Speaker 1:
From the Library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision and global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism, right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearing houses around the world. Now, welcome, Inside the ICE House, here's your host Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
Twenty eight years ago, the president elect of the United States flew in a chartered American Airlines 727, about 1,000 miles from Central Flying Service in Little Rock, Arkansas to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. One of the first events on January 17, 1993, was called an American Reunion, a gathering for thousands on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Architect Henry Bacon's neoclassical tribute to our 16th President housing, the iconic sculpture by Daniel Chester French and the carved inscriptions of Lincoln's second inaugural address and his Gettysburg address in the north and south chambers.
Josh King:
The program featured Aaron Copland's Lincoln portrait narrated by Jack Nicholson, Oprah Winfrey, Edward James, almost and James Earl Jones and soprano, Kathleen Battle, gave a rendition of We Shall Overcome on the same steps where a half century before, Marian Anderson had held a free concert after being barred from Constitution Hall because of her race.
Josh King:
Now, three days later, as prescribed by the Constitution and after tea at the White House with his gracious and defeated predecessor, President Elect Bill Clinton was inaugurated on the west front of the Capitol, making his way down Pennsylvania Avenue back to the White House to his new office, where he found a humble letter from President Bush that was made public only many years later, "You will be our president when you read this note," Mr. Bush wrote, "I wish you well. I wish your family well. Your success is our country's success. I'm rooting hard for you. Good luck, George."
Josh King:
Now, with those words, Mr. Bush continued a tradition of a peaceful transfer of power that's been upheld by his successors, Clinton, Bush and Obama to their successors in the decades since. Suffice to say that when President Elect Biden makes the 109 mile trip from Wilmington, Delaware to Washington to become our 46th president, it's unclear what message, if any, President Trump will leave him in the drawer of the resolute desk in the Oval Office, and perhaps acknowledging the interruption of this right of our democracy was left to another immigrant to this nation, another Republican, former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to post a video message on Twitter a few days ago, Republican to Democrat, American to American, to uphold the rite of passage.
Josh King:
In his message, Governor Schwarzenegger said, "Our democracy is like the steel of this sword. The more it is tempered, the stronger it becomes. Our democracy has always been tempered by wars, injustices and insurrections. We need to heal." The governor went on, "Not just as Republicans or Democrats, but as Americans. Now, to begin this process, no matter what your political affiliation is, I asked you to join me in saying to President Elect Biden, we wish you great success as our president. If you succeed, our nation succeeds." Sort of an echo of President Bush.
Josh King:
Whether our new president is making his way to Washington via 100 mile trip from Wilmington, fully guarded and protected by every asset that the United States Secret Service can bring to bear or via a 2,000 mile Odyssey by train spanning 100 speeches in seven states over 13 precarious days amid the threat of assassination with seven states, having already seceded from the Union, the endurance of our democracy challenged as it's been, we'll continue on January 20, 2021.
Josh King:
As we take stock of everything that's happened in the last few days and months and years, let's travel back much farther in time, 160 years to harness a greater grasp of what this moment means. Our conversation with my friend, Professor Ted Widmer, author of Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington, out now in paperback from Simon and Schuster, it's coming up right after this.
Speaker 3:
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Josh King:
Welcome back. Our guest today my friend, Professor Ted Widmer, is a distinguished lecturer at Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York. He regularly contributes to the Washington Post, in New Yorker, and the New York Times and previously, Ted worked in the White House with me as a special assistant to President Bill Clinton, foreign policy speech writer and Senior Advisor for special projects, which involved advising on history and scholarship-related issues, later served as a senior adviser to Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton and his most recent book, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington is out now in paperback from Simon and Schuster. Ted, welcome Inside the ICE House.
Ted Widmer:
Thank you so much, Josh. Great to be talking with you.
Josh King:
Ted, in his address to the Senate following the January 6th attack on the Capitol building, Senator Dick Durbin called the dome building a symbol of unity and hope completed under the direction of former President Abraham Lincoln at the height of the Civil War. What were your thoughts as you watched?
Ted Widmer:
Well, it was an incredible day to put it mildly. I mean, we saw the horrors of the afternoon, the invasion, desecration of the Capitol, but then it was pretty inspiring in the evening. I'm not sure we've heard enough about that, that Senate and House came back only hours later and deliberated and voted and confirmed the election of Joe Biden but also gave beautiful speeches, beautiful five-minute speeches, and Durbin's was one of the best and I loved it.
Ted Widmer:
Yes, it told that story that needed to be retold about how Lincoln demanded that the work continue on completing the dome. It was a very difficult architectural project. Actually, what isn't very well known, and he didn't say is that, up until the time Jefferson Davis resigned as a Senator from Mississippi, or just before that, he was in charge of a lot of the renovation of the US Capitol, which is fascinating but Lincoln felt it was a really important symbol of union, which it is. It was the completing of the central edifice of our government. By the time the war was over, the building had been completed.
Josh King:
Ted, I lasted a podcast with you about your book on The Secret White House recordings of John F. Kennedy that was back in 2012. You've also written six other books on subjects ranging from Martin Van Buren to a history of US foreign policy in arc of the Liberty's. Your new book's release and topic met squarely with the 2020 election last year when it first came out but your research began a decade ago. What drew you to the topic of this long ago train trip taken at a time of great discord in a country with a house divided?
Ted Widmer:
Well, I'm so grateful, first of all, to you for hanging in there with me. I've been on a journey of my own from a pretty academic historian, which is what I started out as to, I'm not trying to tell stories for a wider audience and it's not just book sales, although we all care about that. I think we want to be in a national conversation about where our country is headed and academics, even though I am one and I respect them, often speak to each other. I'm just trying to get out there a little more.
Ted Widmer:
The Lincoln project for me began in 2011, so even before the last time I talked to you. I was part of a group of historians, public historians who were trying to write about the civil war in the online section of the New York Times, which was pretty new back then. Now, that's how almost all of us read, The New York Times is online but back then it was sort of less valuable real estate. The editors would do innovative projects back there that they didn't worry too much about. They let some historians try to write about the Civil War and I was one of them.
Ted Widmer:
It was at that time, the 150th of the Civil War. I was trying to follow what was Lincoln doing on this day 150 years ago, and I stumbled on the train trip. He's not even president yet. He's coming in, as you said, and I was honestly just trying to put up some content but then as I started, it just fascinated me, the story of how hard it was for him to even get to Washington, which was new to me. Then, these other assassination plots that were pretty serious, some of them, and his growth as a speech giver on the journey, it had all these great plot elements of danger and personal growth, and also just movement across the country seeing America.
Ted Widmer:
I thought this is a great story for a book and I was personally looking for a better story. Like I'd said, I'd written sort of academic kinds of history books in which someone does a lot of research, me and then sort of presents it in a package like, aren't you impressed by all the research I did. This time, I wanted to just let the story tell itself. For me, it was a real break. I mean, breakthrough implies, it happened pretty fast and it took me nine years, but it felt like a great story all the way through. If Americans are reading it and feeling the power of the story, then I'm really happy.
Josh King:
One of the things that I worked on in the Clinton years that I appreciated most was weeks and weeks focused on trying to get President Clinton from Huntington, West Virginia to Chicago, Illinois, for the start of the 1996 convention all by train through six states. The book resonated particularly with me is who was involved in this massive modern whistlestop but it was nothing like what happened in 1861. The US Capitol, Ted, is the destination of the book but it's also where the story begins.
Josh King:
Our listeners are familiar with a compromise made between Hamilton and Jefferson to launch the Capitol Markets and move the Capitol to the south but you point out that the meal from the room where it happened was cooked by a slave in Washington DC wasn't quite as ideal either. How did the developments happening in the capitol leading up to an after Lincoln's election reflect the State of the Union at the time?
Ted Widmer:
The more research I did, the more Washington DC becomes a very dangerous place. It's important to the plot that he's not just going anywhere, he's going somewhere that will be very hard to reach. It's a kind of a pilgrimage or a quest, almost like a Star Wars movie in which a virtuous hero is trying to get to a very dangerous place. DC is kind of the Death Star and the decision to put the Capitol of the United States on the banks of the Potomac River, is still shrouded in all kinds of mystery.
Ted Widmer:
There was a dinner in June of 1790 in New York and very near Wall Street, very near the New York Stock Exchange, on a street that's still their Maiden Lane, just above Wall Street, and that's where Thomas Jefferson had rented an apartment and in his home, he had Alexander Hamilton and James Madison to dinner. We don't have a transcript. We have only sort of vague references to what happened but there is a lot of feeling among historians that at this dinner, they agreed to this grand bargain that was extremely consequential.
Ted Widmer:
Miraculously, after this meeting, Congress approves the Hamiltonian program but then also right around the same time in the summer, they approved a bill that will move the Capitol ultimately in two steps: first to Philadelphia and then to the future city of Washington, DC and. Just over this private dinner, a huge decision was made to put the Capitol in the south. I argue it really was a very southern location. It wasn't really a middle location. Philadelphia was a middle location.
Ted Widmer:
The Potomac River is Southern. It's way south of the Mason-Dixon Line, which is between Pennsylvania and Maryland. It grew to become a beautiful city. It is a beautiful city now, but it was a pretty desolate place. In the 1790s, the Cornerstone is laid in 1793 by Washington. Then, the government moves there in 1800 but it took a long time to be a normal city. It was also a very pro-slavery location.
Ted Widmer:
That added to the danger of Lincoln getting there because they don't really want them there in Washington. The south has controlled the government for most of American history really doesn't want him there and then the local people in DC also aren't excited about this anti-slavery precedent coming in. It was fraught with danger.
Josh King:
Ted, part of Lincoln's reasoning to turn his trip to Washington into this 13-day tour was to pay respects to the people and places that really were behind his victory. How did he chart a path to the White House, albeit with less than 40% of the vote, and outlast this formidable field, many of whom would go on to join his cabinet and become the Team of Rivals?
Ted Widmer:
Well, that is a fascinating question. There are historians and I'm probably a little more in this category than I perhaps should be but the sentimental people who just love Lincoln, they love his beautiful speeches, they love his sad and homely features, not always homely, sometimes he's actually quite handsome looking and who get a kind of personal feeling almost a friendship with Lincoln, and then there are other historians who see him as an incredibly, canny, political opportunist who just always saw the right path to go into. I think the truth is, he was a little bit of both.
Ted Widmer:
As the year 1860 was beginning, everybody knew the Republicans had a better chance than they did four years earlier. They were still a very new party. The party was only about six years old, and politics was in disarray. The Whig's had broken up. They're sort of drifting, some are going south, some are going north but then the Democratic Party was also in a lot of trouble. It split in 1860, meaning whoever had the Republican nomination was much more likely to win.
Ted Widmer:
At the beginning of the year, people thought it was going to be William Seward, a senator from New York who was very famous, been a governor of New York. New York is a huge state with a huge number of electoral votes. I mean, even more then than now it's still a lot but there was some feeling against Seward.
Ted Widmer:
Interestingly, some people thought he was too anti-slavery and that Lincoln was a little bit more moderate. That's surprising because Lincoln still struck the South as dangerous but the Republicans were pretty smart and thought Lincoln was just a step more moderate than Seward was, so he would win more votes in the middle. They were also thinking regionally that a Westerner would pick up a lot of votes for them, and might also be helpful in keeping Kentucky and Missouri and Virginia in the Union if it came to secession.
Ted Widmer:
Then, there's just, I mean, you love to study the nitty-gritty of politics, Josh, and so do I, there was a feeling in states like Pennsylvania and New Jersey that we don't want a New Yorker as president. People love New York and people also love to hate New York. Seward was suffering from a little wave of hating New York in the spring of 1860.
Josh King:
You write that this presidential election in 1860 was the first where technology allowed news of Lincoln's victory to reach almost all corners of the nation on election night but what did the telegraph lines reveal about the infrastructure gap between north and south at the time?
Ted Widmer:
Well, technology was just racing through the North and it was much slower in the South. It did exist. You could send a telegram from, say Richmond to Charleston, to Mobile to New Orleans, though between the big cities you could connect but long stretches of the rural south were not connected at all. None of it was as connected as, in the North, you've got like spider's webs, connecting everything, every small town, and from Maine through New York, which is already the great media headquarters of the United States, and then in a huge and busy information corridor, through the Midwest to Chicago, which is just exploding in energy and size, and then pass Chicago, to Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa.
Ted Widmer:
That corridor is really important. There's a lot of business happening. There's a lot of immigration happening along the train routes. Train routes are often the same as the telegraph routes, the wires go over the tracks. It's just growing so fast. That's one reason Lincoln was an attractive candidate for the whole Republican Party. That growth in population, as well as information was really threatening to the South. There was language, even then about fake news and fake information just like with Donald Trump.
Ted Widmer:
There were a lot of Southerners who were just very threatened by how fast information was moving in the North. They were also really threatened by the demographic surge in Lincoln's home State of Illinois, but the whole region, because they knew Congress was going to change, 1860 is a census year, and they were going to lose votes in the South, and they were going to lose their control they had always had over the federal government.
Josh King:
Talking about the railroads and their particular impact, Ted, Lincoln actually worked for a couple railroads that would eventually list on the New York Stock Exchange after the Civil War. He even held a patent for a flotation device he invented. Why do you think his industrial period between this vision of Lincoln, the railsplitting country lawyer, and then the presidential nation savior, hasn't become a bigger part of Lincoln's lore?
Ted Widmer:
I mean, the attractiveness of the Realsplitter, which is how he was described as a candidate, was so powerful that I think people remember that and forget the other reality, which is he's a very sophisticated lawyer working on important legal doctrine, clearing away obstacles for business. He was very friendly with the railroad business, which was friendly by itself with every business, especially in the North and Midwest.
Ted Widmer:
Yeah, I mean, that part of the story is a little less easy to grab on to emotionally. It's more fun to think of this poor kid growing up in a log cabin who conquers every obstacle, but the reality is, he was a very successful lawyer. It wasn't just that he made his income from railroads, especially the Illinois Central, which becomes a massive railroad built up in the 1850s and after, and lasted all the way until the merger with Amtrak in the late '60s and early '70s but Lincoln also believes in what is symbolized by the railroad, which is that American business ingenuity will clear obstacles and help people, including both wealthy people and poor people to move out to the West and start new lives.
Ted Widmer:
That's getting into the heart of our emotions about what is American history, and for a long time, that was all just considered great stuff. The train tracks going to the edge of the horizon, that was considered part of the triumph of Americans over the wilderness. Now, we have more conflicted feelings because Native Americans were displaced in that story. There was corruption in the management of railroads, but there was also heroism in building those vast national networks. I took a pretty sympathetic approach in this book. I grew up loving railroads and I actually have a ton of business history in this book. Just [crosstalk 00:24:49] he went through, there are really interesting local industries that are taking off because of the railroad.
Josh King:
Ted, it's almost unimaginable in modern politics and strange considering how we look back on Lincoln and his brilliance with words talked about the second inaugural address and the Gettysburg Address being chiseled into the walls of the Lincoln Memorial, but Lincoln won the presidency despite going months without even opening his mouth. What was his strategy? Did the rust show as he set off on this trip that would require 101 speeches over 13 days?
Ted Widmer:
Well, as it turned out, it was a pretty good strategy. You're absolutely right. He did not give a normal speech throughout the entire campaign. There was one moment where he went out to a fair in Springfield, Illinois and he was sort of forced to say a couple sentences. Maybe that's a speech or maybe not, but that was the only time he said anything at all. He basically said, "The Republican platform says everything for me. I have given other speeches before this year, and they speak for me and I have nothing new to say."
Ted Widmer:
As it turned out, it was a pretty smart strategy because emotions were running so high in 1860. It was a lot like the way it is now. I think you saw with Joe Biden's campaign, something similar that he didn't give that many speeches. I mean, he did give some. He gave more than Lincoln did but they tended to restate earlier positions and didn't break as much ground as say, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren were trying to do with their plans. I think Americans wanted to calm down a bit. That was part of Biden's appeal. It worked for Lincoln too especially given the South's really very advanced fear that he was going to come in and banned slavery.
Ted Widmer:
He said in his correspondence, and then once he gets on the train, he says again, that he's not going to interfere with slavery, which now gets him in trouble with academics because they feel he wasn't anti-slavery enough but he was trying to walk on a tightrope of keeping the South in the country and not going to a civil war. He felt it was important. What he said very specifically was, "You can have slavery where you already have it but you cannot expand it into the territories across the Mississippi River. We don't want slavery to grow. We just want it to be protected where it is." That was already to anti-slavery for a South that had become pretty crazy and just wanted to expand slavery all around the hemisphere and around the world.
Josh King:
Well, Lincoln took this circuitous route to avoid traveling through the southern states. Ted, he did skirt along the divide. What did your research reveal about the interwovenness of those border cities that belie a simple understanding of a North and South walled off by this metaphysical thing called the Mason-Dixon Line?
Ted Widmer:
Well, one reason I took so many years, Josh, I'm a little embarrassed, but it also was good. It's that I was just reading a ton. I was reading about every state along the route and I was trying to visualize the country as it looked out the train windows. That was really exciting to me. Like you, I was remembering being in a presidential motorcade many years ago, and how exciting it was to see thousands of people sort of looking, I mean, they weren't looking at me, I was just in the back in a car with a bunch of speech writers in it but there's something fascinating about the passage of a president through a country.
Ted Widmer:
I was following the route very closely. Then, I discovered that the actual train lines went right along the Ohio River a couple different times. In southern Ohio, it goes along the Ohio, where you can see Kentucky cross the river, Southern state, or it's also a border state, but it's a Southern state with slaves, the state Lincoln was born in, and he felt it was too dangerous for him to go into the state of his birth. I thought that's so interesting. He can look across and see the South on this train. Then, as they sort of pulled the camera back, and I thought about a city like Cincinnati, it's an amazing city where North and South are mingling together every day.
Ted Widmer:
You have Kentuckians coming in all the time with slaves, going into the best restaurants and hotels, and demanding service. Then, you have pretty strong abolitionists, including Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin and a lot of northerners are in Cincinnati making their fortunes starting businesses. It's way too simplistic to say there is a North and there is a South. There are Southerners who are pretty strong unionists who want the country to stay together. There are Northerners who are doing a lot of business with slave interests who are somewhat indifferent. They just want their contracts to be renewed and then city by city inside each state, they're really different feeling.
Ted Widmer:
Illinois, where Lincoln's from, has a pro-South section, Southern Illinois. All of those states along the Ohio like Indiana, Ohio, have pro-Southern sections. Pennsylvania to this day, in the middle part between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia is a place where you find a lot of Trump support. I think it's more sophisticated to look at each state as a complicated patchwork of different sympathies.
Josh King:
Let's talk a little bit more, Ted, about Cincinnati. It was the first big stop on Lincoln's journey. As you said, it was a booming industrial city at the time with an economy large enough that just a few years later, a stock exchange would be established that still functions today as NYSE National. How did the city actually react to the arrival of Lincoln? How did that foretell how the rest of the trip would go?
Ted Widmer:
Well, they went crazy for him and all along the route. Even though he's controversial, people really want to see him. They just have a sense that this one human being is a harbinger of great change coming, which he was. Just astonishing crowds came out. I think, in Cincinnati, it was something like 150,000 people. It's huge. Everywhere he went, he was mobbed. It was dangerous. I tried to tell the story in the book of how he was in danger from friendly people as well as from unfriendly that the crowds were just always getting out of control. Even just to get to his hotel was really hard but as you said, Cincinnati is a fascinating place of a lot of business. It's a really important Western city. I mean, it's sort of Southern in some ways and Western in a lot of ways.
Josh King:
You say that Cincinnati went crazy for President Elect Lincoln. I heard a podcast of yours in which you were talking about some of your research tools. One of them, I think, was something called the American Chronicle. I'm curious, between photography, lithography, writing, and other research sources, how do you come away and be able to write in Lincoln on the Verge this impression of a city going crazy for the visit of a person in the way that you and I might if we go on YouTube and watch a Trump rally?
Ted Widmer:
Well, for me, a lot of what made it vivid was the newspapers. You mentioned a source I loved. It's actually called Chronicling America.
Josh King:
Yeah.
Ted Widmer:
American Chronicle would be a better title but it's Chronicling America and it's just loaded up with local newspapers throughout American history. I just plugged in February 1861 and read hundreds of small town newspapers, and that's where you get the emotion. They would describe women fainting and men cheering at the top of their lungs, throwing their hats up in the air as Lincoln came through and a lot of really good writing with almost painterly description of Lincoln's face, whether what his eyebrows look like, what his ears look like, to people who had never seen him before and never would again. They had a few minutes ever to see Abraham Lincoln come through. They put a lot of care into writing about him. That was some of the best sourcing I found for the book.
Josh King:
You wrote a piece, I think, in the New York Times last week reflecting on the events at the Capitol. I mean, in addition to the dangers of the trip, Lincoln's team was concerned about the electoral count that might reveal changed electorates and other intrigue. In the Capitol you write about the Great General Winfield Scott. He was more cautious than the Capitol Police would be 160 years later. How did that play out in places like Columbus and Washington DC?
Ted Widmer:
Well, there were a lot of different police forces that policing was a very local thing back then. There was really nothing like Secret Service or even a National Military. The actual military was quite small and mostly in forts like out west primarily defending the frontier from it was still, kind of a dangerous place for tax from Native Americans. The numbers involved were very small. There just weren't that many policing or military authorities available. A chief of police in a town like Columbus would be the guy to try to maintain safety, and it was tough.
Ted Widmer:
In some cities, it came really close to breaking down Buffalo, New York. They were lucky not to be killed basically. The crowd was so big and the protection is so small that Lincoln was lucky to make it out of there alive. He was trapped in a corner of the train station for a long time with a few guys with guns, with bayonets, trying to defend him from a mob of like 100,000 people. That was really a close call.
Ted Widmer:
Well, even before he got to Washington, there was this day, a lot like last Wednesday, when the electoral votes were brought into Congress to be counted. What everyone expected to happen would be that it would produce the electoral victory for Lincoln, and he would be declared the incoming president, but it was a very fraught situation.
Ted Widmer:
A lot of people were trying to break in to the Capitol. A lot of people with violent intentions were trying to break in and grab the boxes, holding the electoral certificates. Only because Winfield Scott was very old, former general, he put men all around the Capitol, and he had undercover men inside the Capitol. They kept out the hooligans who were trying to get in, who were very angry to not be let in. That allowed to a normal count.
Ted Widmer:
There was another element of drama that the vice president who's counting the votes there in the in the House chamber was John Breckinridge, who had been the South's candidate whom Lincoln defeated. The day was filled with drama, but it was another hurdle Lincoln got through.
Josh King:
Ted, despite knowing the outcome, your description of the daily events is quite dramatic in Lincoln on the Verge. Did you think it was just luck that during the trip, the president wasn't crushed by any of these incidents that you're talking about given some, also there's disease or being attacked by many of these handshaking escapades, such as the cheese box?
Ted Widmer:
Yeah, luck played a factor luck. He had luck on his side including just at the beginning of the year 1816, nobody thought Lincoln was going to be the nominee. He really was a very dark horse candidate when he got the nomination in 1860. It feels almost like fate that historians are uncomfortable with concepts like fate or destiny but a lot of this book did feel to me that way that he was a kind of unstoppable force to redeem America. He talks about our better angels in his first book, but we had our worst angels also. He comes in to redeem us from our worse angels.
Ted Widmer:
Some of it was luck. Some of it was quick wittedness. He's a very smart improviser of language. I think the words he was speaking are really interesting and getting better and better. That's a theme of the book I care about is this guy under great pressure writing increasingly beautiful, even haunting speeches as he gets nearer to Washington. He's also, I mean, it should not be minimized that he's a big strong guy.
Ted Widmer:
We heard from Arnold Schwarzenegger and that was a moving message yesterday and Lincoln too was a kind of warrior for justice and civil rights. That's not a phrase that was used then but he is and he does well in a crowd. He's just, you can see him from far away but he is very strong and that's not unattractive. I mean, that's another part of the book I found interesting was just how his strength was impressive to people like Walt Whitman, who saw him from far away.
Josh King:
In your other seven books, I think you mentioned this at the beginning of our conversation, Ted. As we head to the break, curious your thoughts, they haven't focused a lot on sort of the emerging American industrial economy and the businesses that are helping to build what would be the North's industrial might heading into the Civil War but you mentioned what was seen in places like Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, also Cleveland in the book. What was the eye opening experience for you seeing this business story unfold?
Ted Widmer:
It was fascinating, Josh, I must say. I had not been a business historian before and I'm not sure I ever will be one again. I never was taught any business history in any of the classes I took in history as an undergrad or grad student. It sort of seemed like something you do in business school, but not in conventional American history. The more I studied this time, the more I thought, how can you possibly study in America without studying the incredible economic energy of the country at every moment in our history, but really, in a kind of overwhelming way in 1860 and '61. It's this story beneath the story.
Ted Widmer:
What we usually study is slavery is a big problem. Lincoln is elected. He fixes it. There's a civil war. But business is booming. I mean, there are depressions but business is booming that's tied to immigration and people coming over from Europe and getting jobs and pursuing the American dream. The United States developing as a global power on an equal level with France and England and Germany isn't quite united yet, but it will be and incredible ingenuity.
Ted Widmer:
Science is a part of the story. Inventors inventing new products that then get to market but I found the story of business really relevant in a lot of ways to the story of Lincoln and the Civil War, because business, I mean, it's a complicated story. I don't want to tell it too simplistically. You can find evidence of business on both sides. Slavery is a business. The selling of cotton and cloth around the country and around the world is a very big business. New York is deeply invested in the South's success.
Ted Widmer:
There's a lot of evidence of New York firms shoring up southern interests but I also felt the more I looked into it that business likes precision, factuality, fast communication, and ultimately honesty that business doesn't really like falsifying records or being in a dirty business that is exposed over many years and just sort of looks bad to the world. I felt like the energy of American economic might was going in an anti-slavery direction. Lincoln understood that and the train I thought was symbolic of that because, yes, the trains exist in the South. They are built with slave labor in some places or with free labor in other places, but the South had nothing like the North's railroad network.
Ted Widmer:
That really is a force for speed of information, clarity of information and I would say democracy and Lincoln rides the train literally, as an agent of all of those things. He's about speed of information, transparency, getting immigrants out to Western towns where they will start their own communities and democracy. The South doesn't like any of it. Then, as it turns out, the train is a real reason for the victory of the North in the Civil War. They've just got all these products they can bring to battlefields including rapid firing guns, clothes for soldiers, packaged food for soldiers, eyeglasses, sights that you can put on guns to see at a much greater distance. The South did very well at the beginning of the Civil War, but they never had a chance against this industrial superpower of the North.
Josh King:
The industrial superpower of the North, after the break, Ted Widmer, author of Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington and I will discuss the second half of those 13 days that's coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Welcome back. Before the break, Ted Widmer, author of Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington, and I were discussing how he came to write about the fateful days leading up to President Lincoln's inauguration and the start of that long journey that is so far taken us from Springfield to the industrial Erie triangle. Ted, after he finishes the first week of the trip, the drama is growing. We mentioned earlier, Jefferson Davis is on his way to take office. LINCOLN is being worn down by the road and DC in the surrounding areas are becoming increasingly dangerous. How did we two start with the now tired President Elect sporting a Mary Todd Lincoln makeover?
Ted Widmer:
Well, yes, she was a good adviser to her husband. I mean, to be honest, she's a complicated figure for me in the book. I have one episode that describes her having a temper tantrum in a way that interfered with Lincoln's progress. In another place, I talk about her giving him soothing advice and helping him and helping him to look better. I think she was a bit of both, but obviously, they loved each other a lot. I didn't want to go into, there's a tendency among some historians to just sort of only describe her as a bad influence on him.
Ted Widmer:
She later had mental health difficulties after his assassination, but yeah, she, in one scene in the book, which I thought was quite touching. She made a servant go and bring back a better hat because Lincoln's hat looked so decrepit and worn out. He obviously didn't care very much about his appearance, which I found kind of endearing, but he needed to because he was the representative of a great cause. She often kept him in line a little more than he would himself.
Josh King:
Up until, I guess, Friday, a couple days ago, Ted, it was impossible for 88 million or so Americans not to know what was on the mind of the President of United States for his whereabouts at any minute based on President Trump's Twitter following and basically what Twitter represents, overall but the amount of information that was available in 1861 was pretty novel. How did the telegraph change how Lincoln's activities were covered by the media and also those tracking him both for good or malicious reasons?
Ted Widmer:
It did both, Josh. His words were ricocheting around the country almost as fast as they would today with social media or live TV. That was new. James Buchanan, who's Lincoln's predecessor, gives very few speeches as president. I tried to count them and I think I counted five over four years. Suddenly, Lincoln so after being quiet, during the campaign and then becoming elected, he gets on this train and there's a hoard of media around him everywhere he goes, and he speaks a few words in every stop that he gets to. Those speeches become very important. They're just little kind of half mumbled, greetings that he's given from the back of a train platform, but they're immediately sent around the country and sometimes that helps him.
Ted Widmer:
I wrote a lot about a short speech he gave saying goodbye to his hometown in Springfield that becomes one of the great speeches in the whole canon of Lincoln speeches. It wasn't even written out. He just improvised it with no paper in front of him to his friends gathered as the train was leaving and it's hauntingly beautiful speech about loving his fellow townspeople, thanking them, saying he hopes he will come back, but you get the feeling he knows he's not coming back. It's a beautiful short speech that was immediately sent around the country. The fact that it was so short, was effective because it could be squeezed onto a front page very easily and it was. A lot of people saw it the next day but sometimes, it hurt him when he made a mistake in a speech. It also got telegraphed around the country very fast.
Josh King:
Just like the reporters who transcribed Lincoln's every movement, your writing tracks his journey across the Empire State into New York City. It was a key place for his election but how did Mayor Wood's ambitions to hope to keep the city as a nation unto itself, threaten not just Lincoln's enjoyment of his stop, but also the very outcome of the war that was to come?
Ted Widmer:
Well, New York was dangerous territory for Lincoln. I mean, we think of it as this extremely Northern city. The baseball team is called the Yankees, which would suggest it's just as Northern as you could get but in fact, there were a lot of really strong business relationships with the South and ships would one way in which cotton would be shipped to Europe was the it would leave a port like New Orleans or Mobile or Savannah or Charleston, and then stop at New York for a few days. There was a whole business of buying the cotton off of a Southern ship and then loading up a new ship to take it over to Europe, and New Yorkers were very good at transshipment, it's called.
Ted Widmer:
There were investors in Southern plantations and complex economic structures in place on Wall Street, including, if a southern plantation owner died, often a northern sort of management firm, would take over the running of the plantation until someone else could be found to run it in the South. These were deep relationships, and New York loved the money that came in. A lot of politicians were absolutely fine with this business, very distinguished ones.
Ted Widmer:
The mayor of New York, Fernando Wood is kind of slightly shady operator but a lot of New York mayors have been, and he's quite beholden to these financial interests, and he doesn't like Lincoln. They have a kind of standoff. They have a meeting in which they talk a little bit of trash to each other. Maybe that's not quite the right phrase but Wood gives a speech, kind of a welcoming speech, but also a threatening, saying, "I hope Lincoln remembers how important New York's economic interests are to the Union." Lincoln responds with a kind of veiled language that the union is bigger than New York.
Ted Widmer:
Lincoln meets, in the course of his New York visit with some Wall Street leaders and he has a little bit of a bad meeting. He's not at his best in that meeting. It comes out a few times on the trip, including in that meeting that he's not a very good speaker about business concepts. Even though he is a sophisticated lawyer, he doesn't understand the higher language of finance very well. He's uncharacteristically a little bit intimidated by business leaders. That's an interesting part of the story of someone who's still in formation.
Josh King:
From this experience in New York City, he beats a retreat pretty fast following the path of General Washington's 1766 retreat from New York with stops in New Brunswick and Princeton, New Jersey on the way to Trenton, what happened in the Garden State that would set the stage for his final public stop in Philadelphia?
Ted Widmer:
I'm glad you asked that. I think you're the first interviewer who has. I was really proud of having a chapter on New Jersey. A lot of histories would just focus on New York and then Washington DC, and for me, the local places are really at the heart of this book. New Jersey is a very, very important state in this country. It was important to his election. He did pretty well in New Jersey, although he lost one electoral vote, as I recall to Stephen Douglas, but it crosses the Hudson on a ferry, which is how you did it then. He goes through Newark and Princeton, and ultimately to Trenton.
Ted Widmer:
While there, he goes into New Jersey State House and gives two amazing speeches back to back: one to the Senate, one to the assembly about what American history means to him. He almost never talked about himself. He really never talked about his childhood but he talked about being a boy and reading books about George Washington and crossing the Delaware and surprising the Hessians and taking the city of Trenton at a moment when things were not going well at all for the Continental Army. Washington's sneak attack raised morale and helped win backing in Europe.
Ted Widmer:
Lincoln talks about how he believed that some special courage must have motivated those men as they crossed the Delaware. It's a beautiful set of two speeches that day, and it shows him working up to the speech he would give the next day in Philadelphia, which I argue is really pretty close to the Gettysburg Address about what the Declaration of Independence meant in 1776, and still means in 1861, and by extension in 2021, this sort of imperishable set of truths at the heart of our history.
Josh King:
The last day of the journey after the Philadelphia stop where he's basically resetting America's moral compass, Ted, was the opposite of the previous 12 days that he spent on full public display. Why did Lincoln's travel and transparency suddenly change once he met with his fellow Allan Pinkerton?
Ted Widmer:
Well, they're beginning to get intel that a serious assassination, conspiracy is organized to kill him in Baltimore. It's not just one or two people, it's possibly as many as a thousand, the figure of a thousand is given in one document or even multiples of a thousand. While Lincoln is on the train coming to the East, there are people desperately trying to intercept his entourage and give them the warning of what they're discovering.
Ted Widmer:
There are operatives on the ground in Baltimore who are pretending to be anti-Lincoln and are told all the information about the plot that will kill him. It's a plot that would have had people with guns and knives and explosive devices surrounding him in a transfer between two train stations in Baltimore. His schedule had been publicly announced by telegraph, as you were asking a few minutes ago, and it was printed in the newspaper. Everyone knew where he would be.
Ted Widmer:
The operatives, who are led by Allan Pinkerton, who later helps to found the US Secret Service, they were successful in reaching Lincoln's people. Then, finally Lincoln himself and a woman operative was really heroic in this. You don't hear a lot about women in the Civil War era at the top levels of politics, but a woman named Kate Warne was a brilliant spy and sent by Alan Pinkerton to warn Lincoln not to come through Baltimore unless in disguise or in the middle of the night. That's what ends up happening.
Ted Widmer:
Pinkerton organizes a nocturnal journey, incredibly dangerous in which Lincoln boards an ordinary overnight commuter train from Philadelphia through Wilmington along the route, Joe Biden will take through Baltimore at about 4:00 in the morning and getting into DC at about 6:00 in the morning and their ruse works. Nobody notices Lincoln on the train, although I wondered a lot about how you conceal a six-foot-four guy with a beard, in an ordinary passenger train. How did he go out to go to the bathroom or whatever he was doing in the middle of the night, but he made it in any event. Without that all night journey, you don't have Lincoln taking the oath of office or delivering one of the most beautiful inaugural addresses in our history.
Josh King:
After this harrowing night train to Washington, how was he received? You mentioned at the beginning of our conversation that they really wanted nothing of this guy to be showing up into town?
Ted Widmer:
He is received by a single friend, a congressman named Elihu Washburne from Illinois who Lincoln had known for a while by an amazing coincidence. There are a lot of amazing coincidences I found out for this book but when Lincoln was last in Washington, he's a failure as a one term congressman. The very last night, he's with the same friend Elihu Washburne, they stayed up all night to celebrate the inauguration of Zachary Taylor and Lincoln lost his hat in the middle of the celebration. Elihu Washburne walked him back to his hotel.
Ted Widmer:
Then 12 years later, Elihu Washburne is there on the platform of the train station, which is pretty close to where Union Station is now. He waits and all of the people get off the train and he thinks, "Oh, no, Lincoln didn't make it." Then, a door opens in the back of the train and three people get off and in the middle is this very tall guy and he starts walking towards him. That's Lincoln. That was the reception committee, one guy sitting there on the platform at the Washington station of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
Ted Widmer:
They go to the Willard Hotel and pretty quickly, William Seward, the incoming Secretary of State is there. He has arranged a lot of things. He finds a room for Lincoln. Lincoln, that day goes to the White House and interrupts a Cabinet meeting and everyone is amazed because he's not supposed to be there but that's the beginning of the Lincoln administration is Lincoln is safely there in Washington, but just getting there was incredibly dangerous.
Josh King:
I mean, just by showing up alive, Ted, Lincoln strikes a blow to Southern power brokers who were left in the Capitol. Did his inauguration, conducted under the watchful armed eyes of General Scott, finally secure the city for a time?
Ted Widmer:
It did. I mean, as you said, it was a great blow against the South. There are a lot of different kinds of people from the South. In the winter of 1860 to '61, there outrights secessionist, who are gathered around Jefferson Davis starting the new Confederacy in Montgomery, Alabama. Then, there are a lot of pro-Southern people who are still in DC and then there are angry young men who are walking around in militias with guns, kind of like the people we saw on Wednesday storming the Capitol. A lot of those guys have been saying they're going to kill Lincoln before he can become president. They're going to take him out, maybe even during the inaugural ceremony.
Ted Widmer:
Just standing up there and giving the inaugural address, one of the greatest speeches in our history, was an act of tremendous courage by Lincoln because many people had threatened to kill him, if not in Baltimore, then in this very public moment when he's standing in front of thousands of people on the East front of the Capitol. The opposite side, they stand on now, but back then they stood on the East side. Just by doing all of that, Lincoln struck a huge blow for democracy and the integrity of the United States of America but it still was hard at a couple moments, Josh.
Ted Widmer:
A couple weeks go by and in late April, April 18, I think it is, a regiment of Massachusetts soldiers tries to come through Baltimore in the same way he did. You have to do a transfer. You can't come through and stay on the train. You have to get off. The people of Baltimore got really angry and began shooting guns at the soldiers who shot back. A number of people were killed that day and there are other days where it feels like Washington is really cut off from the North and might be surrounded by Southern soldiers after Virginia has joined the Confederacy.
Ted Widmer:
It took a long time for Washington to feel safely the Capitol of the North. It's funny, we just think Washington is the Capital of the United states but there were a few weeks there were it was really touch and go.
Josh King:
As we wrap up our conversation, Ted, one of the bits of news coming out about the planning for the upcoming inaugural is that the first event planned prior to the inauguration will be a wreath laying at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, by the Biden's, the Obamas, the Bushes, and the Clintons. One thing certainly all former presidents can agree on is respect for those who've worn the nation's uniform.
Josh King:
While it's not the focus of your book, you do spend significant time investigating the Lee family really on whose property the Arlington National Cemetery is based in the Lee Custis' families. You write that he had the strongest claim to Washington's lineage, and even on the eve of the Civil War hosted Northerners and Southerners together to celebrate Washington's birthday, what did you conclude about generally and how history should view them?
Ted Widmer:
Thank you. I think you're the first person to ask me that too. I really cared about that section of the book. Even if I took a lot of years to do the research, there were these stories that sort of bubbled up that I didn't expect. That was one of them that had a great deal of emotional intensity, including the story of Robert E. Lee, who is an army officer in the United States Army, not the Confederate Army at the time of Lincoln's train trip. He's stationed in Texas where he sees secessionist trying to take Texas out of the United States, and he's really upset.
Ted Widmer:
He's a Virginian. Virginia feels that it's the home state of the United States of America, that it's the home state of Washington and Jefferson. He's really upset when he sees these Texans pulling Texas out of the country, and then he has to go back toward his home and that home, the Custis Lee mansion, which is still there, is the home of his wife's family. She's a very close relative of George Washington's. She's the, I think the great granddaughter of Martha Washington, George Washington's wife. It's not just the relationship, they've got all of his things. They've got his revolutionary war tent, which is now in Philadelphia at the National Constitution Center. A lot of his personal things like tea sets and personal silver with GW on it.
Ted Widmer:
It's the most vivid shrine to the memory of George Washington in America. There's this half built Washington Monument, but it looks ugly, and it's just not finished. The Custis Lee mentioned is the real place and the memory of George Washington was important to both sides as the civil wars beginning both sides claim him. The South certainly claims him and Washington's male relatives did fight for the Confederacy but the North also feels passionately about George Washington. They love him.
Ted Widmer:
One of the big questions as the nation is being ripped apart is who owns this stuff? Who owns the Declaration of Independence? Who owns George Washington? Who owns Thomas Jefferson? With George Washington is really tough, he's the most beloved of all figures, and Lincoln loves him. Lincoln talks about him a lot. I wanted to describe that dinner party on the last night of the trip with the secret train coming. A Northern family, the Adams' is there having dinner with a Southern family, the Lee's on Washington's birthday, and it's like the final night of the old America, the First Republic, and Lincoln is coming in to basically start a Second Republic. It's going to be a new kind of country.
Josh King:
In the end, Ted, as you reflect on it, and the book's now been out for almost a year, and we're now just seeing the paperback in this most auspicious moment a few days before the inauguration of our 46th president, how did those 13 days shape what you describe as the Second Republic and also affect Abraham Lincoln himself?
Ted Widmer:
I wish I'd use that phrase in the book, Josh. It just, it just came out in our conversation, but the Second Republic I like it. Well, I argue in the book that Lincoln got off the train a much stronger President Elect than he got on the train 13 days earlier, that he'd given beautiful speeches about 100 speeches is an all a lot. He won over many tens of thousands of Americans and probably more like a million Americans had seen him en route and were impressed. This guy is going to be a good leader. I'm signing up for his version of America. He only won the vote with a little under 40%. He wasn't a very strong president elect on the way in but he performed very well along the route. He made a couple mistakes, but not very many, and got stronger and stronger.
Ted Widmer:
Then, by surviving assassination, came in with a bit of an aura of a guy who had a mission to keep the country together. A lot of the neutral politicians in Washington were impressed. He had also talked to the governors of all the states he came through. He was in a stronger position to negotiate with them when he needed to call up troops.
Ted Widmer:
Governor's called up troops back then. In a military way, he was in a much stronger position but mainly, I think he just really developed his defense of the idea of the United States of America as a country that could not be divided. He talks about that in his first inaugural address, but the union, which is a word we don't use that often anymore, he had really developed the idea along the train trip of a union that was sacred, that a Southern state or any state could not leave a sacred contract unless every other party agreed to it. He did not agree to secession.
Ted Widmer:
In other words, secession was illegal. That put him on a good ground for the argument he would make throughout the Civil War, that the idea of the United States of America was sacred and inviolable. As he knew, from all those years, as a lawyer, if you have a really strong moral position, and you stick to it, you get to that higher ground before the other side, that's an advantage from the very start. He had that advantage from the moment he got off that train and arrived alive in Washington.
Josh King:
Inviolable idea that we have tracked very well in this conversation, Ted. It was a great ability to reflect with you on these 13 days and so much to think about as we focus on the few days ahead, and certainly the first 100 days of the Biden administration. Ted Widmer, thanks so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.
Ted Widmer:
Thank you, Josh. I really enjoyed it a lot. Thanks, Josh.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Professor Ted Widmer, distinguished lecturer at Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York and author of Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington, out now in paperback from Simon and Schuster.
Josh King:
If you liked what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. If you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us at ICEHousePodcast. Our show was produced by Pete Ash with production assistance from Steven Romanchuk and Ian Wolfe. I'm Josh King, your host signing off from the Library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening and talk to you next week.
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The information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor his affiliates make any representations or warranties, expressed or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information, and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content here-in. All of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing here in constitution offered to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the proceeding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
