As the Anniversary of Lincoln's Assassination Approaches, a Historian Analyzes His Last Speech
"Lincoln's Last Speech" is Louis Masur's second look at the 16th president
Abraham Lincoln gave his final speech from a window on the north portico of the White House on the evening of April 11, 1865. In it, he laid out his plans for reconstructing the South, defended his acceptance of the new, if imperfect, constitution of Louisiana, and suggested that voting rights be extended to some African Americans, especially those who had served in the armed forces.
In the audience on the White House lawn that night was the actor John Wilkes Booth, who, hearing Lincoln advocate enfranchisement for African Americans, told his companion, Lewis Powell: “That means n----- citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.” Three days later, Booth assassinated Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre while Powell tried and failed to kill Secretary of State William Seward.
Louis P. Masur, distinguished professor of history and American Studies in the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, analyzes the last speech and the circumstances surrounding it in Lincoln’s Last Speech: Wartime Reconstruction and the Crisis of Reunion (Oxford University Press, 2015). This is Masur’s second look at Lincoln. The author of Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union (Harvard University Press, 2012), Masur is a cultural historian, and has written books on subjects as varied as capital punishment and the World Series. As we near the 150th anniversary of the 16th president’s assassination, Rutgers Today asked Masur to talk about the significance of Lincoln’s last speech and the reconstruction that followed.
Lincoln’s speech was what we would call “wonky” today – it explained and defended policy. What was Lincoln's aim in this speech?
Masur: Lincoln wanted to talk directly to the people about his plan to restore the Union. It was certainly time. Lee had surrendered to Grant only two days earlier. Six weeks earlier in his second inaugural, Lincoln had waxed poetic about the need to act “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” Now he sought support specifically for bringing Louisiana back into what he called “proper, practical relation” with the government. In typical Lincoln fashion, he did so by using an analogy that everyone could understand when he talked about the new Louisiana state government being as the egg is to the fowl and asked whether “we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it?”
Aside from John Wilkes Booth and Lewis Powell, who was there on the White House lawn that night?
Masur: Thousands of Americans swarmed the White House grounds. Many were government employees and residents of Washington. Some were soldiers. Many others were members of the professional and working classes. Some traveled from Maryland, Virginia and elsewhere to celebrate.
Is it fair to say that "reconstruction" – meaning, the reintegration of the former Confederate states into the Union – was a continuing project of Lincoln's almost from the beginning of the Civil War? Why has this attracted relatively little attention from historians?
Masur: The events of 1865-1877 that so traumatized the nation have made it easy to think only of President Andrew Johnson’s battles with Congress as the era of Reconstruction. But Lincoln understood from the very start of the war the need to craft a policy for restoring the seceded states to the Union. Indeed, he understood it as both a means toward winning the war as well as an end in itself – the more quickly Southern unionists could organize new state governments and send representatives to Congress, the more quickly the Confederate effort would be defeated. Accordingly, he appointed military governors in several southern states and, in 1863, issued a Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction that established his plan for ending the war and making the nation whole again.
Thaddeus Stevens, the radical Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, wanted to treat the rebellious states as "conquered provinces." Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts maintained that the Confederate states had "committed state suicide" when they seceded from the Union and that only Congress could lay down the conditions upon which they might be readmitted. How close did Sumner and Stevens come to getting their way, and how might history have been different if they had?
Masur: Lincoln called the doctrines of state suicide and conquered provinces “a pernicious distraction.” In his last speech he referred to the “so-called seceded states” because he held to the doctrine of an indissoluble union so, as far as he was concerned, they never left. While Sumner and Stevens did not get their way to the extent that they hoped, they did wage a fierce battle against Andrew Johnson and managed to assure passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. It is likely that had he lived, Lincoln also would have supported constitutional protections for the freedmen. It is also likely that, as he had during the war, he would have been able to work with Sumner and Stevens and not allow their differences to become toxic. Sadly, it was not to be. The process of Reconstruction after his death, one writer predicted at the time, “will teach us to mourn him doubly.”
Media Contact: Ken Branson, kbranson@ucm.rutgers.edu, 848-932-0580, cell 908-797-2590