With Malice Toward None: A Biography of Abraham Lincoln

by Stephen B. Oates

Moreover, she developed a deep compassion, born of her own suffering and her friendship with Lizzie Keckley, for “all the oppressed colored people.” She helped Lizzie care for “contraband” blacks who now filled up Washington—and even persuaded Lincoln to contribute two hundred dollars for them because “the cause of humanity requires it.”

After McClellan had gone, Lincoln made a vow, a covenant. If the general won a victory, Lincoln would consider it “an indication of Divine Will” that God had “decided the question in favor of the slaves” and that it was Lincoln’s duty to “move forward in the cause of emancipation.”

Able-bodied black men, of course, could now be enlisted as soldiers. But what should be done with the rest? Obviously they couldn’t be sent North, wrote a correspondent with Rosecrans’s army, “in consequence of the heartless bigotry of the people of the free states.”

the Fifty-fourth finally had to retreat. And so in a narrow technical sense the battle of Fort Wagner was a failure. But in a larger sense it was a tremendous victory for black Americans—it was their Bunker Hill, the New York Tribune declared—because it shattered the myth of Negro passivity and demonstrated to the army that blacks could be capable and courageous fighting men. After that, Negro units were to serve on the front lines in every theater from Texas to the Virginia and Carolina coasts. In all, some 180,000 blacks—a majority of them emancipated slaves—were to fight in Union military forces, adding enormous strength to Lincoln’s war machine.

The Massachusetts 54th's role in history.

“the how and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln.”

He was “the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely,” Douglass said later, “who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color.”

Frederick Douglass on Lincoln.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” He waited for the applause to die away, then went on: “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. “But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish

from the earth.”

The Gettysburg Address.

Where were the office seekers? Lincoln quipped. Now he had something he could give everybody.

No, the paramount problem was not Sumner or even political infighting among Southern Unionists, The major problem was how to prevent the rebel majority in a given state from outvoting and overwhelming the loyalist minority and thus restoring the old Southern ruling class to power. Should that happen, the war would truly have been fought in vain.

Specifically, he refused to pardon the following classes, thus disqualifying them from voting or holding political office in the occupied South: all men who’d held Confederate civilian and diplomatic posts, all who’d served as rebel officers above the rank of colonel in the army and lieutenant colonel in the navy, all who’d resigned from the U.S. armed forces or left the Congress or judicial positions to assist the rebellion, and all who’d treated Union soldiers other than as prisoners of war. Apart from these, he granted full pardons to all other Southerners who’d engaged in rebellion so long as they took an oath of allegiance to the United States.

As the December days passed, Lincoln left the two sisters to dine by themselves in the evenings, to reminisce together about Lexington and Springfield, families and friends. Emilie regretted, though, that “this frightful war comes between us like a barrier of granite,” so we cannot “open our hearts to each other as freely as we would like.” Still, the sisters wept together about their dead. And Emilie found an endearing tenderness in the White House, where both Lincolns “pet me as if I were a child.” She noticed, too, how concerned Mary was about Lincoln’s health. “Emilie, what do you think of Mr. Lincoln, do you think he is well?” He was run-down from his recent bout with varioloid, and Emilie replied, “He seems thinner than I ever saw him.” “Oh, Emilie,” Mary said, “will we ever awake from this hideous nightmare?”

Mary and sister Emilie on opposite sides.

Lincoln accepted reconstruction in Louisiana as the best that could be done and took similar steps in Arkansas, Tennessee, and Virginia.

Reconstruction.

Still, this wasn’t likely to happen any time soon, since most white Unionists in the state were hostile to black political rights.

So many contradictions.

“Surrounded by all sorts of conflicting claims, by traitors, by half-hearted, timid men, by Border States men, and Free States men, by radical Abolitionists and Conservatives, he has listened to all, weighed the words of all, waited, observed, yielded now here and now there, but in the main kept one inflexible, honest purpose, and drawn the national ship through.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe on Lincoln.

As always, he pardoned convicted deserters on any reasonable pretext. “There are already too many weeping widows in the United States,” he said. “For God’s sake do not ask me to add to the number.”

“if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”

Soon a popular cartoon circulated in the newspapers, showing a laughing black man who said, “Now I’s nobody’s nigger but my own.” Up in Boston, William Lloyd Garrison, who’d struggled most of his adult life to free the slaves, gave Lincoln the credit for getting the amendment passed.

“We shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it,” Lincoln believed.

Finally, with Lincoln and Robert both pressing her, Mary relented and said he could go.

Robert Lincoln becomes a Captain.

conflict itself should cease.” No, Lincoln said, “each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. 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 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.” And God’s purpose perhaps was to will “this terrible war” on both North and South to remove “the offence” of slavery. “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.’”

The second Inaugural

“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 a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

"With malice toward none...."

It was the first inaugural reception in the history of the Republic in which an American President had greeted a free black man and solicited his opinion.

“Glory!” cried a black woman. “Glory glory!” Accompanied by Crook, Penrose, and the naval guard, Lincoln took Tad by the hand and set out for downtown Richmond a couple of miles away. By now black people were flocking around him, yelling his name and reaching for his hand. “God bless you,” said one woman, and he smiled at her and nodded at the others. The city was under martial law and patrolled by a number of black Union troops, so the white inhabitants stayed in their homes, watching from their windows as Lincoln and a column of cheering Negroes passed in the dusty streets. “Every window was crowded with heads,” said Crook. “But it was a silent crowd. There was something oppressive in those thousands of watchers without a sound, either of welcome or hatred.” Lincoln scanned the windows, as though expecting a jeer or some sort of defiance. But nothing. Only a white woman shaking her head in disgust.

"Glory!"

Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania paid Lincoln homage. On the night run to Indianapolis, bonfires lit up the route, and mute crowds stood in the rain as the train rolled by. In Chicago, thousands of Lincoln’s fellow Illinoisians—columns of officials, ordinary citizens, Ellsworth Zouaves, immigrants, carpenters, Chicago actors, Jews, Negroes, and ten thousand schoolchildren wearing black armbands—all marched with the coffin in final tribute. From Chicago the train ran south across the prairies, taking Lincoln and Willie home now, home at last to Springfield.

185 Zouave company, 208, 234, 240, 436