92 Quotes by Harold Holzer

Historian David M. Potter pointed out in 1942 that as president-elect, Lincoln was no more than “simply a lawyer from Springfield, Illinois – a man of great undeveloped capacities and narrowly limited background. He was more fit to become President than to be President.

Lincoln may have shown how relieved he was that there had been none of the “outrage and violence” some had predicted in New York when a giant of a man neared him, and someone in the crowd cried out, “That’s Tom Hyer,” the retired prizefighter who had won fame with a 101-round victory years before. To which the president-elect replied, to much laughter: “I don’t care, so long as he don’t hit me.

He not only fumbled badly in his attempts at impromptu oratory en route to the capital, but worst of all, ended his journey in the dead of night, embarrassingly fearful for his safety, after encouraging unseemly partisan demonstrations in friendly Northern cities. He was too conspicuous. He was too sequestered. He was too careless. He was too calculating. He was too conciliatory. He was too coercive. He was too sloppy.

By mid-November, his protests notwithstanding, whiskers began sprouting from his face. A few weeks later, his assistant private secretary, John Hay, approvingly punned: Election news Abe’s hirsute fancy warrant – Apparent hair becomes heir apparent.44.

It came as no surprise that another visitor to Springfield found Lincoln on November 14 “reading up anew” on the history of Andrew Jackson’s response to the 1832 Nullification Crisis. While he made no effort to conceal “the uneasiness which the contemplated treason gives him,” Lincoln assured his guest that, like Jackson, he would not “yield an inch.

As of Election Day, Lincoln had successfully avoided not only his three opponents, but also his own running mate, Hannibal Hamlin. Republicans had nominated the Maine senator for vice president without Lincoln’s knowledge, much less his consent – true to another prevailing political custom that left such choices exclusively to the delegates – in an attempt to balance the Chicago convention’s choice of a Westerner for the presidency.

Lincoln’s “campaign” for president ended how and where it began: in adamant silence, and in the same Illinois city to which he had so tenaciously clung since the national convention. Like the solar eclipse that had obscured the Illinois sun in July, Lincoln remained in Springfield, hidden in full view.

James M. McPherson spoke for a later generation of scholars when he asserted in 1988 that Lincoln’s entire, public inaugural journey might have been a “mistake,” because in his effort to avoid “a careless remark or slip of the tongue” that might “inflame the crisis further,” the president-elect “indulged in platitudes and trivia,” producing “an unfavorable impression on those who were already disposed to regard the ungainly president-elect as a commonplace prairie lawyer.

Lincoln likely concluded – was, as Jackson had put it, “fallacious” in its justifications and, “in direct violation of their duty as citizens of the United States, contrary to the laws of their country, subversive of its Constitution, and having for its object the destruction of the Union.” As Jackson had bluntly concluded: “Disunion by armed force is treason.