Cleveland to Buffalo, Feb. 16, 1861
The Presidential Special left Cleveland for Buffalo at 9 a.m. The train made its usual stops, but Lincoln’s remarks were limited by his hoarseness. Strange mishaps occurred here and there: near Euclid, a celebrant blew his hand off when he fired a cannon in salute. In Erie, Penn., Henry Villard recorded that a roof collapsed “on which a large number of curious Republicans had gathered. The sudden disappearance of the whole group, and the scramble among the ruins, was most ludicrous.”
After crossing into New York, the Special made its first stop at Westfield. At a stage near the station Lincoln began making his usual perfunctory remarks. Suddenly, in mid-speech, he asked if aMiss Grace Bedell was in the audience. She was the young girl, he explained, who had written him only a few months earlier
to urge that he grow a beard. There was a commotion in the crowd, and his 12-year old correspondent made her way through the crowd to him. Lincoln stooped to kiss her, and in the exuberant reporting style of the day, the New York World recounted, “the young girl’s peach cheek must have been tickled with a stiff whisker, for the growth of which she was herself responsible.” (Grace Bedell lived until Nov. 2, 1936 – the day the BBC pioneered the use of television. After leaving New York, she spent most of her life as a pioneer in Delphos, Kansas, where a campaign is underway to save her house.)
to urge that he grow a beard. There was a commotion in the crowd, and his 12-year old correspondent made her way through the crowd to him. Lincoln stooped to kiss her, and in the exuberant reporting style of the day, the New York World recounted, “the young girl’s peach cheek must have been tickled with a stiff whisker, for the growth of which she was herself responsible.” (Grace Bedell lived until Nov. 2, 1936 – the day the BBC pioneered the use of television. After leaving New York, she spent most of her life as a pioneer in Delphos, Kansas, where a campaign is underway to save her house.)
The Special approached Buffalo a little after 4 p.m. A teeming crowd of 75,000 waited in desperate anticipation; Hay called it the largest crowd ever seen in that part of the country. Buffalo was the 10th largest city in the country, with a population of 81,129, 46 percent of whom were foreign born. A huge cheer erupted when Lincoln descended from the train and greeted his predecessor, Millard Fillmore, the 13th president. As in Cleveland, the sound was so prodigious that Nicolay tried to describe it – a wild cheering “that began with the multitude away down the track of the railroad, gathering volume as it rolled up to the depot, and continued through the mass extending far up the street, until it became a roar that was mightier and more majestic in sound than the boom of a cannon.”
But that enthusiasm quickly turned dangerous. As Nicolay described it, “the crowd, in its crazed eagerness to get nearer to the distinguished visitor – the man in whom circumstances have centered a deeper and more universal interest than ever was felt, perhaps, in any other living individual by the American people – became an ungoverned mob.” The soldiers protecting him were quickly overmatched, and it was a wonder no one was killed. In fact, Nicolay reveals, the guards even lowered their bayonets in desperation:
It was awful. Men were overcome to the point of fainting. Some … were seriously injured. The soldiers, as we have said were overwhelmed in an instant, and their weapons came very near becoming deadly without intention. Several bayonets got lowered in the fierce struggle of the soldiery with the crowd, and were actually wedged into the living mass so firmly that they could not be extracted. In one instance, the point of a bayonet, sharp as a stiletto, pressed against the breast of a man, and there seemed for a moment no mode of saving him from being pierced by it.
Somehow Lincoln, the center of this maelstrom, emerged from it. The papers reported that “the tall form of Mr. Lincoln and the venerable head of Mr. Fillmore were seen to sway to one side and the other as the crowd surged in upon them on either side, and the people acted more like a lot of savages than anything else.” Hay wrote that the soldiers and police were “swept away like weeds before an angry current.” A few of them, along with Lincoln’s friends, formed a protective phalanx that prevented his being crushed, “but only at the expense of incurring themselves a pressure to which the hug of Barnum’s grizzly would have been a tender and fraternal embrace.” The next day, the Buffalo Courier wrote, “The Pass of Thermopylae was a memorable performance, but it was no such jam as the Pass of the Central Depot.”
The day was not quite over; Lincoln still had to attend a reception at the American Hotel, where Buffalo’s acting mayor greeted him with insipid congratulations that his progress “thus far towards the federal capital has been without accident or any circumstance to mar the pleasure of your journey.” Lincoln responded amiably, as usual, and spoke in soothing tones from the hotel balcony. Once again, he encountered a successor; Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th president, was in the audience.
But in the riot’s aftermath, it was not entirely certain that Lincoln or the presidency would endure. A Buffalo paper, trying to explain what had happened, observed that a crowd can become “dangerously unwieldy” when it has “wedged itself into a space too small for it.” That might be said for the country as a whole in 1861, boxed out of peaceful options. Three days earlier, at Columbus, the governor of Ohio had predicted that the entire question of self-government would be worked out during Lincoln’s presidency – that at stake was not merely slavery, but the validity of the democratic experiment itself.
Lincoln would not have disagreed. But he had a terrible problem on his hands. As the man elected to lead this experiment, he had become so famous that self-government was breaking down everywhere he went. Would democracy survive the attempt to save it?
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 (ed. Michael Burlingame), “With Lincoln in the White House”; John Nicolay, “Some Incidents in Lincoln’s Journey from Springfield to Washington”; Henry Villard, “Lincoln on the Eve of ‘61”; Scott D. Trostel, “The Lincoln Inaugural Train” (forthcoming); John Fagant,”Abraham Lincoln in Western New York”; The Lincoln Log.
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.”
