Chapter 1: The Inaugural Bullet
Greetings all. It's been some years since I updated my previous TL with the same subject matter. Over that time, I have been refining it, drastically changing some elements of the previous TL, and expanding upon it. I figure today, the 160th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln's first inauguration, would be the perfect time to unveil this redone version of my old TL. I have a backlog of updates/chapters, which I will be releasing on a weekly basis. However, once I catch up to the chapters I have already written, updates will come a bit slower, at most every two weeks. I currently have 13 chapters written, so for now you will all be getting regular updates, but I wanted to make sure you were clued into the plan. Each chapter will take the form of an excerpt from a history text, usually from a collegiate-level survey course, that would exist in this alternate reality. So, without further ado, I present this TL redux:
1 THE INAUGURAL BULLET
From Battle Hymn: A History of the American Civil War
By Eric McPherson, 1988
The Republican Party, whose rise was in many ways a catalyst that launched the US towards civil war, formed in 1854 to combat the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In violation of the 1820 Missouri Compromise which determined a state’s slave-or-free status based on each state’s geographic location, this act allowed residents of the Kansas and Nebraska territories to decide via popular sovereignty whether or not to allow slavery in their respective territories. Many abolitionists were angered by this, and as such came into bloody conflict with slave-owners in the Kansas Territory. Between 1854 and 1861, these forces clashed over the slave issue, serving ultimately as practice for the Civil War.
It was during this growing discontent over the Kansas-Nebraska Act that Abraham Lincoln grew to political prominence. Born in Hodgenville, Kentucky on February 12, 1809, Lincoln grew up in the frontier states of Kentucky and Indiana. He was largely self-educated and became a lawyer in Illinois. From there, he became a leader of the Whig Party and a member of the Illinois House of Representatives from 1834 to 1846. He was elected to the US House of Representatives from Illinois’ 7th district where he only served for one term. Lincoln returned to Illinois in 1849 to resume his law practice.
His return to electoral politics began in the senatorial elections of 1858 when he took on Democrat Stephen Douglas. Douglas, the incumbent in the race, was first elected to the US Senate in 1846, the same year Lincoln was first elected to the House. He took office in 1847 and, by the election of 1858, had been in office for 11 years. During that time Douglas was one of the major orchestrators of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and was well-positioned as Lincoln’s political rival.
During the election, Lincoln and Douglas engaged in numerous lengthy debates on slavery in the territories and the wider US. Lincoln, ever the orator, regularly delivered hours-long speeches on the question of slavery, firmly solidifying him as an abolitionist candidate. At numerous points during the election, Lincoln attempted to back Douglas into a corner by getting him to take a firm stance on the extension of slavery. One of Douglas’ strategies in the 1858 senatorial election was to appeal both to conservative Illinoisans in the state’s south and moderates in the state’s north. Lincoln knew this and hoped to alienate one group or the other by forcing Douglas to commit on the expansion question. Should Douglas say he supported expansion of the institution, he would alienate Illinoisians and other Northerners; should he oppose it, he would alienate his Southern base. Douglas instead continued to tiptoe around the issue, stating that in the same way that Kansas and Nebraska settled the slave question through popular sovereignty, so too could other Western territories.
This was enough to satisfy Illinois’ legislature, who re-elected Douglas by a vote of 54 to 46. Lincoln, despite the loss, still garnered major support throughout Illinois and indeed the national Republican Party. At the 1860 Republican Convention, he was one of four front runners in the battle for the Republican nomination. However, as the convention in Chicago proceeded, it became abundantly clear that none of his opponents could muster the same support in the Republican base and indeed throughout the rest of the nation as Lincoln could. As such, he won the Republican nomination on May 18, 1860.
Senator Hannibal Hamlin of Maine won easy nomination as his Vice President. Hamlin was born on August 27, 1809 in the town of Paris in what was then part of Massachusetts; this territory became the state of Maine in 1820. He was admitted to the bar in 1833 and began practice in Hampden, Maine. Originally a Democrat, Hamlin’s political career began with his election to the Maine House of Representatives in 1835. From there, he was appointed to the military staff of Democratic Governor Robert P Dunlap where he took part in the negotiations that ended the Aroostook War over Maine’s northern border. This service raised his profile in Maine, facilitating his 1843 election to the US House of Representatives in which he served until 1847. In 1848, the Maine state legislature elected Hamlin to the US Senate where, except for a month-long term as governor, he served until 1861. An active opponent of slavery and vocal abolitionist, Hamlin was strongly opposed to the aforementioned Kansas-Nebraska Act. His radical abolitionist views increasingly put him at odds with the Democratic Party. In 1856, he finally switched his allegiance and became a Republican. His political experience and the geographic balance brought by his New England heritage made him an obvious choice to be Lincoln’s vice president.
With this Lincoln-Hamlin ticket, the Republican Party would sweep the Northern states and clench victory in the election. Lincoln won just under 40 percent of the popular vote but earned 59 percent of the electoral vote. The Democrats, plagued by partisan disarray, never stood a chance. Yet despite Lincoln’s overwhelming victory, southerners still worked to prevent themselves from living under Lincoln’s rule. Chief among these was Roger Buckley, born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland.
The son of a wealthy merchant, Buckley had deep connections to the Southern uppercrust of Baltimore society. In 1860 Buckley joined a group of Southern sympathizers led by an Italian barber named Cipriano Ferrandini, a radical Southern sympathizer with a deep, abiding hatred for President-elect Lincoln. Ferrandini’s group made it their mission to ensure that Lincoln never made it to Washington, DC for his inauguration in the first place. The group planned to assassinate Lincoln on his trek to DC during a scheduled public appearance in Baltimore. However, Allan Pinkerton, detective and spy charged with the protection of Lincoln on his transit, had learned of this plot and urged Lincoln to travel through the city in secret. Lincoln obliged and, travelling in disguise on a night train, managed to slip through Ferrandini’s fingers.
Ferrandini’s hatred for Lincoln never waned and his group became even more radicalized. Roger Buckley was perhaps Ferrandini’s closest disciple, and they would often share drinks in a private saloon at a local hotel. Buckley was at first unsure about why Lincoln had to die; indeed, Buckley felt that terrorist efforts ought to focus more on the local government of Baltimore in order to encourage Maryland’s secession. However, he was a deep admirer of Ferrandini’s conviction and was eager to adopt his thought process. One night in the saloon, Buckley asked Ferrandini, “Are there no other means of saving the South except by assassination?” “No,” Ferrandini said sternly. “He must die, and die he shall. If necessary, we will die together.”
Pinkerton for his part was diligent in spying on the group. However, his efforts were largely focused on Ferrandini himself. While the Italian was certainly not a fan of Lincoln and was an ardent secessionist, it is unlikely that he would have killed the president-elect if given the opportunity. Most of his boasts were just talk. “The barber’s combs have more teeth and his shears more conviction than he,” Pinkerton once remarked, dismissive of any further trouble from Ferrandini’s gang.
Unfortunately for the nation, Pinkerton forgot to account for Buckley, who was determined to carry out Ferrandini’s plot even if his mentor was not. Buckley fancied himself a true Southern patriot. For whatever reason he felt that Confederate President Jefferson Davis was moving much too slowly in dealing with the North. To remedy this, Buckley resolved to assassinate Lincoln at his inauguration to show that the North was not safe even in their capital. Buckley’s last passage in his diary clearly illustrates his convictions:
"Who are we to let tyranny go unanswered? Why, when our course is so clear, do some shirk from their God-given duty? Lincoln must be dispatched for the good of the South and her way of life; there is no other course which must be taken. The treasonous North must learn that the South will not so quietly secede; indeed she will take some of those abhorrent abolitionist monsters with her as she departs. It is times like these when brave men must relinquish their life and liberty for the good of their God-fearing white brethren. I shall gladly accept this burden in the hopes that when I die, Lincoln dies with me."
Buckley, with the aid of two compatriots in the movement, would act on March 4, 1861. A Baltimore gun manufacturer, sympathetic to the movement’s cause, supplied the gang of three with their weapons. Once armed, the gang set off for Washington, DC to prepare for Lincoln’s arrival. They holed up in a boardinghouse owned by Buckley’s cousin, situated along the inaugural parade route. While not a member of the movement himself, Buckley’s cousin was sympathetic to its goals. They arrived on March 2 to give themselves ample time to prepare an escape plan should the opportunity present itself. Lincoln, for his part, arrived in the city on February 23, 1861. He spent the time between then and his inauguration getting the President’s House set up for his administration and family. He and his family would never take up residence there.
On the morning of March 4, 1861, Lincoln made his way, along with then-President James Buchanan, from Willard’s Hotel on 14th Street to the Capitol. Lincoln and Buchanan rode together in an open carriage, surrounded on all sides by scores of soldiers sworn to protect the president-elect with their lives if necessary. Along the way other soldiers were positioned on rooftops with strict instructions to shoot anyone crowding towards the carriage.
The procession eventually passed by the boardinghouse, giving Buckley and his gang the perfect opportunity to strike. The gang opened their windows and rested their rifle barrels, fully loaded, on the sill. Then, just as the roar of the crowd reached a fever pitch, the gang fired three bullets in all. One struck the lead horse pulling the carriage; the second whizzed by President Buchanan’s ear without causing any damage, eventually cracking the brick in a wall across the street; the third would change the course of history.
Lincoln was hit in the side of the head, just above his left ear. The crowd was shocked. They began to run around the streets helplessly, trampling each other in a mad dash for shelter. Soldiers searched diligently for the killer, but no one was quite sure from which direction the shots came. The carriage, despite the wounded horse, made a mad dash for the nearest hospital or doctor in hopes of saving the president-elect, but these efforts proved futile. Buckley and his gang, for their part, were ecstatic about the results. None of them died and they had succeeded in assassinating the “abolitionist ape from Illinois,” as some in the South had taken to calling him. The gang, feeling confident, decided not to take any chances and stayed in their room the rest of the day.
Vice President-Elect Hannibal Hamlin was waiting in the Capitol’s Senate chamber for the procession to arrive so that outgoing Vice President John Breckinridge could deliver his successor the oath of office. Approximately 20 minutes after shots were fired, a cadre of soldiers burst into the Senate chamber, completely out of breath, and shouted to a puzzled Hamlin, “Lincoln has been slain!” These soldiers had been dispatched by Lieutenant-General Winfield Scott to protect Hamlin. Scott had, of course, also been charged with protecting Lincoln during the inaugural parade. Despite having failed in his mission, his resolve barely wavered. He ordered the soldiers to protect the Senate chamber while he went back into the chaos. Reportedly, as he rode away, he angrily shouted: “I will manure the hills of Arlington with fragments of those rebels!” In the meantime, Chief Justice Roger Taney rushed to administer the presidential oath of office to Hamlin in order to provide some sense of continuity during this crisis.
Throughout the coming days, Allan Pinkerton embarked with the army on a relentless pursuit of Lincoln’s killer, barging into homes and businesses along the parade route. Eventually they came to Buckley’s cousin’s boardinghouse. While checking the guestbook, Pinkerton quickly came across Roger Buckley’s name, which he recognized from his time spying on Ferrandini’s radical group. The army arrested Buckley’s cousin, having been given the power by now-President Hamlin, and interrogated him for information as to Buckley’s whereabouts.
The army eventually tracked Buckley to an abandoned Virginia farmhouse just south of DC where he and his gang had taken shelter in an abandoned barn. Pinkerton resolved to smoke the gang out and force them into the hands of the waiting army. On March 7, Pinkerton set the barn aflame. Rather than let themselves get captured by the Union army and subsequently hanged, the gang decided to go out in a blaze of glory. Leaning out the burning windows, they pulled their rifles on the army and began firing. Two soldiers died in the exchange, as did the three members of Buckley’s gang.
Lincoln’s funeral was held on March 8 in the Senate chamber. Hamlin used this time to deliver his inaugural address in the form of a eulogy to Lincoln, reproduced here in full:
"Fellow-Citizens of the United States:
"We were struck a bloody blow just four short days ago. In anger and apprehension over the democratic process, Southern rebels struck down our chosen leader before he could even take the Oath. They were at once apprehensive about Abe’s politics, and about his commitment to abolition of that most horrid of institutions. Abe was first and foremost concerned with the unity of this Nation, which has endured unimpeded four score and three years. Now he belongs to the ages, along with any hope of unity for this great country.
"We are presently engaged in a grand trial, testing whether this nation conceived in unity and dedicated to liberty can endure terrorism perpetrated by crazed children, poisoned by dangerous ideas of slavery and violent retaliation. We have come here to eulogize our president-elect and immortalize him as a martyr for the great cause of liberty. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. Yet our efforts pale in comparison to his sacrifice; his blood-stained carriage has done more to immortalize the greatest moral struggle of our time than any of our efforts ever could. History will little note what was said here in this chamber, but it can never and will never forget Abe’s martyrdom.
"We must now dedicate ourselves to his mission of unity and liberty – for this honored martyr we must increase our devotion to the abolitionist cause and bind this nation together with stronger ties. Abe shall not have died in vain. This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. These may have been the first shots of this rebellion, but they will not be the last. This government of the people, by the people, for the people that Abe so long defended shall, despite the best efforts of some, not perish from this world. My heart is in the coffin there with him, and I shall not rest till it comes back to me."
This speech did a marvelous job stirring up Union loyalists for a bloody Civil War, but it only served to enrage the Confederacy more. Hamlin talked outright of abolishing slavery as one of his primary presidential goals and of attributing the actions to a few crazed terrorists to an entire country. The seven Confederate states, which had already been encouraged by the assassination of Lincoln, were thus further resolved to mobilize and end the Union before the Union could end them. There were eight states that had yet to make up their minds about which side to join in the war: Arkansas, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. Their allegiances would become critically important in the coming years.
1 THE INAUGURAL BULLET
From Battle Hymn: A History of the American Civil War
By Eric McPherson, 1988
The Republican Party, whose rise was in many ways a catalyst that launched the US towards civil war, formed in 1854 to combat the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In violation of the 1820 Missouri Compromise which determined a state’s slave-or-free status based on each state’s geographic location, this act allowed residents of the Kansas and Nebraska territories to decide via popular sovereignty whether or not to allow slavery in their respective territories. Many abolitionists were angered by this, and as such came into bloody conflict with slave-owners in the Kansas Territory. Between 1854 and 1861, these forces clashed over the slave issue, serving ultimately as practice for the Civil War.
It was during this growing discontent over the Kansas-Nebraska Act that Abraham Lincoln grew to political prominence. Born in Hodgenville, Kentucky on February 12, 1809, Lincoln grew up in the frontier states of Kentucky and Indiana. He was largely self-educated and became a lawyer in Illinois. From there, he became a leader of the Whig Party and a member of the Illinois House of Representatives from 1834 to 1846. He was elected to the US House of Representatives from Illinois’ 7th district where he only served for one term. Lincoln returned to Illinois in 1849 to resume his law practice.
His return to electoral politics began in the senatorial elections of 1858 when he took on Democrat Stephen Douglas. Douglas, the incumbent in the race, was first elected to the US Senate in 1846, the same year Lincoln was first elected to the House. He took office in 1847 and, by the election of 1858, had been in office for 11 years. During that time Douglas was one of the major orchestrators of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and was well-positioned as Lincoln’s political rival.
During the election, Lincoln and Douglas engaged in numerous lengthy debates on slavery in the territories and the wider US. Lincoln, ever the orator, regularly delivered hours-long speeches on the question of slavery, firmly solidifying him as an abolitionist candidate. At numerous points during the election, Lincoln attempted to back Douglas into a corner by getting him to take a firm stance on the extension of slavery. One of Douglas’ strategies in the 1858 senatorial election was to appeal both to conservative Illinoisans in the state’s south and moderates in the state’s north. Lincoln knew this and hoped to alienate one group or the other by forcing Douglas to commit on the expansion question. Should Douglas say he supported expansion of the institution, he would alienate Illinoisians and other Northerners; should he oppose it, he would alienate his Southern base. Douglas instead continued to tiptoe around the issue, stating that in the same way that Kansas and Nebraska settled the slave question through popular sovereignty, so too could other Western territories.
This was enough to satisfy Illinois’ legislature, who re-elected Douglas by a vote of 54 to 46. Lincoln, despite the loss, still garnered major support throughout Illinois and indeed the national Republican Party. At the 1860 Republican Convention, he was one of four front runners in the battle for the Republican nomination. However, as the convention in Chicago proceeded, it became abundantly clear that none of his opponents could muster the same support in the Republican base and indeed throughout the rest of the nation as Lincoln could. As such, he won the Republican nomination on May 18, 1860.
Senator Hannibal Hamlin of Maine won easy nomination as his Vice President. Hamlin was born on August 27, 1809 in the town of Paris in what was then part of Massachusetts; this territory became the state of Maine in 1820. He was admitted to the bar in 1833 and began practice in Hampden, Maine. Originally a Democrat, Hamlin’s political career began with his election to the Maine House of Representatives in 1835. From there, he was appointed to the military staff of Democratic Governor Robert P Dunlap where he took part in the negotiations that ended the Aroostook War over Maine’s northern border. This service raised his profile in Maine, facilitating his 1843 election to the US House of Representatives in which he served until 1847. In 1848, the Maine state legislature elected Hamlin to the US Senate where, except for a month-long term as governor, he served until 1861. An active opponent of slavery and vocal abolitionist, Hamlin was strongly opposed to the aforementioned Kansas-Nebraska Act. His radical abolitionist views increasingly put him at odds with the Democratic Party. In 1856, he finally switched his allegiance and became a Republican. His political experience and the geographic balance brought by his New England heritage made him an obvious choice to be Lincoln’s vice president.
With this Lincoln-Hamlin ticket, the Republican Party would sweep the Northern states and clench victory in the election. Lincoln won just under 40 percent of the popular vote but earned 59 percent of the electoral vote. The Democrats, plagued by partisan disarray, never stood a chance. Yet despite Lincoln’s overwhelming victory, southerners still worked to prevent themselves from living under Lincoln’s rule. Chief among these was Roger Buckley, born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland.
The son of a wealthy merchant, Buckley had deep connections to the Southern uppercrust of Baltimore society. In 1860 Buckley joined a group of Southern sympathizers led by an Italian barber named Cipriano Ferrandini, a radical Southern sympathizer with a deep, abiding hatred for President-elect Lincoln. Ferrandini’s group made it their mission to ensure that Lincoln never made it to Washington, DC for his inauguration in the first place. The group planned to assassinate Lincoln on his trek to DC during a scheduled public appearance in Baltimore. However, Allan Pinkerton, detective and spy charged with the protection of Lincoln on his transit, had learned of this plot and urged Lincoln to travel through the city in secret. Lincoln obliged and, travelling in disguise on a night train, managed to slip through Ferrandini’s fingers.
Ferrandini’s hatred for Lincoln never waned and his group became even more radicalized. Roger Buckley was perhaps Ferrandini’s closest disciple, and they would often share drinks in a private saloon at a local hotel. Buckley was at first unsure about why Lincoln had to die; indeed, Buckley felt that terrorist efforts ought to focus more on the local government of Baltimore in order to encourage Maryland’s secession. However, he was a deep admirer of Ferrandini’s conviction and was eager to adopt his thought process. One night in the saloon, Buckley asked Ferrandini, “Are there no other means of saving the South except by assassination?” “No,” Ferrandini said sternly. “He must die, and die he shall. If necessary, we will die together.”
Pinkerton for his part was diligent in spying on the group. However, his efforts were largely focused on Ferrandini himself. While the Italian was certainly not a fan of Lincoln and was an ardent secessionist, it is unlikely that he would have killed the president-elect if given the opportunity. Most of his boasts were just talk. “The barber’s combs have more teeth and his shears more conviction than he,” Pinkerton once remarked, dismissive of any further trouble from Ferrandini’s gang.
Unfortunately for the nation, Pinkerton forgot to account for Buckley, who was determined to carry out Ferrandini’s plot even if his mentor was not. Buckley fancied himself a true Southern patriot. For whatever reason he felt that Confederate President Jefferson Davis was moving much too slowly in dealing with the North. To remedy this, Buckley resolved to assassinate Lincoln at his inauguration to show that the North was not safe even in their capital. Buckley’s last passage in his diary clearly illustrates his convictions:
"Who are we to let tyranny go unanswered? Why, when our course is so clear, do some shirk from their God-given duty? Lincoln must be dispatched for the good of the South and her way of life; there is no other course which must be taken. The treasonous North must learn that the South will not so quietly secede; indeed she will take some of those abhorrent abolitionist monsters with her as she departs. It is times like these when brave men must relinquish their life and liberty for the good of their God-fearing white brethren. I shall gladly accept this burden in the hopes that when I die, Lincoln dies with me."
Buckley, with the aid of two compatriots in the movement, would act on March 4, 1861. A Baltimore gun manufacturer, sympathetic to the movement’s cause, supplied the gang of three with their weapons. Once armed, the gang set off for Washington, DC to prepare for Lincoln’s arrival. They holed up in a boardinghouse owned by Buckley’s cousin, situated along the inaugural parade route. While not a member of the movement himself, Buckley’s cousin was sympathetic to its goals. They arrived on March 2 to give themselves ample time to prepare an escape plan should the opportunity present itself. Lincoln, for his part, arrived in the city on February 23, 1861. He spent the time between then and his inauguration getting the President’s House set up for his administration and family. He and his family would never take up residence there.
On the morning of March 4, 1861, Lincoln made his way, along with then-President James Buchanan, from Willard’s Hotel on 14th Street to the Capitol. Lincoln and Buchanan rode together in an open carriage, surrounded on all sides by scores of soldiers sworn to protect the president-elect with their lives if necessary. Along the way other soldiers were positioned on rooftops with strict instructions to shoot anyone crowding towards the carriage.
The procession eventually passed by the boardinghouse, giving Buckley and his gang the perfect opportunity to strike. The gang opened their windows and rested their rifle barrels, fully loaded, on the sill. Then, just as the roar of the crowd reached a fever pitch, the gang fired three bullets in all. One struck the lead horse pulling the carriage; the second whizzed by President Buchanan’s ear without causing any damage, eventually cracking the brick in a wall across the street; the third would change the course of history.
Lincoln was hit in the side of the head, just above his left ear. The crowd was shocked. They began to run around the streets helplessly, trampling each other in a mad dash for shelter. Soldiers searched diligently for the killer, but no one was quite sure from which direction the shots came. The carriage, despite the wounded horse, made a mad dash for the nearest hospital or doctor in hopes of saving the president-elect, but these efforts proved futile. Buckley and his gang, for their part, were ecstatic about the results. None of them died and they had succeeded in assassinating the “abolitionist ape from Illinois,” as some in the South had taken to calling him. The gang, feeling confident, decided not to take any chances and stayed in their room the rest of the day.
Vice President-Elect Hannibal Hamlin was waiting in the Capitol’s Senate chamber for the procession to arrive so that outgoing Vice President John Breckinridge could deliver his successor the oath of office. Approximately 20 minutes after shots were fired, a cadre of soldiers burst into the Senate chamber, completely out of breath, and shouted to a puzzled Hamlin, “Lincoln has been slain!” These soldiers had been dispatched by Lieutenant-General Winfield Scott to protect Hamlin. Scott had, of course, also been charged with protecting Lincoln during the inaugural parade. Despite having failed in his mission, his resolve barely wavered. He ordered the soldiers to protect the Senate chamber while he went back into the chaos. Reportedly, as he rode away, he angrily shouted: “I will manure the hills of Arlington with fragments of those rebels!” In the meantime, Chief Justice Roger Taney rushed to administer the presidential oath of office to Hamlin in order to provide some sense of continuity during this crisis.
Throughout the coming days, Allan Pinkerton embarked with the army on a relentless pursuit of Lincoln’s killer, barging into homes and businesses along the parade route. Eventually they came to Buckley’s cousin’s boardinghouse. While checking the guestbook, Pinkerton quickly came across Roger Buckley’s name, which he recognized from his time spying on Ferrandini’s radical group. The army arrested Buckley’s cousin, having been given the power by now-President Hamlin, and interrogated him for information as to Buckley’s whereabouts.
The army eventually tracked Buckley to an abandoned Virginia farmhouse just south of DC where he and his gang had taken shelter in an abandoned barn. Pinkerton resolved to smoke the gang out and force them into the hands of the waiting army. On March 7, Pinkerton set the barn aflame. Rather than let themselves get captured by the Union army and subsequently hanged, the gang decided to go out in a blaze of glory. Leaning out the burning windows, they pulled their rifles on the army and began firing. Two soldiers died in the exchange, as did the three members of Buckley’s gang.
Lincoln’s funeral was held on March 8 in the Senate chamber. Hamlin used this time to deliver his inaugural address in the form of a eulogy to Lincoln, reproduced here in full:
"Fellow-Citizens of the United States:
"We were struck a bloody blow just four short days ago. In anger and apprehension over the democratic process, Southern rebels struck down our chosen leader before he could even take the Oath. They were at once apprehensive about Abe’s politics, and about his commitment to abolition of that most horrid of institutions. Abe was first and foremost concerned with the unity of this Nation, which has endured unimpeded four score and three years. Now he belongs to the ages, along with any hope of unity for this great country.
"We are presently engaged in a grand trial, testing whether this nation conceived in unity and dedicated to liberty can endure terrorism perpetrated by crazed children, poisoned by dangerous ideas of slavery and violent retaliation. We have come here to eulogize our president-elect and immortalize him as a martyr for the great cause of liberty. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. Yet our efforts pale in comparison to his sacrifice; his blood-stained carriage has done more to immortalize the greatest moral struggle of our time than any of our efforts ever could. History will little note what was said here in this chamber, but it can never and will never forget Abe’s martyrdom.
"We must now dedicate ourselves to his mission of unity and liberty – for this honored martyr we must increase our devotion to the abolitionist cause and bind this nation together with stronger ties. Abe shall not have died in vain. This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. These may have been the first shots of this rebellion, but they will not be the last. This government of the people, by the people, for the people that Abe so long defended shall, despite the best efforts of some, not perish from this world. My heart is in the coffin there with him, and I shall not rest till it comes back to me."
This speech did a marvelous job stirring up Union loyalists for a bloody Civil War, but it only served to enrage the Confederacy more. Hamlin talked outright of abolishing slavery as one of his primary presidential goals and of attributing the actions to a few crazed terrorists to an entire country. The seven Confederate states, which had already been encouraged by the assassination of Lincoln, were thus further resolved to mobilize and end the Union before the Union could end them. There were eight states that had yet to make up their minds about which side to join in the war: Arkansas, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. Their allegiances would become critically important in the coming years.
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