I’m currently reading Ted Widmer’s book, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington the story of President-elect Lincoln’s journey from Springfield, Illinois to Washington, D.C. I thought the paragraphs below spoke to the recent events in the United States Senate. There was an opportunity for Republican Senators to exhibit some bravery. They could have demonstrated they actually possessed spines They did not. Lincoln knew there were those along the way who wanted to see him murdered before he could take the oath of office. States had already left the Union. Jefferson Davis had been elected president of the Confederacy and the southern states were preparing for war. Lincoln, unlike the Republican Senators who voted not to convict, understood the danger and his duty to the country. Those Republican Senators did not fear death. They voted to acquit simply to avoid losing their precious seat in the Senate in the next election. They are more concerned with their grasp on power than they are the health and welfare of the United States. They should no longer be allowed to claim they members of the party of Lincoln. They are unworthy and unfit.
“But to save democracy in its hour of darkness, it was essential that Lincoln travel publicly, unafraid, to his inauguration. He never wavered, even if there were flickers of his awareness of the danger. After sending a memo to Winfield Scott urging him to hold the forts, he said, “There can be no doubt that in any event that is good ground to live by and die by.” When a visitor mentioned that the secessionists might seize Washington, he answered with heat, promising, “I will suffer death,” before giving in to any compromise that made it look like he was “buying the privilege” of the office to which he had been legitimately elected. Since he would never “concede to traitors,” he was ready, if need be, for his soul to “go back to God from the wings of the Capitol.” On the eve of his journey, he said to an old friend, “I will die before I will depart from any of those things under threats made by traitors and secessionists under arms, defying the government.”
“From the election on, he would never be free from the knowledge that people were trying to kill him as he tried to save the country—that, in fact, his life and the life of democracy were, for a time, running parallel to each other. In a letter to a congressman from Pennsylvania, Lincoln said that he would never give in to the threats: “If we surrender, it is the end of us, and of the government.””
