Lincoln: A Photobiography by Russell Freedman Read Free Book Online Page B

Abraham Lincoln bounced over the cobblestones of Pennsylvania Avenue, heading for Capitol Hill. Infantrymen lined the parade route. Army sharpshooters crouched on nearby rooftops. Soldiers surrounded the Capitol building, and plainclothes detectives mingled with the crowds. On a hill overlooking the Capitol, artillerymen manned a line of howitzers and watched for trouble.
    A long covered passageway had been built to protect the presidential party on its way to the speaker's platform in front of the Capitol. More than three hundred dignitaries crowded the platform, waiting to witness the swearing-in ceremony. Among them was Stephen Douglas, who had pledged to support the new administration.
    Lincoln was visibly nervous. He was wearing a new black suit and sporting a neatly clipped beard. He held his silk stovepipe hat in one hand, a gold-headed cane in the other. He put the cane in a corner, then looked around, trying to find a place for the hat. Stephen Douglas smiled and took the hat from him.
    Lincoln unrolled the manuscript of his inaugural address. He put on his steel-rimmed spectacles and faced the sunlit crowd below. Thousands of people jammed the broad square in front of the Capitol, waiting to hear the new president speak.
    Four months had passed since Lincoln's election in November. During that time, seven Southern states had left the Union, and four more were about to join them. In February, Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi had been sworn in as president of the Confederate States of America. Now, with the Union collapsing, the defiant South was preparing for war.
    Congressional leaders had tried to find a compromise plan that would hold the Union together. But the Southerners would not budge from their demands. They wanted slavery to be guaranteed not only in the South, but wherever else it might spread—to the western territories, and perhaps even to Central America and the Caribbean. By the time Lincoln left Springfield for Washington on the eve of his fifty-second birthday, all attempts at compromise had failed.
    He traveled east on a special presidential train, stopping at dozens of cities, towns, and villages along the route. Thousands of Americans had a chance to see and hear their elected leader forthe first time. "Last night I saw the new president/' one man reported. "He is a clever man,
and not so bad looking as they say,
while he is no great beauty. He is tall ... has a commanding figure, bows pretty well, is not stiff, has a pleasant face, is amiable and
determined.
"

 
    The new president

 
    The first lady in the gown she wore to the inauguration ball.
    At Philadelphia, the presidential train was met by detectives who had uncovered evidence of an assassination plot, a plan to murder Lincoln as he traveled through Baltimore the next day. He was persuaded to switch trains and travel secretly through the night to Washington, accompanied by armed guards. When his night train passed through Baltimore at 3:30 A.M., Lincoln was safely hidden in a sleeping berth. He arrived in Washington at dawn, unnoticed and unannounced.
    Word of Lincoln's secret night ride spread fast. Opposition newspapers ridiculed the president-elect, calling his escape from Baltimore "the flight of Abraham." The abuse became nasty. Hostile editors and politicians snickered at "this backwoods President" and his "boorish" wife. They taunted Lincoln as a hick with a high-pitched voice and a Kentucky twang, an ugly "gorilla" and "baboon." Lincoln shrugged off the insults as a hazard of his job, but Mary was mortified.
    He was still living under this cloud when he stood in front of the Capitol on Inauguration Day, ready to take his oath of office as the sixteenth president of the United States. In his speech, he appealed to the people of the South, assuring them again that he would not tamper with slavery in their states:
    "In
your
hands, my dissatisfied countrymen, and not in
mine,
is the momentous issue of civil war. The government