civil war – History First

John Tyler, The Traitor

After his presidency, John Tyler became a staunch supporter of the emerging Confederate States of America

By Kaleena Fraga

John Tyler is best known for two things. One, he was the “Tyler” in “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.” Second, he was the first vice president to become president, after William Henry Harrison died just one month into his presidency.

But Tyler’s legacy contains another facet as well. After his presidency, he became an enthusiastic supporter of the Confederacy.

John Tyler’s Path to the Presidency

John Tyler, circa 1826 | Virginia Historical Society

John Tyler was born on March 29, 1790, to a slave-holding family in Virginia. He was raised to be a member of the Southern gentry, receiving a top-notch education as his family’s dozens of slaves toiled on the plantation outside.

As a young man, Tyler used his connections among Southern elite to secure a place in the Virginia House of Delegates — which led to a seat on the U.S. House of Representatives, a stint as governor of Virginia, and a seat in the U.S. Senate.

In politics, Tyler made his views known. He distrusted federal overreach — and voted to censure legislators who supported the Bank of the United States. He did not support the Missouri Compromise of 1820 — Tyler believed slavery should be legal everywhere. And he deeply disliked the populist Democrat Andrew Jackson, to such an extent that Tyler left the Democratic party and joined the new anti-Jackson Whig party.

The Whigs maneuvered to block Jackson’s power. They failed in stopping his vice president, Martin Van Buren, from succeeding Jackson in 1836. But in 1840, their ticket of William Henry Harrison (the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe) and Tyler led to victory — and to History First’s favorite song:

“Tippecanoe and Tyler too” by They Might Be Giants (based on an 1840s campaign song)

But Harrison died just one month into his presidency.

This was a first. No president had died in office before. And no one was exactly sure what to do. Yes, Tyler would take power — but was he the “president”? Some called him “His Accidency.” But Tyler set a precedent for vice presidents becoming president and not just an acting president.

Tyler receiving word that Harrison had died | Library of Congress

As the president — and in a sign of things to come — Tyler bucked his party in favor of state’s rights. His veto of bills attempting to establish a national bank infuriated his fellow Whigs, who responded by launching impeachment proceedings against him. (The first time this had been done.)

Tyler survived. However, the furious Whigs expelled him from their party.

“Popularity, I have always thought, may aptly be compared to a coquette,” Tyler mused. “The more you woo her, the more apt is she to elude your embrace.”

In 1844, Tyler, lacking a party, was forced to run as a third-party candidate. He eventually threw his weight behind the Democrat, James K. Polk, to deny the Whigs a victory.

The Emergence Of The Confederacy

The attack at Fort Sumter launched the Civil War | Wikimedia Commons

After Polk succeeded Tyler, the 10th president returned home to Virginia. But storm clouds were on the horizon. In just fifteen years, the country would shatter into the bloody conflict of the Civil War.

Tyler watched the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 with deep displeasure. “The day of doom for the great model republic is at hand,” he wrote. Southerners agreed with Tyler. Before long, rumbles of secession filled the country.

However, Tyler, to his credit, initially tried to prevent violence. He convened a “Peace Convention” after six states had seceded from the Union, with the goal of finding alternatives to disunion. Delegates from all states were invited to attend the Convention, which took place in February 1861.

But Tyler’s efforts were in vain. He had slowed — but could not stop — the outbreak of bloodshed.

Instead, he decided to give up on the cause of peace. Tyler threw his weight behind the nascent Confederacy. He voted for Virginia to secede and was soon elected to join the Confederate House of Representatives. His granddaughter was even the first person to raise the Confederate flag.

“When he takes this action, he knows he’s a rebel,” noted Edward P. Crapol, who wrote a biography of Tyler called John Tyler, The Accidental President. “He knows what he’s done. They’re not playing bean bag, if you know what I mean. This is very serious stuff.”

However, Tyler died before he could serve the Confederacy. On January 12, 1862, he died of a likely stroke at the Ballard Hotel in Richmond, Virginia.

John Tyler’s Legacy Today

John Tyler in 1861, shortly before his death | Library of Congress

After John Tyler died, the Confederacy celebrated him as one of their founding heroes. His coffin was draped with a Confederate flag. The Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, arranged a parade in his honor and ordered flags lowered to half-mast.

But in the North, news of John Tyler’s death was greeted with stony silence. He was seen as a traitor. Abraham Lincoln issued no word about his passing — marking the first, and only, time in American history that an official proclamation wasn’t issued following a president’s death.

The New York Times, noting that other living presidents remained loyal to the Union, called Tyler “the most unpopular public man that had ever held any office in the United States.” The paper went on, sneering:

“He ended his life suddenly, last Friday, in Richmond — going down to death amid the ruins of his native State. He himself was one of the architects of its ruin; and beneath that melancholy wreck his name will be buried, instead of being inscribed on the Capitol’s monumental marble, as a year ago he so much desired.”

Then the Times dealt a final blow:

“It will be remembered that Mr. TYLER’s mansion at Hampton, over which he hoisted the rebel flag last Spring, has been for some time occupied as quarters by our troops.”

Ouch.

Tyler’s legacy hasn’t particularly improved since his death. His fellow presidents express little admiration for their predecessor who betrayed his country. Harry Truman called him “one of the presidents we could have done without.” Theodore Roosevelt described Tyler as “a politician of monumental littleness.”

In his biography of John Tyler’s life, Robert Seager wrote: “His countrymen generally remember him, if they have heard of him at all, as the rhyming end of a catchy campaign slogan.”

But history should remember Tyler for two things. One, he cemented the idea that the vice president becomes the president, if the president dies. And two, he betrayed the country which he had sworn to serve.

The First Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln

By Kaleena Fraga

We’ve talked about awkward presidential transitions before—we even dove deep into the chilly exchange of power between Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

But nothing quite tops Abraham Lincoln’s first inauguration in 1861. By the time Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4th, seven Southern states had seceded from the Union.

The Election of 1860

The Election of 1860 was split between four men. Abraham Lincoln ran under the banner of the Republican party—a new organization which united Know-Nothings, Whigs, and others under one roof. The Republicans largely opposed the expansion—not the existence—of slavery.

(The party had denied William Seward the nomination. Seward had thundered against slavery, noting that Americans should answer to a “higher law” than the Constitution. The Republicans prefered Lincoln, a moderate from a battleground state.)

Shattered by questions around slavery, the Democrats were a party divided. Democrats in the north nominated Stephen Douglas. However, Democrats in the south nominated John C. Breckinridge, the current vice president. Senator John Bell also threw his hat into the ring, as the nominee for the new Constitutional Union party.

Facing a divided opponent, Lincoln easily swept to victory—even though Southern states omitted Lincoln from the ballot.

Abraham Lincoln in 1860 | Library of Congress

“Well, boys,” Lincoln is alleged to have said to reporters after his victory, “your troubles are over now—but mine have just commenced.”

Lincoln’s “troubles” would be greater than he predicted.

The 1860 campaign had been bitter. Even though none of the candidates—except Douglas—openly campaigned, tensions skyrocketed over questions about slavery and its expansion. Newspapers in the South launched deeply racist attacks against Lincoln and, all the while, Southern states rumbled with the threat of secession.

Following Lincoln’s election, they made good on their threat. On December 20th, 1860 South Carolina seceded from the Union. Six more states followed. In February 1861, they formed the Confederate States of America.

Abraham Lincoln’s 1861 Inauguration

Days after Jefferson Davis was elected president of the new Confederacy, Abraham Lincoln set out from Springfield to travel to Washington D.C.

He arrived in the city at the crack of dawn on February 23rd. Because of a possible assassination plot, Lincoln had taken a night train. Rumors, unfounded, quickly spread that the new president had snuck into the city in disguise.

On March 4th, he prepared for his inauguration. Inauguration Day always draws crowds, but a different kind of tension sparked the air in 1861. Elizabeth Keckley, a Black dressmaker and confidante of Mary Lincoln’s, wrote in her memoirs:

“The streets of the capital were thronged with people, for this was Inauguration day. . . Never was such deep interest felt in the inauguration proceedings as was felt today.”

As Lincoln made his way to the Capitol, he was surrounded by heavily armed cavalry. One reporter noted that the president’s carriage was “closely surrounded on all sides by marshals and cavalry, so as almost to hide it from view.”

A young Julia Taft—who would write about Lincoln as an adult—stood in the crowd with her mother. They took care to not get too close—it could be dangerous. She recalled that as they took their place on the edge of the crowd “a file of green-coated sharpshooters went through up to the roof. The whisper went round that they had received orders to shoot at any one crowding toward the President’s carriage.”

In Taft’s recollection, the crowd seemed hostile toward Lincoln. She heard a woman sneer: “There goes that Illinois ape, the cursed Abolitionist. But he will never come back alive.”

In his inaugural address, Lincoln struck a firm but moderate tone. He promised to not interfere with slavery where it existed, but warned that the federal government would “hold, occupy, and possess” its property. Secession, he told the crowd, was “the essence of anarchy.”

Inauguration Day, March 4, 1861 | Library of Congress

Lincoln warned the South that if conflict were to break out, it would be because of their actions. “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors.”

Lincoln ended his speech—at the suggestion of Seward, his new secretary of state—with “words of affection” toward the South. His words would echo through the ages:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

A little over a month later, shots were fired at Fort Sumter in South Carolina. The Civil War had begun.

Abraham Lincoln in 1865

Abraham Lincoln, before and after the Civil War | Reddit

The Civil War changed the country. It changed Abraham Lincoln. He was no longer a moderate from a battleground state; he was the commander-in-chief during a conflict that would kill 600,000 Americans. Lincoln went from assuring Border States that the war wasn’t about slavery to championing the Emancipation Proclamation.

By the time he was inaugurated for the second time in March 1865, the war had begun to limp to its bloody end. A Union victory was in reach.

“At this second appearing to take the oath of the presidential office,” Lincoln noted during his inauguration, “There is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first.” He gave a short speech—about 700 words—denouncing slavery in searing, religious terms as figures like Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, and John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s soon-to-be-assassin, looked on.

Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration in 1865 | Library of Congress

Just as he had four years earlier, Lincoln ended his speech with a call for peace and goodwill: “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 lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

—

It’s true—as Keckley said, and as Taft noted—that inauguration days are always fascinating affairs. The upcoming inauguration of Joe Biden is sure to strike a slightly different tone than normal, however.

The nation—rattled by the events of January 6, 2021 at the US Capitol—awaits his swearing-in with apprehension. Despite possible threats that may exist, Biden has avowed that he is “not afraid” to take the oath of office outside.

Out with the old, in with the new—what will the Biden era bring?

Julia Grant at the Corner of History

By Kaleena Fraga

Julia Grant is one of the many women largely forgotten by most Americans, yet one who bore witness to watershed moments and even likely altered the course of American history.

Part I: The End of the Civil War

Grant, née Dent, was married to the Civil War general and president Ulysses S. Grant. She was his steadfast companion during the war, despite her own Southern roots. She, like Mary Lincoln, endured questions about her loyalty to the Union cause–both were labeled secesh, or a supporter of secession because of their Southern roots and their families’ divided loyalties. But Julia Grant completely supported her husband and the Union. When approached in a grocery store by a woman who suggested that Julia Grant was “Southern in feeling and principle,” Grant responded, “No, indeed, I am the most loyal of the loyal.”

Still, Grant admitted to deep melancholy after touring the fallen city of Richmond, Virginia. She described abandoned streets littered with paper “like forest leaves after summer is gone.” In her memoirs, she wrote how she left the tour feeling distraught. “I fell to thinking of all the sad tragedies of the past four years. How many homes made desolate! How many hearts broken! How much youth sacrificed!…tears, great tears, fell from my eyes…could it be that my visit reminded me of my dear old home in Missouri?”

As the two armies faced off near Richmond, and as the war began to look hopeless for the South, Confederate general James Longstreet seethed that continuing to fight was “a great crime against the Southern people and Army….[a] hopeless and unnecessary butchery.” In discussions with a Union General, Edward Ord, Longstreet suggested that his own wife could pass through Union lines and meet with Julia Grant, whom she had known as a girl, and then Julia could visit the Confederate side.

Julia Grant, for her part, was enthusiastic to participate. “Oh how enchanting, how thrilling!” she exclaimed to her husband. But when she asked Ulysses S. Grant if she could go, he refused. “No, you must not,” he said. “The men have fought this war and the men will finish it.”

The war would continue for two more months, before Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox.

Part II: Julia Grant, Mary Lincoln, and a Fateful Decline

In the end, Julia Grant’s greatest influence on the Civil War itself may be her companionship to her husband–she traveled over 10,000 miles during the war in order to accompany him as often as possible–and the fact that Ulysses S. Grant, an alcoholic, never drank when his wife stayed with him.

Yet Julia Grant would command an oversized influence on the events directly after the war. Over the course of the conflict, her husband had developed a close working relationship with the president, Abraham Lincoln, who had struggled to find an effective leader for the Union Army. As the war wound down near Richmond, Julia Grant also spent time with Lincoln’s wife, Mary.

Their first meeting was auspicious. In his biography of her husband, Ron Chernow writes that it became family lore among the Dents. In their telling, Julia Grant paid a courtesy call on Mary Lincoln, only to find that the First Lady “expected [Julia] to treat her like royalty.” Mary Lincoln is infamous for her wild rages, but she had special reasons to dislike the Grants–she suspected that Ulysses S. Grant wanted her husband’s job, and he had allowed her son Robert to join him as an aide-de-camp, against her wishes.

Their relationship never improved, and Julia Grant was horrified when Mary Lincoln accused General Ord’s wife of flirting with her husband in a blistering tirade. When Julia tried to intervene, Mary Lincoln snapped, “I suppose you think you’ll get to the White House yourself, don’t you?”

A few months later, when the Lincolns invited the Grants to a night at the theatre, Julia Grant “objected strenuously to accompanying Mrs. Lincoln.” When the president later encouraged her husband to accompany them, Ulysses S. Grant offered his regrets, joking that he “now had a command from Mrs. Grant.” Lincoln understood, saying, “Of course…Mrs. Grant’s instincts should be considered before my request.”

In the end, the Lincolns invited Clara Harris and Major Henry Rathbone. That night Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth–dramatically altering the lives of everyone else in his box. Word had already spread that Grant would be accompanying the Lincolns that night, and, indeed, Booth sought to assassinate both Lincoln and Grant. We’ll never know if Grant would have been killed alongside with Lincoln, or if his military instinct might have saved both their lives.

There’s no doubt that Julia Grant played an important role during the Civil War by supporting her husband and suppressing his inner demons. Her fateful decision after the war to refuse the Lincoln’s invitation likely altered the course of events for decades to come.

Of War and Poets: Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln

By Duane Soubirous

In celebration of National Poetry Month, History First recognizes Walt Whitman for crafting his observations into poetry, giving future generations of Americans the ability to see Whitman’s time period through his eyes.

Walt Whitman is best known for his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 with 12 poems. He continuously revised and added to Leaves of Grass throughout his life, and the final 1892 “deathbed” edition consists of almost 400 poems, including “Drum-Taps,” a collection of poems written about the Civil War, and “Memories of President Lincoln,” containing Whitman’s best-known poem, “O Captain! My Captain!”

In 1842 Whitman attended a lecture given by Ralph Waldo Emerson, where Emerson predicted that America would soon have its own poet who would write about the American experience in a uniquely American style. “When he lifts his great voice, men gather to him and forget all that is past, and then his words are to the hearers, pictures of all history,” Emerson said.

If Walt Whitman believed he could be the “genius of poetry” that Emerson prophesied, few others shared his confidence. The first edition of Leaves of Grass, where Whitman debuted his style, free of the forms that defined poetry, was met with scathing reviews. It sold fewer copies than Whitman had given away. One reviewer called Leaves of Grass “a mass of stupid filth,” and Whitman’s brother even said he “didn’t think it worth reading.” Emerson, however, wrote Whitman a letter of encouragement, praising Leaves of Grass as “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.”

The 1850s were a time of unprecedented divisions in the United States. Northerners denounced pro-slavery laws of Congress and Supreme Court decisions, and Southerners threatened secession over Northerners’ hostility to slavery. Whitman hoped Leaves of Grass would unite the country. “I think that Whitman believed that Leaves of Grass was going to prevent a Civil War,” Whitman scholar Ed Folsom said in the Walt Whitman episode of PBS’s American Experience. “Leaves of Grass is really a book about preserving the Union. It’s a book about holding things together, being able to absorb contradictions and still maintain a single identity.”

Whitman’s poetry couldn’t keep the country together, and the ensuing Civil War hit especially close to home. Whitman read in the papers that his younger brother was a casualty in the Battle of Fredericksburg, where the Union was badly defeated. Whitman rushed to the battlefield, only to find that his brother was minimally injured. Whitman stayed with his brother for over a week and witnessed the realities of war. “Living so close to the front, to the dressing stations and the hospital tents pitched on the frozen ground, the fresh barrel-stave markers in the burial field, the vexed Rappahannock, and the ruins of Fredericksburg, he saw ‘what well men and sick men and mangled men endure,’” Justin Kaplan wrote in Walt Whitman: A Life. Whitman began writing down these observations, later using them for his “Drum-Taps” poems.

After his experience on the battlefield, Whitman, too old to fight, became a dedicated volunteer in army hospitals. He served the non-medical needs of wounded soldiers, providing them with items like food, linens, stationery, and money. He often wrote letters informing families of a loved one’s death. “In his poem ‘Come Up from the Fields Father,’ Whitman imagined the family that received a letter like those he wrote,” Drew Gilpin Faust wrote in This Republic of Suffering. “It reports his gunshot wound but does not yet communicate the more terrible truth that ‘he is dead already’ by the time the letter arrives. It is a letter that will destroy the mother, as a rifle has already destroyed the son.”

Whitman captured the widespread grief after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. He wrote “Hush’d Be the Camps To-day” on the day of Lincoln’s funeral. “Whitman speaks as one of the people, leading the soldiers in mourning and urging common men to whom he is so devoted to join him in tribute to ‘our dear commander,’” Faust wrote. Another poem commemorating Lincoln, “O Captain! My Captain!” was written with a rhythm so uncommon to Whitman’s poetry, a democratic style that is accessible to common people. In this poem, Whitman represents “the searing grief of a single man, in a representation of the individual pain of which the cumulative loss is constituted.”

If Irish folklore is to be believed, Irish clans fighting in the old wars had an agreement to spare the poets. “Don’t kill the poets, because the poets had to be left to tell the story,” historian David Blight said. Through Walt Whitman’s poetry, the modern reader can see the total devastation of war and pain of losing a leader and a hero.

Part III: A Ship in the Storm–Lincoln’s Steady Hand in the Tumultuous Final Years of War

By Duane Soubirous

January 1, 1863, the day Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and declared freedom for all slaves living in the Confederate States of America, was just like any other New Year’s Day to those slaves. In order to gain freedom, they would need to escape behind Union lines or wait for Union troops to advance past them. Slaves living in the loyal border states and parts of the Confederacy that had been pacified by the Union army were kept in bondage. The Emancipation Proclamation freed no one the moment it was issued, but it was the beginning of the end of slavery in the United States. Three years later, slavery was abolished throughout the U.S. with the ratification of the 13^th Amendment.

Though the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, Lincoln had issued a preliminary proclamation 100 days earlier, on Sept. 22., This warned that emancipation was coming, but rebels could keep their slaves if they put down their arms and rejoined the Union (no one took that offer). Midterm elections in November 1862 showed that many in the Union agreed with Confederate president Jefferson Davis, who called the Emancipation Proclamation “the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man.”

Racial violence perpetrated both sides of the conflict. That year, the Democratic Party ran a racist, anti-war campaign, warning that emancipation meant black people would move North in droves and force whites out of their homes. “The Constitution as it is, the Union as it was, and the negroes where they are,” was their campaign slogan. Democrats gained 34 seats in the House of Representatives, won gubernatorial races in New York and New Jersey, and won control of several state legislatures. In 1863, Horatio Seymour, the Democratic governor of New York, said, “I assure you I am your friend,” to anti-draft rioters who had lynched black doormen and burned down the Colored Orphan Asylum in New York City.

Unfazed by backlash to the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln pressed for emancipation in the loyal states. He encouraged a constitutional amendment that would gradually emancipate slaves (until 1900) and provide compensation to slaveholders. Lincoln believed that his emancipation plan for the border states was “one of the most potent, and swift means of ending” the Civil War. “Let the states which are in rebellion see, definitely and certainly, that, in no event, will the states you represent ever join their proposed Confederacy, and they can not, much longer maintain the contest.” To people who didn’t want tax dollars spent on buying slaves, Lincoln replied that compensated emancipation would cost less than a prolonged war: “I had not asked you to be taxed to buy negroes, except in such way, as to save you from greater taxation to save the Union exclusively by other means.” Lincoln also warned that failing to accept gradual, compensated emancipation might lead to immediate, uncompensated emancipation.

Many soldiers who had enlisted to defend the Union had reservations about fighting to free the slaves. Lincoln deployed his power of persuasion in a letter to be read at a Union rally in Springfield, Illinois: “You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but, no matter. Fight you, then exclusively to save the Union. I issued the proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union.”

General Ulysses S. Grant was one soldier who didn’t need convincing. He wrote in a letter to Lincoln, “I have given the subject of arming the negro my hearty support. This, with the emancipation of the negro, is the heavyest blow yet given to the Confederacy … by arming the negro we have added a powerful ally. They will make good soldiers and taking them from the enemy weakens him in the same proportion they strengthen us. I am therefore most decidedly in favor of pushing this policy to the enlistment of a force sufficient to hold all the South falling into our hands and to aid in capturing more.”

After the major Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863, the war dragged on through 1864 and Democratic anti-war sentiment rose again. Democrats believed the war could end and the Union restored by negotiating a peace agreement that upheld slavery. Such a treaty would overturn Emancipation Proclamation, which said slaves with disloyal masters “are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.” Lincoln was up for reelection that year, and though his electoral prospects looked grim that summer, he decided to hold firm on his proclamation and insist upon abolitionism in any peace talks.

By the fall of 1864, a string of Union victories dampened anti-war sentiment, and Lincoln and Republican legislators were resoundingly endorsed by the electorate. During the lame-duck session of Congress, when many Democratic congressmen had only a few months left before being replaced by Republicans, Lincoln pressed the House to pass the 13^th Amendment, which had passed the previous April with the requisite 2/3 majority in the Senate. After much personal lobbying by Lincoln, just enough lame-duck Democrats either abstained or voted yes to clear the amendment through Congress on Jan. 31, 1865. It was then sent to the states and finally ratified in December 1865.

Lincoln’s second inauguration happened on March 4, 1865, when Union victory was imminent. He closed his Second Inaugural Address by extending an olive branch to the defeated Confederates and looking ahead to Reconstruction: “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 lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”

After news reached Washington that Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, crowds gathered at the White House to hear Lincoln speak. Instead of delivering a bombastic victory speech, he addressed Rreconstruction. It was the last speech he gave, and true to form, he encouraged moderation. Radical Republicans didn’t want to accept Louisiana back into the Union because its constitution didn’t enfranchise black people. While Lincoln said that he personally supported enfranchisement for “the very intelligent” and “those who serve our cause as soldiers,” he asked, “Will it be wiser to take [Louisiana’s constitution] as it is, and help to improve it; or to reject, and disperse it? Can Louisiana be brought into proper practical relation with the Union sooner by sustaining, or by discarding her new State Government?”

A distraught Confederate sympathizer named John Wilkes Booth attended Lincoln’s speech and was outraged to hear Lincoln endorse black suffrage in Louisiana. “That means n—-er citizenship. Now by God I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make,” Booth reportedly said. He assassinated Lincoln three days later.

Abraham Lincoln closed the Gettysburg Address by saying, “We here highly resolve that these dead men 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.” Freedom for all Americans was a work in progress when he died, but it began when Lincoln insisted that for slavery to end, its expansion must be culled.

Lincoln is exalted as a god among men today; he is seen as the savior of black American slaves, and the sole reason that slavery ended. Like all people, Lincoln was flawed–his actions and thoughts, judged by today’s society, would make many uncomfortable. Still, he believed in moderation, in fairness, and in the importance of listening to both sides. This, in any era, makes him one of the nation’s most remarkable leaders. He certainly deserves credit for his handling of the Civil War years.