The custom of the country
compelled this man, whom it had long since selected as its ruler, to
make a journey of extreme danger without any species of protection
whatsoever. So far as peril went, no other individual in the United
States had ever, presumably, been in a peril like that which beset him;
so far as safeguards went, he had no more than any other traveler. A few
friends volunteered to make the journey with him, but they were useless
as guardians; and he and they were so hustled and jammed in the railway
stations that one of them actually had his arm broken. This
extraordinary spectacle may have indicated folly on the part of the
nation which permitted it, but certainly it did not involve the disgrace
of the individual who had no choice about it. The people put Mr. Lincoln
in a position in which he was subjected to the most appalling, as it is
the most vague, of all dangers, and then left him to take care of
himself as best he could. It was ungenerous afterward to criticise him
for exercising prudence in the performance of that duty which he ought
never to have been called upon to perform at all.[126]
Immediately after his arrival in Washington Mr. Lincoln received a
visit from the members of the Peace Congress. Grotesque and ridiculous
descriptions of him, as if he had been a Caliban in education, manners,
and aspect, had been rife among Southerners, and the story goes that the
Southern delegates expected to be at once amused and shocked by the
sight of a clodhopper whose conversation would be redolent of the
barnyard, not to say of the pigsty.
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