The Last Speech He'll Ever Make
The hosts look at an an account of Lincoln’s last speech from Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave and confidant of Mary Todd Lincoln – and how the speech may have sealed his fate. Voiced by Cady Garey and Adam Brock.
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BRIAN: Welcome to the show, I’m Brian Balogh.
PETER: I’m Peter Onuf.
ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. On April 11, 1865, the mood in Washington DC was giddy. Two days before, Lee had surrendered his army to Grant and it seemed that the war might finally be over. That evening, a crowd began to gather in front of the White House, eager to hear the president speak. Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave who was now a seamstress and close friend of Mary Todd Lincoln, stood near the president and described the scene outside.
FEMALE SPEAKER: The band stopped playing. And as he advanced to the center window over the door to make his address, I looked out and never saw such a mass of heads before. Close to the house, the faces were plainly discernible, but they faded into mere ghostly outlines on the outskirts of the assembly. And what added to the weird spectral beauty of the scene was the confused hum of voices that rose above, sounding like the sullen roar of an ocean storm or the wind sowing through the dark lonely forest.
ED: Next to the president stood his young son, Tad, who held a lamp for his father to read by.
FEMALE SPEAKER: The father and son standing there in the presence of thousands of free citizens, the one lost in a chain of eloquent ideas, the other looking up into the speaking face with a proud manly look formed a beautiful and striking tableau.
MALE SPEAKER: We meet this evening–
FEMALE SPEAKER: Shh.
MALE SPEAKER: Not in sorrow, but in gladness of heart. The evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond and the surrender of the principal insurgent army give hope of a righteous and speedy peace, whose joyous expression cannot be restrained.
ED: Lincoln went on to praise the situation in Louisiana, which had recently come back in the Union fold. Louisiana had adopted a free state constitution that opened public schools to white and black students and laid the groundwork for African American voting rights. The speech seemed well received, but years later, when Keckley wrote about that night in her memoirs, she described her distinct sense of unease.
FEMALE SPEAKER: I stood a short distance from Mr. Lincoln. And as the light from the lamp fell full upon him, making him stand out boldly in the darkness, a sudden thought struck me. What an easy matter it would be to kill the president as he stands there.
PETER: Nothing happened to Lincoln that night, but in the crowd below was John Wilkes Booth, a well known actor from Maryland, and Lewis Powell, who had fought for the Confederacy at Gettysburg. For months, both men had been trying to figure out a way to kidnap Lincoln and use him to force the release of Confederate war prisoners.
But hearing Lincoln support of voting rights for black veterans, Booth reportedly turned to Powell and said that means nigger’s citizenship. That’s the last speech he’ll ever make. By God, I’ll put him through.
BRIAN: It was his last speech. By the end of the week, Lincoln would be dead, shot by Booth in Ford’s Theater. You know that part of the story. But today on the show, we’re going to explore some of what you may not have heard about this momentous event, an event that took place 150 years ago this week.
ED: We’ll hear about how the assassination plot took shape. We’ll also look at the ways Americans mourned, and, yes, celebrated Lincoln’s death. And we’ll consider the prosecution of those responsible and the reasons it remains controversial to this day.