'We must not be enemies': Lessons from Lincoln and the holder of his hat
National Post, 04 March 2021
Lincoln and Douglas established that the Union would be preserved not only by force of arms, but by, as much as was possible, a unifying spirit.
Thursday is the 160th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s hat.
Not of him wearing a hat, which he started to do long before his inauguration as president on March 4, 1861. But of a particular hat which had a particularly important day.
Lincoln was elected president in November 1860, the Republican defeating the (secessionist) Democrat John Breckinridge, the (unionist) Democrat Stephen Douglas and yet another unionist, the Constitutional Union’s John Bell. On the brink of civil war, Lincoln’s travel from Illinois to Washington, D.C., was perilous. At one point he travelled incognito to avoid hostile mobs, which required him to abandon the stove-pipe hat.
He arrived in Washington privately, the official presidential train serving as a decoy. In the days before his inauguration, he worked diligently on his address at the inauguration, at that time fixed by law for March 4.
Lincoln’s first inaugural is remembered most for its stirring peroration, one of the most beautiful paragraphs in the history of political oratory:
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
That first inaugural remains relevant today. It is Lincoln’s disposition, both of attitude and policy, toward those who would soon enough become his enemies in battle.
Hence the importance of the hat. Lincoln had a new hat made for the occasion. Why not? At that time, it may have been the last inauguration of an American president.
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