MARCH 17, 1865:
President Lincoln addresses an Indiana
Regiment at the National Hotel in Washington D.C.. His brief speech reads in
part:
It will be but a very
few words that I shall undertake to say. I was born in Kentucky, raised in
Indiana, and lived in Illinois; and now I am here, where it is my business to
care equally for the good people of all the States. I am glad to see an Indiana
regiment . . .
There are but few
views or aspects of this great war upon which I have not said or written
something . . . But there is one --- the recent attempt of our erring brethren
. . . to employ the negro to fight for them . . . The great question . . . [is]
whether the negro . . . will fight for them. I do not know . . . They ought to
know better than me.
I have in my lifetime
heard many arguments why the negroes ought to be slaves; but if they fight for
those who would keep them in slavery, it will be a better argument than any I
have yet heard. He who will fight for that, ought to be a slave . . . While I
have often said that all men ought to be free, yet would I allow . . . persons
to be slaves who want to be . . . I do know [a slave] cannot fight and stay at home and make bread too. And . . . one is about as important as the other . . .
I am rather in favor
of having them . . . as soldiers . . . I
wish I could send my vote over the river so that I might cast it in favor of
allowing the negro to fight. But they cannot fight and work both. We . . . now see the bottom of the enemy's
resources . . . I am glad to see the end so near at hand . . .
This is one of the President’s first
public appearances since the Inauguration, and Lincoln is so worn out afterward
that he changes his evening plans. He is supposed to attend a charity
performance of the play Still Waters Run
Deep to be given at Campbell Military Hospital on the outskirts of
Washington City. Instead, he returns to the White House and goes to bed.
What Lincoln does not know is that he
has unwittingly foiled John Wilkes Booth’s plot to kidnap him.
Booth happens to be staying at the
National Hotel. Lincoln appears there whilst Booth and his cronies are
traveling out to Campbell Hospital. The group is intent on intercepting the
President’s carriage, seizing the man bodily, and taking him to Jefferson Davis
bound and gagged. When Lincoln does not appear, the group disperses in
disappointment and disgust. Booth goes back to the National Hotel only to
discover to his outrage that he has missed his quarry by scant minutes. He
retires to his rooms fuming, to brood on the injustices of his life.
