The Capitol & the Inauguration: Of Insurrection and Better Angels
With the Capitol, the Inauguration and Democracy in peril, an American president channeled his spiritual muse, reminding our present generation of the resilience of the American Soul.
Lincoln’s First Inauguration at the U.S. Capitol 1861
A Secret Journey, A Capitol in Danger
On February 11, 1861, a tall but slightly stooped figure carrying the weight of the nation on his shoulders, boarded the train bound for Washington, D.C. Heading to the capital from Springfield, Illinois to be inaugurated as the nation’s 16th president, Abraham Lincoln is facing the starkest of realities: seven states have already seceded from the Union since his election in November. Four more are looking for a reason to do the same. Southerners believe a Lincoln presidency means the end of slavery and their way of life. Talk of civil war is rampant. Northerners rejoiced at the election’s outcome, yet fear it could lead to the country’s dissolution. They look to Lincoln for reassurance.¹
Created on Google Maps, Valerie Jones
Though he quoted George Washington from the eve of his 1789 inauguration, feeling like “a culprit who is going to the place of his own execution,”² Lincoln hoped to get to the Capitol while there was still a country left to save. Allan Pinkerton, founder of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, managed Lincoln’s security throughout the journey eastward. While they would travel through cheering crowds in Indiana, Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania — nearly 100,000 spectators gathered to see Lincoln in Philadelphia — the train had to be diverted several times, skirting hostile territory. It was inevitable that it would have to journey through inhospitable regions, being that the capital was wedged between the pro-slavery state of Virginia and the “neutral” state of Maryland with its deep confederate sympathies. As the president-elect traveled, Pinkerton and his detectives went further undercover, investigating possible threats to the Pennsylvania, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad and discovering that police forces, government officials, and many citizens in Baltimore were sympathetic to the secessionists.³ The trip proved exhausting and at times frightening — with at least two assassination attempts⁴ in what would later become known as The Baltimore Plot.⁵
Baltimore is a figurative and literal lynchpin to the story. Once Lincoln’s train made it to the city, he would be carried one mile across town by horse-drawn carriage to board another train to Washington, further exposing the President-elect to antagonistic forces. According to Pinkerton, there was a plot to stab the President-elect. Several alleged would-be assassins, armed with knives, would gather to greet Lincoln once he emerged from the car to change trains. The plotters figured at least one of the assassins would be able to get close enough to kill him. Pinkerton was all too aware of Baltimore’s reputation as a hotbed of anti-war and pro-slavery contingents. In fact, weeks after Lincoln’s passage, the city would be the site of the Pratt Street Riots, with an armed conflict between traveling Union soldiers and southern sympathizers. More than a dozen died (both soldiers and civilians) with hundreds wounded.
Knowing how difficult it would be to get Lincoln to his inauguration safely, Pinkerton changed plans. Shrewdly, rather than travel through Baltimore during daylight hours, he had communication lines cut between Pennsylvania (where Lincoln would be traveling from) and Maryland the night before the scheduled trip. He then snuck Lincoln onto a special train, concealing him as it steamed through the city in the dead of night.
Purportedly in disguise and protected by armed Union soldiers, Lincoln arrived in Washington, D.C. the next morning. Though Lincoln would later be ridiculed in the press for traveling incognito, the security ruse worked. Pinkerton sent a one-line telegram to the president of the PW&B Railroad company: “Plums delivered nuts safely.”⁵
But this turned out to be only one phase of the drama.
“Manure the hills…. Blow Him to Hell.”
In his fascinating book Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington, author Ted Widmer reveals that shortly before Lincoln’s arrival there were reports of “plots to take the city, [to] blow up the public buildings, and prevent the inauguration of Lincoln.” The nerve center of government, the Capitol — not only home to Congress but also the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress and repository for all federal records — “was a tinder box waiting for a match.” Two days after Lincoln had embarked for Washington, a pro-confederate, anti-Union mob gathered outside the Capitol and tried to force its way in to disrupt the counting of the electoral certificates that would confirm Abraham Lincoln’s election three months earlier.⁶
But the aging General Winfield Scott, a Mexican War veteran appointed by Thomas Jefferson decades earlier, had other thoughts. He warned that any intruder would “be lashed to the muzzle of a twelve-pounder and fired out the window of the Capitol.” He added, “I would manure the hills of Arlington with the fragments of his body.”⁷ When the mob reached the Capitol, Scott’s soldiers denied them entry. Only those with a special pass gained access to the seat of government. Pro-Southern delegates of states that had not yet left the Union, stood on the floor of Congress angrily expressing their displeasure over confirming the election. When secessionist senator from Texas Louis Wigfall asked General Scott if he would dare arrest a senator for treason, Scott exclaimed: “No! I will blow him to hell!”⁸
“The Mystic Chords of Memory”
Some ten days after his arrival, the grounds secured, Lincoln took his mark at the top of the Capitol steps for his inaugural address. The intensity of his recent experiences seemed to focus his mind and elevate his prose. The man known primarily as an intellect, lawyer, formidable debater and politician, turned inward. On this day, as would happen often throughout his presidency, he summoned his spiritual muse:
Abraham Lincoln, 1860 by William Marsh, Springfield, IL. Public Domain.
“Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him, who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust, in the best way, all our present difficulty…
In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war… You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect and defend” it.
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 battle-field, 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.”
Lincoln’s referencing the “mystic chords of memory” reminded Americans of their common sacrifices, interior bond and the singular destiny of the nation. His oft-repeated quote of aspiring to “the better angels of our nature” is a transcendental, non-religious plea to the soul of every American.
It is curious to note that the man who some historians have labeled an atheist… may have tapped more deeply into the “mystical core” of America than any president.
While acknowledging the predominant religion of the day in his speech, Lincoln’s adept lyricism illustrates a sentiment offered by Joseph Campbell, author of The Power of Myth: “when a poet carries the mind into a context of meanings and then pitches it past those, one knows that marvelous rapture that comes from going past all categories of definition.” Lincoln’s metaphysical phraseology allowed the sentiment to move past the purely rational mind of the American citizen, to a place of deeper reverence. His uncanny knack for upliftment, without sermonizing, was the hallmark of Lincoln’s greatest oratory gifts.
It is curious to note that the man who some historians have labeled an atheist, who admitted to never belonging to any Christian church, may have tapped more deeply into the “mystical core” of America than any president. Mark Noll’s book The Puzzling Faith of Abraham Lincoln details the unconventional beliefs of the man. “Lincoln was probably…a Universalist who believed in the eventual salvation of all people,” Noll says. While some pastors posthumously called Lincoln “an eminently Christian president,” his former law partner and later bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon said differently in his book the Life of Abraham Lincoln. “He was a deist… and he did not believe in… the inspiration of the Scriptures in the sense understood by evangelical Christians.”⁹ As with many of his great American predecessors, Lincoln’s spirituality was a moving target that could not be easily identified. Sometimes Lincoln’s speeches adopted orthodox religious tones, at others he tread lightly upon esoteric inspiration and in other instances he was completely agnostic on the matter of God. But like most of the great Founding American men and women before him, Lincoln had a spiritual bent to him.
And with that awareness came a prescient warning for all future American generations.
“Live Through All Time, or Die by Suicide.”
Some twenty years before the outbreak of the Civil War, Lincoln in his now infamous Young Men’s Lyceum speech warned that the nation could fall, but only from within. “Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!… It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”¹⁰
In that same address, Lincoln refers to the Constitution and rule of law as “the political religion of our nation.”¹¹ He feared a “mobocratic spirit” where vigilante bands of self-declared “good citizens” took the law into their own hands. Lincoln warned that if American citizens tolerated such abuses, the nation would descend into anarchy and call upon a despot “a Napoleon, Caesar or Alexander the Great for rescue and salvation.” To prevent that downward spiral Lincoln said “[a]s the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor.” In Lincoln’s estimation, to survive as a democracy, we must transcend our racial, religious, regional, and party affiliations and “embrace together under one unifying political religion: the Constitution and the rule of law.”¹²
As the dark hour of the Civil War fell upon the nation and brother went to war against brother, world powers looked upon the nation anticipating when, not if, the Republic would fail. What they had not counted on was the country’s resilience and its intuitive sense of its destiny. For those who knew Lincoln, his fortitude and unconventional spirituality — calling upon the “angels of our better nature” — are the core values that must be summoned from within the American Soul in our present time of crisis.
Serving as president for the duration of the Civil War, his mission complete, Lincoln made one last trip back to Springfield. After his tragic death, his remains were placed aboard the presidential railroad car that had just been built specifically for him at the end of the war. It was his first and last trip on the new presidential car. The train carried his body along the same route as his 1861 journey to Washington. Americans lined the route so they could pay their final respects to the man of great inspiration who carried the Union through its most fearful hour.¹⁴
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¹The Train Ride That Brought Lincoln to D.C., Richard Moe, The Washington Post, April 24, 2020
² Ibid.
³ Spies, Lies and Disguise: Abraham Lincoln and the Baltimore Plot, The White House Historical Association
⁴ op. cit., The Train Ride
⁵ op. cit., Spies, Lies and Disguise
⁶ Ibid.
⁷ The Capitol Takeover That Wasn’t, Ted Widmer The New York Times, January 8, 2021
⁸ Ibid.
⁹ Ibid.
¹⁰ Lamon, W: Life of Abraham Lincoln, James R.Osgood and Company, 1872, p. 486.
¹¹ Lincoln’s Young Men’s Lyceum Address, Abraham Lincoln online http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/lyceum.htm
¹² Eli Merritt, “The Constitution is Our ‘Political Religion: Remembering Lincoln’s Words,’” Seattle Times, March 8, 2019
¹³ Ibid.
¹⁴ op. cit., Spies, Lies and Disguise