National Post (National Edition)
Lessons from Lincoln and his hat holder
Thursday is the 160th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's hat. Not of him wearing a hat, which he started to do long before his inauguration as president on March 4, 1861. But of a particular hat which had a particularly important day.
Lincoln was elected president in November 1860, the Republican defeating the (secessionist) Democrat John Breckinridge, the (unionist) Democrat Stephen Douglas and yet another unionist, the Constitutional Union's John Bell. On the brink of civil war, Lincoln's travel from Illinois to Washington, D.C., was perilous. At one point he travelled incognito to avoid hostile mobs, which required him to abandon the stove-pipe hat.
He arrived in Washington privately, the official presidential train serving as a decoy. In the days before his inauguration, he worked diligently on his address at the inauguration, at that time fixed by law for March 4.
Lincoln's first inaugural is remembered most for its stirring peroration, one of the most beautiful paragraphs in the history of political oratory:
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
That first inaugural remains relevant today. It is Lincoln's disposition, both of attitude and policy, toward those who would soon enough become his enemies in battle.
Hence the importance of the hat. Lincoln had a new hat made for the occasion. Why not? At that time, it may have been the last inauguration of an American president.
When Lincoln approached the podium to deliver his speech, he removed his hat. But where to put it? It was not an inconsequential piece of millinery. Presidential retinues not being so bloated in those days — Lincoln travelled to Washington with a single bodyguard — there no flunkie on hand to whisk it away, nor was there an advance team that had made provision for the hat.
And it was a very fine hat, so sticking it under a chair would not do.
“Permit me,” said Sen. Stephen Douglas, stepping forward to take Lincoln's hat. He held it on his lap throughout the speech.
Yes, the same Douglas who had just lost the election to Lincoln. Indeed, the same Douglas who had defeated Lincoln in 1858 for the senate seat from Illinois.
In was during the 1858 campaign that the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates took place. The three-hour format included an opening statement of 60 minutes, a rebuttal of 90 minutes, and then the opening speaker was given another 30 minutes. The texts were published in the leading newspapers of the day.
Douglas had been Lincoln's nemesis; aside from Lincoln, he may have been the greatest orator in American politics. And now, he quietly took the hat. It was a magnanimous gesture not overlooked by the rest of the great and good on the dais.
If Lincoln's hat brought a touch of graciousness to the day, Lincoln himself attempted a matching policy disposition. His views on slavery were well known by 1861 and the prospect of war was very real. The president of the confederacy of seceding states, Jefferson Davis, had already been inaugurated.
Lincoln would not compromise on the union itself, which he characterized as “perpetual,” but he offered to meet the southern states more than half way. He went so far as to say that the federal government would abide by the “fugitive slave” clause of the constitution, under which escaped slaves in free states were returned to their owners in slave states.
The spirit of that day — from the hat to the text — was all the more remarkable given that war was in the air. That spirit is the antidote to so much of what poisons political life today, where rancour and division are often the first choice, not the last resort.
A moderating disposition, to be sure, does not mean that moderating policies will prevail. Not six weeks would pass before Fort Sumter would be attacked, and the Civil War would begin.
Yet Lincoln (and Douglas) on that day established that the Union would be preserved not only by force of arms, but by, as much as was possible, a unifying spirit. And when the war would eventually end, a foundation for magnanimity in victory had been laid.
The political stakes today are not as high, and yet the temperature is rising. On the brink of war in 1861, Lincoln remembered that it was important to walk in the other man's shoes. Or to try on his hat.