Lincoln Center

New York City, Feb. 20, 1861

Even in the great mart of American commerce, by far the country’s largest city, Lincoln was the center of attention everywhere he went. He started his day by greeting New York’s financial and political elite over a power breakfast. Then he had a ceremonial meeting with a local nonagenarian, Joshua Dewey, a Revolutionary war veteran who had voted in every presidential election. It was a fitting historical echo: George Washington had been inaugurated just south of Lincoln’s hotel, in the old Federal Hall on Wall Street.

Library of Congress Fernando Wood

At 11 a.m., Lincoln went to City Hall to meet the mayor, Fernando Wood. One can imagine that the two men looked somewhat askance at each other. As Jay Monaghan, a historian, later wrote, “Mayor Fernando Wood, handsome, smooth-shaven, dressed in a double-breasted frock coat and black stock, received Lincoln publicly but his welcome was almost insolent.” Lincoln knew his type. Later that afternoon, Lincoln gave a speech to the mayor and City Council; having met the “Mayor Who Would Be King,” Lincoln added this jab: “There is nothing that can ever bring me willingly to consent to the destruction of this Union, under which not only the commercial city of New York, but the whole country has acquired its greatness.”

The speech was followed by the usual reception, including the bugbear of presidents, a long line of earnest supporters waiting for a handshake, eye contact and a few words of intimate communion. Over two hours, Lincoln reportedly shook 2,000 hands and bowed 2,600 times. One of them, who had probably worked on his line all day, said pompously, “the flag of the country is looking at you,” to which Lincoln quickly replied: “I hope it won’t lose any of its eyes.”

Lincoln had another memorable line. When a visitor from Canada shook his hand, he said, “I suppose I must shake hands with representatives of foreign nations” – then, when a visitor from South Carolina appeared, he said the same thing!

In his memoir, newspaper editor Horace Greeley wrote that everyone was asking Lincoln, “Are we really to have civil war?” Lincoln answered the anxious city slickers this way:

Many years ago, when I was a young lawyer, and Illinois was little settled, except on her southern border, I, with other lawyers, used to ride the circuit; journeying with the judge from county seat to county seat in quest of business. Once, after a long spell of pouring rain, which had flooded the whole country, transforming small creeks into rivers, we were often stopped by these swollen streams, which we with difficulty crossed. Still ahead of us was Fox River, larger than all the rest; and we could not help saying to each other, “If these streams give us so much trouble, how shall we get over Fox River?” Darkness fell before we had reached that stream; and we all stopped at a log tavern, had our horses put out, and resolved to pass the night. Here we were right glad to fall in with the Methodist Presiding Elder of the circuit, who rode it in all weather, knew all its ways, and could tell us all about Fox River. So we all gathered around him, and asked him if he knew about the crossing of Fox River. “O yes,” he replied, “I know all about Fox River. I have crossed it often, and understand it well; but I have one fixed rule with regard to Fox River: I never cross it til I reach it.”

Obviously, Lincoln was not even close to being the rube that his political enemies considered him to be. It is probably true that he knew quite well what he was doing, even in his unsophisticated moments, and derived satisfaction from acting like a hayseed, just to throw off the cynics, who loved to portray him as a “clodhopper” or worse. But every now and then, there was a hint that Lincoln still had some of the frontier in him. In the evening he dined with his vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, from whom he had no reason to conceal anything. Being in New York, they either ordered or were simply given a famous New York delicacy: oysters on the half shell. (Oysters were once closely identified with New York eating: according to a 2005 article in these pages, the city’s harbor may have held half the world’s supply of oysters at one time.) According to Hamlin, Lincoln stared at the oysters on his plate “with a half-doubting, half-smiling look and said, as if he had never eaten such a dish before, “Well, I don’t know that I can manage these things, but I guess I can learn.”

Abraham Lincoln: Profile in Courage.

We do not know his final verdict on the oysters, but we do know that the Lincolns went to the opera in the evening. And it was not just any opera. Nine days earlier, on Feb. 11, New York had witnessed the American premiere of a new work by Giuseppe Verdi, “Un ballo in Maschera,” or “A Masqued Ball.” It was politically charged, as everyone there understood, with undertones of liberalism, in the 19th century sense of the word. Only two years old, it had been censored by Italian authorities when it was first performed (Perhaps you’d like to hear Caruso singing a bit of this opera, from 1915? Thank you, Internet.) Several historians have noted that “Un ballo in Maschera” was about a political assassination very much like the one that would befall Lincoln four years later; in the play’s case, it was the murder of Sweden’s King Gustavus III, who was shot while attending a masked ball in 1792.

Lincoln committed a fashion blunder upon entering the Academy of Music, one of New York’s temples to culture and the location of the performance. Instead of wearing white gloves, he wore black – the only man in the crowded theater to do so. His biographer Carl Sandburg wrote, “In a box opposite, a Southern man remarked to the ladies of his party, ‘I think we ought to send some flowers over the way to the Undertaker of the Union.’ The word spread, and the press commented on the one pair of black gloves in the packed house.” Fortunately there were other more tolerant people in the audience, and the Lincolns were enthusiastically applauded at the show.

“A Masqued Ball” became politically charged all over again in the 20th century, when the great singer Marian Anderson became the first African American to perform at the Metropolitan Opera House, singing that particular opera in 1955. It was not the first time she was a pioneer. Famously, Eleanor Roosevelt had sought a new venue for her in 1939, after she was banned from the DAR’s Constitution Hall. She eventually offered an inspired backdrop, the Lincoln Memorial. Once again, Lincoln’s memory stood at the center of history. And, of course, if you’re in New York today and you’d like to hear opera, you go to Lincoln Center.

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Sources: John Hay, private scrapbook, from the collection of Robert and Joan Hoffman; William T. Coggeshall, “The Journeys of Abraham Lincoln”; Victor Searcher, “Lincoln’s Journey to Greatness”; Harold Holzer, “Lincoln, President-Elect”; Michael Burlingame, “Abraham Lincoln: A Life”; John Nicolay, “Some Incidents in Lincoln’s Journey from Springfield to Washington”; Henry Villard, “Memoirs of Henry Villard”; Henry Villard, “Lincoln on the Eve of ‘61”; Harold Holzer, ed., “Lincoln and New York”; Scott D. Trostel, “The Lincoln Inaugural Train” (forthcoming); The Lincoln Log; mrlincolnandnewyork.org; lincolnandnewyork.org.

Ted Widmer is director and librarian of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He was a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and the editor of the Library of America’s two-volume “American Speeches.”