B?C87n Crof ^ut, Wi i Ham A, "Now ! recollect Souvenirs of the Sanctufr", "Lincoln as I saw him". UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY MEMORIAL the Class of 1901 founded by HARLAN HOYT HORNER and HENRIETTA CALHOUN HORNER 'Now I recollect-Souvenirs of the Sanctum "LINCOLN AS I SAW HIM" hy William A. Croffut Printed by The Colonial Press Washington, D. C. 1943 Copyright 1943 by Usher L. Burdick INTRODUCTION William A. Cruffut of Washington was not only a con- temporary of Abraham Lincoln but his personal friend. Among the papers left by Mr. Croffut was an unpublished manuscript of Mr. Lincoln. Mr. Croifut was a writer of note for many years in the Capitol City and this manuscript sheds further light on the life and character of the Great Emancipator. As the years pass, it will be more and more difficult to find manuscripts written by men of note who were personally acquainted with Abraham Lincoln, and when one is found it should find its way into print. I am indebted to Mrs. Anita Nichols, 142 B Street, N. E., Washington, D. C, for the right to publish this manuscript. Usher L. Burdick Dated at Washington, D. C. February 12, 1943 WILLIAM AUGUSTUS CROFFUT William Augustus Croffut, author; b. Redding, Conn., 1835; s. Benedict and Harriet N. (Hull) C. ; ed. common schs. ; (Ph.D., Union Coll.); m. Margaret Marshall, of Danbury, Conn. ; 2d, Bessie B. Nicholls, of Washington. In newspaper work since 1852; pvt. U.S.A. in Civil War; phonographic reporter and corr. on many leading jours. ; traveled abroad extensively. Was some time editor Minne- apolis Tribune, New York American, Rochester (N. Y.) Democrat, New Haven (Conn.) Paladium, American Ar- chitect, Hearth and Home, and Daily Post, Washington. Exec, officer U. S. Geol. Survey, 1888-94. In 1899, organ- ized and became sec. Anti-Imperialist League; pres. Lib- erty League. Author : Helping Hand for American Homes ; War History of Connecticut ; The Vanderbilts ; Folks Next Door; A Midsummer Lark; The Open Door of Dreamland; The Lord's Day or Man's; Labor's Riddle Guessed At; Fifty Years in Camp and Field, being a Diary of Maj.-Gen. Ethan Allen Hitchcock; The Crimson Wolf (novel). Also several vols, of verse; opening ode for Chicago Expn., 1893; many pamphlets; and *'Des- eret," an opera, with music by Dudley Buck. Address: 142 B St., N. E., Washington. (Died: August 31, 1915). Source: Who's Who in America, 1914-1915, p. 552 From an unpublished M. S. of W. A. Croffut "Now I Recollect Souvenirs of the Sanctum" Lincoln As I Saw Him — 1HAVE never known so great a change to take place in any man's appearance as in Mr. Lincoln's during the three years following the day when I first saw him, March 4, 186L He was never handsome indeed, but he grew more and more cadaverous and ungainly month by month. The terrible labor which the great war imposed prevented him from taking systematic exercise, and he became constantly more lean and sallow. He had a very dejected appearance and ugly black rings appeared under his eyes. I well remem- ber how weary and sad he looked at one of the inevitable receptions as he stood near the folding doors where the central corridor empties itself into the East Room. As there was a pause for a moment in the stream of visitors, I heard a lady standing near him ask if the inces- sant handshaking was not even more fatiguing to him than his work in the office. "O, no — no", he answered; "of course this is tiresome physically ; but I am pretty strong and it rests me, after all, for here nobody is cross or exacting, and no man asks me for what I can't give him." And he gave his hand to the next in line. During the last two years of his life, he was constantly threatened with assassination. Of course no public notice was taken of the menaces, and he alluded to them only to protest against the military escort which he could not always escape. When Secretary Stanton or General Hitchcock warned him of danger, he said "Nobody can escape assassi- nation by dodging. Moreover, if they kill me, the next man will be just as bad as I am ! Under a republic no man can defend himself with a body guard. If I had a platoon with drawn sabres always at the door, they would cry out that I was aiming to be emperor." He was always exposed to personal attack. There were at least two doorkeepers to pass before getting to his room, but they did not consider it necessary to be vigilant after office hours, and I often walked into the White House un- challenged, and went straight up to the private secretary's room adjoining his own, without seeing any person what- ever. And it was no uncommon thing for him to go alone out of the house almost any hour of day or night, and walk across the lawn to the War Department for a consultation or to seek some news. During the search that succeeded his assassination it was ascertained that very complete arrangements had been made to kidnap him and the gloomy cellar of the old Van Ness mansion down by the river had been prepared for his prison. Notwithstanding his constant exposure to danger Mr. Lincoln often said "I am physically a coward, and should very likely run if great danger threatened me. I'm afraid of a gun.'* His estimate of his physical courage is hardly consistent with the fact that when challenged to fight a duel by the intrepid General Shields in 1834 he promptly accepted, and thus defined the conditions : "First: — ^weapons: cavalry broadswords — size precisely equal in all respects to such as are now used by the cavalry company at Jacksonville. "Second: — position: a plank ten feet long and from nine to twelve inches wide, to be firmly fixed on the ground as the line between us which neither is to pass his foot over on forfeit of his life. Next, a line drawn on the ground on either side of dais plank and parallel with it at the distance of the whole length of the sword and three feet additional from the plank, and the passing of such line by either party shall be deemed a surrender of the contest. "Third: — time: Thursday evening at five o'clock." The seconds prevented a collision. If not afraid on his own account he certainly had some fear for his family's safety, and early in the War he sent them to Philadelphia out of harm's way. He was not only prudent but he was somewhat superstitious, for one day he telegraphed. "Mrs. Lincoln, Philadelphia: Think you had better put Tad's pistol away. I had an ugly dream about him. A. Lincoln." Mr. Lincoln came to the Presidency under circumstances that would have tried the toughest fibre, and it is now well known that he was not exactly of that kind. He was not aggressive. He was essentially a man of peace. There never was a ruler who disliked contention more. He was always behind his party instead of being ahead of it — a follower and not a leader. Instead of being inspired by hate, as his enemies declared, and probably supposed, he was moved by an uncommon forbearance that seemed to many of his friends to be born of fear. Instead of being the rampant abolitionist he was frequently called, he was not an abolitionist in any sense and was in favor of the Crittenden Compromise, which secured the permanence of slavery and its extension through half the national terri- tories. He had shrewdness enough to call around him stronger men than himself, like William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Edwin M. Stanton; and when Sumter was fired on and captured during the second month of the domi- nance of his party, he began to see that the spirit of the strange revolt was one that could not be trifled with or cajoled. Whether Mr. Lincoln was the best man to be at the head of a great people at such a time will always be a matter of controversy. He was possessed of a lively sense of humor and that great tenderness which generally accompanies it, but he was in no other sense a hero. While not deficient in personal courage, he was painfully deficient in self confi- dence and self assertion. His mood was passive, not active. He seldom imposed his will on others. If he had been in the position of Napoleon in Paris in 1795 he would have distributed coffee and ginger bread to the mutinous national guard, instead of blowing them to atoms with his artillery. If he had been Frederick, he would probably have left Maria Theresa in Silesia as justice required. It is now well known that his comical complaint that he "had no influence with his administration" was something more than a joke; that all of his cabinet were more or less insubordinate; that he was swayed by Seward's masterful spirit; that Chase man- aged to circumvent him and have his way; and that the imperious Stanton even went so far as boldly to counter- mand his orders, given to oblige some tearful suppliant, whenever they thought they interfered with the good of the service. More than once during the War when the Democrats of the North held peace meetings and resisted enlistments and 8 the draft, Mr. Lincoln fell into despair, acknowledged to his confidential friends a fear that the rebellion could never be crushed, and expressed the apprehension that posterity would hold him responsible for the heaps of slain and the misery caused by the fratricidal struggle. He was a man of ideas rather than of affairs ; of conscience rather than of force; of contemplation rather than of action. He had the temperament of a poet, and the heart of a woman. He liked dearly to tell a humorous story; he could repeat pages of Shakespeare and half of Childe Harold's Pilrimage, and he was fond of crooning over Holmes' "Last Leaf." If Mr. Lincoln had weaknesses, they were of an amiable sort that "leaned to virtue's side" and excited a vast amount of sympathy, love, and grateful enthusiasm that recruited the Union armies from the ranks of those who hated battle, and were moved to enlist only by the highest purpose. He never was quite as sad as he looked, and amid his heaviest responsibilities he generally decorated the situation with a story, an allegory or a joke — ^though the latter were less broad than reported. To a committee that came to protest against making the South so angry that it would never reunite, he asked "Would you prosecute the contest in future with alder-stick squirts, filled with rosewater?" To a visit of Louisiana planters who complained of their great losses and besought him to get them back into the Union without further injury, he remarked "Broken eggs cannot be mended. Louisiana has nothing now to do but to take her place in the Union as it was, barring the already broken eggs." An acquaintance of mine asked Mr. Lincoln to appoint his son to the position of paymaster. "How old is he?" he was asked. "He is twenty — ^well, nearly twenty-one," said the ap- plicant. "Nearly twenty-one," shouted Mr. Lincoln, "I wouldn't appoint the angel Gabriel paymaster if he wasn't twenty- one." Mr. Lincoln had a good deal of trouble wrestling with contumacious newspapers, that criticized him sharply for going too fast, or for not going fast enough. When one of these editors called, the President got rid of him with a "little story." "A traveller on the frontier found himself out of his reckoning as night came on in a most inhospitable region. A terrific thunderstorm came up to add to his trouble. He floundered along in the mud till his horse gave out, and then got out to lead him. Occasional lightning afforded the only clue to the path, but the peals of thunder were frightful. One bolt, which seemed to crush the earth beneath him, made him stagger and finally brought him to his knees. Being by no means a praying man, his petition was short and to the point: 'O, Lord! If it's all the same to you, give us a little more light and a little less noise !' " One day Marshal Ward Lamon, Lincoln's close and courageous friend, called to get a pardon for some deserter. When Lincoln was about to write his name, he looked up and said "Lamon, I'm overdoing this pardon business. Did you ever hear how Patagonians eat oysters? You didn't? They open them and throw the shells out of the window till the shells get higher than the house, then they move. I think of it often, now-a-days." Frank B. Carpenter, the artist, dropped into the Treas- ury Department one morning and invited John Pierpont, Ed Stedman, and myself to go over to the White House and see the portrait of Mr. Chase which he was just finishing in the great historical group on which he was engaged, "Sign- ing the Emancipation Proclamation." The large canvas was propped up against the wall in the state banquet room. It was the opinion of a majority that Mr. Chase's unfinished portrait promised to be more lifelike than that of the President or any other of his cabinet. Mr. Lincoln was the severest critic the artist had. He was not present on this occasion, but Mrs. Lincoln paused in passing through the room and said to the old poet, "What puzzles me is, what on earth are we ever going to do with it," — evidently having a vague idea that it must somehow be got into the little wooden cottage they had left in Springfield, Illinois. Nobody could conjecture that Mrs. Elizabeth Thompson would come forward and pay $25,000 for it and give it to the country, so that it would find permanent place upon the walls of the Capitol. 10 Day by day it became clearer to Lincoln's mind that the rebellion was slavery and that it was necessary to keep the Border States on the side of the Union. So he proposed a scheme of gradual emancipation in which they would be paid the full value of what they called their property. Con- gress objected that the remedy was too expensive. He pro- posed that $400 each be paid for slaves, including all men, women and children. This was a tremendous price, but he knew it was much cheaper than prolonging the war. There were $750,000 worth of slaves in Delaware. The cost of the war was $2,000,000 a day. So, for a third of one day's expenses all the slaves in Delaware could be pur- chased. He proposed to apply the same policy to the slaves in other border states and ultimately to all the states. He was wiser than his time, wiser than the American people. The North was so indignant and the South so mad that his advice was unheeded. Congress was too deaf to hear and too blind to see. Of course we know, looking backward through the vista of years, that it would have been the wisest possible settlement of the quarrel. If we had had as much sense as Japan and Russia have manifested, or as Norway and Sweden have still recently shown, it would have been far better for all concerned. As the end of the slaveholders' rebellion approached Lincoln became even more conciliatory. To satisfy a few fault finders at the North he went down the river to Grant's headquarters and met some Confederate commissioners. He said to them "You are rebels in arms; if the South wants peace, all it has to do it to stop fighting." One of the commissioners cited as a precedent that Charles I had nego- tiated with rebels in arms. "Yes", said Lincoln, "I remember to have read about it. If I am not mistaken, Charles I lost his head." In critical moments Lincoln's judgment seems to have been superb — superior to that of his generals. Had Mc- Clellan followed his advice, he would have taken Richmond. Had Hooker acted in accordance with his suggestions, Chan- cellorsville would have been a victory for the nation. Had Mead obeyed his explicit commands, he would have de- stroyed Lee's army before it could have re-crossed the Potomac. No death ever caused such a convulsion of terror, of anger, of grief in America as the death of Mr. Lincoln. It 11 seemed for a month as if the sun was blotted from the sky, and yet — ^was it not Azrael, the angel of death who was called the good angel? Perhaps the coward stroke that bore Lincoln down was the most merciful thing that could have happened to him. Suppose he had not been slain? Sup- pose he had lived and lived to bear upon his tired shoulders the vast burden of Reconstruction — ^the great race problem? Suppose he had gone back to Springfield, Illinois, and hung out his little sign again, "Abraham Lincoln, Attorney-at- Law ?" Suppose he had had to mix again in the turmoil and squabble of local politics, to decide who should go to the Legislature from Sangamon County? What would Fate have had in store for him? Upon what pedestal would he stand — he, who is today the nation's great hero and martyr? ift<'.4itf*;K=Kii*r-fH>srt=Hssa=i UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS-URBANA 973.7L63B2C87N C001 NOW I RECOLLECT-SOUVENIRS OF THE SANCTUM 3 0112 031794172