Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley

Conclusion: Re-Remembering Lincoln and Greeley

90 Conclusion: R e-r emembering Lincoln and Gr eeley As the war entered its final months and only time separated the Union from victory, Abraham Lincoln managed to shed at least some of the excruciating strain that Horace Greeley had sensed in their final meeting. Lincoln’s reelection in November 1864, combined with Union general William Tecumseh Sherman’s devastating campaign through Georgia and the Carolinas, had put the end of the war in sight. Discussions in the North and in Congress turned to life after the war and—with glimmers not felt for years—to hope of what might become of the restored nation. With the major cities of Virginia reconquered by Union forces and General Ulysses S. Grant’s successes in both the eastern and western theaters of the war, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865. As news that the war had ended reached readers in the North, Greeley’s Tribune reported that the streets of New York City were filled with cheers lasting the entire night.1 In the months following the November 1864 election, Lincoln’s harshest critics, which had at times included Greeley, recognized that the president had at least begun to secure a Union victory and shifted from attacks to more general support of the administration. James Gordon Bennett, for his part, remained focused primarily on reporting war news, telling readers of the New York Herald that they could vote for their own candidate instead of following what would have ordinarily been his endorsement of the Democratic candidate. conclusion | 91 Bennett was doubtless gratified that Lincoln had offered him the position of minister to France, the most prestigious post Lincoln had offered to any of the New York editors. Greeley, who waited in vain for an appointment to Lincoln’s cabinet after having been told he had reason to expect one, had learned to live with the disappointment of exclusion from Lincoln’s closest advisors. Lincoln had correctly reasoned that Greeley and Seward simply could not work together and that, as long as Seward remained his secretary of state, Greeley—whether or not he knew why—simply could play no direct role in the administration. Lincoln’s Martyrdom Despite the perception of Greeley, much of which was mixed, with his faithful readers remaining loyal admirers and his critics having pegged him as a self-serving office seeker, Ward Hill Lamon, a longtime friend of Lincoln’s, observed that the Tribune editor “had power” over the president.2 Lamon, as a self-appointed bodyguard of the president, had made it his job to pay close attention to those who surrounded Lincoln, but on the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln had sent him on an assignment to Richmond, Virginia. Before a night at the theater with his wife, the president—for the first time in years—took the opportunity to relax during a carriage ride. He spoke of early days in a log cabin, of his old Springfield home, and of his days working in a law office, Mary Lincoln recalled. “The tension under which he had for so long been kept was removed,” she said, “and he was like a boy out of school.”3 Later that Good Friday night, the couple attended the play Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, where an assassin fired a bullet into the president’s head and killed him. The nation grieved with a sorrow as profound as that which had become so familiar to families who had lost loved ones during the war. Greeley was naturally devastated, with the eulogies to Lincoln revealing an uncommon perspective, with little of the shock, disbelief, and horror communicated nationally. Greeley, instead, reacted with words of respect and emotion. “He filled a larger space in the public eye than any American before him, partly because of the stupendous 92 | conclusion events in which he bore a conspicuous part,” he wrote, suggesting few graves would be more visited “or bedewed with the tears of a people’s prouder, fonder affection.”4 Lincoln, in Greeley’s most astute observation , was a man and not a superman—an assessment that students of history almost 150 years later can trust in many ways more than the president’s most worshipful contemporaries. The New York Tribune’s first announcement of Lincoln’s assassination came in columns separated by black bands, which...