Abraham Lincoln’s last speech (April 11th), and a vision unrealized
from Salon:
Exactly 150 years ago, two days after Robert E. Lee's surrender, Lincoln spoke not of victory, but reconciliation
____Through the cool evening mist of Tuesday, April 11, 1865, darkness gave way to light. The White House was “brilliantly illuminated” and the reflection revealed a “vast throng” assembled to hear the president speak. Throughout the city bonfires blazed and celebratory rockets whistled.
Crowds had gathered outside the White House the previous day, expecting a triumphal speech in the aftermath of Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox on April 9. A procession of some two thousand Navy Yard workmen, dragging six boat howitzers, trekked through the city. The gathering had swelled on its march to call on the president. Bands played and people sang the “Star-Spangled Banner,” “Hail Columbia,” and other patriotic tunes. First to be sighted at the mansion’s second-floor window was not the president, but his twelve-year-old son. Tad couldn’t resist the parade and, encouraged by the crowd’s cheers, he waved a captured rebel flag. Quickly, according to one reporter, “he was lugged back by the slack of his trousers by some discreet domestic...”
As darkness fell, lights illuminated the city. At the War Department, every window was “ablaze with light” and the building decorated with large flags. A transparency with the word “Grant” flapped beneath a wreath of evergreens. The Treasury Department featured a sign that read, “U.S. Greenbacks and U. S. Grant—Grant gives the greenbacks a metallic ring.” The State Department, “brilliantly lighted and festooned with flags,” displayed a banner that read, “the Union saved by faith in the Constitution, faith in the people, and trust in God.”
The north portico of the White House was also brightly lit. Men and women gathered and stood in ankle-deep mud from the April rains. They not only filled the grounds in front of the White House but spilled over onto the sidewalks from Fifteenth to Seventeeth Streets. Banners streamed and bands played. At last Lincoln appeared and was greeted with “tremendous and continued applause.” Mrs. Lincoln and some friends could be seen in an adjoining window. Noah Brooks, the Washington correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union, observed later that “there was something terrible about the enthusiasm with which the beloved Chief Magistrate was received—cheers upon cheers, wave after wave of applause rolled up, the President modestly standing quiet until it was over.” Writing several years afterward, Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Todd Lincoln’s black seamstress, recalled a vast mass of heads like “a black, gently swelling sea. . . . Close to the house the faces were plainly discernible, but they faded into mere ghostly outlines on the outskirts of the assembly; and what added to the weird, spectral beauty of the scene, was the confused hum of voices that rose above the sea of forms.” Lincoln chose to read from a prepared manuscript, “evidently so that there should be no chance for misconception of his views enunciated,” thought one reporter.
“We meet this evening, not in sorrow, but in gladness of heart,” he began...
Lincoln continued
read more: http://www.salon.com/2015/04/11/how_the_south_could_have_been_saved_abraham_lincolns_last_speech_and_a_vision_unrealized/
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I agree with the other poster, Elizabeth Keckley is a wonderful writer.
I love history. 