Rise to Greatness Read Free

used his size subtly to intimidate, even as he used his humor to put people off guard. At fifty-two, Lincoln was 180 pounds of muscle on a six-foot-three-and-three-quarter-inch frame, and he wore his black suit narrowly tailored to fit his sinewy shoulders and thin waist. He would soon be wasting away, losing as much as thirty pounds in three years, but for now Lincoln was still the virile figure of his campaign propaganda, the rail-splitter whose blend of brain and brawn reflected America’s favored image of itself: strong, bright, and independent.
    His friend and occasional bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon stood close to Lincoln that day. Lamon, too, was a strong and solid man, but in the eyes of the artist Alfred Waud, sketching the scene from the corner of the room, he looked ordinary beside the looming, dominant president. Lincoln had a shambling animal force about him, which some found appealing and others found unsettling. Women were constantly flirting with him; at the same time, some of Washington’s leading Democrats referred to him as “the gorilla.” Countering this force was his gentle, sorrowful expression, which was, according to a painter who studied him for a portrait, “remarkably pensive and tender, often inexpressibly sad, as if the reservoir of tears lay very near the surface.”
    Magnetic, keenly sensitive, often able to understand others better than they understood themselves, Lincoln was, nevertheless, profoundly isolated, and this was a source of his sadness. He “never had a confidant,” his law partner and biographer William Herndon wrote. “He was the most reticent and mostly secretive man that ever existed.” Lincoln usually masked this isolation behind jokes and anecdotes and apparent bursts of candor. But even his brief descriptions of his youth strike a note of profound loneliness; he was, he once wrote, “a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy.” His mother died when he was nine; soon afterward, Lincoln’s father abandoned him and his sister in the wilderness, to be cared for only by a slightly older cousin. The father returned months later to find the Lincoln children filthy, poorly fed, and in rags. Now, four decades later, Abraham Lincoln was no longer a lonely genius on a raw frontier, but he bore the internal scars of a boy who learned not to let others too close.
    As eleven A.M. approached—the hour when Washington’s dignitaries would greet the president—a throng of visitors formed into a long line winding down Pennsylvania Avenue. Stationed at intervals, maintaining order, were uniformed officers of the new District of Columbia police department. (The capital had never before been large enough to warrant its own force.) The police opened a path through the crowd for members of Congress, cabinet secretaries, ambassadors, and generals. The carriage of Attorney General Edward Bates rolled up the curved driveway, past a mossy statue of Thomas Jefferson, and came to a stop at the tall doors. A Jovian man with thick gray hair swept back from his stern face, Bates took his place near the head of the line of dignitaries, and soon found himself reaching out to shake the president’s hand. The master politician was an ardent hand-shaker, taking a half step forward and leaning into the grip while locking on with his blue-gray eyes. But as Bates felt his hand swallowed up and heard Lincoln greet him in his surprisingly high and reedy voice, he harbored unnerving doubts about this man’s ability to meet the crisis.
    The previous evening, Bates had been struck by how rudderless the president seemed, his apparent weakness revealing itself as never before during an extraordinary meeting at the White House. Coming at the end of a year of low moments, this was perhaps the lowest. With his cabinet gathered around him, Lincoln was forced to reveal under questioning by an aggressive delegation from Congress—the Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War—just how little