Charlottesville

[David Lockmiller]

(08-26-2017 03:46 PM)L Verge Wrote:  Did Lincoln ever express his views on various members of the Confederacy during the war?

In her book “Team of Rivals,” Lincoln historian Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote at pages 731-33 of President Lincoln's last day fully alive:

Good Friday, April 14, 1865, was surely one of Lincoln’s happiest days. The morning began with a leisurely breakfast in the company of his son Robert, just arrived in Washington. “Well, my son, you have returned safely from the front. The war is now closed, and we soon will live in peace with the brave men that have been fighting against us.”

At 11 AM, Grant arrived at the White House to attend the regularly scheduled Friday cabinet meeting. He had hoped for word that Johnston’s army, the last substantial rebel force remaining, had surrendered to Sherman, but no news had yet arrived. Lincoln told Grant not to worry.

[At the cabinet meeting], Lincoln said that “he thought it providential that this great rebellion was crushed just as Congress had adjourned,” since he and the cabinet were more likely to “accomplish more without them than with them” regarding Reconstruction. He noted that “there were men in Congress who, if their motives were good, were nevertheless impracticable, and who possessed feelings of hate and vindictiveness in which he did not sympathize and could not participate. He hoped there would be no persecution, no bloody work, after the war was over.”

Stanton later wrote that Lincoln seemed “more cheerful and happy” than at any previous cabinet meeting, thrilled by “the near prospect of firm and durable peace at home and abroad.” Throughout the discussion, Stanton recalled, Lincoln “spoke very kindly of General Lee and others of the Confederacy,’ exhibiting “in marked degree the kindness and humanity of his disposition, and the tender and forgiving spirit that so eminently distinguished him.”

That afternoon, Mary and President Lincoln went for an open carriage ride. During the drive, President Lincoln said to Mary: “We must both be more cheerful in the future—between the war & the loss of our darling Willie—we have both been very miserable.”