” wrote a northern editor in April 1865, “the real trial of our statesmanship, our patriotism, and our patience will begin.”23 No one knows what Lincoln would have done had he lived to complete his second term. As his last speech and final cabinet meeting demonstrated, Reconstruction policy was in flux when Lincoln died. Despite his determined support for the Louisiana regime, Lincoln had never been wedded to a single plan for Reconstruction. Different approaches had operated simultaneously in different parts of the South, all of them conceived as ways to weaken the Confederacy and secure the abolition of slavery rather than as fixed blueprints for the postwar South. None had been very successful. Lincoln had failed to bring a single reconstructed state back into the Union. The new governments he had initiated had not revealed a willingness to deal justly with the former slaves.

What we do know is that Lincoln was succeeded in office by a man who lacked all the qualities of greatness that he possessed. Lincoln was intellectually curious, willing to listen to criticism, attuned to the currents of northern public opinion, and desirous of getting along with Congress. Over the course of the war he had developed a deep sense of compassion for the slaves he had helped to liberate, and a concern for their fate—what the New York Times called, in commenting on the second inaugural, a “feeling for the bondmen and the sense of the great wrong done to them.”24 Andrew Johnson was self-absorbed,