Reverend Peter Marshall's Commentary Archive

 “I Bid You an Affectionate Farewell”

 ". . .Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?" (Luke 12:56)  

A cold rain had been drizzling from lowering skies ever since dawn.

Inside the overheated waiting room of the brick Great Western Railroad station the atmosphere was somber, even depressed.  At the center of the room the tall prairie lawyer had spent the last half-hour quietly saying farewell to hundreds of Springfield, Illinois friends, neighbors and well-wishers. Abraham Lincoln’s leathery and seamed face was pale, and his deep-set eyes betrayed powerful emotions, but the normally garrulous story-teller said little to those who shook his hand. At six feet, four inches, he had to bend forward to greet each of them, and when he did risk a few words of farewell his voice almost broke.

            At length the station clock showed five minutes before eight, and the locomotive’s bell on the waiting train outside began clanging an all aboard. The long months of waiting were over. At last, the moment for which Abraham Lincoln had been waiting ever his election last November had come. He was now beginning his long journey eastward to be inaugurated as the fifteenth President of the United States.

William Wood, in charge of making the arrangements for the inaugural journey, led the President-elect and his party of fifteen out through the station doors and onto the platform, now jammed with Lincoln’s neighbors. As the crowd respectfully made way for him, holding out hands for a last handshake, Lincoln could see his three-car inaugural train poised on the tracks. At the head was a modern Rogers 4-6-4 locomotive with a kerosene lantern and a funnel-shaped smokestack, quietly hissing steam, as if impatient to begin its important task. Behind it were coupled three cars – a baggage car, a smoker for the press and politicians, and a bright yellow passenger coach decorated with patriotic bunting. 

            As soon as Lincoln’s entourage was onboard, and Lincoln himself had swung his lanky frame up onto the rear platform of the passenger car, the conductor raised his hand to pull the bell cord once again – the signal for the engineer to get the train moving. But Lincoln stopped him, realizing that almost a thousand people had gathered around the rear of the train, hoping for some farewell remarks from him.  He had not planned any sort of speech, but they waited, shouting their goodbyes, the now steady rain drumming on their umbrellas. Lincoln pulled a tall beaver hat off his shock of black hair and waved his hand for silence, struggling with his emotions. After a moment, he gripped the platform’s rail for support, raised his head and looked out into their up-turned faces.

            “My friends,” he began in tones of deep feeling, “no one not in my situation can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting.  To this place and the kindness of these people I owe everything.  Here I have lived for a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man.  Here my children have been born, and one is buried.  I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington.  Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed.  With that assistance I cannot fail.  Trusting in Him who can go with me and remain with you and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well.  To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.”[1]

            Lincoln was barely able to finish, choking back the tears as he asked for their prayers.  Many in the audience were in tears themselves, and cried out in response to his request, “We will do it. We will do it.”

To three rousing cheers he turned and went into the car. A moment later the big drivers on the locomotive slowly began to turn, and as her smokestack emitted chuffs of black smoke, the train eased into motion. Soon it gathered speed and pulled away from the station. 

The people stood in the rain in utter silence, watching until it was out of sight. 

Lincoln had referred to “a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington.” This was not grandiosity or self-importance – there simply was none of that in the man. Anyone searching his speeches and letters looking for self-aggrandizing language will come up empty. Rather, these sober and humble words were used by a man who sensed an appointment with destiny. He was embarking on a mission; he was being summoned by God to a duty far beyond his ability. And he was openly confessing that without Divine assistance he could not answer that call.

In his brief remarks Lincoln had used 63 out of 152 words for the invocation of God – far more than the perfunctory “God bless America” with which most modern politicians close their speeches.[2]  The short speech was an extemporaneous expression of heart-felt emotion, which makes all the more significant Lincoln’s mention of genuine belief in and reliance on a personal God, who could at the same time watch over him and the people he left behind in Springfield. 

As the train slowly approached the thirty-miles-an-hour mark for the day’s run over to Indianapolis the President-elect settled into one of the heavy chairs in the ornate parlor car and stretched out his long legs.  Carpeted thickly throughout, the coach was decorated with tassels and scrolls. Strips of blue silk with silver stars hung below the windows, and American flags were prominent at both ends of the coach.   

Accompanying the President-elect in the front of the car were four soldiers detailed by the army to protect him. His seventeen-year-old son Robert and an accompanying friend sat next to him, and nearby were his two young secretaries – John Nicolay and John Hay – and his personal aide and bodyguard, long-term friend Ward Hill Lamon. Various reporters, local politicians, and railroad officials occupied the adjacent car.

Robert asked his father where the rest of the family would join them in Indianapolis that evening.  “They’ll be brought to our hotel,” Lincoln replied, and his thoughts turned to that morning’s argument with his wife Mary about their journey. 

Mary Todd Lincoln was the headstrong daughter of a prominent and thoroughly Southern family from Lexington, Kentucky, and used to getting her way.  She had insisted at the last moment that she and their three sons, Robert, Willie, and Tad, ride with Lincoln in the same railroad car all the way to Washington.  His protests that this was not the way it was done, and that reporters and officials needed access to him without the boys underfoot, had fallen on deaf ears.  They finally reached a compromise that saw Robert riding with him, and Mary and the two younger boys coming to Indianapolis in a separate train later in the day.

What amounted to flaming temper tantrums on Mary’s part were not rare occurrences. Some time before the family left Springfield a man named Hermann Kreismann showed up at the Lincolns’ home looking for a patronage job. To his amazement he found Lincoln sitting despondently in the parlor, and Mary “on the floor in a sort of hysterical fit, caused by L’s refusal to promise the important position of naval officer of the N.Y. Custom House to Isaac Henderson.” Lincoln had no idea who Henderson was, but he had been plugged by William Cullen Bryant, the influential editor of the New York Evening Post. Apparently, Mary had met the man on her recent New York shopping trip, and he had sent her a diamond brooch in anticipation of receiving the position. “Kreismann,” Lincoln complained morosely, “she will not let me go until I promise her an office for one of her friends.”

Mary’s tantrum worked – Lincoln promised Henderson the job.[3] It had been difficult enough to deal with the myriad job seekers during the months before his departure, but for his wife to have badgered him on behalf of someone he had never even heard of was hard to take. He had protested vigorously, but in the end had reluctantly yielded to keep the peace, which was typical of their relationship. Several years later he explained his seemingly infinite patience with Mary: “If you knew how little harm it does me [to give in to her], and how much good it does her, you wouldn’t wonder that I am meek.”[4]

Temper tantrums were not Mary’s only embarrassing behavior. Worried that Washington society would write her off as an ignorant and plain Western female, she had lavishly spent Lincoln’s limited funds in New York’s dress shops. An avid peruser of Godey’s Lady’s Book, and almost obsessive about her moderately attractive appearance, she was determined to make a fashion statement as the nation’s new First Lady. Mary Lincoln’s impulsive spending would haunt their years in the White House.

But she was equally determined not to be a mere fashion plate. Raised in a politically savvy household, she was used to asserting her opinions on current events, and to the delight of the reporters, often did so at the teas she hosted during her days in New York. There would come a time when Mary Lincoln would be vilified in the papers, but for now the press treated her as a celebrity, and hung on her words. This only reinforced her high opinion of her own opinions, and fed the delusion that she was the most important advisor in her husband’s life.

Bidding farewell to Springfield had been emotionally wrenching for Lincoln. As eager as he was to assume the reins of power in Washington, leaving the place where he was loved, and jumping into the seething cauldron of the nation’s crisis was an unnerving proposition. At the end of January he had paid an affectionate last visit to his stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston, down in Coles County, Illinois, who had always especially loved Abe, calling him “the best boy I ever saw.” After several days together, the time finally came for mother and son to part. Sarah clung to him, crying out that “she would never be permitted to see him again,” and that “his enemies would assassinate him.”

“No, no, Mama,” Lincoln tried to calm her. “They will not do that. Trust in the Lord! And all will be well.* We will see each other – again.”

But she refused to be mollified. After Lincoln’s assassination, Sarah would say: “I knowed when he went away he wasn’t ever coming back alive.”[5]

Another farewell, only slightly less difficult for Lincoln, was that with his long-time law partner, Billy Herndon, which took place at their second-floor office just before Lincoln left Springfield. As Herndon remembered it, Lincoln supposedly offered him a job in his administration, which the junior partner turned down, and “we ran over the books and arranged for the completion of all unsettled and unfinished matters.” Their business matters concluded, Lincoln threw himself down on the old and battered office sofa, and lapsed into a lengthy silence. Neither man said a word. Finally, after long moments Lincoln asked: “Billy, how long have we been together.”

“Over sixteen years,” responded Herndon.

“We’ve never had a cross word during all that time, have we?”

“No, indeed we have not,” was the emphatic reply.

With that, Lincoln unfolded his long legs from the sofa, gathered up the few papers and books he was taking with him, and asked Herndon to come with him down the office steps. Gesturing at the old Lincoln-Herndon signboard, he said: “Let it hang there undisturbed. Give our clients to understand that the election of a President makes no change in the firm of Lincoln and Herndon. If I live, I’m coming back some time, and then we’ll go on practicing law as if nothing had ever happened.”[6]

According to Herndon, Lincoln was not at all sure that he would live through his Presidency, and had expressed that foreboding to his law partner as he said goodbye. Herndon had begged him to abandon such thoughts, but they continued to linger in the back of his mind for the rest of his life. 

            Lincoln’s musings on the train were interrupted by the approach of veteran reporter Henry Villard, who had first met Lincoln during the 1858 debates with Senator Douglas. Villard had recently renewed his friendship with Lincoln while filing newspaper dispatches on him from Springfield, and now asked the President-elect if he would write down his farewell remarks at the station. Lincoln wrote out the first four sentences, but hindered either by the rocking of the train or a hand sore from shaking goodbyes, he handed the task over to one of his young secretaries, Nicolay, and dictated the rest. Villard would later say that he had “prevailed on Mr. Lincoln, immediately after starting to write (the speech) out for me on a pad,” and that he had sent the words “over the wires from the first telegraph station.”[7]

After Nicolay handed Villard his dictated copy of Lincoln’s brief farewell, the President-elect leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and pondered the national crisis into which the train was carrying him. It was February 11, 1861, the day before his fifty-second birthday.

[1] Lincoln, Works, IV, 190-91; New York Tribune, Feb. 11, 1861.

2 White, The Eloquent President, pp. 17-18.

3Holzer, Lincoln: President-Elect, 238. It has been suggested that this incident happened on the day the Lincolns left Springfield, but the evidence for placing it at that time is scanty.

4Ibid.

* This is an revealing comment by Lincoln, especially in light of the claims by some historians that he had no personal relationship with God.

5Holzer, Lincoln: President-Elect, 251; Foote, The Civil War, Volume I, 35.

6Holzer, Lincoln: President-Elect, 293-94.

7White, The Eloquent President, 20.

Copyright, 2010, Peter J. Marshall. All rights reserved.     

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