Jon Meacham - And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle

Lincoln, Nathaniel Hawthorne observed, was about the homeliest man I ever saw. These images were taken by Mathew Brady circa 1864, the year of the presidents reelection.

T he storm had come from the south. At dawn on Saturday, March 4, 1865, the day of Abraham Lincolns second inauguration, gales of wind and sheets of rain roared across the Potomac and struck Washington, destroying trees and soaking the city. Pennsylvania Avenue was a sea of mud, thick and soggy. It had already been raining for two days running; the Army Corps of Engineers considered constructing pontoon bridges to make the citys main thoroughfare passable. A foot could sink as deep as a knee in the ooze.

The wet wartime capital was at once festive and solemn. Willards Hotel, next door to the Treasury Building, was packed with 1,008 guests, and The Daily National Republican reported that twelve hundred inauguration-goers had swarmed the hotels dining tables. The other hotels in the city were also full, not being able to accommodate another boarder, the newspaper wrote. The crowd in the city perfectly awful, the diarist Nathan W. Daniels observed, every available place taken upthe crowd fairly packed Pennsylvania Avenue from one end to the other, the cortege itself extending over a mile in length. Boswells Fancy Store at 302 E Street, near Fourteenth Street, advertised Flags, Flags, For The Inauguration: Silk, Bunting, Delain and Muslin Flags on sticks as well as Chinese Lanterns, Fireworks, &c. The retailers Burns & Wilson at 340 Pennsylvania Avenue, between Ninth and Tenth streets, let it be known that ladies intending to honor the inauguration ball with their presence will want to appear with white slippers and white gaiters, which Burns & Wilson were now selling at the lowest price.

What the journalist Noah Brooks, an intimate of President Lincolns, recalled as the dark and dismal weather improved slightly as the crowds slogged to the Capitol for the inaugural ceremonies. Completed in the war years, the buildings cast-iron dome loomed above Washington. The president had made sure that the project continued even as the struggle unfolded. Workers, many of them enslaved until Lincoln had signed the bill for emancipation in the District of Columbia in 1862, stayed on the job. It seemed a strange contradiction to see the workmengoing on with their labor, The New York Times had written, the click of the chisel, the stroke of the hammer amid the tramp of the battalions drilling in the corridors. Lincoln understood the significance of perseverance. If people see the Capitol going on, he had said, it is a sign we intend the Union shall go on.

And it had. Now Lincoln stood again where he had stood four years before, on the East Front of the Capitol. Hundreds of thousands of Americans who had been alive on March 4, 1861, were dead, slain by one anothers hands. Innumerable others were wounded and maimed in body and in spirit. Everything had hung in the balance since Fort Sumter. We are now on the brink of destruction, Lincoln had said after a late 1862 Union defeat at Fredericksburg. It appears to me the Almighty is against us, and I can hardly see a ray of hope. Until victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in the summer of 1863, the war had seemed lost. Even afterward the president had expected to lose reelection in 1864. Now, in the late winter of 1865, Union forces were poised for ultimate victory. And at last, slavery was in its final months of life in the United States.

Emancipation had created a different countryand the man at the pinnacle of power, about to address the nation on the occasion of his second inauguration, had put antislavery principle into practice, pursuing justice at perilous moments when a purely political man might have chosen a different course. Successive generations have variously depicted Lincoln as a secular saint, the savior of Union, and the Great Emancipator; as a grasping tyrant; or as a calculating political creature imprisoned by public opinion and white prejudice. The truth is more complicated. Driven by the convictions that the Union was sacred and that slavery was wrong, Lincoln was instrumental in saving one and in destroying the other, expanding freedom and preserving an experiment in popular government that nearly came to an end on his watch. In him we can engage not only the possibilities and the limitations of the presidency, but the possibilities and limitations of America itself.