

‘Now he belongs to the ages’: Why Lincoln was made by his martyrdom

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Abraham Lincoln’s heroic status in American history is based on many things: his rise from humble origins, his tremendous eloquence, his emancipation of America’s slaves, and his preservation of the Union. It was his assassination, however, that truly cemented his reputation. When John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865, he made Lincoln a martyr and spared him from the political ugliness of Reconstruction. Had Lincoln not been killed, he would surely rank among America’s best presidents, but he would not be the icon he is today.

It is easy to forget how shocking Lincoln’s murder was at the time. Lincoln was the first president to be assassinated. Thirty years earlier, an insane man had tried to shoot President Andrew Jackson, but the guns misfired and the incident was largely forgotten. Lincoln himself was nearly killed by a sniper in August 1864; the “disloyal bushwhacker,” as a flippant Lincoln later called him, put a bullet hole in the president’s hat. It was the closest a president had ever come to assassination to that point, but the incident was kept from the public. On the night Lincoln was killed he had only one (horribly negligent) bodyguard. The idea that the president could be murdered was hard for Americans to imagine, which made it all the more astonishing when it happened.

Lincoln’s assassination stands out even in hindsight. In striking contrast to Canada, which has been blissfully free of top-level political murder, three U.S. presidents have been killed since Lincoln. But the others (Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy) were gunned down in fairly meaningless fashion by random weirdoes. Lincoln’s murder, by contrast, was the tragic denouement to the most tragic chapter in American history, the Civil War. Lincoln is the only martyr on the list of dead presidents, and his reputation rests in part on that status.

The Civil War arose out of the secession of 11 southern states, and their formation of the Confederacy. The immediate spark for secession was Lincoln’s victory in the election of 1860. Lincoln was no abolitionist. He called only for the containment of slavery to the states where it existed, and supported a constitutional amendment to preserve slavery in those states, but this did not satisfy the secessionists.

As the war went on, and especially as the Union’s military position improved, though, Lincoln moved steadily toward abolition. By 1864, Lincoln had fully embraced what would become the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which outlawed slavery throughout the United States. His support was essential for getting the amendment through Congress early in 1865, the first step toward ratification by the states later that year.

Preserving the Union might not have required abolition, but it did require war, and so war there was — the bloodiest in American history. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers died, including a huge swath of the white male fighting-age population (about 10% in the North and 30% in the South). By early 1865, victory was at hand. On April 9, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses Grant, essentially ending the war.

Lincoln was a melancholy man — clinically depressed in modern parlance — but even he had reason now to be joyous. The country had been ripped in half and too much of its blood had been spilled, but now Lincoln could begin sewing it back together. The great moral evil of slavery had been repudiated. Lincoln’s place in history was secure: preserver of the Union and great emancipator.

Around that time, Lincoln had a creepy premonition. He dreamt that he heard sobbing somewhere in the White House. He wandered around until he found the source, “a throng of people, gazing mournfully upon [a] corpse, whose face was covered.” He asked who the dead person was. “The President,” came the reply, “killed by an assassin.”

The day he told a friend about that dream, April 11, Lincoln gave a speech in which he supported giving voting rights to some freed slaves. This was anathema to at least one member of the audience, John Wilkes Booth, who resolved then to kill the president. Booth and a group of co-conspirators hatched a plot to kill not only Lincoln, but also Vice President Johnson and abolitionist Secretary of State William Seward. Their motive was political; they supported the Confederacy, hated Lincoln and his administration, and hated the idea of black people voting.

Lincoln was shot the night of April 14th at Ford’s Theater and died the next morning; Seward was stabbed that night, nearly killed, and scarred for life; Johnson survived harm when his would-be assassin chickened out. It was the worst episode of political violence in American history and shocked the nation to its core.

Lincoln died not because a lone nut decided to kill him, but because he had won the war and freed the slaves. He had died for America’s sins. Indeed, it escaped nobody’s notice that Booth shot Lincoln on Good Friday.

The nation descended into mourning. Lincoln had not been a generally beloved figure before. A few months earlier, he had come from behind to win re-election, but still saw 45% of the Union electorate vote against him. These opponents hated Lincoln’s bloody war, were not so interested in freeing slaves, and on a personal level, did not like the folksy Lincoln much. Once Lincoln was killed, however, all but his most unrepentant enemies and critics were united in their horror and grief. He remains to this day America’s great national martyr (joined over a century later by Martin Luther King, Jr.), and it is this that has raised him above the merely great presidents, up to the rank of demigod.

Lincoln’s assassination also spared him from the damage to his historical standing that he surely would have suffered had he served out his second term. Lincoln was killed just at the moment of his victory over disunion and slavery. As a result, he was able to avoid most of the political and moral morass that accompanied the Reconstruction debate — the terms on which the South would rejoin the Union, and freed slaves would join the polity.

Lincoln had always been a relative moderate regarding the South. Although he held anti-slavery views personally, he did not run in 1860 as an abolitionist. He was resolute in his defense of the Union but much less resolute in his opposition to slavery. “What I do about slavery, and the colored race,” he declared, “I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.” In that vein, he rescinded as premature two emancipation orders issued by his generals, and he toyed with the idea of compensating slaveholders for their freed slaves. His Emancipation Proclamation freed few slaves, excluding as it did the slaves in the Union’s four remaining slave states, and those in parts of the Confederacy that had been recaptured to date by the Union Army.

As recounted above, Lincoln did come around to supporting complete abolition eventually, but he was no radical exponent of racial equality. In the fateful speech he gave that incited Booth to murder him, Lincoln had not called for universal suffrage for freed slaves but only for limited rights. “The very intelligent” among the freedmen should be able to vote, he said, and those who had fought for the Union.

He also supported relatively generous terms for welcoming the defeated Confederate states back. But the famous soothing words of his second inaugural address, calling for “malice toward none” and “charity for all,” were not echoed in Congress, where the self-proclaimed Radical Republicans held sway.

The day he died, Lincoln was enmeshed in a stalemate with the Radicals. He had pushed a plan under which some states would be readmitted once 10% of their 1860 electorate swore allegiance to the Union and accepted the reality of emancipation. The Radicals rejected this in favor of a harsher plan that, after they enacted it, Lincoln vetoed.

When Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency after Lincoln’s death, he pushed an even more forgiving approach than Lincoln. He pardoned millions of workaday Confederates and looked kindly upon efforts to suppress freedmen’s rights. The result was bitter conflict with the Radicals, who impeached Johnson in the House of Representatives 126–47, and voted against him 35–19 in the Senate, missing by a single vote the two-thirds majority needed for conviction.

Surely, Johnson fared worse than Lincoln would have, had he lived. Neither man was a Radical Republican, but Lincoln was a conciliator while Johnson was stand-offish. Indeed, Johnson was not any sort of Republican; he was a Southern Democrat, and had been a slaveholder himself. His only redeeming quality was that he was a Unionist, and it was this, coupled with Lincoln’s impulse toward compromise and conciliation, that had led to his selection as Lincoln’s running mate in 1864.

Moreover, some of the Radicals’ vengefulness toward the South was spurred by Lincoln’s assassination itself. Still, Lincoln was more conservative than the Radicals who held power. Had Lincoln lived, he probably would not have been impeached, but he likely would have embraced positions that would not sound as saintly to modern ears. Fighting for gentler treatment of southern traitors, and calling for fewer rights for the former slaves than the Radicals were seeking, Lincoln’s reputation would have been compromised. His status as the Great Emancipator surely would have lost some of its luster had he lived.

It takes nothing away from Abraham Lincoln’s accomplishments to acknowledge that his assassination both burnished and protected his reputation. It is just another way of saying that Lincoln gave his life to the cause of preserving the United States and making it a free country for all, and that he was cut down at the peak of this triumph. He lived as a politician — an extraordinary one, yes, but a man. In death he became much more. In the famous words of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, just after Lincoln took his final breath, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

Brian C. Kalt is Professor of Law & Harold Norris Faculty Scholar at Michigan State University College of Law

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