TCNJ

18 The College of New Jersey Magazine T he charred ruins of Richmond smoldered as the tall visitor wearing a distinctive stovepipe hat stepped from his boat. Newly freed slaves first recognized him and flocked to thank him for their liberation. The encounter was miraculous. It was Tuesday, April 4, 1865. Abraham Southerners remained. While conversing with one, Lincoln recalled how four years before he had urged "his friends in Congress" to accept a constitutional amendment that ruled out "any interference with the institution of slavery in the slaveholding states." He hoped to arrest secession and prevent war. However surprising Lincoln's comment might seem today, he recalled correctly. On March 4, 1861, he delivered his first inaugural address. Speaking from the east front of the Capitol on a windy but "gloriously bright" early spring day, he pointedly denied that he or the Republi- can Party intended to "inter- fere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists." He had neither the "lawful right" nor the "inclination" to do so. Lincoln then noted that Congress had just passed a constitutional amendment to address the matter. Because he considered "such a provision to now be implied constitutional law," he had "no objection" to it being made explicit. Paradoxically, the man later known as the Great Emancipator once accepted a constitutional amendment The first inaugural address was evidence of Lincoln "prostrating himself" before the "slave-holding oligarchy," wrote the pro-war abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Lincoln had been staying downriver at Union headquarters, awaiting a military breakthrough. He rushed to the fallen city to see whether a Confederate surrender might be within reach. He wanted to end the enormous convulsion that had dominated his presidency. Nobody knew he had little more than a week to live. Confederate officials had fled Richmond, but other prominent

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