Inauguration note of history - Peter Baker, New York Times

[David Lockmiller]

Inauguration note of history - Peter Baker, New York Times
The Morning – January 20, 2021

But when American democracy is under siege, an inauguration can have a very different feel. That was true in 1945, when the U.S. was fighting fascism in World War II, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fourth inauguration was a spartan affair. It was true in 1861, when the country was on the verge of war and Abraham Lincoln was the target of an assassination plot. It was true again four years later, when smallpox was raging and the Civil War was nearing its end.

On Inauguration Day, 1861, cavalry members flanked Lincoln’s procession, soldiers blocked streets and roof-mounted snipers eyed the crowd. The first sentence on the front page of the next day’s New York Times: “The day to which all have looked with so much anxiety and interest has come and passed. ABRAHAM LINCOLN has been inaugurated, and ‘all’s well.’”

1865

Washington was a grim wartime city for Lincoln’s second inauguration, having endured waves of smallpox and torrential recent rains. The crowd that day stood in mud “almost knee deep.” Lincoln rode in an open carriage, with a military escort of both Black and white troops.

A Times account — by the poet Walt Whitman — noted that as the president spoke, “a curious little white cloud, the only one in that part of the sky, appeared like a hovering bird, right over him.”

The caption of the 1865 Inauguration photograph by Alexander Gardner reads: “Black soldiers were among the crowd at Lincoln’s second inauguration. Alexander Gardner, via Library of Congress