All the Laws but One: Civil Liberties in Wartime

A cold drizzle of rain was falling February 11 when Lincoln and his party of fifteen were to leave Springfield on the eight o'clock at the Great Western Railway Station. Chilly gray mist hung on the circle of the prairie horizon. A short locomotive with a flat-topped smokestack stood puffing with the baggage car and special passenger car coupled on; a railroad president and superintendent were on board. A thousand people crowded in and around the brick station, inside of which Lincoln was standing. One by one came hundreds of old friends, shaking hands, wishing him luck and Godspeed, all faces solemn. Even huge Judge Davis, wearing a new white silk hat, was a somber figure."

On that dreary Illinois winter day in 1861, President-elect Abraham Lincoln began his journey to Washington, D.C., where he hoped to be inaugurated as President on March 4. "Hoped to" because there were already rumors afloat that secessionist sympathizers would somehow prevent his inauguration from taking place. In the November presidential election, Lincoln had prevailed over three opponents, receiving 180 electoral votes. The incumbent Vice President, John Breckenridge, the candidate of the South, received 72; John Bell, the candidate of the Constitutional Union Party, 39; and Lincoln's longtime Democratic opponent Stephen Douglas, only 12. But the electoral vote did not tell the whole story of this bitterly contested election. Lincoln received a minority of the popular vote, slightly less than 1.9 million votes out of a total of some 4.7 million. In ten states of the South, he did not get a single popular vote. Indeed, he was not even on the ballot in some states. He was elected by the nearly solid electoral votes of the North, together with those of California and Oregon. In an election dominated by the issue of the extension of slavery, Lincoln received no electoral votes from any state south of the Ohio River.

Unquestionably, then, he was a sectionally chosen President, and soon after his election the states of the Deep South began to carry out their threat to secede from the Union. Within days of the election, the two Senators from South Carolina resigned their seats, and the state legislature enacted a bill calling a convention to determine whether it should secede from the Union. Delegates were duly elected, and on December 20, 1860, the convention voted to take South Carolina out of the Union. By the time Lincoln was boarding the train to Washington, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana had passed ordinances of secession, and delegates from these states were meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, to launch the Confederate States of America.

From the rear platform of the car that would bear him and his party on their slow and circuitous journey to Washington, Abraham Lincoln said goodbye to his Springfield friends:

My friends-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 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 everywhere for good let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope you and your prayers will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.

Lincoln's train moved eastward over the flatlands of Illinois and Indiana, reaching Indianapolis in the late afternoon. There he was greeted by Governor Oliver P. Morton, and spoke in the evening from the balcony of his hotel. The next day, February 12--Lincoln's fifty-second birthday--the special train took him and his party from Indianapolis to Cincinnati, where he could look across the Ohio River to the state of Kentucky, where he had been born.

When little Abe was seven, he moved with his parents and brother north across the Ohio River, to Indiana. His mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, died when he was nine, and at the age of twenty-one he moved with his father and family to a farm near Decatur, Illinois.

He worked in a store in New Salem, was elected to the Illinois legislature, and then moved to Springfield, where he began the practice of law in 1836. Six years later, he married Mary